In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

158 •——— verso runninghead ———• ———— Chapter Thirteen ———— The Girl of the Period p Although described by one of her students as “frailty personified” and barely five feet tall, Miss Chapin loomed high in Cora’s anxieties .1 During the winter of 1885, Cora was turning out to be a disappointment to her. With students who had no talent, she was sweet-tempered and tolerant, but with students who had potential, Miss Chapin had uncompromising standards and demanded the utmost rigor and thoroughness . Miss Keck continued to rush through her pieces and make the same mistakes over and over, while her instructor stretched her thin lips together under her very long nose and glared in annoyance. Cora wrote in March, “Took my Music lesson, but was squelched perfectly awful as I thought I was ‘getting on’ beautifully in my piece. But behold, from 112 metronome I was lowered to 88 metronome in time, and I certainly feel as if I was not progressing at all. And as to the concert in May I’m sure I will not be up to time [that is, back to the faster pace of 112] Woe be unto me if I have it not.” While her teacher tried to correct her careless keyboard technique and unresponsive attitude, Cora spun listlessly back and forth on the piano stool in the music studio and stared absently into the half distance. Miss Chapin was fast losing patience with this student, who seemed to have trouble applying herself to routine but important tasks such as drilling on scales and arpeggios in each key to improve her fingering and technique . Cora could not impress her with superficial flash and flurries of fast notes. Miss Chapin was looking for the depth and confidence of piano technique that comes from many hours of disciplined hard work, and she was not getting it. She must have been grinding her teeth with frustration; she had finally been assigned a student who had the makings of a music department star, but she couldn’t get the girl to put in the effort required to make it happen. Cora had native talent, but she was wasting it. She apparently did not care if she remained a musical [ 158 ] •——— Recto Runninhead ———• 159 Frontispiece of Cora’s Beethoven sonata, from her book of bound sheet music. •——— The Girl of the Period ———• 160 •——— verso runninghead ———• dilettante all her life. Cora herself could not understand why she was not progressing as well as her teacher expected and did not like being reined in. With all her hectic social activities and squelchings in German class, she was sinking deeper and deeper into a well of frustration. When I first read about Miss Chapin in the diary, I took an instant dislike to her, as her severity tends to conform to everyone’s worst image of a grim Victorian disciplinarian spinster. However, the more I learned about the lives of Vassar’s earliest alumnae, the more I came to appreciate Miss Chapin’s side of the story. She had good reasons for her harsh response to Cora’s poor work ethic. She had graduated from Vassar ’s School of Music in 1872 as part of an earlier generation of women who really understood what a miraculous opportunity it was to get an advanced education. She had gone through the program determined to make a career for herself in music as an independent single woman, and she must have found it difficult to overlook the fact that Cora was clearly at Vassar hoping to find a husband from a higher social stratum, not to work hard at her music. At age thirty-six, Jessie Chapin was probably anxious about and frustrated with her own future. Even though she had found a job in the field for which she was trained, in many ways her situation resembled the “gilded cage problem” that oppressed Cora’s corridor teacher, Miss Davis. The only place Miss Chapin could find paid employment was at the place that had created her, not in the real world. Miss Chapin’s tense relationship with her flighty student went right to the heart of Vassar’s academic and financial crisis. Cora entered Vassar as part of the threatening tide of underachievers surging in through the front doors to keep the college afloat financially. As an alumna, Miss Chapin might well have shared the sentiments expressed in that 1884 letter sent by the ten distinguished Boston alumnae to Vassar’s board of trustees. Those women...

Share