she had slept in her room. In her case, it was innocent enough: “I can safely say that I never learned to love any girl so much in so short a time. The most I did was to tell her that she was a dear and give her a bear hug.”
Such infatuations are commonplace in an isolated and sequestered female community. Besides being way out in the country, Westover was surrounded by a seven-foot fieldstone wall. Within the school, it was forbidden to read newspapers that reported scandals. In this atmosphere, Miss Hillard gave sensible advice about health: she warned girls about smoking, too much dieting, and about drinking more than one cocktail at a time. Other more benign behavior was under scrutiny. Besides being marked on room tidiness, girls were graded for their posture. If someone yearned to be alone for a while, she could place a sacrosanct sign that read “Please Excuse” on her bedroom door or on a pile of books asking respect for her privacy or possessions. The cure for low spirits was considered to be going on a long walk or doing something for someone else.
An outsider’s eye offers another perspective, so it is fascinating to read the description of a visit to Westover in February of 1925 by a Russian political exile named Vladimir Zenzinoff. Mary Hillard had an intense interest in the Russian Revolution, and she invited him to Middlebury to give a talk. Undoubtedly eager for the generous lecture fee, he agreed and was met at the Waterbury train station by a teacher and driver in a luxurious automobile with a fur throw. They drove over the snowy, wooded, hilly landscape to the three-and-a-half-story school, which Zenzinoff described as “an enormous and elegant stone house.” Middlebury in winter vividly reminded him of his village in Russia, and his descriptions are reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s imaginary Herland, too. “It seemed to me as if I were in a fairy tale,” he remembered, and his three days at Westover would turn out to be “unquestionably … the most pleasant, cheerful days [and] the most interesting” of his four months in America. His guest room “had a distinctly maidenish atmosphere about it … purity, immaculateness, a naive simplicity [with a] … snow-white, comfortable bed near the window.” But in some ways—the electricity everywhere and telephone in his room—the school did not remind him of his native land at all.
After being told that dinner would be in half an hour, the visitor, who spoke French but little English, admitted to himself that “still I did not know what sort of a school it was, where I was, nor who would compose my audience.” A group of teachers met him in the small dining room along with Mary Hillard, “who in her majestic bearing reminded one of Catharine the Great.” Through the door to the adjoining main dining hall, he heard the sound of “gay” young voices and tried to look inside, but all he could see were “rapidly moving white silhouettes.” Then he understood. “It appeared that I was in a school for—girls! Fear seized me, but soon this gave way to the courage of despair!” After dinner Miss Hillard led him to her sitting room, which was softly lit and warmed by a fire. He noticed a Russian samovar, which had been electrified to boil water more quickly. There were bookcases and upholstered furniture, as well as a piano and a large round table covered with books and magazines. “Seldom had I seen surroundings more comfortable, more attractive, more cultivated,” he wrote in his memoir.
Soon his hostess was called away, and Zenzinoff realized that what he called an “enormous, magnificent” room—Red Hall—was filling up. “Girls’ voices coupled with laughter became more and more audible, then suddenly silence reigned and I heard Miss Hillard’s voice.” She entered the sitting room where he waited and asked him to follow her, which he did with trepidation. In the big room “broad rows of chairs [were] densely covered with white figures,” he remembered. “On this white background only the faces [stood] out, blonde and chestnut heads, and an ocean of young, eager, radiant eyes. The entire audience was composed of girls of the most charming age—fifteen to eighteen.” Then the headmistress turned to the visitor and asked him a question: “We women listen and understand better when we have our hands busy—will that bother you, Mr. Zenzinoff?” He replied that it would not, and to his astonishment the girls pulled out their needlework. When he began to talk in halting English about the hardships of the Russian people under the Bolsheviks, he saw “sad amazement” on their faces. “To them, who had been accustomed to democracy, to an atmosphere of independence from childhood, all this seemed to be the height of insanity and violence. And wherever it was necessary, the dear girls laughed or were indignant. Wherever it was possible, they applauded. And at the end they recompensed me with prolonged applause, which seemed to me quite an ovation.”
During the next few days, the Russian observed daily life at the school for girls. Each morning as a breakfast tray was brought to his room, “somewhere near—as if having just waited for this moment—a delicate feminine voice would start to sing and someone’s hesitating fingers would play on the piano. Evidently the mysterious singer was practicing some hymns.” After lunch he was taken to watch pupils play ice hockey on the frozen pond. All day, he noticed, there was “animated conversation, laughter, gayety [sic]. Childishness, combined with maidenish gracefulness, but without even a shade of coquetry.” He had exactly the same experience as the fictional young men who stumbled on Herland: “Meeting me, the girls smiled in a friendly way, but without a trace of accentuated curiosity, not to speak of bashfulness—my greetings were answered with friendly words, and open, clear eyes.” He attended a play one evening and, after reluctantly saying good night, he immediately regretted refusing to go tobogganing in the moonlight with a group of teachers.
A view of the front of the school and the headmistress’s apartment from the chapel. SVEN MARTSON.
After his visit, the Russian revolutionary’s hope for a joyous new kind of existence began to seem real. “I think that those who have spent the years of their girlhood in the school of Miss Hillard must keep for life the wonderful sensation of the possibility of such marvelous fullness of life,” he wrote. “Does not here lie the inmost, the most important aim of education—to awaken in the young conscience for the rest of her life a longing for what in youth had already seemed half attained, as if in a dream?” He added that, contrary to the morning prayer of the Jews about not being born a woman, “I would have been glad to have changed for a month into a girl of eighteen and to spend that month in the school of Miss Hillard.” It is, he concluded, “a real girls’ republic.”
3
The Art of Living:A Balanced Life
MARY HILLARD HAD ALWAYS WANTED HER SCHOOL TO BE A place devoted to the wholesome values of her girlhood, the same ones that had shaped the grandmothers of most of her pupils. Life at Westover would be “simple, sincere, and natural,” she had written in the school’s first catalog. Her own childhood had consisted of “an education which brought her soul in touch with God, her mind in contact with the great thinkers of the past and present, [and] her body in contact with nature in all her aspects among the hills of Connecticut,” in the words of a her minister friend in Waterbury, John Dallas. As she structured a way of life for her young charges—one she envisioned as a balanced existence—she hoped that they would adopt it as their own after graduation. Some activities and traditions were similar to those in other girls’ schools, and others were unique to Westover. Mornings were for classes, afternoons were for exercise, and evenings were for studying in the schoolroom, or dancing in the gym, or attending events in Red Hall, or listening to the headmistress read aloud in her sitting room.
The first Westover yearbook, for the 1911–1912 school year, indicates the way the days made up a routine, marked by traditions, in a rhythm that would be repeated for years. On many Saturday nights there were “germans” (a word meaning little plays), parties with songs, favors, costumes, and skits put on by the seniors, athletic teams, and others. From the first year there was the performance of a nativity play in the style of an old English pageant before Christmas
