Girl Sleuth (8 page)

Just before her fourteenth birthday, her unshakable faith in herself—not to mention her indiscriminate use of her father's stamps—was rewarded. In the June 1919 issue of her beloved
St. Nicholas
magazine, emblazoned with the Silver Badge Award, appeared a very short story by Mildred Augustine titled “The Courtesy.” She had been entering the magazine's contests for several years already, and at last she had been recognized. Though
St. Nicholas
did not award any cash, the venerable magazine gave the young author her first taste of the thrill of publication, much as it had the infamous poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who as a child had published her first poems in
St. Nicholas
roughly a decade earlier.

The page announcing Mildred's success opened, as usual, with an editor's note that featured an illustration by a child at the top. It showed a graduate and a bride, and had been created by a fifteen-year-old contributor to the magazine. In the note beneath, the anonymous writer extolled it as “a fitting introduction to the month of roses, and weddings, and glad (or tearful) farewells to school or college!” And then came something a bit different. “The Courtesy” was a tiny fable about the merits of good behavior and the golden rule with just a touch of the
Lord of the Flies
about it:

 

Mrs. Gardner sat gazing out of the window. In her lap lay a letter. The door opened and her daughter Andrea entered the room. Mrs. Gardner, smiling faintly, said, “I have received a letter from Aunt Jane, who will arrive next week to spend the winter with us.” For a moment Andrea was too surprised to speak. Then she burst into tears.

A week later Aunt Jane arrived, parrot, umbrella, baggage and all. She was even worse than Andrea had imagined. She breakfasted in bed, grumbled at everything, was courteous to no one, and was, in short, as Andrea declared, “a perfect grouch.”

As time passed, matters grew worse. The parrot screeched incessantly, and the house was in a constant uproar.

Several weeks after her arrival, Aunt Jane overheard a conversation that caused her much thought. Coming noiselessly past Andrea's room, she heard Andrea clearly say: “Aunt Jane thinks that we should do nothing but wait on her and show her every courtesy, while she just bosses and grumbles. For my part, I think that courtesy is as much her duty as ours. If only she were pleasant, it would be much easier for us to be courteous to her.”

Aunt Jane silently entered her room. Next morning the Gardners were surprised to find Aunt Jane down for breakfast. Later, she helped wash the dishes without even grumbling.

Weeks passed. Aunt Jane became so helpful and cheerful it was a pleasure to have her around.

When spring came, the Gardners wanted her to remain, but, declining, she announced her intention of traveling, providing Andrea would accompany her. Andrea—not from courtesy, but because she really liked Aunt Jane—accepted.

No one except Aunt Jane knew, and she never told, that it was Andrea who had first shown her the need for true courtesy.

 

The story clearly had its roots in Mildred's experience of being a smart, impatient child to whom adults did not defer as often as she thought they should. Having exorcised her demons in print in a most satisfactory manner, she was more certain than ever that writing was what she wanted to do with her life.

She began to send short stories incessantly to church magazines and newspapers. Her first big sale came when she was sixteen, to the Nazarene Publishing Company, which bought “Midget” for the grand sum of $3.50. Midget, the title character, was a girl who would reappear regularly in Mildred's writing throughout the next two decades. Like her creator, she was an excellent swimmer, a girl who agonized when her “fancy diving” wasn't up to par, and who, in a later story, would rescue a panicked, drowning swimmer, holding her in a “safe and scientific way” until the swimmer gave in to Midget's experience. She also played basketball, like Mildred. In one episode, she is being relied upon to bring the home team to victory and told that luck is with her as she goes out for the final moments of the game. “Luck was it? Well she guessed it wasn't luck. She would show them what it was.” By the end of the tale, having won the game, of course, she is speaking with hard-headed, Mildred-like practicality: “After this, I will never be foolish enough to think that people get things in this world unless they get out and work for what they want. There isn't any such thing as luck.”

Midget's assessment of the world closely mirrored a clipping that Mildred had cut from a publication called the
American Magazine
and pasted in her high school memory book. It was titled “Code of a ‘Good Sport'” and listed the ten requirements for that honor:

 

1. Thou shalt not quit.
   
2. Thou shalt not alibi.
   
3. Thou shalt not gloat over winning.
   
4. Thou shalt not be a rotten loser.
   
5. Thou shalt not take unfair advantage.
   
6. Thou shalt not ask odds thou art not willing to give.
   
7. Thou shalt not always be ready to give thine opponents the shade.
   
8. Thou shalt not overestimate an opponent, nor overestimate thyself.
   
9. Remember that the game is the thing and that he who thinketh otherwise is a mucker and not a true sportsman.
   
10. Honor the game thou playest, for who playeth the game straight and hard wins even when he loseth.
    

 

Mildred must have cut this out on her birthday, for pasted onto the same page of the book are two horoscope readings for the day that she thought rang true enough to save. The first one ran, “You have a rather stern and rigid disposition, quite vain and self-satisfied. You believe in your way of thinking and doing things, too intolerant of the beliefs of others for your own good . . . A child born on this day should prove steady and persevering with every chance of rising in life.” The other astrological reading added, “A child born on this day is likely to be given to disputes and wrangling, and may be proud and imperious unless carefully trained in early youth.”

This, then, was Mildred when she graduated from Ladora High School in 1922, one member of a class of four. She played baseball, volleyball, and basketball, and she had been a “decided hit” as the character of the landlady in the senior class play. She also played the xylophone extremely well, usually as a member of the Ladora Band, for which she also played the slide trombone. On occasion, she played at the town Chautauqua, sometimes accompanied by her mother on the piano. She had done summer school in Iowa City in order to finish high school in three years, and she was ready for more urbane surroundings than the small town of Ladora. “Senior activities were dismal,” she recalled of her graduation week, “as four persons couldn't stir up much excitement . . . no matter how hard we tried . . . I just wanted to forget about it and move on to better things.”

Mildred was assigned to give the class prophecy—a speech imagining the futures of the foursome—“a fantastic document over which [she] labored many weeks.” This portion of the graduation proceedings took place in the town's movie house. When Mildred rose to give her address, a “fringe of hang-abouts” outside began to honk their horns so loudly that it obscured all other sounds. Mildred was devastated. “I tried to speak above the honking but couldn't. The tooting kept on without a break and no one inside the theater made any attempt to go after the hoodlums. Not until I finished the reading did the disturbance cease. No one inside heard a word of my speech. Hurt and angry, I tore up the manuscript.” Though she claimed later on that the experience had taught her never to take her writing too seriously, in truth, it was the idea that others might not take it as seriously as she did that she grasped for the first time that evening, and it made her furious.

Mildred was headed west to the State University of Iowa in Iowa City, where she enrolled as a freshman in the fall of 1922. The big state colleges had been accepting women with great success for decades by now, and though it was still comparatively rare for girls to attend college, their numbers had doubled between 1910 and 1920. The previous generation of women had used the college campus as a place to organize for suffrage and assert themselves politically. Thanks to their efforts and the victories they had won, Mildred's generation would use it to find themselves in a whole new way.

3

“T
HE
H
IGHER
E
DUCATION
of Women is one of the great world battle cries for freedom,” thundered the founder of Wellesley College in the school's opening sermon in 1875. “I believe that God's hand is in it . . . that He is calling womanhood to come up higher, to prepare herself for great conflicts, for vast reforms in social life, for noblest usefulness.” Henry Fowle Durant was a true New England blue blood, descended from English immigrants who had come over in the 1660s. A lawyer, he had become rich after handling a claim for a rubber company and investing in their product, which he recognized as the future. The land just outside Boston that Wellesley College occupies—five hundred acres of rolling hills and forest, including a lake—was originally intended as a country estate where Durant and his wife, Pauline, planned to build a pleasure palace for their gifted young son. When the child died of diphtheria at the age of eight, Durant and Pauline, heartbroken, struggled to find meaning in their lives. For Henry Durant, the process included a religious conversion, and while he first thought to found an orphanage in his son's memory, he came to believe that he could best do God's work by educating women. During the recent Civil War, women had proved eager, among other things, to take over teaching duties from their absent men, only to find themselves ill prepared to do so. This was in great part the result of the prevailing attitude that, as one Boston physician put it, “woman's brain was too delicate and fragile a thing to attempt the mastery of Greek and Latin.” Durant chose to believe otherwise, and he put his real estate behind his convictions.

In 1875, twelve years after Durant's son's death, Wellesley opened its doors. The idea of higher education for girls was no longer completely foreign, though it was still viewed as inappropriate in many circles. In 1873 Robert Hallowell Richards, a professor of mining engineering at MIT, made a list in his journal of what he believed to be the pros and cons of coed education. He admitted to himself that men and women were “together in the family, why not in the school?” But still, he felt that educating the sexes together would do nothing but create “feelings and interests foreign to the lecture room.” As late as 1899, long after the founding of Vassar, Barnard, Smith, Bryn Mawr, and Radcliffe, Charles William Eliot, the president of Harvard, was speaking out against the efficacy of education for women. Amazingly enough, he chose the inauguration of Wellesley's fifth president, Caroline Hazard, to express his views on why educating women was a means to no real end. Though many single young women of the lower classes were employed in unskilled work, he noted that “the so-called learned professions are very imperfectly open to women, and the scientific professions are even less accessible;
and society, as a whole, has not made up its mind in what intellectual fields women may be safely and profitably employed on a large scale.” He had personally approved an expansion of Radcliffe, which was soon to become a more integral part of Harvard, but women's colleges, he believed, were still viewed as “luxuries or superfluities which some rather peculiar well-to-do girls desire to avail themselves of.” He also thought that these schools should stop pretending to be counterparts to those for men. They should cease the practices of “grades, frequent examinations, prizes, and competitive scholarships” and follow a program that would not injure women's “bodily powers and functions.” He finished up by pronouncing, “It would be a wonder, indeed, if the intellectual capacities of women were not at least as unlike those of men as their bodily capacities are.” (Wellesley did not, in fact, give women grades until 1912—prior to this they were simply told whether or not they had passed.)

Nevertheless, by 1880, nearly a third of all college students were women—forty thousand of them in total. Their numbers only grew in the 1890s, when the field of home economics was introduced by none other than the wife of the dubious Robert Hallowell Richards of MIT. Ellen Swallow Richards was not only the first woman admitted to MIT in 1870—with the understanding that it was not to set a precedent of any kind—but also its first female professor. She, like her fellow home economists, “thought that homemaking was too complex and too important to be left to chance transmission from mother to daughter.” Instead, they believed young women should be trained in the domestic arts in the classrooms and labs of the university, so that they could “run their homes according to the most up-to-date scientific knowledge.” This included “the application of business and industrial management techniques to the homely tasks of cleaning and cooking.”
But even as it offered women new chances in education as both students and professors, the field of home economics also further emphasized the idea that a woman's role was in the home, bringing it out of the old century and into the new one.

For colleges seeking to educate women in the liberal arts, there were other kinds of hurdles, and schools like Wellesley were not exempt from them. In its first year of operation, 314 students were admitted to the college. When it came time for them to take the entrance exams for placement into classes, however, only thirty proved to be qualified to undertake the work expected of them to earn a college degree because of their inferior education in the lower grades and high school. The result was that in its early days Wellesley, like many other women's colleges, accepted many girls into a kind of preparatory program for first-year students.