Expect Great Things!
How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
A fun and fascinating social history of the famed Katharine Gibbs School, which from the 1910s to the 1960s, trained women for executive secretary positions but surreptitiously was instilling the self-confidence and strategic know-how necessary for them to claim equality, power, and authority in the wider world.
It’s a safe bet that most of the secretaries on the TV series Mad Men would have attended the Katharine Gibbs School in New York City. The iconic institution was in its heyday in the 1950 and '60s synonymous with supplying secretaries—always properly attired in heels, ladylike hats, and white gloves—to male executives. In Expect Great Things! Vanda Krefft turns the notion of a “Gibbs girl” on its head, showing us that while the school was getting women who could type 90 words per minute into the C-suite, its more subversive mission was to get them out of the secretarial pool to assume positions of power on the other side of the desk. And Gibbs graduates did just that, tackling the sexism of the era and paving the way for 21st-century women to succeed in any profession.
Katharine Gibbs was one her own success stories. She started her school when, as a 46-year-old widow, she was left near-broke with two young sons. The school taught typing and stenography but Gibbs also hired accomplished professors from elite colleges to teach academic subjects—it was a well-rounded education that produced early feminists ready to tackle the sexism of their era. "Expect great things!" was her motto and her philosophy. Within a decade she’d opened schools in three elegant locations. With nostalgic period photographs throughout, Expect Great Things! takes us back to Katie Gibbs’s life and tells the stories of the women she influenced. We meet Gibbs graduates who worked for the Walt Disney, Marilyn Monroe, and Robert F. Kennedy. Others forged pathfinding roles as an Emmy-winning television star, a women’s rights advisor to four U.S. presidents, a writer of Wonder Woman comic books, the head of the Women’s Marines, a best-selling young adult author, and a U.S. Ambassador.
For readers of The Barbizon and Come Fly the World, Expect Great Things! reveals the seismic impact the Katharine Gibbs school had on the American workplace—and on women’s opportunities today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Krefft (The Man Who Made the Movies) offers an upbeat chronicle of the Katharine Gibbs School, a midcentury secretarial school that propelled a notable number of women into prominent roles in American arts and business. Gibbs, an impoverished widow who, facing money trouble after her husband's death, felt frustrated by women's financial dependence on men, established the school in the 1910s; by the '50s, it was considered "the Tiffany's" of secretarial schools. Students were taught shorthand and typing, advised on business fashion and etiquette, instructed in voice and diction, and given a solid education in government, literature, and art. Tracing the careers of its graduates—among them Wonder Woman lead writer Joye Hummel; Viking books president Clare Ferraro; and actor Loretta Swift ("Hot Lips" Houlihan from M*A*S*H)—Krefft argues that Gibbs's curriculum subversively aimed to instill in women the self-confidence and strategic thinking needed to succeed as leaders, rather than as mere helpers. Getting a "C-Suite" secretarial position was presented to the students (if not those hiring them) as a first step to becoming executives themselves, Krefft writes, calling it "a modern-day Trojan horse campaign." Following the feminist upheavals of the '60s, the school became obsolete almost overnight, but Krefft's overview serves as an exuberant and fascinating look back at how the uphill battle women faced inspired them to be creatively subversive. Readers will be engrossed.
