Editor’s Note: In this article from August 1931, Fortune reviewed the most prestigious American schools charged with educating proper ladies-in-training. One offered a prize for the first graduate to have four babies. Another threatened to kick out a student because a boy sent her a telegram. Thank goodness times have changed.
There is this essential irony about our education of the jeune fille who is one day to become the grande dame: that in preparing her for a life of sophistication, the almost universal emphasis should lie on simplicity and the Biblical virtues. The daughter of the industrial leader, of the great professional man, must thrive in a complex civilization, a civilization which places little premium upon its women’s homelier virtues: meekness and modesty, earnestness and Godliness. Yet such a man must, according to the mores of his kind, send his daughter to one of a handful of institutions whose codes rest upon these foundations. No schoolmistress but must realize that the day her charges doff the cotton she prescribed, silk will take its place–literally and figuratively. Rouge, lipstick, powder, things that are sheer, tabooed foods, verboten slang all wait on commencement–but no longer. More fundamentally: habits of luxury, a sophisticated approach to life. A life once pointed at avoiding the opposite sex now has, for a few years at least, mingling with that sex as its chief objective. The American maiden’s schooling is more truly in the old convent-bred tradition than one might presume. Her education has little more direct reward than its own virtue.
Still greater irony, perhaps, is the fact that, with so indirect an approach, our girls’ schools do so good a job. The cycle of cloistered girlhood, a debutante-young-married fling and then, suddenly, the calm assumption of responsibility, is an American phenomenon. The American woman of position is inclined to take the responsibility of that position seriously. Her children’s education she studies, she assumes charitable obligations far beyond the necessity of social acceptance, satirists to the contrary notwithstanding. She takes as a matter of course the fact that she must continue her education, that things are going on in the world about which she must keep herself informed. She has faith of a sort, if no longer the orthodox faith of the Victorians. If these things are true, then perhaps the root reaches back to those quiet, sequestered years in a New England village after all. They were lived in an institution which has changed less, as the world changes around it, than most institutions. Two things her school definitely did do for her: it made her strong physically (although she may have done her best to dissipate that strength in the next stage of the cycle), and it gave her days of simple peace upon which she will probably look back enviously for the rest of her life. And it gave them to her when the twig was being bent.
WHICH observations may be made without touching upon pedagogical theories. Strictly in the matter of education, our girls’ schools are changing, the trend being well defined. About the older “finishing school” conception of a smattering of art (history of), music (piano exercises), and literature (Dickens and tears) has been wrapped the educational corset of college entrance requirements. And that steel-ribbed intellectual garment, curiously, has been laced tighter and tighter. A dozen of the best of our girls’ schools might have sent forty of their 1911 graduating class to college; this year some 200 passed all the requirements. One had thirty-five.
It was not long ago that the group from which the few “good” schools could choose their clientele was so small that they could hardly afford to narrow it still further by adding intellectual to social snobbishness. Today the field has so broadened that an institution can afford to maintain scholastic standards. It is able to survive economically without endangering its essential character of selectivity.
Beyond the above generalization, the best girls’ schools of today follow no formal theory of teaching in their educational programs. This generation has demanded little of its female educators, pedagogically. Of the modern educational schemes, such as Progressive Education and the Dalton plan, none appears in full bloom in any one of our present subjects.
OF THE 1,200-odd private schools for girls in this country, curiously enough only a score or more really matter. So ambitious a nation are we for our daughters that anyone who will offer us a few simple guarantees–largely of social acceptability–will be elevated in our evaluation to a prominence inconceivable in Utopia: However, so ephemeral are the things which make one school and mar another that intangible indeed are the distinctions. To determine exactly what is the successful girls’ school of today and how it is educating tomorrow’s ruling generation, FORTUNE presents case notes on ten institutions chosen from the upper ranks.
FOXCROFT
Where girls ride horses and are happy.
Founded 1914 by Miss Charlotte Noland, founder-headmistress. Seventy-five girls. Uniform: green and brown corduroy suits. Stresses country life and riding. Easy-going scholastically; honor system guides its few rules; no boys may call. Students recruited largely from New York, Philadelphia, the South.
FOXCROFT is perhaps the one school in America founded with the avowed purpose of making its students happy. This is due partly to its environment–Virginia, where women are still bred to the idea of giving people a good time and having a good time doing it–and partly to its headmistress, Miss Charlotte Noland. Miss Charlotte (you may as well forget the Noland) is Virginian-of-the-Virginians. She likes coon hunts, in which she is the first to plunge into ice-choked streams, whooping with excitement; theatres; school prayers, which she conducts in her long black robe; horses (her Warpaint, pictured on page 42, is the most famous); and advising the young and worried, which she does with simplicity and success. She is, without side or affectation, that indefinable thing, a gentlewoman.
Her school lies down a curving sixty-mile ribbon of road from Washington, just outside of sleepy Middleburg, where dusty roads and paneled fields drowse in the sun and talk is all of hacks and hunters. Turn right just outside of Middleburg and you will find the place–Georgian brick and rambling colonial white, in the midst of a tangle of bridle paths and some of the loveliest woods in Virginia. The center brick house belonged to one of the innumerable cousins of George Washington; it is haunted (to the delight of the girls, who eat there) by a wailing woman who went crazy some hundred and twenty years ago and was chained in the attic. She wails quite audibly. An old bell in back summons the girls to classes; with what they consider hideous appropriateness, it was a slave bell. The frame building for the smallest girls is The Porch; The Wing, hitched to it at one end, is next oldest; there is also The Orchard. (Never say merely “Porch” or “Orchard.”) If it is early fall, The Porch is still in pigtails. The first year at Foxcroft, new girls were made to wear one pigtail; the next year two, and so on. After the school had been going ten years, the pigtail problem grew acute for little girls with bobbed hair, who simply didn’t have enough material to work with. As a result, pigtails now go in rotation, increasing one in number every year until one unfortunate class has to wear ten, after which the next batch reverts to one. This year, The Porch will appear in two only; and, as always, with their clothes on inside out during initiations (the first week of school).
The stables are off to your right as you face the school: big rambling stables which fill the air with that delicious mixture of horse and boxwood that makes any Virginian homesick. This is the heart of Foxcroft, where form is so stressed that some people think they can recognize a Foxcroft trained rider at a Warrenton horse show. Here is Eleanor MacKubin, the riding mistress, blonde, tanned, in her famous green gabardine coat, teaching girls to have light hands and backs like ramrods. Though all athletics are revered at Foxcroft, though a good basketball forward is a Homeric figure, riding is the ultimate test, hunting the ultimate goal: the two competing school divisions are the Foxes and Hounds, and even the school magazine is the Tally-Ho. Alumnae come back to Foxcroft perhaps more than to any other school; especially to the Thanksgiving hunt, when Middleburg meets at the school and the girls serve a hunt breakfast afterwards. The ivy ceremony at graduation is a tearful affair. Josephine Patterson, daughter of Joseph Medill Patterson, was the honored girl to plant the ivy this year (two other journalistic daughters–Sarah Brisbane and Barbara Mason–heading the class with her). And then, as before and after all school occasions, the girls link arms and sing a song which ends:
So sing, girlies, sing, and let every girly sing
That is old enough to lead or to follow;
For every girly here has a memory near and dear
For the school and its whoop and its holloa.
The song, rather disturbingly in such a conservative school, is to Drink, Puppy, Drink.
Patterson and Harris, Whitney, Wickes, and Woodward, Foxcroft girls genuinely love the school and are apt to turn there for advice on anything from husbands to servant problems. It is nice to report that they have at last repaid Miss Charlotte (who, in spite of the fact that she does not allow beaus, is a firm believer in matrimony) by winning the highest prize she has offered: a cup with a blue ribbon on it to the first Foxcroft girl to produce four babies: Susan Groome (Mrs. Robert Toland).
BREARLEY
East End intellects.
Founded by Samuel Brearley (died 1886); Miss Millicent Carey, young headmistress. Day school, 400 girls. Highest scholastic standing. Student list from social and professional New York.
There are only a half-dozen famous girls’ schools in New York, and two of them are aware only of each other. To Brearley, Miss Chapin’s (quite visible across a vacant lot on East End Avenue) is the only real competitor; and Miss Chapin’s is inclined to return the compliment, especially since the comparative eclipse of Spence. Both schools inhabit the newly but immensely smart reclaimed region on the upper stretches of Manhattan’s East River–East End Avenue, Gracie Square, the upper Eighties–where cobblestones now jounce limousines instead of beer trucks, and warehouses yield to swank apartment houses. Brearley lives in a high new building practically in the East River (two lower floors are known as Deck A and Deck B) at the snub end of Eighty-third Street; only to the 400-odd Brearley students is granted the privilege of taking their prep-school course 100 feet in the air, with the sound of tugboats clear through the windows of biology class. There is an air of modern precision about the building as about the school: in the big vermilion elevators, in the yellow-walled, red-upholstered library where the Sevens and Eights (seniors) study, in the three huge gymnasiums. And there is also an air of culture with no capital C. George Bellows did the picture in the reception room; the bulletin board is posted with prize poems, some in free verse; each child collects an elaborate summer notebook of esoteric insects and plants; sixteen-year-old girls read Pater for their exams. In a field in which most institutions show unmistakable signs of being mentally arrested in the late eighties, Brearley is notable for a liberal and imaginative attitude toward education. Its graduates (partly because it is entirely college prep) include an unusual percentage of women of personal distinction: it has produced Virginia Gildersleeve (dean of Barnard), Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, Michael Strange, Hope Williams, along with Milburns and Auchinclosses, Barstows, Jays, and Pells. Social little girls must work hard to keep up with daughters of professional men like Judge Hand, harder still to keep up with the Schwarzes, Schiffs, and Loebs.
Partly because it is a day school, there is no school life of the cinemaesque kind: student activities are worthy and just a little dull. An annual party–most inappropriately called the Hilaria–is given by each upper class; and school ends each year with three cheers for Carrie (the venerable maid) and three cheers for ice cream. The school anecdotes and traditions significantly concern teachers and headmasters rather than girls: Brearley remembers Carl Van Doren, who as headmaster blushed regularly when he got up to face the girls; James Croswell, who practised a curious rite–he dropped a single rose at the end of graduation ceremonies (Brearley does not believe in diplomas) to signify that at that precise mystic moment each class in school advanced one year farther toward the top; Anne Dunn, the gay Irish headmistress and teacher of English who was the most vital individual in the school.
Most significant of all in Brearley, perhaps, is the fact that you will find it listed in Manhattan’s Directory of Directors as The Brearley School, Ltd.; that its board of directors prides itself on operating as efficiently as the board of any business machine; that the board membership is a cross section of feminine Park Avenue (Talcott, Lord, Wilder, Field) and masculine Wall Street and that, while it includes one grandson of Matthew Arnold (Arnold Whitridge), it includes also three lawyers (Lloyd Garrison, Hamilton Hadley, George Martin), two financiers (Robert Brewster, George C. Clark), and a large textile merchant (Gerrish Milliken). Brearley is in every sense a skyscraper school.
MISS CHAPIN’S
East End chic.
Founded 1900 by Miss Maria Chapin, headmistress. Day school, 350 pupils. Character, character, character; a monitor system governs strictly. Large new building at 100 East End Avenue. None but New Yorkers.
The smartest school in New York City is indubitably Miss Chapin’s. Nowhere else will you see so many limousines, such smart governesses waiting to take their charges home, such elegant parents escorting offspring to luncheon. It is, today, the great feeder to charity committee and Junior League. Its new building on East End Avenue (rather Georgian in front, rather like a modern factory behind) has housed Pratt and Rockefeller, Flagler, Stettinius, an occasional stray Cabot; sometimes for college prep, more often for a straight finishing course. Here they learn, not to cook, but how best to budget a household and estimate their legitimate number of maids; to keep accounts; to speak French, read Latin, dance and play basketball; and above all, to have Poise.
For Miss Chapin believes above all in Character and Poise, the two being so entwined as to be almost synonymous. Where Brearley leans toward a feeling that a well-dressed mind will take you through most of the difficulties in this life, Miss Chapin feels that all anyone really needs is Character. Brearley shows a good deal of detachment about the details of its pupils’ lives; Miss Chapin’s is intensively organized. Uniforms, for instance: varying combinations of light and dark green for varying ages and occasions, with special aprons for special purposes. Rules: no frivolity in the course of the week, Poise at all times (a favorite Chapin edict: no running on the stairs). Constant moral instruction: morning prayers, a verse from the Bible to be recited in unison by the entire school — above all talks, from Miss Chapin herself.
For the school after all is Miss Chapin: the graduates remember her rather than any class or atmosphere. She is tall, large, forceful. Her Thursday nights are as famous as the late Miss Spence’s ethics classes. Though Chapin is a day school, all students gather Thursdays to see a play, hear a lecture, or, above all, to be talked to informally by Miss Chapin about Life. Spring and fall Saturdays, a time when girls are particularly in danger of movie-going, she usually gets them out to the athletic fields in Westchester. Long vacations worry her: a high point in any mother’s life may be when Miss Chapin calls her urging her not to let her daughter attend the theatres. One quirk: Miss Chapin’s passion for historic dates. All Chapin girls must learn five important dates a week, beginning, conservatively, with 2,000 B.C., and proceeding down the centuries. It takes some patience to reach King James.
That Miss Chapin manages to be strict without being irritating is testified to by the extraordinary devotion of Chapin girls to their school. Unlike St. Paul’s graduates, they do not wear hatbands the rest of their lives; in very much the St. Paul’s spirit they are conscious of being Chapin girls, and conscious that Chapin means something.
SPENCE SCHOOL
Correctness and care.
New York City; 22 East Ninety-first Street. Founded 1892 by the late Miss Clara Spence (died I923); Miss Helen Clarkson Miller, headmistress. Seventy boarders, 250 day pupils. Traditionally the outstanding New York girls’ school. Strict moral and scholastic standards. Little interest in athletics, organized religion, or extra-curricular activities. No uniforms. No callers. Students largely from New York and Chicago.
Time was when to go to Spence was the equivalent of an American patent of nobility: when it was taken for granted that people like the present Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Mrs. W. Plunket Stewart, Mrs. George Schieffelin, should be Spence girls. If Mrs. Cary Rumsey, who founded the Junior League in New York, was not a Spence girl, the first national president (Mrs. Willard Straight) and a host of outstanding Junior Leaguers like Mrs. Carleton Palmer were, whence the impression that the League was largely a Spence product. Though this was never true, and though it is even less true today than twenty years ago, there is still a flavor in the name Spence. On the other hand, as Easterners love to say (with an expressive look), the Mid-Westerners have crept in. Like an impoverished aristocratic family, it is accused of threatening to marry into trade. Against this eventuality, some of its friends–and no school has more fervent friends–have set about restoring it to the social niche it occupied almost until the death of Miss Spence in 1923. When the school moved, in 1929, to its new building just off Fifth Avenue on Ninety-first Street, there were dinners (speeches by Dean Gildersleeve, President Angell of Yale, Charles Schwab), appeals for money from a distinguished committee, an article in the Junior League Magazine by Ernest Poole.
In any case, you can still identify Spence girls on their bi-daily walks–two by two-the last girl (who is also the latest) walking with the chaperone; and the school is still strict and fair, giving tutoring where needed and exacting the highest standard of scholarship. Its rules are still of the utmost severity: Spence girls will remember the college boy who sent a girl an idle and affectionate telegram and was chilled to learn that the school had wanted the girl either to leave or to announce her engagement to him; the boarder whose mother mailed her a trunk key, which made such a suspiciously bulging envelope that it was only after prolonged thought that the girl was allowed to open it. Its alumnae are still devoted. There is the Alumnae Society which gives charity entertainments; the various charity committees; the Spinsters, an organization which includes only talented Spencites who like to give charity shows. No alumnae list is more distinguished: diplomatic wives like Mrs. Sheldon Whitehouse, Mrs. Stanley Carr, Mrs. James Beck; wives of businessmen like Mrs. Charles Glore, Mrs. Roland Harriman, Mrs. Robert McCormick; Damrosches, Vanderbilts, Cudahys, Schieffelins, Coes. Day students or boarders, they must remember the great spring teas–every day student giving them in rotation—and the most charming Spence tradition of all: the sewing class where earnest fifteen-year-olds sew endless baby clothes, to be inspected, approved, and pinned into a scrapbook and kept.
ROSEMARY HALL
For good complexions.
Founded 1890 by Dr. Caroline Ruutz-Rees who, with Dr. Mary Lowndes, is headmistress. Robust athletics and study emphasized. Large grounds, colorful buildings at Greenwich, Connecticut. Boys call weekends. Uniform: green wool in winter, blue-and-white checked gingham in spring.
Rosemary is British. It may take you time to discover this, for the main building–mottled lavender and rose—is Californian, the white cottages are early New England, the gym is Late School, and the Gothic chapel is just that. Still Rosemary is British. The dining hall is British–a Magdalen-like hall of long tables, with a high table at one end for Tuesday night dinners to clubs and teams. The Latin atmosphere is British: ten-bar girls (girls who have served in student government ten times) are Duces, and the girl voted the leading girl in every class is Optima; lists of immortals (their Latin class numerals beside them) decorate every room not already decorated with the quotations that are a great Rosemary feature — contemplative, literary, or uplifting. The point to which uniforms are carried is girls’-school British: there is even, at Rosemary, a Rosemary-blue evening dress, known as an opera uniform. And Rosemary customs are British as may be: last names only, constant roll calls by the girl marshals from the rostrum in the dining hall, the tradition of “beating the bounds” — running just as fast as possible (and for no good reason) around the school boundary at graduation. One important custom may be considered international: the Old and New Girl Feasts. The point of the feasts is for old or new girls to gather together very secretly in one place, give a cheer, and start eating before their traditional enemies can find them. Girls will climb through ventilators, along rafters, or under floors to break up a feast; the fun is often fast and furious. Very harrowing is the penalty for violating the rule against eating a forbidden food (such as fudge cake at any time; or fruit, even, after hours): the loss, for the greedy one’s entire form, of the feast privilege for that entire year.
And Rosemary goes in for energy. It is one of the half-dozen girls’ schools to practice interschool athletics. Ethel Walker is another. They play each other in tennis (in which Rosemary is likely to lose) and in hockey (in which Rosemary is likely to win), and thereby bring together what must be the two healthiest collections of girls in New England. And when not playing in organized sports like hockey (which Rosemary was the first American school to play), Rosemary does not walk — it “bounds.” Bounding is a recognized sport: in the spring, the upper form bounds from Greenwich to distant and romantic spots like Ridgefield; once it even bounded to New Jersey. Other times, girls merely bound around the school. Bounding to a distance brings a privilege — the right to compose a new school song and sing it very loudly under the school windows, especially if the bounders return late at night. This privilege is naturally highly prized.
Scholastically, Rosemary is equally, Britishly, energetic. Classes are so strenuous that girls sink with a sigh of relief into Bryn Mawr or Smith. Graduating classes go in one by one to meet the assembled faculty and hear their oral criticisms. They get their final marks in a unique way. The Sixth Form has a garden kept for them to walk in and, on a certain day, files one by one through that garden to find, tucked among peony root and hollyhock leaf, slips of paper. Each has a girl’s name on the outside, and within the single letter P or F — passed or failed.
All this Britishness comes back to the two headmistresses — Miss Lowndes and Miss Ruutz-Rees. Miss Ruutz-Rees is the original founder, the more dominant personality of the two and one of the most famed of headmistresses. She is big and breezy, with a sense of humor, a sense of expediency, a nice voice, and clothes that are soundly British in cut and fit. She has light hair which has never grayed, a rosy face, bright blue eyes, a finger in twenty pies, and a habit of ignoring the more annoying parents — to their hurt surprise. Her energy is stupendous; she will appear for salad in the dining hall and disappear before dessert; teach half a Greek philosophy class in her own living room and then turn it over to someone else; comment on a missing button, a problem of abstract morality, and the exigencies of Latin verbs in a breath. She has a feminine passion for color: the buildings are pastel triumphs in rose and mauve, and during hockey matches she hangs banners of every color — and origin — from the upper windows. And even the doorknobs in the main reception room are painted with pink roses to conceal their gray. She is not as British in manner as little Miss Lowndes, who is horsey (reputed to have a platinum rib from one of her not infrequent falls) and looks it. But she has a sound British belief in fresh air, in keeping girls girls and not pseudo-women; she adores traveling, of which she does a great deal, leaving the school with capable Misses Lucas and Shepard; she loves ironwork to the point at which she turned down the donation of a new swimming pool in favor of some very fancy gates; and on the lawns of Rosemary she raises the curliest of sheep and the curliest of poodles to chase them.
ETHEL WALKER
Which stays on bounds.
Founded 1911 by Miss Ethel Walker (Mrs. E. Terry Smith): Miss Jessie Hewitt, headmistress. One hundred and fifty girls. Specializes in college preparatory. Concentrates on health. Uniforms: green wool in winter, green cotton in summer. Like Foxcroft, slightly horsey, much sought after.
Ethel Walker is bounded by “sins” on one side and Pettibone Inn on the other. It is a cosmos of its own on a Connecticut hillside–635 acres of it, with its own roads, its own brooks, its own special milk supply (Senator McLean’s prize Guernseys), its own society. Purgatory is being kept on the hilltop over the weekend; heaven is being allowed to eat at the foot of the hill in Pettibone Inn. The cosmos is highly organized and lustily healthy. Its seniors live in a dormitory perched upon the brow of the hill. In winter girls slide down the snowy slopes to classes on skis, sleds, or their tummies; in very cold weather they institute a system of closing their windows from bed with an elaborate series of strings. Halfway down the hill are the big manége and the forty-five horses (Rosamond Pinchot, an old Walker girl, helped judge the evening horse show this winter); and Beaverbrook, the main house, long and stately brick. Beaverbrook has the well-known sleeping porches, thirty or more beds to a porch (and no whispering after lights out). Beaverbrook also has the classrooms, which look over a long sweep of Connecticut pines and fields, and graduate more girls to high college distinction than those of almost any other boarding school. Famous names are engraved upon the school’s athletic cups: Biddles and Cheneys and Jays and Iselins, and especially that of Nancy Voorhees, whom Ethel Walker will never forget because she broke the world’s record for the high jump and went over to the Olympics. There is also a Posture Cup: you are constantly being observed for posture in Beaverbrook, and even if you don’t stand straight enough to win the cup, you may accumulate enough posture credits to wangle a tea at the Inn. For the cosmos gives you both merits and demerits. When you have sinned (broken study hall, or whispered in the dark) you write your sin on a little piece of paper and put it in a box for a monitor to read. Sometimes credits mean a picnic at Miss Walker’s place in Hartford, where she serves tea in the terraced garden and swims with the girls in a big pool.
In athletics, half a dozen interschool teams (“Suns” and “Dials”) compete; and sometimes the varsity plays Rosemary, or Low & Heywood, or Miss Day’s. But Sun and Dial initiations are no longer what they used to be. In the Homeric days, all new girls lined up in the gym, were called out one by one, told to “wipe that smile,” were subdued in clothes hampers (a heavy girl sitting on the lid), raced over stubbly fields blindfolded, had their stomachs sat on and a soapy sponge strained into their mouths. But for years no girl has been held squirming while a husky schoolmate put spaghetti down her back , screaming “worms, worms.” These are decadent days, though the seniors at their Halloween party for the Four Corners girls still accomplish ingenious things with knocking books on the floor, and stroking girls with spinach and spaghetti.
FARMINGTON.
Which is itself.
Farmington, Connecticut. Established 1843 (oldest American girls’ school) by Miss Sarah Porter; Robert Porter Keep, principal. Two hundred students. Strictly finishing. Its most notable feature: Farmington spirit.
Farmington has spirit. When a Farmington girl leaves Farmington she hands a yellow ribbon to her favorite new girl, symbol of the fact that no girl leaves Farmington in spirit. At graduation time, she walks dressed in white (new girls used to have to wear black stockings) in the daisy chain up from the big gardens back of Brick House, singing–also to symbolize the Farmington spirit. To get her diploma she must not only pass her classes but have spirit as well. No one will ask her to report herself if she sneaks off to the little drug store on the Simsbury road or hides candy in her laundry bag–she simply won’t do such things: they are against Farmington spirit. And finally, to keep and inculcate Farmington spirit, she attends, every Sunday night, the most famous Farmington institution–the Little Meeting. The Little Meeting includes the entire school and meets, without faculty, in silence. An older girl reads (this is a great honor) a paper on charity or unselfishness and their relation to the Farmington spirit.
Indeed, Farmington centers around spirit to a point at which other activities sink into comparative obscurity. The school itself–a dozen New England houses on either side of the noisy College Highway (north from New Haven)–is not of the usual country-school type. Beautiful, with its elms and gardens, but not retreated. Athletics mean little at Farmington, and classes (since practically no one goes to college) almost less. The school events are around and of the girls themselves. Although beaus arrive (the entire school lines up to receive them) on certain Saturdays, the Saturday night dances are girl-and-girl dances, and the elaborate German, which is given once a year with much decoration in the gym, favors, dates for dances et al, is entirely feminine. Girls give bouquets and poems to older and admired girls before big dinners. “Walking home” is entirely a girl affair: two nights before term end you ask your second favorite girl to walk home; the last night your favorite. Farmington is feminine and sentimental.
When Miss Sarah Porter died, back in 1900, at the age of eighty-seven, she left the school to her niece, Mrs. Keep; and Mrs. Keep in turn left it to her nephew, Robert Porter Keep, who with his wife conducts it today. He is a slim, graying man of fifty, with a quiet, satiric sense of humor and great poise. The most vivid recollection of Farmington graduates about him is that he looks exactly like the pictures of Julius Cesar in their Latin books.
WESTOVER
Which is Miss Hillard.
Founded 1909 by Miss Mary Hillard, headmistress, at Middlebury, Connecticut. One hundred and fifty students. Finishing. Lectures, music, above all, character-building. Spartan atmosphere. Uniform: khaki daytime, white evening. School teams: Wests and Overs. Handpicked girls. Selected callers.
A classic tale about Miss Hillard concerns the time she introduced a girl to a distinguished visitor, dwelt at length on her cousins, her uncles, and her aunts–only to discover it was the wrong girl. The story is probably unfair, for Miss Hillard can normally rattle off your genealogy to the third and fourth generation without a mistake. Westover is no place to enter your daughter unless you are thoroughly arrived. A long line of graduates like Faith and Gladys Rockefeller, Lucy and Marjorie Pratt, Estelle Manville, and the Honorable Sylvia Fletcher-Moulton preclude that. When Miss Hillard takes Mid-Westerners, they are at least Mid-Westerners with an air: Lolita Armour; the Big Four—Genevra King, Edith Cummings, Peg Carry, and Courtney Letts–who ruled the younger Chicagoans a few years back.
And Miss Hillard feels that wealth entails responsibility. Her influence is all-important in the school and it is directed toward great good-doing. For most frailties, the punishment seems to be merely a talk of appropriate severity from Miss Hillard. For being late, however–the one unforgivable sin–you must rise and recite poetry at table (the entire school learns a poem a week). There are innumerable lectures and concerts. Miss Hillard will hold you back to avoid an early debut.
Westover is in every sense a country school. Pleasures are simple; the girls remember only simple things: the famous three trees in the courtyard–the West Tree, the Over Tree, the Senior Tree (only a West may walk under the West Tree–it would be infinitely bad taste for her to go near the Over); the capes. The Westover evening uniform is white, the capes of ten different colors, some highly prized. Happy the senior who, having first choice, gets a blue or white or champagne instead of the dark red for late-comers. Usually she keeps it afterwards in a drawer with her diploma (if she was one of the few fortunate girls to get one) and the picture of Miss Hillard that all graduates get–big, firm-jawed, level-eyed, and looking as if she were about to advise them.
MISS HALL’S
Which is feminine.
Established 1898 by Miss Mira Hall, headmistress, at Pittsfield, Massachusetts. For gentlewomen and old-fashioned finishing. Little interest in athletics. No uniforms: strict atmosphere, though callers are encouraged.
The greatest believer in femininity, among headmistresses, is most paradoxically named Miss Mira Hall—and looks it. Men are miserable at the average school; they are welcomed at Hall’s, smiled upon and urged to stay to dinner so cordially that they feel rather like the young man who suspects a girl’s mother of having plans for him. Once a year there is a dance, and boys congregate in the very ungymnastic-looking gym, to dance from 7:30 to 12:00, drink Sanka, eat chicken salad (they are carefully herded in and out of the refreshment room, with no loitering), and troop out to their cars while the girls remain safely drawn up in the middle of the dance floor.
In the colonial building (full of antiques) on top of the hill, Miss Hall practices great scholastic severity and sees to the detail of her pupils’ lives. Candy is not allowed; if fond families send Sherry’s, it is passed around the dining room at luncheon — devastating to any box. The cooking classes are near Miss Hall’s heart — she wants all Hall girls to be wives and mothers — and once a week the class cooks supper for the entire school. But most significant of all is one small detail in the life of Miss Hall’s guarded pupils: they are not allowed to salt their food. Miss Hall knows exactly how much salt there should be in it, and the cook has cooked accordingly.
DOBBS
Which still goes to church.
Dobbs Ferry, New York. Founded in 1877 by the Misses Masters. Miss Evelina Pierce, headmistress. Religious and athletic. Uniforms: “Peter Toms” — white middies, blue serge skirts. Students from all over.
When the Misses Masters’ father died he made them promise three things: never to dance round dances, never to enter a theatre, never to sit on a sofa with a young man. These precepts they applied literally to themselves and in spirit to the school they founded at Dobbs Ferry. No girls’ school was ever bred in such a Puritan tradition.
And yet the late Miss Lily Masters, one of the most famous of all headmistresses, and the dominant half of the Masters sisters, seemed less a Puritan than a marquise. Her lace cuffs and rings were as exquisite as her hands; her table linen and silver, perfection; her favorite trick was winking one large brown eye knowingly when amused or skeptical. Charles Howard Taft and Henry Sloane Coffin were her greatest friends, and to the end of her life she took long walks with them, backing up the steep places in the hills around Dobbs when she couldn’t negotiate it forward. Since her death in 1920, her school has devoted itself to evoking her influence — which belied the sophistication of her personality by being profoundly religious.
Nowhere else will you find such famous Bible classes. Nowhere else save at Farmington will you find anything like “Tens.” A Ten (by a White Queen sort of arithmetic) is actually twelve or fifteen girls gathered together into a religious discussion group on Sunday night. Nowhere else will you find an entire school pining for membership not on a team but in Missionary Society –an organization which sets an all-time record for exclusiveness by having four members out of a possible 275. Dobbs remembers the girl who confessed to breaking the Non-communications rule — she had prayed for guidance during an exam.
Such religious fervor is especially startling in the Dobbs decor. The grounds are Long Island-country-estate to the n‘th degree; Estherwood, the senior house, would do comfortably for a South American Embassy and have room and gilt to spare; and it is appalling to think of Missionary Society members, dressed in “Peter Toms,” running up and down a white marble staircase thirty feet wide and through rooms called the “Red Room,” the “Music Room,” and hung with amazing plush.
Outside of Estherwood, in Estherwood Circle, Tap Day is still held. Here the school, every morning, takes its gentle morning exercise, and here on Tap Day the members of the Dobbs Athletic Association, superb in white blazers with lavender D.A.A.’s, circle counterclockwise and tap their choice.
Dobbs is still an excellent school, scholastically, morally, in the affection of its alumnae. But there is a certain Silver Age quality to its fame. The days of its great chic passed with the days when the hot-water can served in place of its meager bathrooms, with the days when Mrs. Percy Stewart and the Pittsburgh Laughlins and young Mrs. Vincent Astor went there; with the days when Miss Masters ruled as marquise.
