First of all, was this real? Second, was this common throughout the United States or even Europe, or was it more of an isolated thing? Third, were contracts of similar nature required for male teachers? For women in other professions? For anyone else?
It's obviously fake.
To start with, it's typed in Times New Roman - which was developed in 1931. It's also printed on modern printer paper with word processor margins.
The language used throughout the "contract" is modern, sometimes trying to (poorly) imitate formal language of the past. There's also repeated grammar problems, which is a good indication of the fact that this is a hoax.
As you can probably tell, the "contract" is just a joke attempting to amuse the reader with some stereotypical notions of the past ("petticoats", "above the ankle", etc...)
To quote from Snopes:
The bottom line is that nobody has ever been able to verify the authenticity of this list of rules. It has been reproduced in countless newspapers and books over the last fifty years, and copies of it have been displayed in numerous museums throughout North America, with each exhibitor claiming that it originated with their county or school district. It has also been also offered in a number of different guises, such as a list of rules for sales clerks at W.T. Stewart's department store in New York, for floor nurses in a hospital, and for the employees of a New England carriage works. All attempts to trace this document to its origins inevitably dead end with a photocopy or printed sheet of indeterminate origin (and suspiciously modern vintage). . . .
We are curious about why so many supposedly genuine reproductions of this document include a heading that mentions a specific year, such as "RULES FOR TEACHERS — 1872." If these documents were genuine, why wouldn't the headings simply read "RULES FOR TEACHERS"? Did the rules change so frequently that including the year was necessary to avoid confusion? Do these documents represent an important revision to the "RULES FOR TEACHERS — 1869" list?
