Westover: Giving Girls a Place of Their Own

12. Backlash: Defining the Difference

12 Backlash: Defining the Difference a s h a l f t h e g i r l s ’ s c h o o l s i n a m e r i c a d i s a p p e a r e d , o n l y a few voices were raised in opposition, like the eloquent one of Adrienne Rich, who had attended a female high school before going to Radcliffe College. Teaching teenage girls together was especially important, she believed, because those are the years when “polarization between feminine attractiveness and independent intelligence” is widest, or, in other words, when attention given to appearance often undermines the ability to think. She was well aware of the many ways that the world sabotages schoolgirls—from making sexist assumptions to ignoring sexual harassment. “If there is any misleading concept, it is that of ‘coeducation’: that because women and men are sitting in the same classrooms, hearing the same lectures, reading the same books, performing the same laboratory experiments, they are receiving an equal education,” she had declared in her 1978 speech. “They are not.” In the late 1980s, the remaining girls’ schools started to take a stand. British-born scholar Rachel Belash, head of Miss Porter’s School, and a counterpart, Arlene Gibson of Kent Place School in New Jersey, organized a meeting of all-girl schools in October of 1987, and then, at Joseph Molder’s invitation, they gathered in Middlebury the following spring. Before long they organized the National Coalition of Girls’ Schools with a membership of fifty-six schools. “Ours is a coeducational world—no doubt about it— and single-sex education needs its defenders, promoters, believers, and proselytizers,” Belash wrote in The New York Times Magazine. “Yes, some people think girls’ schools are 216 ✦ w e s t o v e r anachronisms, but they succeed, better than most people realize, and remain necessary in a world where men and women still do not work equally together as professionals.” The next year, on the heels of the publication of Carol Gilligan’s second book, Making Connections, same-sex Emma Willard School took out in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal feisty advertisements that promoted educating girls apart from boys and denigrated “St. Grottlesex,” a nickname for a group of formerly male prep schools in New England. Next, the coalition commissioned a study of attitudes toward schools for girls. It revealed that parents assumed that math and science were better taught in coeducational than in girls’ schools. This astonished and dismayed Ann Pollina, who realized that few people were aware of what was happening at Westover. She also blamed this impression on bias, saying that “women are still fighting our battles for gender equity on a primal level.” She realized that girl-only schools had been struggling so hard for survival that they had neglected to oppose this widespread attitude. “We are, however, beginning to do so at Westover,” she declared in 1991. She also adamantly rejected the stereotype of the schools as refuges from unfair classrooms. “This must not be the message of single-sex education,” she added in an article. It was evident that she understood that the relatively few girls’ schools must enlarge their mission as well as their message. “We are a natural laboratory for the investigation of how girls learn best,” she continued, adding that what teachers of girls have learned over the years should be used to improve the nation’s classrooms for girls and boys alike. In June of 1991 she, along with math teacher Louise Gould of Ethel Walker School, co-hosted a symposium, under the aegis of the new coalition, about teaching math, science, and technology to girls. Gathering at Wellesley College, eighty-seven educators met at a time when women’s progress in computer science and similar fields had stalled. Over the next few days, as the educators shared ideas and information, they talked about teaching girls technological abstractions through stories, substituting sports or rocket metaphors for those that pupils invented, finding ways for them to see themselves as experts, and many other matters. Judith Jacobs, a mathematics professor from California, spoke about her success with using journals: “I find that when my students write about how they feel as they are learning mathematics, as well as how they are doing in mathematics, they have amazing growth.” Claudia Henrion, a mathematics professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, mentioned the importance of...