Women Who Ran: Margaret Andrew

About Margaret Andrew (1844–1915)

On September 5, 1893, Margaret Andrew defeated her male opponents with a landslide 209 votes to win a seat on the Grand Rapids Board of Education. Her run for reelection, however, played out differently. About one month before the 1895 school board election, a scandal erupted. The Grand Rapids Board of Education had recently voted to adopt Frye’s Geography as its new standard geography textbook. Not long after the change, parents objected to the cost of replacing the old textbooks and leveled accusations of bribery at the school board. These were soon followed by a Grand Rapids Evening Press article that detailed the board’s long-standing  practice of accepting valuable books from textbook firms in exchange for favorable consideration in curricular decisions.

The scandal, referred to as the “text book war,” loomed large during the election, forcing Andrew to pull out of the race entirely. Whether or not Andrew accepted bribes from textbook companies is not clear. She never publicly denied or affirmed the accusation, but she had served on the committee that selected the controversial textbook.

“Training the Youthful Mind: The Kindergarten, Its Origin and Growth and How this City Has Taken Foremost Place in the Work.” Grand Rapids Herald, August 11, 1901.

Although Andrew’s time on the school board was cut short, she quickly found other ways to impact her community. From 1897 to 1901, she served on the board for the Grand Rapids Kindergarten Association. Kindergarten, invented in Germany by Friedrich Froebel, emerged as a national women-led movement within America in the late-nineteenth century. The Grand Rapids Kindergarten Association was founded in 1891 “to advance the cause of kindergartens and aid the growth of public sentiment in favor of kindergartens in our public schools.”  In 1901, Andrew was elected president of the association and served in that role until at least 1906. She also served the kindergarten cause as president of the local Froebel Club and by taking an active role in local mothers’ clubs, which served as complementary organizations to local kindergartens.

Andrew’s interest in education reform extended to the state level. In 1899, she served as chairman of the Program Committee for the Mothers Congress of Michigan, a state branch of the National Congress of Mothers that eventually evolved into the National Congress of Parents and Teachers in 1925. The organization is known today as the Parent Teacher Association (PTA). 

Andrew was also involved in the women’s club movement in Grand Rapids and was elected vice president of the Ladies’ Literary Club in 1899. In 1891, she served as vice president and secretary of the Emerson Industrial Home, and in 1903 she became the third vice president of the Bissell House, which was modeled after the anti-poverty work being done at the time by Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago.

Margaret Andrew died on February 14, 1915. Local newspapers memorialized her as a woman “actively engaged in club and philanthropic work” who was “highly respected and loved.”