Girl's Gotta Do What a Girl's Gotta Do (Leviticus)

An Alabama state senator named Shadrak (whoa!) McGill says that keeping teacher's pay low is a biblical principal.  Prompting, as so many things do, Ivan to remember his youth in the newspaper business and elsewhere:

Back a half century and more ago all the smart girls who could get to college studied to be teachers. My wife graduated from U of A  with a teaching degree when she was 19 years old. Started at 16 out of  Hazel Green HS. Taught 5th grade at Verner school at U of A.  ... When I was a reporter in Kentucky I went around the state sizing up the election between LBJ and Goldwater. In one really poor Kentucky county I interviewed the county’s chief official. He was proud of the county seat – “no stoplights, no (n’s) and no jews,” he told me. What kind of work was there for the people, I asked him. He admitted there were no industrial jobs – not one in the county. All the good timber had been cut generations before. No coal. What do people do for a living? (a lot grew marijuana for the market in Lexington, but he didn’t go into that). “Well, if a woman ain't married and got to work,” he said, “she can be a waitress or a teacher or a whore.” Haven’t checked in a while but I bet that county still votes Republican. Shadrack would fit right in.

 I can match it.  Armed with her freshly minted PhD, Mrs.Buce descended on the unemployment office.  They offered her: (a)  third grade or (b) go-go dancer.  Actually, she was a pretty good third grade teacher in her day.