A Hostile Gender Offer.

The topic of Wellesley College came up in my last post (“I Wandered like a Tear Gas Cloud” 9/22) and that got me thinking about single-sex education, particularly girls’ schools. This formerly common practice is now rare enough to be considered exotic. I wonder why it exists at all.

Having only been to co-ed schools myself, I turned to to my authority on such matters: Town and Country Magazine. They’re better known, of course, for shining a spotlight on lives undimmed by the financial crisis. Yet, sometimes - between the ads for execrable art and stiffly posed photos of Dr. and Mrs. Bunshaft at their beach wedding in Guatemala - an article appears that is, well, the genuine article. In this case, it’s, “Single-Sex Schools: Let’s Hear It For The Girls.” (1/04) by Diane Guernsey

One reason for single sex education seems to be academic necessity. Ms. Guernsey claims that, “Girls are called on, and speak up, less often than boys; they emerge from middle school with their interest in math and science dampened, if not demolished; their high school grades are often higher than boys’, but they tend to score lower on the high stakes test that influence college admissions.” I won’t dispute any of that, but it raises two questions. First, when is the damage done? The allusion to middle school suggests that all-girl high schools and women’s colleges may be closing the barn door after the mare has escaped. Second, is it gender related? After all, the same could be said of shy boys.

The author also claims that girls’ schools “Offer a unique in-depth knowledge of girls’ particular learning styles and how to make the most of them.” I’m sure that’s true, too, but it’s true across the board. The best co-ed schools are also distinguished by close, personal attention to the learning styles of their students. Yet, according to JoAnn Deak, a psychologist, even these elite institutions are compromised. “The mere presence of boys has a repressive effect.” If that is true, then it points to a more fundamental social evil than educational inequity. One that, like racism, is only perpetuated by segregation.

What concerns me most are the purported psychological benefits of going to a girls’ school. Greater self-confidence, for instance. Ms. Guernsey states, “The absence of boys means girls hold every leadership post, from editor of the newspaper to school president.” What happens when these girls enter a world filled with boys and men or, shudder, men who act like boys? Some will succeed and that’s fine, but some will be disillusioned and that’s unfair. It’s not the sleepwalking I object to, it’s the rude awakening.

The parents of these students are engaging in a bit of sleepwalking, too. They are hoping that the right school will keep their daughters pure and innocent. Not that I blame them. Everyone wants their children to remain children for as long as possible. Single-sex, however, doesn’t mean no sex. At least, if the movie, Caged Heat, is to be believed. Granted, that was about a women’s prison, but the principle is the same. It doesn’t mean no boys, either. Ironically, the social life at these schools consists largely of dances where girls are judged exclusively (even brutally) on their looks. Travel to and from these ordeals is usually by car and not always unaccompanied by alcohol. Even if someone succeeded in sheltering their daughter through high school and college, two outcomes are likely: the young woman will either try to make up for lost time or, like people who were deprived of television and popular music in their youth, always wear a slightly puzzled expression when someone mentions The Man From U.N.C.L.E. or The Dave Clark Five.

Do girls’ schools, therefore, have any reason to exist? Yes, but like a wedding, it’s more about the parents than the daughter. From her point of view, it’s like being a bridesmaid. You don’t regret buying the dress, but it’s not something that you would ever choose for yourself.

I Wandered Like A Tear Gas Cloud.

Fall always makes me think of school. Not public school, which was compulsory and boring. The only thing that reminds me of that is waiting in line at the Motor Vehicle Bureau. No, crisp mornings, changing leaves and the smell of wood smoke mean college to me. Tweed jackets, plaid skirts and long, woolen scarves in school colors. Lambent shadows upon gothic buildings with dreaming spires and, most of all, walking to classes amid the pied beauty of autumn in New England. Those aren’t my memories, but I prefer them. At best, they're a mash-up of Wellesley College and Brideshead Revisited. I went to Boston University, which is splayed out like a nervous system around the streetcar line that zips, like electrical messages, up the spinal cord of Commonwealth Avenue. No quaint customs about walking around the lake or sherry at the High Table there, I’ll be bound. The campus was anchored at one end by my dormitory, a cinder-block structure with steel furniture bolted to the floor, the only amenity being a phone – with cord – mounted, firmly, on the wall of your room and at the other by that clogged drain, since gentrified, known as Kenmore Square. My classes took place in a former commercial building, probably an auto showroom. Again, renovated without amenities. The business end of those classes, however, was vastly more gratifying.

I spent my freshman and sophomore years in very small study groups, interdisciplinary in nature and under the ministrations of brilliant, tenured professors. There were no grades and their attendant pressures and a common library, so you didn’t have to buy books. Alas, that program is long gone due to a scheming university president, who taught Richard III by example. Not that it was an academic paradise, it wasn’t. In fact, I wonder how gratifying it was for the professors. I gave most of my classes about one-tenth of the attention they deserved. Had I given them more, I might have invented blogs instead of jumping on the bandwagon precisely at the moment that the wheels fall off. One thing that did engage me, not completely, but more than my studies, was the protest movement – mostly anti-war, but it covered a multitude of sins. I wasn’t in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society, but you knew that. Right?) but I marched. Not only was it the right thing to do, but it was exciting and a little bit dangerous (more or less the way I feel about bacon and eggs today.) Recollecting those emotions in tranquility (also known as unemployment or waiting to be published) I have written a poem that, now that I look at it, bears more than a slight resemblance to “Daffodils” by William Wordsworth. I reproduce it below:

I wandered like a tear gas cloud

That floats on high o’er college quad,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of the Riot Squad;

Beside the river, beneath the trees,

Stalwart and grimacing in the breeze.

Continuous as the buttons that shine

Upon a policeman’s chest,

They stretched in never-ending line,

Poised to make arrests:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Swinging their clubs in a baleful dance.

The angry students start to march; attacked,

The frightened marchers flee:

A poet never could be gay,

In such beleaguered company.

I gazed – and gazed – but little thought

That, merely watching, I’d be caught

For oft, when in my cell I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flashback on that inner eye

Which is the bane of solitude;

And before my head can nod

I rise and curse the Riot Squad.

Mary Travers: She Sang Out Love.

Mary Travers was, in many ways, one of the purest voices of the Sixties. Raised in New York’s Greenwich Village, the daughter of labor organizers, she attended the Little Red Schoolhouse (so-called because of its politics) and, thus, unlike many of her peers, was destined to be a part of the looming civil rights and anti-war movements. She left high school to sing back-up for Pete Seeger and, in 1961, joined Peter Yarrow and Noel “Paul” Stookey to become Peter, Paul and Mary. They not only shared a manager with Bob Dylan, their recordings of “If I Had A Hammer” and “Blowin’ In The Wind” became more widely known – and more beloved – than his own. Partly, that’s because of their steady and inspiring appearance at civil rights and peace rallies throughout the Sixties. Mary Travers raised her rich alto for more than politics, however. As their recording of “Lemon Tree” shows, Peter, Paul and Mary were charter members of that period’s Folk Song Revival as well. They could even take a children’s song, “Puff, The Magic Dragon” and make it number two on the charts. Mary’s sincere, emotion-filled voice is, perhaps, most notable on their recording of John Denver’s, “Leaving On a Jet Plane,” the group’s biggest (and final hit) reaching #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 of 1969. The following years saw her career wax and wane as did several of her marriages and her health. In 2005, Mary Travers was diagnosed with leukemia. Throughout it all, she held fast to her beliefs in love and peace and never brought shame or scandal upon anyone or any movement associated with her. Mary Travers died from leukemia on Sept. 16, 2009 at the age of 72. Oh Babe, we hate to see you go.

"Another Opening/Another Show."

In 1932, Robert Benchley wrote, “If you think these are dull days in the theatre, just wait until they appear in somebody’s reminiscences along 1965 and you will realize that we are right at this moment living in the Golden Age . . . In a book probably to be called “Footlight Memories,” you will be able to read of the good old days along Broadway in the early ‘thirties and you will lay the book aside with those old eyes dimmed with tears and crashing one of your grandchildren over the head, will murmur, “Tsk-tsk, those were the times when Titans strode the earth.” He was being sarcastic. Yet, as a playwright somewhat before Benchley’s time wrote, “Much truth is said in jest.”

Robert Benchley was theater critic for Life magazine (1920-30) and then for The New Yorker (1930-1940). In that time, he reviewed premieres (not revivals) of work by the following writers, composers and performers:

DRAMAS

Eugene O’Neill

Lillian Hellman

Thornton Wilder

George Bernard Shaw

Sean O’Casey

Bertolt Brecht

COMEDIES

Noel Coward

James Thurber

Kaufman and Hart

Marx Brothers

MUSICALS

George and Ira Gershwin

Cole Porter

Rodgers and Hart

Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein II

PERFORMANCES

Orson Welles & The Mercury Theater

John Gielgud as Hamlet

Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne

Fred Astaire

Ethel Merman

Bob Hope

It truly was a “Golden Age” and the people involved can justifiably be called, “Titans.” True, a great any more plays were produced in those days than now, so the average quality suffered. We also don’t know how bad the really bad plays were. We know how good Fred Astaire and The Marx Brothers were but only from their movies. Imagine seeing them – and the plays that those movies were based on – in person. The same goes for musicals of the period. The songs of Kern, Gershwin, Porter and Rogers are universally acclaimed, yet imagine hearing the scores of “Showboat,” “Strike Up The Band,” “Kiss Me Kate” or “Babes In Arms” for the first time. You wouldn’t need Robert Benchley to tell you they were great.

I can’t think of another twenty years so rich in - or that so handsomely rewarded – theater talent. Certainly not the last twenty years. Sure, every time has its stars and its hit plays, some more than others (1945-1965 wasn’t too shabby.) I’m not taking away from them. I’m saying that Broadway wasn’t always a fabulous invalid. It was alive and well in the Twenties and Thirties.