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Expect Great Things!
How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women
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.
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.
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Praise
“Readers can indeed expect great things from Vanda Krefft’s engaging new book. Deeply researched with vivid historical details, the book both inspires and entertains. This cinematic portrait of the Gibbs women is Mad Men in reverse—sure to be picked up for its own television series!”
—Heath Hardage Lee, author of The League of Wives and The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon
"Vanda Krefft conducts a thorough survey of the fascinating Katharine Gibbs School and the women it produced—women who went on to break real ground in a sexist world. These stories of the Katharine Gibbs graduates give us a new way to look at American history in the 20th century, through the beautifully detailed tales of their accomplishments and audacity. A dynamic portrait of an heretofore overlooked piece of American culture."
—Nell McShane Wulfhart, author of The Great Stewardess Rebellion
"During the twentieth century, most educational establishments catered only reluctantly to the changing status and aspirations of women. But one gutsy young widow from Rhode Island was ahead of the game, as Vanda Krefft shows in this splendid account of the life of Katharine Gibbs and the schools she founded. In lively prose, Krefft outlines how the schools evolved from training perfect (and perfectly groomed) helpmates for male bosses, to educating modern women eager and qualified to take control of their own lives. Her accounts of the varied and often astonishing careers of Gibbs graduates sparkle with drama. Expect Great Things! is a fascinating exploration of how one woman’s example of self-assurance, hard work, and imagination quietly helped lay the groundwork for feminist challenges to the status quo."
—Charlotte Gray, author of Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons; The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt.
"The Katharine Gibbs School trained tens of thousands of women—white gloves and all—to battle sexism and succeed in business, government, entertainment, politics, and more. The struggle for workplace equality continues."
—Ellen Cassedy, author of Working 9 to 5: A Women’s Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie