Westover: Giving Girls a Place of Their Own

13. The Ethic of Care: Defending Girls’ Schools

13 The Ethic of Care: Defending Girls’ Schools u n f o r t u n a t e l y , a f e w m o n t h s a f t e r a n n p o l l i n a’s i n s t a l lation , the important American Association of University Women suddenly backed off from advocating girl-only classrooms, saying in the spring of 1998 that attention should be given instead to improving education for the vast majority of girls in the nation’s coeducational schools. It was also concerned about the legal and political consequences of endorsing the separation of the sexes in public schools. Its report, which published conflicting or neutral—not negative—data about girls’ schools, “is at worst uncertain” about their advantages, a Wall Street Journal editorial stated, and it concluded that it was “a case history of how politics trumps policy nowadays in this country.” Most contributors to Separated by Sex: A Critical Look at Single Sex Education for Girls acknowledged that the research showed that girls learn better apart from boys, but, they asked, was this because of the absence of boys, or better schools, or more supportive parents, or some other reason? Whatever the case, Westover’s new principal fired off a letter of protest to The New York Times, which went unpublished. The backlash against girls’ schools grew, and the next month The Atlantic Monthly published a harsh attack by the writer Wendy Kaminer, a member of the Smith College class of 1971. When she had attended the Massachusetts women’s college more than twenty-five years earlier, she had experienced more sexism in its genteel female atmosphere than among other Jewish students at her public high school on Long Island, she wrote. “Since their inception in the nineteenth century, all-girls schools have fos- 232 ✦ w e s t o v e r tered femininity along with feminism. They are models of equivocation, reinforcing regressive notions of sex difference at the same time that they educate women and help to facilitate their entry into the professions,” she declared. Ann Pollina responded again, asking rhetorically in a published letter to the Atlantic ’s editor what was the matter with femininity coexisting alongside feminism. What is really wrong, she wrote, is that all too often girls feel they must choose between the two. “What Kaminer sees as equivocation in single sex-schools, I see as balance,” she said, adding that “I do not think we will ever be successful in our quest for equity by androgyny.” In her letter, she also mentioned that she urged the future scientists and engineers in her classes to retain their caring natures. “We have all come to understand that not only can they do mathematics in spite of their traditionally feminine concerns, but that they will do better mathematics because of them.” She believed they would do this by bringing their altruism and other approaches to the profession. While girls need math, she emphasized another time, “in my heart I firmly believe that math needs girls.” This idea has to do with her conviction that integrating relational and rational styles heightens creativity and leads to intellectual breakthroughs. “We get further, we do more, we’re wider open, we learn differently, we learn different things about the universe, and we pose different questions,” she has explained. Scientists like Barbara McClintock, who won the Nobel Prize in cytogenetics, as well as the primatologists Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, have advanced the research in their fields by being attentive to relationships, she has pointed out. In these letters and elsewhere, Pollina has promoted an ethic of care, which includes an ardent defense of women’s traditional work. It is a viewpoint that is unusual for an innovative educator who believes in the empowerment of girls. Women should not have to apologize for staying home and caring for children or elders, she says, or for taking time to cook and do other housework. She has taken exception to the slogan of a supposedly pro-girl advertisement—“If you want her to succeed, give her a chemistry set instead of a doll”—because she believes girls should be given both. “This is a very, very hard message to get across,” she has admitted. Still, she is sure that affirming the gentler virtues long associated with womanhood actually validates schoolgirls, since these values are inherent, or at least deeply ingrained, in girls. “We...