and renamed St. Margaret’s School for Girls when Mary was thirteen. Uncle Moses Hillard, a bachelor, helped with the tuition. When the headmaster of St. Margaret’s, the Rev. Francis Thayer Russell, realized that high-spirited Mary was not settling down to study, he suggested to her parents that she might do better elsewhere. At the age of eighteen her parents enrolled her in Abbott Academy, a girl’s school on a hill in Andover, Massachusetts, where she came under the influence of the elderly, authoritative headmistress, Philena McKeen, a husky-voiced woman with ringlets on both sides of her face. Mary was expected to earn her tuition, so she ran the supply shop and led a gymnastics class. She admired Miss McKeen, and a number of her later educational practices—quiet Sabbaths and simplicity of dress—became traditions at Westover. In her studies, Mary was fair in algebra and Latin but poor in French and German as well as in music and drawing. What interested her intensely were the ideas inherent in the study of history: the history of art, the history of religion, the history of linguistics, and the history of England. She also read voraciously on her own, as she would do all her life.
From an early age she was exceptional in her gift for public speaking. When asked to recite in class, she would turn recitation into something else, “a thought and question-provoking forum,” in the words of Martha Coffin. A natural leader, she was regarded as the head of the school even before she was elected president of her class. She was also firm and opinionated. Girls who went to her for advice often got “a strong bracing up, a sound whacking” instead of sympathy, recalled this classmate, who noted that nothing dampened her high spirits. One of her friends summed her up as “the biggest tease, the one who always kept her things in perfect order, who always had time for any fun going on (mostly setting it going), made the best use of her time, worked the hardest, and had the best time of any girl in school.”
The Rev. Hillard supposedly wanted Mary to go to college like her older sisters but, for reasons that are not entirely evident, she did not wish to go. Perhaps she realized that she was not a scholar, or her certainty and independence made college appear unnecessary. In an era when differences between academies and universities were not as distinct as they are today, she stayed at Abbott for four years, until she earned her high school diploma around the time of her twenty-second birthday. On graduation day she gave an impressive valedictory speech and then returned home to teach children in the Plymouth schoolhouse.
A year later, in 1885, Sarah Porter hired her to teach at her long-established girls’ school in the village of Farmington, a few miles west of Hartford. It was to Mary Hillard’s advantage that when Miss Porter hired a teacher, she was less interested in her education than in her character—“a clear and well-trained mind, quick sympathies and a pure heart” were what she wanted. Perhaps the headmistress at the age of seventy-two saw the twenty-three-year-old Mary as a younger version of herself; both were descendents of old American families and daughters of Congregationalist ministers. There were some differences, however: Sarah Porter, whose brother was the president of Yale University when she hired the young teacher, was a scholar who had studied languages and other subjects with Yale professors throughout her life. A pious woman who dressed in handsome black dresses in winter and gray ones in summer, she was also a person who valued simplicity and humility and was supposedly indifferent to the social backgrounds of her wealthy pupils, preaching that “wealth did not make worth.”
Young Mary Hillard was deeply impressed by this woman, who became a mentor. She admired the way the older woman impressed old-fashioned values upon her pupils to prepare them for family life rather than for teaching, missionary, and other kinds of women’s work. Yet unlike traditionalists who believed that the female body did not have enough blood to sustain both the brain and the womb, Miss Porter also rejected the idea that mental activity undermines a woman’s family responsibilities, and she attempted to prepare girls for lifelong intellectual and spiritual growth. Mary Hillard later said that she was very grateful to Sarah Porter for teaching her everything she knew about successfully running a school during the six years under her wing.
Those years of her early twenties were the time when the lovely Mary Hillard would have been most likely to marry. An old friend of hers acknowledged that Mary had been in love as a young girl, and that she had struggled “to decide between love and duty.” Teaching evidently tapped her idealism: the little girl who had wanted to be a missionary in China now wanted to enlighten and lead young women. If she married, she knew that she would eventually have to give up teaching; wives almost always left or lost their jobs especially after the arrival of children. At that time she expressed caution about romantic feelings. Miss Hillard has “some queer ideas, such as that a girl should never love a man before he asks her to and then she cannot be certain whether she can care for him or not but must wait to find out,” confided Elizabeth Failing, a Miss Porter’s pupil, to her diary. Miss Porter viewed romantic infatuation as a feeling to be directed toward the good of the family, a view the young teacher would also articulate. At the Westover graduation of 1917, she declared that marriage is not for personal happiness but a way to pass along values to the next generation.
Even at that early age, Mary Hillard had a knack for understanding girls; Elizabeth Failing also wrote in her diary that she was in awe of her teacher’s insight into her at a party where Miss Hillard told fortunes and placed an apt quote about each girl at her plate. The girl also wrote about her admiration for her energetic and entertaining young teacher: Miss Hillard is, she wrote, “like a breeze [that] stirs up the air and implants a new vitality.” Still, Mary Hillard came to regard herself as less gifted as a teacher in the classroom than as a leader who could inspire young women with her melodic speaking voice. Miss Porter noticed her leadership qualities and soon gave the youthful teacher a small administrative role in one of the school’s dormitories.
Mary Robbins Hillard as a young woman. L. ALTMAN & CO.
By that time Miss Porter had already chosen her successor, assistant principal Mary Dunning Dow, a former pupil and a widow who was much older than Mary. At the same time, the scholarly and elderly headmaster of St. Margaret’s School in Waterbury was looking for an assistant. His wife had recently died, and one day during a visit with a parishioner he confessed his difficulty in trying to run the girls’ school alone. The woman, whose daughter had roomed with Mary Hillard at St. Margaret’s, mentioned the young teacher as someone with energy and ideas; one thing led to another, and Dr. Russell offered Mary Hillard—whom he had asked to leave the school some fifteen years earlier—the position of assistant principal. When she told Miss Porter about the offer, the older woman urged her to take it, telling her that she had a talent for leadership. Mary’s reservations were about leaving the peaceful village of Farmington for the busy city of Waterbury. Also, she had enlarged her circle of friends in Farmington to include more sophisticated people than those in the parsonages of her youth. Miss Porter assured her that she would find similar people in Waterbury, like the fine old New England family of Edith and Frederick Kingsbury, who had two daughters her age living at home. As Mary Hillard turned twenty-nine, she decided to go.
As Miss Mary Hillard walked rapidly through the streets of Waterbury in the autumn of 1891, she carried herself with more dignity and solemnity than usual, aware that she was being observed. A tall, slender, single woman with searching eyes, she was remembered for parting her long, dark brown hair in the middle and pulling it back into a knot at the back of her head. Instead of elaborate Victorian fashions, she wore the more practical clothing of the professional women of her day. “There was an air of austerity mingled with something athletic,” an observer recalled. “The shirtwaist with a collar and bow tie, the longish skirt, the absence of anything colorful, the modest hat, gloves, all bespoke restraint.” She brought a pearl-handled knife to St. John’s Episcopal Church in the city, where St. Margaret’s trustees and most of its pupils worshipped, to cut tight corset strings of girls who fainted during services. Although young men were awed by her, she got to know several Yale graduates who worked for The Waterbury American as well as families who knew her father. Direct and businesslike, she gave people the impression that she knew what she wanted and had no time to waste.
