In 1911 a nearly penniless widow who called herself Katharine Gibbs sold her jewelry, scraped a $1,000 loan together, and bought a ramshackle “business school” in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, that taught typing and shorthand to young women seeking office jobs, one of the few lines of decently paying work for them a century ago. Gibbs didn’t know how to type or take dictation in shorthand herself at the time, but her older sister, Mary, did. She hired Mary to cover the teaching while she drummed up students.
Nor was she even a “Katharine.” She had been born Catherine Ryan, daughter of James M. Ryan, who made a fortune in the meatpacking business in Galena, Illinois. Like other lace-curtain Irish fathers, James sent the teenage Catherine to the Academy of the Sacred Heart in New York, which later became Manhattanville University but was then the most exclusive Catholic girls’ school in America. The elite Sacred Heart nuns trained the girls not only in rigorous academics but in ladylike manners and decorum suitable for marrying into the highest social circles. At some point after Catherine enrolled, she changed the spelling of her first name to the more aristocratic-looking Katharine. It helped that William Gibbs, the man she married in 1896, had a WASP-y surname that she could attach to her school.
As author Vanda Krefft relates, fortune hadn’t treated Katharine Gibbs well. Her father died without a will in 1891, and her two older brothers managed to destroy, dissipate, and appropriate his estate worth about $35 million in today’s dollars. Then, in 1909, William Gibbs, who had settled with Katharine in Cranston, Rhode Island, fell from the mast of his sailboat. He also died intestate, and 46-year-old Katharine, mother of their two boys ages 11 and 9, couldn’t get access to his estate.
But Katharine, as Krefft writes, had a vivid entrepreneurial imagination. To set her school off from the run-of-the-mill, take-all-comers commercial colleges then ubiquitous, she put to work the silk-stocking ethos she had learned from the Sacred Heart sisters: Her school’s graduates wouldn’t be just crack typists, flawless stenographers, and the tidiest of office organizers, they would also be, as Krefft writes, “well-groomed, nicely dressed, gracious hostesses who could serve afternoon tea to office guests.” She renamed the school the Katharine Gibbs School of Secretarial and Executive Training for Educated Women. She charged top-dollar tuition and advertised in the alumnae magazines of the Seven Sisters and other upper-crust women’s colleges, emphasizing her school’s admissions selectivity. As her school expanded into a multicampus chain, she picked the poshest addresses: Park Avenue in New York and Boston’s Back Bay.
The Katharine Gibbs schools sold themselves to two different female demographics: college-educated young women who needed to learn how to earn a living and working-class young women with only high-school diplomas who hoped to better themselves. Students received lessons, not only in literature and art appreciation but in grooming, professional dress, and judicious use of makeup. Even for class, they were expected to show up wearing ladylike hats and the white gloves that became a Katharine Gibbs hallmark. She emphasized an upbeat mentality, coaching her students always to give their employers more than the job required. “Expect great things!” the title of Krefft’s book, was one of Gibbs’s rallying cries.
When Katharine died in 1934, her son, James Gordon Gibbs, took over the school and lifted its snob appeal to the next level. He hired the poet and celebrity Columbia professor Mark Van Doren to teach literature at the New York campus. There were yearbooks, literary magazines, and balls at ritzy hotels and country clubs. Out-of-town students lived in plush leased quarters at Back Bay mansions or in suites of reserved rooms at the women-only Barbizon Hotel in Manhattan.
Some 50,000 women passed through Katharine Gibbs’s portals over the decades, and Krefft devotes much space in her book to chronicling their lives, gleaned from her research into the school’s archives at Brown University. Some Gibbs graduates found fulfillment in top-drawer secretarial work, such as Jean Drewes, who spent four years living with and organizing the social lives of the Duke and Dutchess of Windsor. Others used their Gibbs diplomas as stepping stones to more adventurous careers as lawyers, advertising executives, government officials, and bank presidents. Ethel Bent Walsh, a 1942 Gibbs graduate, became the first acting chairwoman of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission in 1975. Actress Loretta Swit was a 1957 Gibbs graduate. Another Gibbs graduate, Marie Irvine, “found the secretarial classes at the New York school dull,” Krefft writes, but loved the grooming lessons. She became Marilyn Monroe’s New York makeup artist.
Indeed, one problem with Krefft’s book is that there are too many of these admirable life stories, and the narratives, with photos, start to blur together. I wish Krefft had devoted more space to the nuts and bolts of a Katharine Gibbs education, which might have looked like finishing school but was actually a stenographic boot camp where students spent hours sitting in straight-backed chairs at long tables trying to achieve the 90-words-a-minute typing speed required for graduation — on manual typewriters with blank keys. A single typographical or spelling error meant a page had to be completely retyped.
Similarly, Krefft could have focused on the confluence of economic, sociological, and technological developments at the turn of the 20th century that created an enormous market for private secretaries and their skills and allowed schools such as Katharine Gibbs’s to flourish. It was the era of the first large-scale corporate and government bureaucracies, for one thing. Both the newly invented typewriter and the Gregg shorthand system, with its spidery symbols, were ideally suited to female fine motor dexterity.
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Gordon Gibbs retired and sold the chain in 1968 — just in time. Feminists were already deriding secretarial education as demeaning. In 1970, some 50 women’s liberationists invaded Katharine Gibbs’s New York campus and screamed at the staff. But it wasn’t just second-wave feminism or the opening up to women of hitherto male-specific and better-paying professions that killed off Katharine Gibbs. There was another factor oddly unmentioned by Krefft: the seismic technological changes of the computer revolution that wiped out the need to learn typing and shorthand — and also pretty much wiped out the need for personal secretaries of any kind.
The Gibbs chain, sold and resold over the next decades, collapsed into the ethically rickety world of for-profit higher education, which itself collapsed as graduates discovered their degrees were worthless. The Gibbs schools were already in trouble with federal and state education authorities over fraud allegations, and their last corporate owners shut down the last of the campuses in 2011. It was exactly a century after Katharine Gibbs had opened the first. But her for-profit school had proudly sold its female students something of inestimable value.
Charlotte Allen is a Washington writer. Her articles have appeared in Quillette, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times.
