Why Collect Stories About Girls’ Schools?

When I was doing research for my book, Where Girls Come First, I loved talking with alumnae about their experiences at school. There were so many wonderful stories – funny stories, sad stories, life-changing ones, or ones that gave a really good picture of what growing up was like during different eras. There were many more stories than I could fit into the book. I wondered if there were a way to share all these wonderful stories… and came up with the idea for this site.

I think about this site as a kind of ever-growing historical archive. History isn’t just about big battles or national elections; it’s also about the daily lives of regular people. As a researcher, I loved finding diaries from girls in the 1800s filled with little details about their friendships, pranks, daily routines, favorite or teachers, etc. One girl wrote in 1865 about secretly brewing up oyster stew in thwe aashbasin of her dorm room. Another girl wrote in 1829 about being so excited with math that her hair, instead of forming into curly ringlets each morning, “very deliberately erected itself into triangles, angles, and parallelograms all over my head.” Trivial little details, yes – but added together, they give a vivid picture of what school was like in those days.

Perhaps the stories on this site will help future researchers get a similar picture of our own era. Or they may help inform young women who are considering whether to attend a girls’ school. They may help dispel some of the lingering stereotypes about a girls’ school education.

They can also help us make sense of our own personal experiences growing up. “Huh – I went through that exact same thing!” Or, “Hmm, I never thought of it that way.” My hope is for these stories to build on each other, as a kind of electronic coffee klatsch about what attending a girls’school meant for our lives. Like an intimate talk with a lifelong friend who knows us both now and “way back when,” these stories can help us understand how attending a girls’ school shaped the women we became.

 –Ilana DeBare