Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Vanda Krefft
Vanda Krefft is the author of Expect Great Things!, a social history of the famed Katharine Gibbs School and its impact on the American workplace for women. The book tells the lively, unlikely story of Katharine Gibbs herself and celebrates the many pathfinding achievements of her school’s graduates during the early to mid-20th century. Expect Great Things! (Algonquin Books, 2025) is available today wherever you buy or order your books.
Vanda’s previous book,The Man Who Made the Movies (HarperCollins, 2017), is the first in-depth biography of Twentieth Century Fox founder William Fox and reveals Fox’s many pivotal contributions to the American film industry as well as the shocking events that ended his career. Previously, Vanda wrote about the entertainment industry for leading national magazines and syndicated news services. Her work has appeared in Elle, Redbook, Woman’s Day, Woman’s World, and the Los Angeles Times.
Take it away, Vanda!
What path led you to the Katharine Gibbs School?
I like people who come out of nowhere and do the unexpected. My first book, The Man Who Made the Movies (HarperCollins, 2017), was a biography of 20th Century Fox founder William Fox, who created one of Hollywood’s great movie studios and profoundly shaped not only the art of film, but also the industry’s technology and business structure. Fox grew up in dire poverty on New York’s Lower East Side and had only a third-grade education. Similarly unlikely was the success of Katharine Gibbs and her elegant, landmark school for women.
I had been vaguely familiar with the Katharine Gibbs School, which had its glory days in the mid-20th century and which, after the Gibbs family sold the business in 1968, slowly slid downhill under corporate ownership until permanently closing in 2011. When a friend suggested Katharine Gibbs as a subject for my second book, I was skeptical. I’d always assumed that founder Katharine Gibbs was a stuffy, conservative, Seven Sisters-type New England aristocrat—nothing like jumping to conclusions based on a name!—and that her school aimed to suppress young women’s ambitions by training them as secretaries. Quite the opposite, I discovered, after doing some preliminary research. In fact, Katharine Gibbs came from a small Midwestern town where her father slaughtered hogs for a living, had only a high school education, and had never worked outside the home before finding herself a near-broke middle-aged widow.
In fact, she started her school not to reinforce the status quo but to upend it. Having been betrayed three times by her belief that male family members would always provide for and protect her financially—the last straw was her husband’s dying in 1909 without a will—she was determined that what had happened to her should never have to happen to any other woman. And so, tapping long-dormant assertiveness and courage, Katharine Gibbs built a tremendously successful business with principal locations on New York’s Park Avenue and in Boston’s Back Bay.
Her mission: to give women the skills and knowledge so they could always earn a good, independent living. In an era replete with gender bias, she figured, that meant training them to use executive secretary positions as a springboard into management. Students learned not only typing and stenography, but also academic subjects taught by professors from elite universities. A sort of Trojan Horse campaign, it worked. Among the 50,000 Gibbs graduates by 1968, many became leaders across all facets of American life. It was deeply rewarding to tell the stories of these “hidden figures” of the women’s movement who helped lay the foundation for today’s more equitable working world.
We’re all familiar with the challenges of finding sources for writing about women from the distant past. What are the challenges of writing about women from the early and middle twentieth century?
Massive challenges! In general, my ladies—yes, “ladies,” because in their era, the term primarily connoted discernment, graciousness, and consideration for others—were not firebrands or banner-carrying feminists. They were women who started in the trenches, typing and taking dictation, and worked their way up gradually to leadership positions. At Gibbs, they were trained to camouflage their ambitions with a smile, correct speech, cooperation, and a ladylike hat and white gloves. (That didn’t mean they were pushovers or doormats. The Gibbs placement office assured them they could always quit, with another good opportunity ready at hand.) But because Gibbs women worked within a culture that generally regarded female employees as inferior and/or biding their time till they landed a husband, their achievements were often ignored.
For instance, having learned that in 1930, Gibbs graduate Mary Sutton Ramsdell became one of the first two female Massachusetts State Police patrol officers, I thought that surely the Boston Globe would have covered such a milestone event. Yet not a word on its pages, let alone a photo. Likewise, I found nothing of any substance in mainstream publications about Joan M. Clark who, with her Gibbs education but no college degree, rose from a secretarial job with the US army to become Ambassador to Malta and then head of the US Foreign Service.
But thank goodness for the internet and its rich, deep, and sometimes obscure resources. Via ancestry.com, historical newspaper databases, and unending Google searches, I tracked down family members and friends of Gibbs graduates, found oral histories in archival collections, and located some extensive collections of personal papers in university libraries. Here was one advantage of the time frame. Newspapers proliferated in the US before and during the early days of television. While overwhelmingly they tended to report on women only when they got engaged or married, once in a while I found breadcrumb information about dates, family history, and employment.
Following those clues led to first-hand interviews with Gibbs graduates and their descendants. While some former students were in their eighties or nineties, all those I reached were mentally sharp, with vivid recollections, good humor, and unfailing cooperation—delightful to speak with. Their family members and friends were also extremely helpful, providing illuminating personal details. I would encourage anyone researching this time frame to act fast to get firsthand testimony. Write a letter, pick up the phone, send emails to potential sources and people who knew them (and keep trying if you don’t get an answer right away), ask about scrapbooks and photos and other memorabilia, ask who else might be helpful. Yours may be the last chance to save a valuable piece of the past.
Was there a woman you were sad to leave out?
Not one, but many. The ones I didn’t know about because their achievements hadn’t turned up anywhere in my research. I’m sure there were many unrecognized, uncelebrated Gibbs graduates. One of my early research tasks was to go to Brown University’s Hay Library, home of the Katharine Gibbs School Records, where I scanned every single page of every single Gibbs yearbook they had. It wasn’t a complete collection, and some of the branches of the school didn’t have yearbooks, but something was better than nothing. As I looked at the student headshots and read their comments, it was clear that these young women had great energy, optimism, and potential. But so many times, when I searched beyond for information about them, nothing turned up.
Among the Gibbs women I did profile, I regretted not being able to tell the full story of Myrna Custis. There she was, a lone Black face among the students in the 1956 yearbook of the New York Gibbs School. Race was a complicated issue for the Gibbs School in these mid-century years. I found no evidence that school ever discriminated on the basis of race, religion, or ethnic background. To the contrary, all indications were that the faculty advocated progressive social attitudes—such as pushing back if a boss tried to dissuade them from hiring a Black employee.
More likely, the fact that Myrna Custis was the first Black student to appear in the extant Gibbs yearbooks reflected grim socio-economic facts. That is, the Gibbs School was expensive and most Black families earned substantially less than white families. Then why didn’t the school offer scholarships to help recruit Black students? That raises another, thornier question: would it have been ethical to take two years of a young woman’s life to encourage her hopes and prepare her for a job that almost certainly wouldn’t exist for her upon graduation? The Gibbs placement department well knew the attitudes of employers and no laws as yet prohibited racial discrimination.
I would have loved to ask Myrna or her family members what led her to enroll at Gibbs, what dreams she had then, how the other students and faculty treated her, and what happened to her out in the working world.
For all the Gibbs stories that I missed, I hope that readers will contact me to fill me in on more of this important hidden history. (https://www.vandakrefft.com/contact)
A question from Vanda: You know so much about otherwise forgotten or marginalized women’s history—was there anything in the book that surprised you?
I can honestly say that the biggest surprise was the underlying mission of the school. Even though I was aware of the fact that executive secretaries were (and are) often powerful figures in the organizations they worked for, I, too, assumed that the school was fundamentally conservative in its goals. Once I let go of that assumption, I was ready to be amazed. (And you did in fact amaze me, over and over again.)
One story in particular caught my imagination: Joye Hummel, who was an important writer in the early days of the Wonder Woman comics. Her story was definitely downplayed in other accounts I had read about the creation of my favorite super hero!
***
Interested in learning more about Vanda and her work? Check out her website at https://www.vandakrefft.com/
***
Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Michele C. Hollow, the author of Jurassic Girl.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Sara Catterall
Sara Catterall and I have been following each other around the internet since we met as reviewers for Shelf Awareness, a shockingly long time ago. I’ve been looking forward to her biography of Amelia Bloomer ever since she began posting about it. As you’ll see below, bloomers were only a small part of Bloomer’s life.
Sara is a writer with a Drama degree from NYU, and an MLIS from Syracuse University. She was born in Ankara and grew up in South Minneapolis. She has worked as a librarian at Cornell University, as a reviewer and interviewer for Shelf Awareness, and as a professional book indexer. Her work has been published in the NEH’s Humanities magazine and The Sun, and she co-authored Ottoman Dress and Design in the West: A Visual History of Cultural Exchange. She lives with her family near Ithaca, New York, serves on the Executive Board of Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, and is a member of Biographers International.
Take it away, Sara!
Photo credit: Edna Brown
Many of my readers will recognize the name Amelia Bloomer. Are there particular challenges in writing about women who people think they know something about?
I think that her name recognition helped me more than challenged me. I was first inspired to look up more about her because of it. Once I realized there was much more to her career, I kept a file of misinformation about her starting in 1851 right up to the current news. And I thought a lot about what those wrong ideas served, and why on earth people are still repeating them after so long. Why she comes up more often than some of her much more influential or scandalous peers. Also, though that viral incident of the “short dress and trousers” is far from her whole story, it does echo through her life. And they make a great hook! Even when people haven’t heard of Bloomer, they have heard of bloomers.
The thing most of us know about Amelia Bloomer is her championship of “rational dress” in the form of the “bloomers” that came to bear her name. How did dress reform fit into her larger career as a suffragist and social advocate?
In the more general sense of her advocacy for women’s personal and political freedom. She never considered dress reform one of her primary causes. She came to it by way of alternative medicine. Bloomer was chronically ill herself, with serious GI issues and daily headaches starting in her youth, possibly because of a bad bout of malaria, and possibly because of the mercury treatments that were common at that time. Tight clothes are fine when you’re healthy, but if you aren’t, and a lot of people had uncurable chronic ailments in the 19th century, switching to loose clothes can give some relief. “The Turkish dress” had been worn by white women since the 18th century as a political statement and for exercise and leisure, and was considered a feminine alternative to the clothing men wore. Also, in the 1840s, women’s clothing was not just tight, it was heavy and the hemlines trailed on the ground, which made it hard to work or walk in. Bloomer gave up corsets before she put on “the Turkish Dress” and she blamed her sister’s postpartum death on burdensome clothing. She was also known for walking so fast everywhere that her own husband, who was nearly a foot taller, could barely keep up with her. So the short dress and trousers appealed to Bloomer and her friends, and to other women who wore it before she did, for their physical comfort and freedom, without giving up modesty. You had to be a nonconformist, that’s for sure, but some women who wore it were not in favor of woman suffrage, and some women who kept wearing long skirts, were.
What is the most surprising thing you found doing research for your work?
So many! But one was how broad-minded Bloomer was about gender expression through clothes, given that she was born in 1818 and had a conservative rural upbringing. She had no problem with the idea of men wearing “women’s clothes” if they found them comfortable and liked them. Another was her clash with Frederick Douglass, and her friends Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, over the question of allowing men to be controlling officers in the one-year-old New York Women’s Temperance Society. Douglass, Stanton, and Anthony wanted the most educated, experienced, and influential officers possible, which at that time mostly meant men, and they wanted to focus on women’s rights rather than temperance. Bloomer felt that it was wrong to change the mission of the organization after a year of fundraising for a woman-controlled temperance society, and that women needed to keep control of the funds and the power for a while to gain confidence and learn how to manage an organization. This incident is well documented, including Douglass’s aggravated report of the meeting in his paper, and her reply in hers, but as far as I could see, no-one had written it up before.
Great cover!
A question from Sara: Other than Bloomer and Sigrid Schultz (I loved The Dragon From Chicago and gave it to friends for Christmas!), who are some Midwestern historical women that you think deserve a more national fame than they’ve had so far?
How to chose?
The first one that comes to mind is Indiana-born novelist Gene Stratton Porter (1863-1924). I first read one of her novels, A Girl of the Limberlost when I was nine or ten. I still read it every year or two. The more I learn about her, the more amazing she is. She was a best-selling novelist in the early twentieth century, an early conservation activist, and one of the first women to form a movie production company.
***
Interested in learning more about Sara Catterall and her work?
Check out her website: https://saracatterall.com/
Follow her on Bluesky: @scatterall.bsky.social
Follow her on Instagram: saracatterall
Buy the book here,or at your favorite purveyor of books.
***
Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Vanda Krefft, author of Expect Great Things, the history of the surprisingly subversive Katharine Gibbs School.
Kicking off Women’s History Month a Day Early with Four Questions and an Answer with Amy Reading
In case you missed the memo, or got a memo that says otherwise, March is Women’s History Month.
We’re going to celebrate here in the Margins the same way we’ve celebrated for the last six (!) years, with a series of mini-interviews with people who write about or otherwise work with women’s history. Unlike the rest of the year, there will be new posts Monday through Friday. (If you want to rev yourself up, you can read all the previous interviews here.)
I’ve got a great mix of people lined up to talk about a wide range of women and historical projects. It’s going to be Big Fun!
In fact I’m so excited about the prospect that we’re going to start a day early in celebration of the 100th birthday of The New Yorker. The magazine plays a central role in Amy Reading’s book, The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker, which is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.
Amy is also the author of The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New York Public Library, among others. She lives in upstate New York, where she serves on the board of her local independent bookstore, Buffalo Street Books. Her name is an aptonym. (Pamela here: I’ll save you the bother of looking it up. According to the Oxford English Dictionary an aptonym is “a person’s name that is regarded as amusingly appropriate to their occupation.” How fun is that?)
Take it away, Amy!
Photo credit: Jamie Love
Writing about a historical figure like Katharine White requires living with her over a period of years. What was it like to have her as a constant companion?
I began researching Katharine White’s life and career in 2017, and I immediately knew I could settle in comfortably for a long journey because she felt familiar to me. I get her mind. She was, like me, first and foremost a reader and she felt most herself when reading with a pencil in hand, whether to edit a manuscript or to notate a book. Criticism was her love language or, to put it another way, she had an editorial mindset about nearly everything in her life. Many people know her from her garden columns in The New Yorker and her posthumously published book, Onward and Upward in the Garden, but what is gardening except editing the landscape?
I came to understand how her editorial mindset could feel to her like generosity and abundance, like she was always in pursuit of a higher vision and bringing others along with her. This vision applied, first of all, to the magazine as a whole. She joined the staff just a few months after it was founded in 1925 when it was still a scrappy humor magazine, and she was the person most responsible for expanding its purview to more serious literature, memoir, and poetry. And of course her vision also applied to the manuscripts that arrived in the mail in huge stacks every day. She was so unbelievably good at reading something and seeing the outlines of what it could become. Her authors adored her for it—there are so many letters in the archives that testify to this.
The arc of Katharine’s life was unfailingly interesting for me in the eight years it took to research, write, and publish her biography. She graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1914 and she campaigned for suffrage, but she did not use the term “feminist” to describe herself, and her career took place almost exactly in the interval between the Nineteenth Amendment and The Feminine Mystique, an interval when women’s activism slackened. Yet she published a dazzling array of women authors who became canonical—Kay Boyle, Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, just to name a few—and furthermore, she corresponded with an impressive network of literary women, agents and editors who helped create the literature that women just like themselves were reading. I was riveted to the changes of Katharine’s career over time, to how she responded to changes in the workforce and changes in the culture at large. It’s not a bad idea as a historian to look at the editors who were themselves looking at their own times with critical, discerning eyes. And in Katharine’s case, that sense of being part of the slipstream of her times was doubled. Her marriage to E.B. White and his own career at The New Yorker meant that both people in that partnership were attuned to the news and their own roles in shaping, responding to, and commenting on it.
We’re all familiar with the challenges of finding sources for writing about women from the distant past. What are the challenges of writing about women from the early and middle twentieth century?
I was drowning in sources for Katharine’s life. As a literary woman in the era of typewriters, carbon copies, and secretaries who took dictation, her life and career has been very well documented and preserved. Too well! The New Yorker papers live at the New York Public Library, and just this month the NYPL has put treasures from this archive on exhibit to mark the magazine’s 100th anniversary. Here (second picture) is a note from Katharine White to her boss, Harold Ross. These papers felt nearly bottomless to me. I joked that Katharine’s editorial memos are like bindweed: I’d pull one folder out of the box, and three more folders would grow deep in the archive. My challenge was to forge a path through these papers, to find the authors who particularly mattered to her or who told a story that readers particularly needed to hear. That’s the challenge of any biography: to give shape to a life that is full to bursting in the living of it.
The New Yorker papers weren’t my only source. Katharine spent her retirement creating five distinct archives (her papers, her husband E.B. White’s, her sister Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant’s, and papers from both her mother’s and her father’s families) which she donated to four universities. She would often jot down a note, sometimes small and sometimes running to many pages, to explain why a particular letter was important, and then she’d paperclip the note to the letter, thus expanding her archive even more. It felt as if I were reading every source over her shoulder and that was both a blessing and a curse. Letters and notes within these archives make very clear that she destroyed sources even as she notated and preserved others. I learned about some of the most important moments of her personal life only from letters that escaped her attention or were donated after her death.
But the depth and breadth of these sources arise from privilege, and so the other challenge of writing about Katharine was to make this privilege visible. It wasn’t enough to just read the papers; I also needed to read the silences, the absences, the counterfactuals, the might-have-beens. I researched who Katharine didn’t edit, which authors tried to break into The New Yorker but were rejected time and again, including Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Alex Haley. I looked at other editors whose careers are not as fulsomely documented, such as Jessie Redmon Fauset at The Crisis. The challenge of twentieth century women’s history is that the archives mirror the circumstances in which they were created, and the researcher needs to imagine what might exist outside them to begin to counteract their biases.
One of the important elements in The World She Edited is the way White nurtured the careers of women writers in her role as editor. Do you have a favorite story about her relationship with one of those writers?
Hard to choose. How Katharine revived Jean Stafford’s career after the end of her violent marriage to Robert Lowell, and eventually introduced her to her third husband, New Yorker reporter A.J. Liebling? How Vladimir Nabokov sent the top-secret manuscript of Lolita to her house only to have her send it back unread?
Perhaps my favorite story is her editing relationship with Mary McCarthy. Katharine loved McCarthy’s writing and worked hard to bring her into the magazine. Their relationship really clicked when McCarthy began writing reminiscences about her ghastly childhood as an orphan of the 1918 epidemic, raised by unbelievably cruel relatives. Katharine worked with her to strike the exact right tone of the stories, which risked seeming too incredible or exaggerated. (Katharine also advanced her money before accepting or publishing these stories, something she often did to nurture writers she wanted to publish—she played the long game.) In one exuberantly grateful letter, McCarthy told her that these edits helped her remember the true events lying underneath her facile prose, that Katharine had magically peered through the manuscript to see the real story, as yet unexpressed. The letters between the two of them are quite touching but also fascinating from a literary critical perspective.
And then I reread the book that McCarthy published from these reminiscences, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. I had written a chapter of my dissertation on this book, but now, with Katharine’s editing foremost in my mind, I saw it very differently. When she collected the essays, McCarthy did not change a word from how they had appeared in The New Yorker. But after each essay she appended a new passage, usually just a few short pages, which reconsidered the essay, noting what she originally got wrong or misremembered, what she later learned, where she lied or falsified for a good story. She gave a reading of her own work, probing each essay’s weakness and pointing out where it worked. And suddenly I could see that these interludes sound exactly like Katharine’s gentle but substantive editorial memos. McCarthy had been so influenced by Katharine that she adopted this editorial mindset toward her own work, and it struck her as so valuable that she wove it into the structure of her book so that readers could witness this interplay between earlier draft and later consideration. No surprise that Katharine loved the book and its unique design.
What work of women’s history have you read lately that you loved? (Or for that matter, what work of women’s history have you loved in any format?)
What immense pleasure I got from reading The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963 to 1973 by Clara Bingham. I cannot recommend it highly enough, even to your readers, who are surely more versed than most in second wave feminism. Bingham’s book is an oral history of a tremendously consequential decade, and the dozens of voices we get to hear in these pages make it so lively and vibrant. I guarantee you’ll encounter women and subcultures and victories that you’ve never heard of before. Bingham’s achievement is to render this history fully contingent and suspenseful. You know how it all turns out, of course, but she brings you back to a time when women had far fewer rights and everything to gain by taking risks, speaking out, creating their own networks and institutions from scratch. I found this book equally humbling and inspiring, wildly moving, a page-turner, and above all, deeply relevant.
A question from Amy: How can we use women’s history to forge a path through this post-Dobbs, authoritarian moment, when women, trans people, and LGBTQ folks are highly vulnerable yet ready to fight? What figures and era in women’s history are you reading about to tell us how to counter this administration’s hostility to women?
*Gulp* That is a BIG question. I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer it. (In fact, I urge you to read the Q & A with philosopher and historian Lydia Moland, which will run on March 10, for a much better answer than I can give you.) But here are my thoughts:
- First, and most important, find your heroes. Not only women who inspire you with their courage or stubbornness or brains, but women who changed the world to use as your models.
- Resist efforts to erase women’s accomplishments when you see them. (And they are happening.) If you aren’t able to stop an immediate effort, document it and shout about it where ever you can. And yes, I know this is hard.
- Keep telling and sharing the stories of women who made changes (especially if they were not given credit for their innovations), women whose stories were covered up, women who fought injustice—you get the idea.
- Support the people who are telling those stories.
- If you are in a position to green light projects that tell stories about the history of women or other groups left out of mainstream historical accounts (books, movies, panels, museum exhibits, public programs at a school/church/library), don’t reflexively say no because it might be a hard sell . And don’t cancel scheduled projects just because you are scared. (And yes, that is happening, also.
In other words, use women’s history* as a means to speak up and speak out. It would be easy to say that there are more important battles to fight right now. But the politics surrounding who is remembered and who isn’t is powerful and all attacks on liberties are related.
As for me, these Women History Month posts are my own way of speaking up. Or at least one of them.
*And Black history, and LBGTQ history, and Labor history, etc, etc , etc.
***
Interested in learning more about Amy Reading and her work? Check out her website, http://www.amyreading.com/
***
Come back on Monday for three questions and an answer with Sara Catterall, author of Amelia Bloomer: Journalists, Suffragists, Anti-Fashion Icon.