EXPECT GREAT THINGS!

A boon for working women.

Author and journalist Krefft draws on school records, personal papers, oral histories, and published material for a lively history of the famed Katharine Gibbs School, which empowered young women to reinvent their role in the working world. Besides perfecting secretarial skills, Gibbs students learned “how to walk, talk, dress, and behave so they belonged among the swells.” Katharine Gibbs (1863-1934) was a 40-year-old widow with two young sons when she faced dire financial straits: When her husband died suddenly, without a will, inheritance law left her with nothing. Despairing of finding a job, she decided to become an entrepreneur and open a secretarial school. With a six-week secretarial studies course at Simmons College in Boston as preparation, she founded the Katharine Gibbs School of Secretarial and Executive Training for Educated Women, with branches in Providence, Boston, and New York. Admission standards were high, dress codes unbending (hats, white gloves, trim suits), and the curriculum rigorous—“a combination of skillset boot camp and C-suite finishing school,” with visiting instructors from Harvard, Columbia, Brown, MIT, and Wellesley. Krefft creates succinct biographies of many Gibbs students, examining their motivations for enrolling and their subsequent careers. Loretta Swit, for example, went to Gibbs to have a fallback in case her dream of becoming an actress didn’t pan out. Among her jobs after graduation was as personal secretary to newspaper columnist Elsa Maxwell. Others found positions in government, the military, and the entertainment industry. One helped create Wonder Woman; some launched careers as authors. By the late 1960s, though, the school seemed out of date, as women’s aspirations changed. By 2011, it closed permanently, after more than five decades of offering its students a much-desired path to independence.

A fresh contribution to women’s history.