Doubly Intolerable: Gender, Union Busting, and the Fear of Catholic Power in the Loeb Affair, 1915–1917

Abstract This article explores the Chicago School Board’s 1915 union-busting effort against the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, a union of women teachers co-founded by two Catholics. This article argues that newspaper coverage reveals that the gender identities and religious affiliations of the CTF members made them doubly intolerable. Not only did their very presence in public schools threaten to introduce Catholicism into a space that Protestants viewed as their domain, but these women also had the temerity to expect just compensation for their work. The Catholicism of the CTF’s leaders attracted nativist prejudice, and the press’s fixation on religious difference reframed the Loeb Affair from a conflict over salaries, pensions, and union membership into an endeavor to wrest the schools from Catholic control. Whatever the initial motivation of the Loeb Rule, anti-Catholicism became a weapon to defeat the economic and equality claims of women who demanded to be treated as professionals rather than as proxy mothers. From this viewpoint, the Loeb Affair figures not only as a loss for organized labor and teacher organizing, but it also illustrates Progressive Era beliefs about competing ways of performing womanhood, the role of religion in public schools, and the fear of Catholic power.