During the next few days, the Russian observed daily life at the school for girls. Each morning as a breakfast tray was brought to his room, “somewhere near—as if having just waited for this moment—a delicate feminine voice would start to sing and someone’s hesitating fingers would play on the piano. Evidently the mysterious singer was practicing some hymns.” After lunch he was taken to watch pupils play ice hockey on the frozen pond. All day, he noticed, there was “animated conversation, laughter, gayety [sic]. Childishness, combined with maidenish gracefulness, but without even a shade of coquetry.” He had exactly the same experience as the fictional young men who stumbled on Herland: “Meeting me, the girls smiled in a friendly way, but without a trace of accentuated curiosity, not to speak of bashfulness—my greetings were answered with friendly words, and open, clear eyes.” He attended a play one evening and, after reluctantly saying good night, he immediately regretted refusing to go tobogganing in the moonlight with a group of teachers.
A view of the front of the school and the headmistress’s apartment from the chapel. SVEN MARTSON.
After his visit, the Russian revolutionary’s hope for a joyous new kind of existence began to seem real. “I think that those who have spent the years of their girlhood in the school of Miss Hillard must keep for life the wonderful sensation of the possibility of such marvelous fullness of life,” he wrote. “Does not here lie the inmost, the most important aim of education—to awaken in the young conscience for the rest of her life a longing for what in youth had already seemed half attained, as if in a dream?” He added that, contrary to the morning prayer of the Jews about not being born a woman, “I would have been glad to have changed for a month into a girl of eighteen and to spend that month in the school of Miss Hillard.” It is, he concluded, “a real girls’ republic.”
3
The Art of Living:A Balanced Life
MARY HILLARD HAD ALWAYS WANTED HER SCHOOL TO BE A place devoted to the wholesome values of her girlhood, the same ones that had shaped the grandmothers of most of her pupils. Life at Westover would be “simple, sincere, and natural,” she had written in the school’s first catalog. Her own childhood had consisted of “an education which brought her soul in touch with God, her mind in contact with the great thinkers of the past and present, [and] her body in contact with nature in all her aspects among the hills of Connecticut,” in the words of a her minister friend in Waterbury, John Dallas. As she structured a way of life for her young charges—one she envisioned as a balanced existence—she hoped that they would adopt it as their own after graduation. Some activities and traditions were similar to those in other girls’ schools, and others were unique to Westover. Mornings were for classes, afternoons were for exercise, and evenings were for studying in the schoolroom, or dancing in the gym, or attending events in Red Hall, or listening to the headmistress read aloud in her sitting room.
The first Westover yearbook, for the 1911–1912 school year, indicates the way the days made up a routine, marked by traditions, in a rhythm that would be repeated for years. On many Saturday nights there were “germans” (a word meaning little plays), parties with songs, favors, costumes, and skits put on by the seniors, athletic teams, and others. From the first year there was the performance of a nativity play in the style of an old English pageant before Christmas vacation. Early on Easter mornings the seniors surprised the new girls by awakening them while walking down their bedroom corridors singing hymns. For a few years there was also a May Day dance with a queen and maidens, along with singing, dancing, and the winding of a Maypole.
As always, there was the emphasis on building strength of character. Echoing Mary Wollstonecraft, an early Westover catalog stated that the goal of academic work was to train the mind to reason and to control the emotions. The importance of thought was underscored by the motto on everyone’s brass belt buckle, “To Think, To Do, To Be.” Learning, Miss Hillard believed, should also stimulate originality and inventiveness: “A person of liberal education should radiate life and joy and color by passing everything through the prism of the imagination,” she liked to say. Freshman year studies were intended to develop concentration, while subsequent years were planned to inform and train pupils’ tastes in art and literature. All this education reached an epitome in the senior year. “The studies of the Senior Year, which the thirty odd other lovely girls who will make up our Senior Class next year are to have, are of an especially cultivating character,” Miss Hillard wrote persuasively to the mother of a prospective student who had spent the previous year in Europe.
Besides offering classes in art and literature, the school had many others in European and American history as well as a few in psychology, mathematics, astronomy, geology, physiology, and botany. The learning of languages, including Latin and Greek, was stressed, and plays were performed in German and French. Although the headmistress did not emphasize academics to the exclusion of everything else, she did, unlike Sarah Porter, put pressure on pupils by ranking them academically and reading aloud the list from highest to lowest on a day that was dubbed “Black Monday,” a practice modeled on boys’ schools. She also scolded poor performers. When freshman Marianna Talbott got the lowest grades in the school, Miss Hillard “gave me plain hell in front of the whole school,” the girl wrote in her diary. To encourage good grades, the principal established a policy that allowed a new girl who got over ninety in every lesson in a week to read in the library instead of going to study hall in the evenings.
Mary Hillard (left), Helen LaMonte, and Lucy Pratt. WESTOVER SCHOOL ARCHIVE.
Many graduates spoke glowingly all their lives about the brilliant teaching of Helen LaMonte, who was born the youngest of five children in 1872 on a farm in Owego, New York. It was the quality of her intellect that impressed them as much as her extensive knowledge. In her History of Painting class, which she taught in a large wood-paneled room, she asked pupils to research paintings and then paste reproductions of them in notebooks. “She was a magnificent teacher,” recalled a former student, who credited her with all she knew about art. Many others never forgot what she had said about particular paintings, and when they got to the Louvre and the other museums in Europe (sometimes with their notebooks in tow), they headed for those works of art. Miss LaMonte also taught Literature of the Nineteenth Century, the study of English prose and poetry. One alumna remembered thinking as she entered the class that “‘this is going to be good’—and it always was.” Not only was the teacher’s imagination a delight, but she also explained poems clearly. Another graduate, who wanted to stay at Westover until she had taken every course that Miss LaMonte taught, recalled gratefully that “it was she who opened my eyes to art and my ears and mind to poetry and literature.”
Part of a well-rounded life, in Mary Hillard’s opinion, was to experience the beauty of nature. Early on she had bought seventy acres and a small nineteenth-century farmhouse in the nearby village of Woodbury. While there is evidence that she acquired the property by borrowing money from friends, she had long believed that principals of profitable schools have the right “to share liberally in the earnings of the school,” and she apparently earned an excellent salary. The farm was her personal retreat as well as what she called “a holiday house” for student picnics,