It fought for things like higher wages and higher working situations, identical as all the opposite unions that had been springing up at the time, but also for tutorial and mental freedom. That freedom could be threatened repeatedly, most notably in the course of the communist witch hunts of the McCarthy era. Education associations from 10 states in 1857 shaped the National Education Association to “unite … to advance the dignity, respectability and usefulness of their calling.” The NEA was for males solely till 1866, when women had been taken on as members. In 1910—10 years before the nineteenth Amendment …