Meta Chestnutt's Teachers in Nashville

During her student days at Peabody, Meta Chestnutt came to know several outstanding female teachers. Their ability as classroom instructors and their marital status must have made a permanent impression on her. For example, she no doubt studied under Elizabeth Bloomstein. "Miss Lizzie," as they called her (pictured here), was a native of Nashville and the 1877 salutatorian at the college who later joined its faculty. A life-long student, during breaks in the academic year she pursued additional study at Harvard and the University of Chicago. She traveled extensively in America and Europe. Over a forty-year career, Bloomstein earned a fabulous reputation as a teacher of history and geography.[1]

Another outstanding teacher at Peabody was Julia Sears. She grew up on Cape Cod and began her teaching career in Boston, specializing in science and mathematics. She was the first person in the University of Nashville system to serve for thirty years. At some point, she became the faculty member with the longest tenure, which meant that her name appeared first in the school's catalog. Besides the president, no one at Peabody was paid a higher salary. In 1907, she retired from Peabody at the end of thirty-two years and became "the first teacher in the South to receive a pension from the Carnegie Foundation."[2] 

However, like all the other long-term female members of the faculty in Nashville, neither of these women ever married or had children. Of course, this meant they had plenty of opportunities to pursue knowledge and perfect their teaching skills. Clearly though, they never sensed the freedom to fill the roles that most women of the time were expected and wanted to fill. Young "Miss Meta," as she would come to be called, was watching.

Notes

[1] "School Leader's Funeral Friday," Nashville Tennessean, June 3, 1927, 8; Paul K. Conkin, Peabody College: From a Frontier Academy to the Frontiers of Teaching and Learning (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), 118.

[2] "Peabody Teacher for 32 Years, Dies. Miss Julia Sears Buried in Massachusetts," Nashville Tennessean, September 26, 1929, 22; Conkin, Peabody College, 119, 136-37.