Novelist
Anne Bernays '52 Remembers Millicent McIntosh
in The Chronicle of Higher Education
Millicent McIntosh
Photo courtesy of the Barnard College Archives |
Anne Bernays
Photo credit: Jim Kalett
|
Novelist
Anne Bernays, a graduate of Barnard's class of
1952, wrote the following piece for the Feb. 9
issue of The Chronicle Review, a section of The
Chronicle of Higher Education. It is reproduced
with the permission of the author and the Chronicle
of Higher Education.
Remembering
Mrs. McIntosh
By ANNE BERNAYS
Years
ago, Reader's Digest ran a regular feature
written -- or so you were led to believe -- by
an ardent reader. It was called something like
"the most unforgettable character I've ever met."
It read like a eulogy to someone in that reader's
life, not necessarily dead yet, who had made an
indelible impression. That sort of frontal tribute
has largely gone out of fashion, except at funerals
and memorial services. Accustomed to ambiguity,
nuance, and skepticism, we're uncomfortable in
the presence of pure admiration. Consider this
piece retro.
Millicent
McIntosh died on January 3 in Tyringham, Mass.,
102 years after she was born. For those who have
never heard of her, a brief summary of her accomplishments
should be enough to tweak curiosity about this
amazing woman. McIntosh was born to Quaker parents
in Baltimore. Her mother was a suffragist and
an advocate for prison reform; her aunt and principal
model, M. Carey Thomas, was president of Bryn
Mawr, the college from which McIntosh was graduated.
After
graduate work at Columbia University, she went
on to become dean of Bryn Mawr. Sounds like a
touch of nepotism but, as her subsequent occupations
-- first as head of the Brearley School, later
as president of Barnard College -- demonstrate,
she had more than enough virtues, in personal
style and educational brilliance, to carry her
as far as it was possible, back then, for a woman
to go.
I
knew Millicent McIntosh from 1938, the year I
began my education at Brearley, until 1952, the
year I was graduated from Barnard. At Brearley,
one of the first to offer an education equal in
rigor to that of the best boys' schools, you learned
to read in the first grade, knew your complete
multiplication tables by the end of the third
grade, took biology, chemistry, Latin (and for
a select few, Greek and physics), learned the
Dewey decimal system of library classification
by heart. By the 11th grade you were expected
to write a thoroughly researched and footnoted
paper of some length. Mine was on medieval monks
and monasteries, and I misspelled monasteries
throughout the paper. The teacher took my grade
down a notch.
Homework:
at least two hours a night. Heavy reading over
the summer, which you had to prove you had done
by writing about it. Much memorizing: great chunks
of Shakespeare that you had to prove you knew
by heart by getting up in front of the class and
reciting. All this brain activity was overseen
by Millicent McIntosh, or Mrs. Mac, as she was
referred to by everyone, including teachers. If
it weren't for McIntosh I wouldn't have discovered
discipline, let alone have it work for me nor
derive pleasure from hard work. Solely because
of her I became the opposite of at loose ends.
Twice
a week, members of Brearley's middle and upper
schools trooped down to the assembly hall where
announcements were made, Episcopal hymns sung,
and McIntosh, wearing an academic robe, delivered
what I can only call a secular sermon. She did
this without notes or written text. For nine years
I welcomed her assembly talks, each one different
from all the others, as if they were transfusions
of blood and I was wounded. In a sense I was.
Late to read (I was 8) and write, left-handed
and left-eyed, I had a very hard time learning
anything. My parents were so solicitous that I
had begun to feel there was something wrong with
my brain. McIntosh talked about qualities of mind
and spirit -- loyalty, hard work, devotion to
principles, curiosity, sportsmanship, triumph
over adversity, optimism, and so on -- as if she
had just invented them. Her language was fresh
and clear, her imagery simple, her voice resonant,
her persuasiveness -- at least for me -- perfect.
McIntosh
was the mother of five children, including one
set of twins. We knew they played a large role
in her life even though we never laid eyes on
them, nor on her husband, a pediatrician on the
faculty of Columbia's medical school. She kept
the family entirely separated from her heavy-duty
role as headmistress of the country's preeminent
girls' private school. According to her obituary
in The New York Times, the McIntoshes were
rich enough to employ a governess, a cook, and
two others so that McIntosh could devote her workday
life to the school. This money was the oil that
lubricated her gears, and there's no use speculating
what sort of life she would have had if she'd
been born poor.
Even with the financial means, it must have been
difficult for her to maintain this balancing act.
She never once mentioned it in front of the girls;
she was an extreme example of show, don't tell.
No lessons in feminism -- a word rarely spoken
-- no anxiety-ridden seminars about family or
career, no handwringing over where, exactly, is
a woman's place. She simply chose her work and
her family life and lived them both as if their
melding was the most natural thing in the world.
Some years ago I met one of her daughters-in-law
and asked her what kind of mother McIntosh had
been. Her answer was "wonderful."
The
McIntosh approach to constructing an educated
young woman out of an unformed little girl came
seemingly from everywhere. During the war, for
instance, she insisted that we learn male household
tasks and repairs, since most good men were away
fighting the Axis, and if we needed things done
we had better know how to do them for ourselves.
So we mastered, among other things, the art of
wiring an electric plug, something I've never
forgotten (as I have every theorem I ever memorized
for geometry, except one about isosceles triangles).
At
the same time, we were taught hemstitching and
the rudiments of domestic arts. Before her time,
she believed that girls should find out about
sex through education rather than via whispering,
and she taught sixth-graders the basics herself,
although the basics in those years were more polite
than enlightening; the word for having sex was
the verb "to mate."
In
1946, the year after the war ended, a rabbi named
Joshua L. Liebman published Peace of Mind, an
immediate bestseller. Liebman's principal message
was that science was only one narrow road to the
good life. McIntosh was much taken with this book,
a work that drew equally from religion and science.
So she gave a seminar on it to the upper school,
dividing us into small groups that gathered once
a week in her small corner office overlooking
the East River and where, sitting on the floor,
we discussed the rabbi's book as closely as one
of our teachers would have made us analyze a sonnet.
It was clear from the way she listened to us that
she wanted to hear what we had to say. But even
in this intimate setting McIntosh maintained a
kind of reserve, as if not trusting herself to
get too close. My mother found this reserve off-putting,
claiming McIntosh was cold and snobbish. I saw
something different. I saw a woman of great warmth
and generosity who felt education to be a sacred
mission, one that you didn't muddy with irrelevancies.
My view of her was validated when, years and years
later, I ran into her at the graduation of one
of her 10 grandchildren from Harvard and, greeting
her with customary deference, found myself grabbed
around the neck and fervently kissed.
Was
this woman the original real-life Wonder Woman?
She certainly wasn't beautiful, with dullish hair
and undistinguished, rather broad features. And
there were a few little things wrong with Brearley.
It had, for example, a tiny Jewish quota no one
talked about and that encouraged an incipient
anti-Semitism among both faculty members and students.
There were no black or Asian students, and the
few scholarship girls it accepted were made to
feel vaguely unwelcome. Policies could be stupidly
rigid. For example, one of my classmates was a
dancer with a professional ballet company. When
she asked to be let off Brearley's gym requirement,
McIntosh said no. The girl left school.
McIntosh
was certainly the most remarkable -- not character
but flesh-and-blood -- woman I have ever met,
and I'm surprised no one has written her biography.
Like a book that trims your sails if you're lucky
enough to read it at the exact right moment, McIntosh
did for me what my parents, worried that I was
not quite up to snuff, could not. She gave me
-- and I'm sure, countless others -- the courage
to use my head.
Anne
Bernays is a novelist. She and her husband,
Justin Kaplan, are the authors of Back Then:
A Double Memoir of New York in the 1950s, forthcoming
from HarperCollins Publishers.
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