ER’S TEACHING CAREER BEGAN WHEN SHE AND MARion Dickerman purchased (with Nancy Cook and evidently Caroline O’Day) the Todhunter School for Girls at 66 East 80th Street in New York in 1927. A finishing school “of broad cultural aim,” including college preparation, it attracted the privileged young women of New York who lived generally between Park Avenue and Central Park.
When, in 1926, the British-born and Oxford-educated Winifred Todhunter decided to return to England, she offered her school to her vice-principal, Marion Dickerman. Short of cash, Dickerman turned to ER for advice and support. ER, who had longed to teach ever since she left Allenswood, enthusiastically gave or loaned Marion Dickerman the capital needed, and agreed to teach. But she hesitated to assume the title of associate principal because she lacked a college education and what she considered the necessary training.
On 7 February 1926, ER wrote Dickerman: “I think you ought to take the 1st place [as principal] for the first year with the understanding that you have no financial responsibility. It will be easier for you to settle in that way & when Miss Todhunter and Miss Burrell depart then I’ll slip in & do all I can for you but I feel strongly that you have to find out gradually what I can do…. But associate principals for the good of the School should have college degrees & I think I’d better be something less high sounding!” ER also felt that she should receive no salary the first year, “as I would consider that I was being paid in experience and the next year if we assumed joint financial responsibility then we could arrange some percent of profit after your salary & all expenses were paid. I think it will be quite thrilling for it is your gift & it would be a crime for you not to use it & I know you can make a great success.”
ER’s own success as a teacher was so rapid and thorough, and her popularity so intense, that, her profound modesty notwithstanding, even she had to acknowledge it. For the first time in her adult life, ER was able to take full credit for her work, and to acknowledge its excellence and significance. Despite all her political success, she took unique pride in her teaching career—the fulfillment of her Allenswood ambitions.
After one year of teaching, she would never again feel about herself as she did when she wrote to Marion Dickerman in 1926: “It is going to be such fun to work with you & Nan & you are dear to let me join in it all for I’d never have had the initiative or the ability in any one line to have done anything interesting alone!”
Together, ER and Marion Dickerman, “stately figures in tailored dark red gowns and low-heeled oxfords like those the girls are required to wear,” presided over the daily ceremonies that opened the school day. A hundred uniformed girls ranging in age from five or six to eighteen marched to the cadence of a piano tune into the assembly room, which had once been a mid-Victorian parlor; there, behind a long well-polished table, ER and Marion Dickerman waited to receive them. Announcements, songs, and the school prayer followed:
O God, give us clean hands, clean words, clean thoughts. Help us to stand for the hard right against the easy wrong. Save us from habits that harm. Teach us to work as hard and play as fair, in Thy sight alone, as though all the world saw us. Keep us ready to help others and send us chances every day to do a little good and so grow more like Christ. Amen.
Although Marion Dickerman, Nancy Cook, and ER co-owned Tod-hunter, and Marion was the principal, Eleanor’s influence prevailed. She wrote the articles in magazines and school newsletters, raised the funds, and attracted the students. Nancy Cook was largely involved with the Val-Kill furniture business, and appeared at Todhunter only occasionally. Marion Dickerman was very much present, but many of the students considered her less progressive, and rather less appealing, than ER. Both Annis Fuller Young (Crystal Eastman’s daughter, adopted by Agnes Brown Leach, also ER’s close friend) and Patricia Vaill (class of 1936) remembered Dickerman as dour, frosty, a traditional snob. There were other teachers at Todhunter—excellent instructors of art, music, geography, dramatics, languages, and athletics. But, like Marie Souvestre at Allenswood, ER eclipsed all others and dominated the landscape.
ER loved Todhunter. She loved young people. And she loved to teach. It gave her a forum for her vision and a new dimension of confidence and of real pleasure. That portion of her personal journey which she had begun at Allenswood in 1899 was resumed triumphantly at Todhunter. In 1930, she told a reporter that she meant to continue as a teacher, “because it is one thing that belongs to me.” And in 1932, she told another reporter: “I like it better than anything else I do.”
ER was a natural, enthusiastic, and exciting teacher. Her students adored her—she made them work, and she made them think. To Patricia Vaill, she made history and every character in it come alive—”And I never forgot a damn thing she ever taught me.” Every week, on the train to and from Albany, ER did her own homework. She read voraciously, prepared imaginative lesson plans, graded papers with long, thoughtful, sympathetic comments. Her message to her students was: Be Somebody. Be Yourself. Be All You Can Be.
As a teacher, ER consciously modeled herself after Marie Souvestre: Her own experiences with that great teacher caused her to believe profoundly that the main thing in education “is the interest aroused in a young mind by a stimulating, vivid personality.” ER assigned her students research projects that would enable them to analyze controversial subjects from several perspectives, and to begin to develop their own points of view, their own theories about truth and fraud, decency and dishonor, morality and immorality—in politics, history, and private life.
As progressive as were some of Todhunter’s educational methods, ER supported a traditional system of tests, midterm and final examinations, reports and grades. She and her colleagues believed, ER explained, “that the girls will have to take certain hurdles in life and that hurdles in school are an important preparation. We try, however, not to compare one child with another. And each girl plots a graph of her own term marks to demonstrate to herself whether she is gaining or losing.”
ER’s standards were high, and she was occasionally disappointed. Her senior girls were sometimes spoiled and indolent, sometimes impossibly unprepared. She wrote FDR on 2 February 1928, after her first semester at Todhunter: “I can’t say I am set up by the exams my children did. I only flunked one but the others were none too good.” Ever mindful of her own educational gaps as a young woman, ER was gentle but diligent.
She never forgot that dreadful moment of embarrassment during her honeymoon when she visited the Fergusons. Alone with Lady Helen at tea in the garden, surrounded by rhododendrons and tranquillity, ER was “basking in contentment” until suddenly Lady Helen asked her to explain the structure of the U.S. government. ER repeated that story frequently, and as a teacher dedicated herself to several specific tasks: No student of hers would ever feel so unprepared or politically illiterate. More than that, she wanted her students to be as concerned about the great events of state and their solution as the finest spirits of England, like Lady Helen Ferguson: “a lovely and a brilliant woman, typical of the alert Englishwoman who knows the politics of the hour to the last detail.”
All of ER’s history and government students were prepared to answer a variety of questions on their final exams:
What is the difference between a citizen and a subject?
What is meant by a “public servant”?
List the ways in which your government touches your home.
Do you know of any way in which the Government protects women and children?
How does the family income affect the standards of living?
What is the difference between civil and political liberty?
What is the object today of inheritance, income and similar taxes?
Why is there a struggle between capital and labor?
Into what three different parts are our national and state governments divided by our constitution? What is the function of each?
What is a tariff?
What is the World Court?
Who is Mahatma Gandhi?
Who is John Brown?
What were the causes of the Mexican War?
What was the Dred Scott case?
What were the causes of the Civil War?
How did you feel about the solution of the Indian problem in the Southern states during [Andrew] Jackson’s term of office?
Give your reasons for or against allowing women to participate actively in the control of government politics and officials through the vote, as well as your reasons for or against women holding office in the government.
How are Negroes excluded from voting in the South?
Who is the dominant political figure in Soviet Russia?
Write an account of any article or series of articles on a subject you have read with most interest….
ER’s teaching methods were personal and informal. But, like Marie Souvestre, she held her students strictly accountable and suffered neither idlers nor parrots with notable patience. Although she did not encourage her students to become traitors to their class, she did promote responsible citizenship and urged her girls to challenge authority. “That is what the book says,” she repeatedly admonished. “Now how would you put it?”
Above all, ER prepared her students to lead productive, cultured, and thoughtful lives: “Education only ends with death,” she said repeatedly. Her own appetite for learning, for understanding the complexities and contradictions of the human spirit and society in all its forms, was what she most sought to communicate. Less concerned with an isolated fact or date, she wanted to pass on to her students the tools they needed to make their lives an ongoing adventure in learning and understanding. For ER, the two primary tools were: curiosity and vision.
IN 1930, ER WROTE “WHAT KIND OF EDUCATION DO WE WANTfor Our Girls?” for The Woman’s Journal:
“Vision means imagination and is absolutely necessary to the fostering of curiosity….”
ER hoped that children would receive such usable tools in school, “so that they may not only want information, but know where to go to find it.” ER wished especially that “we could give to all young people” a “real joy in books. If they find some kind of reading in which they can lose themselves, it will help them through many difficult times in their future lives.” Ultimately, education for ER meant the “habit of reading” combined with the opportunity to know “many different kinds of literature.”
ER’s literature classes were much like the literature classes she most loved at Allenswood, and she relied on her old notebooks, and her own daily readings to engage her students. The authors covered ranged from Aeschylus to Zola. Although she never “forgot the ladies,” they represented a very short list. Indeed, except for her inclusion of Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, George Eliot, and such transcendentalists as Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth and Sophie Peabody, most of ER’s references to women were found in her category “Minor Fiction Writers,” which included Miss Sedgwick, Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkes, Sarah Hale, and Lydia Child. Nevertheless, ER’s sense of literature was eclectic and nonexclusive. It ranged and rambled from Aristophanes to the medieval (“How did mystery and miracle plays develop?” “What was 14th Century Theatre?”) to Oscar Wilde (listed with “minor poetry writers”). A good deal of time was spent on the classics. Shakespeare (“Who was your favorite character in Midsummer Night’s Dream and in Twelfth Night?“), Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman were clearly among her favorites. She spent hours on the pastoral writers of the South, as well as the reformers of New England. Her students in world, British, and American literature were treated to a plentiful and rather democratic feast.
ER’s philosophy as an educator reflected the broader political beliefs she had defined during the presidential campaign of 1928 in an article called “Jeffersonian Principles: The Issue in 1928.”
The outstanding issue today is much as it was in Jefferson’s day—trust in the people or fear of the people….
Is the Government to be in the hands of the aristocrats …or shall it again be in the hands of the people who may make more mistakes but who will be free, responsible citizens…?
ER deplored the fact that Republican policies protected “big business and industry,” not the individual on the farm or in the family store. She had no quarrel with big business …“we need business, big and little, for prosperity.” But, she asserted, the Democrats did not “want one group to prosper as the result of Government favor while another languishes as the result of Government neglect.”
Politically, “our desire is to see …[a] more human outlook,” a commitment to “the interests of all the people” and their “health, education, labor conditions, opportunities for joyous living.”
Education, ER concluded, was the essential foundation upon which all democratic institutions rested. Throughout the gubernatorial years, she called for a greater commitment to public education. Public schools were responsible for “training the great mass of our students.” But public school teachers were undervalued and underpaid. ER emphasized that women teachers especially were underpaid. Only when their work was justly rewarded, would we know that our society had affirmed its commitment to real education.
As an educator, there was a contradiction between ER’s theory and practice. ER had a theory of education as an experiment in social democracy in which children of all classes and groups would know one another and learn to appreciate the exciting richness and variety of our complex society. But her school was expensive and restricted. She believed, abstractly, that public education for all would greatly benefit each individual child, and society as a whole. She even entertained the idea of mandatory public education for all children.
But even by her own example, ER’s challenge was contradictory. Her entire family attended private schools, while she increasingly deplored the insularity of the private school. It was unfortunate, she said, that so many children were “closely confined amongst the little groups of people which form their immediate circle of family and friends…. To bring children up with a conception that their own particular lives are typical of the whole world is to bring up extraordinarily narrow people….”
ER was particularly critical of parents who were concerned only about the prestigious aspects of a school and failed even to “inquire how well that school stands scholastically.” It amazed her that parents still emphasized almost exclusively their daughters’ entrance into “that strange thing called ‘society.’” ER dismissed “that magic word ‘society.’” “There was a time,” she noted, when “perhaps there were really only four hundred people who could afford the gaieties and elegant leisure of the society of that day, which was represented by an old lady in a magnificent house who gave remarkable parties to a few people, many of whom, while they may have belonged to the society of the ‘four hundred,’ scarcely can have been said to have either ornamented or elevated its standing in the greater social organization we call civilization.” But today, ER insisted, “there is no such thing in this country …as any one group which may be called ‘society.’”
There were too many people, too many interests, too many occupations, too many groups for any one group to monopolize that idea. There “is no such thing possible in this country as an aristocracy of society based on birth.” We have now “set up a material basis as the final criterion of social eligibility.” But that involves excellence, achievement, success. Many “who arrive at the top are found to have very simple backgrounds….”
So why this insistence, when we are looking for an education, on the school’s providing also “society,” which in the old sense does not exist at all; and in the new sense can only be entered through the acquiring by the individual of the qualities which make for success in the world at large.
I am hoping that as we grow a little older our schools and our parents will cooperate to impress on our youth that there are many types of success, that one may be lacking in many material things …and yet be an outstanding success because of some outstanding service to mankind. Madame Curie is feted over here, she is received everywhere with respect and recognition for the services which she and her husband have through years of patient study rendered to mankind, but the material returns have been very, very small.
I would like to see our schools and our parents cooperate in teaching the younger generation …that the point of real education is an ability to recognize the spirit that is in a real human being, even though it may be obscured for a time by lack of education or opportunity to observe certain social customs….
ER believed that educational policies determined the direction of a democratic society; and her goals as an educator were embodied in Todhunter’s statement of purpose, sent to all prospective applicants: A “state is the most civilized which has the greatest proportion of happy, healthy, wise and gentle people.” Todhunter existed to “educate for such a state….” “In a community of one hundred every one counts ‘but none too much’; thus each girl begins to appreciate her importance not only as an individual but also as a member of a group. Because she has a responsibility, the way she lives becomes important, what she is doing is significant not only for herself but for others….”
For ER, Todhunter’s methods were “a combination of the old and the new.” There were small group discussions, and every student was encouraged to participate in “vivid, first-hand experiences.” Museums, theatres, and foreign-language films were regular sources of instruction. Formal textbooks were replaced by a great variety of readings in newspapers and magazines. ER believed that a good teacher started with her students’ own interests and led them “into an enlivened understanding of every possible phase of the world into which they are going.” It was the teacher’s “function to manage this relating process, to seize all opportunities, however unpromising, to make history and literature and the seemingly barren study of the machinery of government somehow akin to the things the pupils are doing in their daily life.”
During the first years of what was to become the Great Depression, ER’s students were taken to visit courthouses and tenements, state agencies and settlement houses. She introduced them to the work of the Henry Street Settlement, the Neighborhood Playhouse, and the Women’s Trade Union League. ER was particularly concerned that her senior girls continue their studies—especially regarding social issues. She urged them to do community service, specifically to join the Junior League, and she offered a course for recent graduates who wanted to carry on and intensify the efforts they had begun at Todhunter. On 9 April 1930, ER wrote to her friend Jane Hoey, who directed the Welfare Council:
I am very anxious to send a class which has been studying with me this winter of young women, some of them married, all of them out of school for a year or more, on a trip some morning to see the various types of tenements in New York City…. I would like them to see the worst type of old time tenement. They need to know what bad housing conditions mean and then I would like them to see as model a tenement as possible in a bad neighborhood and on up to something really good in the way of houses for the moderately salaried groups….
Despite the contradictions between her educational theories and the private-school environment of Todhunter, ER’s impact as a teacher was generative and everlasting. She persuaded her students to develop their talents, to be responsible for their lives, to seek opportunity and achieve success, to care about and work for their communities. By the force of her own example and encouragement, she demonstrated that there was nothing they could not do, no interest they could not develop. She argued continually that in their future “there will be nothing which is closed to women because of sex.”
FOR FOUR YEARS, ER COULD BE SEEN RUNNING DOWN THE length of the train station at the last possible minute, her briefcase and large pocketbook filled to capacity. Train conductors knew her schedule and often held the train. ER never ceased to be surprised to see the conductors smiling and waiting patiently. According to Frances Perkins, ER thought “it odd that a great, tall woman like herself, who towered over everybody in Grand Central Station, would be recognized when she ran for a train and that they would hold the train for her. It never occurred to her to ask to have the train held for the Governor’s lady. She was utterly without the quality of presuming upon her privileges….”
En route to New York City every Sunday evening, ER read in preparation for her lessons and lectures. Every Wednesday afternoon, returning to Albany, she graded papers, wrote letters, and drafted the speeches she would give that week somewhere in New York State. Nor did she slight her Albany responsibilities. She took the social reins from Missy LeHand by four-thirty each Wednesday afternoon, just in time to preside over the regularly scheduled midweek tea. The social life of the Executive Mansion intensified with her arrival. The Albany household was enormous, and every one of the nine guest rooms was filled virtually every weekend. There were seventeen servants, and countless household demands. ER generally took it all in stride: “Everything is done for me. I simply give the orders.”
But there were times when demands piled up; moments of petty tensions, political failures, exhausting emotional chores. ER had lifelong mood swings. Opposition and imperfection tended to depress her. She would become tired, disgruntled; cold and withdrawn. Those closest to her understood that, when ER expressed fatigue or irritation, something was seriously amiss.
In 1931, Anna wrote her mother: “Father’s letter to me was mostly about trying to persuade you to go to Warm Springs for a week with him. He feels you are tired, & ought to ‘slow up’—he thinks you could get a substitute for your classes for three days & he seems so very anxious to have you go with him…. Pa thinks one week would ‘put you in fine shape for the winter.’ …I had thought you were quite harassed—more than tired—about 3 or 4 weeks ago.” Anna urged her mother to vacation, “cut out a few of the meetings, and some of the speeches (which you swore last summer you were not going to make!) and if you think it would give you any rest at all to go to Warm Springs—do go. Pa seems to want you there so badly….”
However accurate her family’s sense of her fatigue, the prescription was ignored. ER never vacationed when she felt emotionally or physically exhausted. She worked harder, as if each new task was a potential source of new energy. Moreover, she never sought a substitute for her classes. That was the one realm she could always rely upon to lift her spirits, and enhance her well-being.