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WEEK of October 8, 2007 |
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Our First Woman Graduate, Dorothea Gillette by Susan Price ’86 Not only was Dorothea Gillette the first woman to graduate from Brooklyn Friends School, she was the only woman in our first high school graduating class in 1910. Born in 1892, Dorothea grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn and began her studies at BFS in the autumn of 1899. After Brooklyn Friends, she received her B.A. from Swarthmore and, in 1920, graduated with an M.A. from Columbia. Dorothea worked as a schoolteacher for most of her life. She married the musician Edward Murray in 1928 and they lived in Philadelphia, where he played with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Dorothea and Edward had one daughter and, later, four grandchildren. Beginning in 1960, Dorothea taught English as a Second Language to retirees of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union—she was still working with ILGWU retirees in 1975, at the age of 83. In her later years, Dorothea also wrote a personal memoir for her grandchildren; she kindly shared the chapter on her education at Brooklyn Friends, “Gradus Ad Parnassum,” with the school. It is an unbelievable window into Brooklyn Friends School in the early 20th century, and it truly is worth reading in its entirety. Gradus Ad Parnassum* by Dorothea Gillette Murray, Class of 1910 When I was “graduated” from the Pratt Institute kindergarten and elementary grade four, my mother had decided to send me to the Friends’ School, so we went downtown to be interviewed by the Principal, Miss Peckham. She was a tall, slim bespectacled lady, her grey hair parted in the middle and rolled into a high knot. Her grey dress was made with a tight bodice and long, full skirt. She had a kind but firm manner. Alas, there was no immediate vacancy, but I was to be admitted when such occurred. Miss Peckham must have seen the longing in my eyes, for she smiled and patted me on the cheek. At last the day came: The school, at 110 Schermerhorn Street, was a part of the Meeting House. There, in what seemed to be an enormous room, sat all the children for the opening exercises, presided over by Miss Peckham, who called the roll. After that assembly I was put in the charge of a teacher I soon came to love. Miss Robertson was a slight woman, wearing pince-nez, dressed always in a blouse and skirt, her sandy hair in a fringe. Her expression was merry and firm. Like a country schoolmarm, she taught all the lower grades in one room. … When a class had completed the eighth and last grade, most of the boys went off to Polytechnic Institute and the girls to Packer. When my class came to the jumping-off place, my mother couldn’t afford to send me to Packer. At Friends’ I had a substantial scholarship because my grandmother had taught at Pratt Institute. The class below mine was the first to be extended through the high school grades. It was suggested to my mother that I stay on to graduate with this class. To be sure, I’d “lose” a year, but I could have extra work in French, German, Latin, chemistry, and physics. My mother was thankful to have me stay; the phrase “compensatory education” hadn’t then, I think, been invented, but since she worked long hours and we were the only ones in the family, she looked to Friends’ to fill the gaps. At first I wasn’t so pleased; I didn’t want to go down a grade, I had friends in public school, and there I would get marks, as we never did at Friends. Besides, in public school there would be other girls who were poor. I am quite sure that none of my classmates thought of me as poor, but I knew they had homes different from mine; their mothers didn’t go to work; they all went to the country in the summer. Of course, I adjusted; I did some work for my scholarship—clerical work, helping out in the kindergarten, and even in emergency taking the place of absent teachers. I found an interesting friend in a brilliant and humorous girl, Eleanor Stabler. We studied Latin together and read more than the required amount of Cicero and Vergil. … The subject of Latin brings me to Miss Chellis, one of the dearest teachers I ever had… Like my other teachers she wore always a plain white shirtwaist and dark skirt. From seventh grade on she taught us Latin; we began on Bell’s Latin Book, with a picture of a dog on the cover and the warning “Cave Canem.” From two or three of these books we went on to “Fabulae Faciles” and from these warm and shallow waters to the icy and stormy seas of Caesar’s Commentaries. Miss Chellis was a perfectionist; I can’t imagine a more thorough grounding. We had to stay after school every day to correct any mistakes in homework or class. Indeed that was the rule for all subjects; no hiding places down there. Mistakes were not to recur. … But the really great teacher was Mr. Rawson, principal both of the Brooklyn Friends’ School and the New York Friends’ Seminary. He had a fine, noble face, with sandy hair and a close-cropped beard. He taught us General Science, transmitting to us by means of a few pickle jars, bits of wire, rubber and string—and of course his own genius—something of the wonders of the natural world. In teaching history he seemed to pump our minds dry of all the rags and tags of information they contained and then to return them to us enriched and better ordered. I was dreadfully stupid in his geometry class, but when I took solid geometry in college it came clear enough. There were just five of us in the graduating class, four boys and I. We held our commencement in the Meeting House. I walked up the aisle on Mr. Rawson’s arm and in the course of our simple exercises read my essay. Mr. Rawson got me a partial scholarship to Swarthmore College and later in my freshman year got hold of the rest of the tuition money for that same year. I wish that every child could have a kind, sensible, and thorough education as I had. It was permeated by Quaker ideas of sincerity, simplicity, and tolerance; it was administered with perfectly balanced kindness and firmness.
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