Westover. Laurie Lisle

      BY THE TIME WESTOVER OPENED, the task of educating girls already had a long and contentious history. In 1792 during the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft had called for their equal education with boys. In Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, she urged mothers to teach their daughters so they would learn to think, and she herself started several schools for girls. Early on in New England, there had been dame schools, where young children were taught to read, write, and do arithmetic in the homes of women. After the American Revolution, it was regarded as patriotic to educate the future “mothers of the republic,” those who would educate the male citizens of the young democracy. Connecticut had enlightened attitudes about educating females, and many of the best schools for girls were in the state. One was Sarah Pierce’s school in Litchfield, which opened in 1790 to educate the daughters of merchants, landowners, and ministers, including educator Catharine Beecher and her sister, author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Because of the difficulty and expense of travel at the time, they were by necessity boarding schools. In the nineteenth century, a new generation of female educators urged women to take responsibility for educating members of their own sex, and one of them named Emma Willard briefly ran a female seminary in the village of Middlebury.

      The school called Westover was Mary Hillard’s idea long before it was anyone else’s. She envisioned it as a wholesome setting for study and sports, as well as a school in which to instill in young women useful knowledge and idealistic values. It was as if she were trying to recreate the most ideal conditions of her own childhood. Born and raised in Connecticut villages like Middlebury, she knew them intimately as places where a traditional way of life went on apart from all the rapid changes going on in America. This was particularly true of Plymouth, where she lived during the impressionable ages of seven to seventeen with her family in a parsonage on a hill above the Naugatuck River valley in central Connecticut, where brass factories were attracting thousands of immigrants from southern Europe.

      The Rev. Elias Brewster Hillard was the minister of the big white First Congregational Church of Plymouth. A member of the New England intelligentsia, he had acquired a fine education at Andover Academy and Yale University, where he graduated with the class of 1848. His thinking was liberal, learned, and open-minded, particularly about the education of his daughters. He was also curious, candid, excitable, and courageous; even as an old man he had “vividness and aliveness,” remembered his grandson, poet Archibald MacLeish. The minister liked to tell his children stories about their ancestors, Puritans who had sailed from England in the early 1600s. There was the tale of great-grandparents captured by Indians, and one about their grandfather Moses, an enterprising ship’s captain who attempted to smuggle Napoleon out of France. In his spare time Elias wrote a book about four forgotten Connecticut heroes of the American Revolution.

      When the young minister was the principal of a private school in Southington, Connecticut, he met his future wife, Julia Whittlesey, a student there. The daughter of a Yale-educated judge who had moved to Cleveland, Ohio, Julia was sent back East to finish her schooling, and she received what was considered the best possible education for a female in her day. Julia was diminutive and delicate with big, bright, brown eyes and dark hair. Besides being very feminine and lovely looking, she was possessed of a “sweet selflessness” and “charm and inward grace,” according to this grandson. When she became the mother of a large family, she was also firm, frugal, humorous, and extremely organized. Despite her practical nature, she also had an interest in spiritualism. The couple was well matched. “I can see Elias flying off on tangents and Julia holding onto his coat-tails,” said Mary Robbins Whittlesey, Julia’s older sister, for whom her daughter Mary was named.

      The couple’s eldest child, Martha, born in 1856, went to Vassar College, which had opened its doors when she was nine. Her college tuition was paid for by the estate of a tall, aristocratic, and emotionally disturbed aunt who lived with the Hillards, a woman who suffered from what was called “insanity of the will.” After teaching mathematics at Vassar, Martha became principle of Rockford Seminary in Illinois until she married Andrew MacLeish. A leader in progressive education, social reform, and missionary work, she helped Jane Addams establish Hull House and was president of the Chicago Women’s Club, among many other activities. Frederick, born a year later, would invent typewriter parts but fail to profit from his patents. The third child, Helen, became a nurse and was a founder of a settlement house. Mary was born three years later in the summer of 1862, and the petite Emily was born four years after that. Then there was Fanny, who was mentally ill most of her life. The next child, precocious and sickly William, died at the age of twenty. Another son, Arthur, lived only a year. The youngest and ninth child was John, born when Mary was a teenager, who became almost like a son to her.

      The Hillards raised their children based on the theories in Horace Bushnell’s Christian Nurture, which was a more affectionate approach to childrearing than the strict Puritan way; years later, however, when a young man remarked to Mary that “one hardly dares to be too happy,” she asked him with surprise, “have you got that in your background, too?” Martha later portrayed the Hillards as a happy, if financially strapped, family. Their religious expression was “simple, sincere, and beautiful,” and the children were instilled with the highest ideals. Mary was especially idealistic and wanted to become a missionary in China. In the evenings their father would read aloud Dickens, Stowe, and other novelists, while Julia and their daughters would sit around a large table doing needlework. Elias also enjoyed taking his children picnicking and camping. When he went about his parish in a sleigh or horse and buggy, he liked to take young Mary with him; she later said that she had noticed and remembered everything, like the differences in intellect and personality among his parishioners.