LITMIR.BIZ

      Girls in evening uniforms and capes leaving chapel. WESTOVER SCHOOL ARCHIVE.

      The importance of feminine values was emphasized in a 1909 issue of The Lantern, the school literary magazine, when it linked each letter in the name of the school with a virtue—womanliness, earnestness, sweetness, truthfulness, orderliness, vigor, enthusiasm, and righteousness. By adhering to these ideals, girls would learn “the very great art of living,” the editors earnestly explained in a high-minded way. Living in an idealistic community “creates mental responsiveness, stimulates liveliness of mind, and makes possible that interchange of humor, wit, and sentiment that makes the best fertilizer for the garden soil of civilized life,” Miss Hillard would write in an essay in her late sixties. She eventually established at Westover an honor system, which was explained in the initial issue of The Lantern every year. Perhaps it was instituted because of persistent misbehavior. Rebellions against rules and restrictions often took the form of eating forbidden foods in the big closets at night. When Elsie Talbott was class president in 1913, she failed to report that her roommate had hidden contraband chocolates in the covered chamber pot in their room. The honor system valued honesty, studiousness, neatness, loyalty, kindness, and consideration of others. Its existence meant that there were relatively few rules, even though every September Miss Hillard gave incoming students a long lecture about them. Decades later an alumna called it “a code of honor and an idealism which a little at a time I came to accept so joyously that I believed the most complete happiness I could possibly know would be if my life could in some way fulfill [it].”

      School traditions were intended to endorse this idealism. The first year Miss Hillard introduced a number of ceremonies and songs including the school anthem, “Raise Now to Westover.” The autumn day when everyone was given a lantern to carry outside in the evenings soon became a lantern ceremony in the spring, a picnic with a big bonfire, games, and singing, when the headmistress lit a girl’s lantern from hers and whispered a few words of warning or encouragement about the strength of her metaphorical flame. The chapel was decorated with pine wreaths and boughs at Christmas and with white chrysanthemums and lilies at Easter. Repeating familiar rituals every year was a way to enforce loyalty to enlightened values, the headmistress believed. “Creation and presentation of beauty for its own sake is a constant enrichment of school life,” she would later write. Furthermore, she believed that such beauty would lead to “a life of harmony, proportion, sincerity, and happiness.”

      In 1912 Mary Hillard had turned fifty, and as she lost her youthful slenderness, she gained a greater sense of presence. “Instead of any hurry in her walk there was balance and power, [and] at times she seemed to sweep along through the corridor or across Red Hall as if without effort,” recalled an observer. She spoke or read poetry in her lilting voice to girls in the chapel, the dining room, the schoolroom, and her sitting room. She greeted each girl as she arrived for breakfast in the morning, said good night after evening chapel, greeted them or said goodbye when they returned or departed for vacations; one year as she stood by the door in her cape before Christmas vacation, a girl nervously said “Merry Hillard, Miss Christmas,” and everyone burst into laughter. In her sitting room after dinner, Miss Hillard even talked one evening “in a wonderful way” about making less noise, Jessica Baylis wrote in her diary. Prettiness, the headmistress liked to say, has value only because of the pleasure it gives. And happiness has nothing to do with the pursuit of pleasure but with sacrifice of self and loyalty to high ideals. “Miss Hillard talked to us as she alone can, and as no one ever forgets,” wrote another girl in The Lantern in 1911.

      That year the headmistress described in a letter to Theodate a morning, in which her pride in the school was palpable on the page. Before eight o’clock two girls were playing “the handle rolls of a Beethoven trio” in the gymnasium, as they did every day, she wrote. Others were polishing their shoes and tying black ribbons under their white collars in their tidied bedrooms, or reading in the library, or studying in the schoolroom, or crocheting in Red Hall. When the eight o’clock bell rang, “they all came streaming to prayers, to lift their clear young voices in the heavenly notes that fill our chapel and rise on high morning by morning,” she wrote. She felt warmth toward the young girls in her care and admired their “loveliness, spontaneity, and steadiness.” As she aged, “the solemnity [went] out of her face and in its place [was] a tenderness which often assumed a look of motherliness,” her young minister friend, John Dallas, observed. Eliza Talbott remembered that “she seemed to enfold us in a caring that was the real heart of our Westover experience.”

      It was not always that way. Among “the triumvirate” that ran Westover—Mary Hillard, Lucy Pratt, and Helen LaMonte—it was Helen LaMonte who was called the balance wheel. A small, erect, slender person, she looked fragile but actually emanated force. When Miss Hillard flew off on tangents, it was she who gave her old friend a steadying hand. With her gentle and delicious sense of humor, Miss LaMonte would quietly calm everyone down with “bits of humor and wisdom scattered about,” a pupil remembered. One time the headmistress chose a few girls with flyaway curls for a club for those with fuzzy hair; she decided that its involuntary members would have to recite aloud Kipling’s poem “Fuzzy Wuzzy” as a form of penance. After Miss LaMonte heard about this, she told the girls to disband “because she had just returned from the Fiji Islands and feels quite at home among our ‘fuzzy heads,’” as one of the editors of The Lantern explained in the autumn of 1921. In her great enthusiasm and eagerness for adventure, the teacher had gone with a former student to the South Pacific, where they made sure to visit the grave of Robert Louis Stevenson. They had left New York on an old British India cargo freighter, “Lake of the Flowers,” with a few other passengers, including a screen writer and a man from Australia along with his performing dogs. There were “long days of good books and invented games and sleepy long, long thoughts,” remembered the former Betty Choate.

      As assistant headmistress, Miss LaMonte did the administrative work she disliked in her small office to the right of the front door in Miss Hillard’s absence. Like other teachers at Westover, she, a Smith graduate, was among the first generation of graduates of most women’s colleges. Hired prior to 1900 at St. Margaret’s School, she was a widely read intellectual who loved to teach. In the classroom, Miss LaMonte’s method was one of “enticement” into the fascinating world of ideas. Her “attitude was that we were her equals come together for instruction and enjoyment, [and] it would be a breach of manners to behave ill in her class. Still, it did sometimes happen, if the playing fields were being mowed or the apple trees [were] in

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