In 1950, about 3% of lawyers and 6% of doctors in the U.S. were women. The great majority of women who wanted professional careers were in fields then regarded as best suited for them, such as nursing, K-12 teaching and library work. Even in those crucially important jobs, salaries were low and advancement was tough.
In that not-so-long-ago world, there was a lauded vocational school that took women’s aspirations seriously: the Katharine Gibbs School. It didn’t just teach typing, shorthand and grooming. University professors gave courses in academic subjects, and students were introduced to their cities’ cultural riches. If a woman could get a degree from one of the Gibbs schools in New York City, Boston or elsewhere, she had her choice of secretarial jobs. And along with her pillbox hat and white gloves, she had the skills, polish and confidence to rise in the business world or make her mark anywhere she chose.
Vanda Krefft’s inspirational Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women tells the story of Gibbs and its 50,000 graduates, from its 1917 founding by the redoubtable Mrs. Gibbs, of course, to its 1968 sale by her son Gordon to a company that destroyed its ethos. More than a simple business tale, Expect Great Things! is a cultural history of women who were ambitious, but not rebels, advancing within a system by using the limited tools at hand. As Krefft writes, they “worked their way up step-by-step, rather than kicking down doors. . . . They had to confront circumstances as they were, not as they wished them to be.”
Much of the book is a delightful compendium of minibiographies that show the widely diverse ways that Gibbs graduates used their education. To mention just a few of dozens: Katherine Towle became the first director of the Women Marines, aspiring actor Loretta Swit was a temp for a society columnist and assistant to a U.N. ambassador as she rose from bit roles to starring in M*A*S*H*, and Joye Hummel wrote and oversaw production of many early Wonder Woman comics.
Krefft notes that most graduates were white; Gibbs admissions policies were as unwelcoming to people of color as those of so many schools of the era. But it did admit students from all economic backgrounds. Gibbs grads were, Krefft says, “fighting in the trenches” for decades. Pushing onward, they ultimately helped widen a path for their daughters.
