Poring over turn-of-the-century newspapers can be vastly entertaining -- not to mention appalling.

Here's a story I stumbled across from a 1905 edition of The Spokesman-Review which earnestly debates the question: Can women schoolteachers ever make good wives?

Here's what C.L. Shuff, a male teacher in Spokane, was quoted as saying: "I do not say that a teacher should not marry, but I do say a woman should not teach. In our order of society a woman's place is to be mistress of a home and teaching is not conducive to making a woman a good housewife. In the first place, when a woman teaches school, she comes to depend on others to do the work of housekeeping and she grows to dislike these duties. In the next place, teaching gives a woman a mental attitude which is unfortunate in home life."

Shuff illustrates his point with an anecdote about a trip he took with a group of people, one of whom was a schoolteacher. She was, in his words, "constantly running off by herself, perfectly oblivious to the rest of the party." She then "spent her time taking notes of trivial things till her husband and the rest of us were completely out of patience with her."

He concludes that "this attitude of hers is directly due to the fact that she had been a school teacher for a long time."

Other local men defended women school teachers, including a former Spokane school superintendent, who said that the stereotype of woman teachers as "finicky and irritable" was disappearing.

"The finicky women are being weeded out and the teachers who are now employed are the sweet-tempered women. Their training is entirely along the lines of increasing these qualities and as a consequence school teachers are tolerant women, and not liable to be critical and fault-finding with their husbands. As far as I can see, there is absolutely no ground for the statement that school teachers do not make good wives and should not marry."

The paper went so far as to put the question to a woman teacher, who replied, in essence, that she doesn't know what all the fuss is about. She said she knows many women teachers who are happily married.

It fell to J.A. Tormey, the school superintendent at the time, to give the most enlightened reply to the question.

"Personally, I think the school teachers are the best class of women we have and make the best wives," said Tormey. "They are intellectual and take life seriously and when men come to know them, they are attracted by these qualities."

But then we go back to Mr. Shuff, who summed up his argument by saying, "Teaching school is a man's business and women should be kept out of it. It is no more right to compel a man to compete with cheap female labor in teaching than with cheap Chinese labor in another line of work."

Ooooh-kay.

So, here's my question: Have attitudes come a long way since 1905? Or not?

Photo: The students of Greer School, west of Cheney, pose with their teacher, Mrs. Van Brunt, in 1937. Mrs. Van Brunt taught all eight grades in the one-room school.

Well since we are no longer arguing whether or not a women in a certain occupation should or should not marry, I would say in some ways - yes, attitudes most certainly have changed somewhat in the past century.