Westover: Giving Girls a Place of Their Own

PREFACE: My Westover

p r e f a c e My Westover t h i s b o o k h a d i t s b e g i n n i n g i n t h e a u t u m n o f 1 9 7 1 , w h e n I was working for Newsweek in New York. In the wake of the women’s liberation movement , I was seeing everything with new eyes, and I wanted to re-evaluate my life as a girl, especially my three years at Westover. The impact of leaving home at the age of fifteen for a hermetic female community had been huge. As far as I could tell, the school had changed very little from the time my mother had attended in the late 1920s and early 1930s. I wondered why I had never heard the words “women’s rights” spoken by my intelligent and independent women teachers, even by the indomitable Louise Dillingham, who had ruled the place for many years with a peculiar combination of absolute authority and enigmatic detachment. I was wondering about other matters, as well. After graduating in 1961, my memories of my years in Middlebury, Connecticut, remained unresolved. They were as charged as if radioactive, and as ongoing as a persistent itch. I remembered my restlessness because I didn’t believe I was being readied for Real Life. Although I realized I was getting an excellent education, I also wanted something else. After graduation, my adolescent ambivalence turned to antagonism, when alumnae news was more about weddings than professional work or other kinds of adventures. As boys’ prep schools went coeducational, I applauded, regarding female institutions as anachronisms, something I had endured simply because I was born too soon. xii ✦ Preface Intending to write a freelance article about girls’ schools from my new point of view, I wrote to Westover’s acting headmaster for an interview. I was more comfortable returning as a reporter than an alumna and had skipped my tenth reunion the previous spring. When I drove up to the school’s imposing façade along the side of a village green, all the nervousness and anticipation I had felt when returning from vacations came rushing back. I pushed open the heavy front door, walked in, and there was Red Hall flooded with sunlight, with the green grass and little apple trees within the Quad visible through its large windows. Standing in that familiar, feminine place, I felt enveloped by emotion. To my astonishment, I felt a sense of solace. I tried to resist this feeling because it undermined my new ideas. An enthusiastic supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, I espoused equality and togetherness with males, and I rejected the ideas of womanly retreat and feminist separation. Why did it feel so, well, pleasant to be back? Perhaps it had to do with tricks of memory or the beauty of the place. Still, my reaction didn’t make sense to me. After all, I had suffered adolescent angst while there. Maybe I was tired of gender battles in Manhattan, where my boyfriend seemed to live in the Dark Ages, and where female editorial employees of Newsweek had filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission protesting the magazine’s discriminatory policies against them. In the interview, soft-spoken Joseph Molder gave me the impression that he was “more on the girls’ side” than I had expected, my notes of the meeting say. My notes also reveal my point-of-view at the time: It would be a mistake for alumnae to make the school “a bulwark against change in their daughters and granddaughters, rather than a good opportunity to mold the new woman creatively.” Afterward, he introduced me to a long-haired, bearded English teacher about my age, who startled me by saying he was getting girls to read women writers like Sylvia Plath. I was also surprised to see students in their own clothes, to hear about their baking cookies at the headmaster’s house, and to see them riding off on bikes to volunteer jobs outside the high walls of the school. In a note to Mr. Molder after I returned to New York, I thanked him for answering my questions so “patiently and graciously” and praised his “sensitive touch” as headmaster. Then I asked him if the school was ever going to teach sex education or women’s studies. (I never got an answer to that...