Admissions Magazine

THE ADMISSIONS MAGAZINE OF EMMA WILLARD SCHOOL SPRING 2014

CONTRIBUTORS

Erin Schaff ’07

(page 24) If I could go back to any time during the past 200 years I would…Most recently, I’ve been fixated on Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds radio broadcast. I would love to go back to 1938 and get a deeper understanding of Welles and the mood of the country at that time.

In 200 years, I hope the world will be more culturally tolerant and accepting.

If I could change one thing about my personal history…I wouldn’t. We’re made up of all of our experiences, the good, the bad, and the embarrassing (often in my case), and I love where I’m at now.

Robyn Pforr Ryan P’14

(page 16) If I could go back to any time during the past 200 years I would revisit the 19th century, a period in which people put such time and care into nurturing their relationships through letters.

In 200 years, I hope the world will be one with strong communities, despite the racing pace of technology advancements and ever-changing nature of our society.

If I could change one thing about my personal history I wish I could have attended and graduated from an enriching and empowering high school like Emma Willard. I can only imagine how having such a foundation would have impacted my life’s choices.

S p r i n g 2 01 4

THE ADMISSIONS MAGAZINE OF EMMA WILLARD SCHOOL

Gabrielle DeMarco

Director of Communications gdemarco@emmawillard.org Kelly F. Cartwright

Director of Alumnae Relations kcartwright@emmawillard.org Jill Smith

Class Notes Coordinator jsmith@emmawillard.org

Ying Cao ’15 regularly surprises the Emma community with her exceptional reproductions of artist’s masterworks on the popular 2e-café whiteboards. With simple whiteboard markers, she has recreated works by Monet, Picasso, and Van Gogh.

Lilly Pereira

Designer www.lillypereira.com Trudy E. Hall

Head of School Please forward address changes to: Emma Willard School 285 Pawling Avenue Troy, NY 12180 518.833.1787 alumnae@emmawillard.org or www.emmawillard.org/alumnae Signature, the magazine of Emma Willard School, is published by the Communications Office two times each year for alumnae, parents, grandparents, and friends of Emma Willard School. The mission of this magazine is to capture the school’s values and culture through accurate and objective stories about members of the Emma community, past and present, as they put Emma Willard’s signature on the world.

ON TH E COV ER This signature is brought to you by our featured student artist, Ying Cao ’15.

In the photograph, Laura Hendrickson ’07 and Fae Jencks ’06 stand tall at the Lincoln Memorial. Photo

by Erin Schaff ’07.

Printed on 100% recycled paper manufactured entirely with nonpolluting, wind-generated energy.

F E AT U R E S

16 Our Shared History

A walk through the 200 years of history held within the Emma Willard School Archives.

24 Young D.C.

Laura Hendrickson ’07 and Fae Jencks ’06 bring youth, confidence, and Emma Willard School to the hallowed halls of power in Washington, D.C., through their work in the US Capitol and the White House.

32 A Clear View of Our Future: Progress on the 2020 Vision

A progress update on Emma Willard School’s bold plan to prepare for its third century in education.

D E PA R T M E N T S

02 From the Triangle

14 The Classroom

Three Bicentennial “Emmaginings,” the evolution of the magazine, the bowling alley is back, Revels, updates from social media, and four students head to college for D1 athletics.

A new writing course, Girls Write Here, exposes girls to writing and publishing in an entirely new way.

12 Faculty Voices Q&A with history teacher Bob Naeher.

37 Signing Off Head of School Trudy Hall discusses why embracing branding has deep implications for the future of education and Emma Willard School.

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PHOTOS BY MA RK VA N WORMER

From th" Triangl"

Revels

As any past or present Emma Girl knows, with December comes Revels!

This year Kiggins Hall came alive with the 99th production of Emma’s most beloved tradition. Along with the lords, ladies, mischievous jesters, and other traditional regulars came the Grinch, Bilbo Baggins and Gollum from the Lord of the Rings, and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with baby George. The Falconer stopped by the celebration with news from the fox—apparently he does know what they say!

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FROM THE TR IA NGLE

The Evolution of the Magazine

From its first cover to today, the magazine remains the source for Emma news.

The publication you hold in your hands or perhaps are scrolling through on the web looks vastly different from its first printing 71 years ago when it was started in large part to share news with concerned alumnae on how the school was fairing through World War II. Steadfast principal, Anne Wellington, noted in her opening letter to the very first Bulletin of Emma Willard School, “Emma Willard School has carried on its program for the education of young women through other wars.”

The school has also carried on through many iterations of its magazine, shifting and recalibrating the publication for changing times and graduates. What started off as a simple way to detail student war work and list alumnae college destinations quickly became a way for alumnae to stay in touch with each other with the addition of alumnae news in 1946.

By the 1950s, with the war over, the simple pleasures of being a teenage girl at Emma were more prominent with photos of receiving lines at proms and details of dances with Darrow boys.

In the 1960s, alumnae and faculty writing grew in prominence and campus news still reigned with Revels and May Day Queens throughout.

But, a shift in the landscape was occuring through the decade. A report details the shift in college destinations with steady increases in coeducational college and university enrollment. Principle William Dietel, noted he was seeing in the “teen-agers” around him a desire to expand their minds and lives outside the

school. Increasingly frequent articles on social justice and diversity heralded the change.

By the 1970s, a decidedly less formal publication emerged with playful type styles, pops of color, illustrations, lighter articles such as the “Diary of a Mad Housemother,” and some of the first new magazine names. Experimentation was the name of the game.

First, the magazine became simply Emma Willard School and later EWS. Alumnae news also started growing in length as the conversations deepened between alumnae of all generations.

The ’80s provided the first peeks of color photography, but there wouldn’t be a full-color publication for more than 20 years. The ’80s also marked a return to a more formal publication and yet another name change to Emma Willard Bulletin in 1983. That more formalized look and feel continued well into the 1990s until the magazine changed its name to Emma. Along with that name change came a shift in the design, giving the publication a look and feel similar to newsstand publications. This trend continued after the turn of the century, as full-length features began to take over, full-color printings arrived, and graphic design played an increasing role. 2008 marked another major shift and another new masthead, changing the name of the publication to the lowercase emma.

This was accompanied by a shift in content with a focus on broader women’s issues and in-depth personal features.

Fall 2013 marked the first issue of Signature and a return to the community-focused content traditionally held within the magazine—it was the most recent and certainly not the last step in the evolution of a storied publication.

COV E R S T H RO UGH TH E YE ARS 1964

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New Life for the Bowling Alley Hear that? It is the once familiar crack of ball against pin coming from below the Alumnae Chapel at Emma. After more than 30 years, the bowling alley has been reopened and Emma Girls can again be found rolling strikes and making spares Friday nights.

Chief Administrative Officer Peter McCorkle along with several student volunteers led the charge to give new life to the famed bowling alley. Together, they cleaned out the space, which had become a repository for old furnishings and decades of dust. They also repainted the walls, waxed the lanes, refurbished the antique pinsetters, and repaired the nifty gravity-driven ball return.

“Alums of a certain age always share their good memories of the bowling alley with me,” Pete said. “For this reason alone, we are excited that it is back. As it stands today, it isn’t perfect, but it is fun. I hope that we have brought it back to being a space that our present students and returning alums can make new memories in.”

Next semester he plans to have several Emma clubs host Friday Bowling Nights, sell hot chocolate and snacks to raise money for their individual clubs, and bring a true bowling alley feel to the space.

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B I CE N TENN IA L EV E N TS UP DATE

Maker Faire

Inspired by Madame Willard’s commitment to the public examination of knowledge, hosting a Maker Faire at Emma Willard School felt like a natural fit for the school’s second Bicentennial Emmagining. On a warm, bright October 12, the campus was alive with activity as the school community and more than 1,500 guests explored the Capital Region’s first-ever Mini Maker Faire. Participants tested their soldering skills, created energy by peddling bikes, traveled through time in the Tech Valley Center of Gravity’s TARDIS, saw a student-produced documentary, and hula-hooped under fall’s changing leaves.

Attendees and students bounced between “Makers” to touch and experiment with the many hands-on exhibits, and filled up sessions on DIY duct tape wallet making, high-speed cameras, circuitry, and cupcake decorating. They also enjoyed baked goods, soup, and cider from Emma student groups while taking in the view atop Mount Ida.

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FROM THE TR IA NGLE

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B I C EN T EN N I AL EVE N TS UP DATE

The Great Education Debate Brisk January temperatures couldn’t stop educators from braving the cold to debate the future of education with the Emma Willard community for its third Bicentennial Emmagining.

A no-holds-barred keynote from Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, set the tone for the day—“If I offend anybody; it was intentional.”

MEMORA BL E QUOT ES

The Great Education Debate sessions challenged all participants—from panelists to curious audience members—to think differently and more expansively about education today. The resulting back-and-forth between the debaters offered up some memorable words on what a truly enriching education should provide students, and the role girls and boys play in the modern classroom.

IN ADDITION TO PROBLEM SOLVING, WHAT OTHER CORE SKILLS DOES THIS GENERATION NEED?

“Not skills, but values….They need accountability for their own actions and an element of self-determination to progress upward.”

—Heather Briccetti, President and CEO of The Business Council

“Einstein had curiosity throughout his life….

The challenge of the current educational system is tapping into that curiosity.”

—Mubuso Zamchiya, CEO of Albany Charter School Network

DO GIRLS STILL NEED SINGLE-SEX SCHOOLS?

The day included sessions across the campus on topics exploring whether students are being prepared for the world of work, if single-sex education is relevant today, the role of Advanced Placement, and how to incorporate the Internet and it’s capabilities into the classroom. The day concluded with remarks from Lynn Pasquerella, president of Mount Holyoke College, who celebrated the gains women have made in the US, while highlighting the need to continue fighting to improve womankind worldwide.

“If you are confident then you will be able to voice your opinion [in a public school]. The boys help to introduce new ideas. The boys in my school are more likely to bring up political views than the girls. They definitely bring up more interesting conversations.”

—Olivia, public high school student

“When you think of a class president at a coed school, it would typically be a guy.

Emma allows you to try out something you might not otherwise.”

—Emily, Emma Girl

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—Shabana Basij-Rasikh, Head of School of Leadership, Afghanistan

EmmaTalks EmmaTalks, inspired by the popular TED series, brought together six diverse women to share their stories on how to cultivate meaningful and sustainable change in the world.

On February 21, Emma Willard School and several hundred guests filled the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to hear their stories during our fourth Bicentennial Emmagining. Through the tales of these successful businesswomen, environmentalists, education advocates, feminists, and scientists, the audience heard how women can use their particular passions to change the world around them for the better, from the rich biodiversity of the rainforest canopy to the Afghan desert.

At the end of an inspiring day, students and faculty returned to campus to think through a case study on female entrepreneurship. The exercise enabled the girls to apply their new knowledge and think critically about how female entrepreneurs worldwide can access capital, acquire mentors, and receive entrepreneurial education.

See more about all Bicentennial events at www.emmawillard.org/bicentennial.

The “Twitter-sphere” ignited during EmmaTalks as students took to Twitter to share their reactions to the day’s inspirational speakers:

FROM THE TR IA NGLE

When faced with a challenge, I’ve learned it’s best to: a) deal with the challenge with an open mind and confidence in your ability to overcome it b) consult mentors or friends you trust, especially those who have proven to be able to make bold decisions.

I’ve never felt more humbled, hopeful, or inspired. Thank you @emmawillard

Saturday is national Feminist Pride Day, and what are Emma Girls doing? Listening to amazing feminists! #whatafeministlookslike #EmmaTalks

The idea that we need to use our education for others is inspiring and humbling. Thank you so much #EmmaTalks

#EmmaTalks made me want to travel internationally even more than I already did

“The one thing that can never be taken away from you is your education.” @sbasijrasikh Thank you #EmmaTalks and @emmawillard for my education!

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O N TH E F I EL D

Emma’s D1-Destined Athletes

BY KATIE COAKLEY

For the first time in the school’s 200-year history, four Emma Willard School seniors have been recruited to play Division I sports in college.

“Each of these girls has demonstrated enormous commitment and passion for their sports during their time at Emma, and we couldn’t be more proud of them as they head into the next phase of their lives,” said Director of Wellness and Athletics Shelley Maher.

For Claire Schmitz, committing to play tennis for Marist College in the fall comes after an exemplary senior season, which concluded with her winning the Section II singles title and being named the girls’ tennis Player of the Year by the Albany Times Union.

“Not only was it an individual accomplishment, but with the whole team there and proud of us, it was such a good moment,” she recalled.

As she prepares to begin anew at Marist, Claire is grateful for lessons learned at Emma, including the skills gained by taking on a leadership position her senior year as one of the team’s few upperclasswomen.

Alexandra “Xani” Shultis is also getting ready to jump right into athletics with “fall ball” lacrosse at

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Virginia Tech in August. This threesport athlete made a name for herself at Emma in track and field and field hockey, before emerging as a prominent player on the lacrosse field.

Xani strongly values teamwork on and off the field as it stresses fairness and builds confidence, she said. In her junior year, she modeled these values by helping her teammates build up their skills.

“I would assist people no matter what…it’s competitive at Emma, but we don’t let the competitiveness of the game interfere with other people.”

This sentiment was echoed by Xani’s Harvard-bound lacrosse teammate Olivia “Liv” Gundrum who noted how the close bonds that form on small teams showed her the value of being a team player.

As the girls prepare to end their senior seasons on the field, Liv recalls standout moments from her own Emma lacrosse career, including making it to the Section C championships last year. Not only was it her first time making it to the final

round, it also marked her last time playing with her sister, Francesca Gundrum ’13, who now attends Dartmouth. She is looking forward to playing with her sister once again next year—except this time, they will be on opposing teams!

In addition to getting acclimated with a new team, Liv is ready to explore the many opportunities Harvard has to offer.

“I am really excited to discover more about myself and figure out what I want to do with my life,” she said.

Aleksandra Torkelson is also looking forward to what college life holds for her as she embarks on her final season with Emma’s crew team and prepares to bring her talents to the University of Connecticut.

When deciding on schools, Aleks was strongly committed to finding a place with a focus on academics first.

A visit to UConn left her in love with the campus and the spirit of the school, and excited from her meeting with the rowing coach.

“I wanted to find a team that I could not only make a difference for, but one that can really push me to keep improving,” she said of her decision.

The dedication and athletic excellence exhibited by these four athletes is inspiring not just for other Emma Girls, but also to the coaches, teachers, and advisors who saw them grow and excel at Emma.

“We live in an age where the notion of the student-athlete is, in many cases, a myth, but these students reassure us that the ideal lives on here,” said Kent Jones director of college counseling at Emma. “By their example, they have raised the bar for those who will follow them, and they have become part of the new face of Emma Willard athletics.”

Top Feminist Empowerment Sites for Teenage Girls emmawillard.org/admissionsblog

FROM THE TR IA NGLE

SO C I A L ME D IA

ROOKIE rookiemag.com The FBomb thefbomb.org Miss Representation missrepresentation.org/blog The SPARK Movement sparksummit.com Ultraviolet weareultraviolet.org Feministing feministing.com Fem2pt0 fem2pt0.com The F-Word Blog thefword.org.uk/blog l i ke s

facebook.com/ emmawillardschool Mother Nature must’ve known that our December traditions are beginning this week and wanted us to have some snow!

@emmawillard @emmawillard #NotOK: magazine editors are photoshopping models to downplay their extreme thinness. http://huff.to/1lBtRK2 #BADvertising #bodyimage @emmawillard Women committed to bettering the world are changing corporate culture from the inside out. http://onforb.es/ NKiF1o #womeninbusiness #progress Samantha Scruggs, RD @Nutri2Fruition The reason I am who I am (or at least part of it) is because of @emmawillard. #emmagirl for life. (check it out if you have a girl)

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Faculty Voice!

INTERV IEW BY GABRIELLE DEMARCO

Robert Naeher

And the Rest is History For nearly 16 years, Newell Chair of Humanities and Head of History and Social Science Robert Naeher, Ph.D., has cheered on Emma Girls from across the classroom and the sidelines. His tall, lanky build and warm smile are fixtures of the Emma Willard experience.

He is at times an exceptional softy (even thinking about his current students graduating makes him misty); other times wildly unexpected (he had to turn down a well-worn Grateful Dead concert CD before we began); and at others, a diehard history buff (his thoughts on the moral citizen and noncooperation with the government are straight out of a doctoral thesis).

While we don’t yet have a “master teacher” title, Bob is, unarguably, a master. See for yourself….

Let us start with the real basics.

How did you decide on history?

I started as a religion major because I really didn’t have clear thoughts as to what I wanted to do. I had no interest whatsoever in history.

I thought it was kind of irrelevant because it was over. Then in my junior year, I went to France.

I ended up falling absolutely in love with being there. Part of what I fell in love with was that there were old stones everywhere.

There were cathedrals. There were monasteries. There were megaliths and other prehistoric structures.

I remember the first time seeing an illuminated cathedral. I grew up on Long Island where our architecture was McDonald’s or

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the L.I.E. I remember sitting on that French curb and being just transfixed. So I came back as a history major.

You have met so many Emma Girls (one is even your daughter!).

If you had to describe an Emma Girl, what would you say? They get that learning matters and that this is a place where they can really jump in. I was leading a Mongolia trip last summer and the girls were all reading on the train and they were all reading things like Dostoyevsky.

Right!? They are reading Crime and Punishment. They are reading The Brothers Karamazov. They are reading these books because they didn’t have time to read them during the

year. And they were engaged and really talking about it with each other, with me.

They celebrate each others’ achievements as well as their own.

They are very competitive, but it isn’t a zero-sum game where they are competitive against others. It is a competitiveness within yourself.

They really push. And grades matter.

They come here because they want to do something special; they want to make a difference. And they will push themselves harder than one should to do those things. That is just normative for these kids.

One of the major criticisms of history is that it is very malecentric. Would you say you teach history in a different way because of the female perspective here?

Girls’ learning style is perfectly meshed for history because what we want historians to do is understand where people were coming from.

History is understanding the past from the perspective of the past and

FACU LTY VOI CE S

women and girls are just smarter at getting that you need to think about where others are coming from. Jefferson gave us aspirational statements as a nation that we are still looking to fulfill. The fact that he failed personally—that matters— but are there still things he gave us that we can use?

We do strive to have the women’s perspective as central to what we do. At each point through the year in A.P. US History, we bring in primary sources written by women. We make sure to talk about Margaret Fuller when we talk about Transcendentalism, and the letters of Abigail Adams when we look at the American Revolution.

What would your students be surprised to know about you?

I think they would be surprised to know how much I care. (Laughs.)

If they do well: I am ecstatic. And if they struggle…(Pauses.)

I don’t want to say it is “A” work if it is not. I can see where they can get to and when they are not there I don’t feel I can say, “That is really awesome!”

I suspect they don’t understand how much I really care about their growth. And I don’t think that is just me. I think that is the same for all teachers here.

There have been times that I have come home from graduation and just cried. It is just so emotional. Is it because they are going?

Who knows what it is about. I care about them. I think they would be surprised. How invested.

That is beautiful. Do you have some favorite classroom moments?

Those stories you love to share….

I am having this sort of out-of-body experience….sort of scenes going by. (He makes a swooshing sound and trails his arms across his face like he is scouting a landscape).

Every year we take students to Old Sturbridge Village to do an interactive day where they are interviewing townspeople and asking them to sign an anti-slavery petition, and so the girls have to engage with them. And that day, this group of kids at lunchtime says, “Dr. Naeher! Dr. Naeher! This one guy!

He won’t sign; no matter what we say! We need more reasons!”

So we talked about ideas. Later in the day: “He still won’t sign!”

And then, at the end of the day, they came rushing up, “He signed!

He signed!” True excitement. And I asked, “What did you say?”

“We started talking about Lafayette and Emma Willard!”

And I thought, these are juniors.

These are high school kids! They could roll their eyes at this whole project, this whole day. Yet they are wise enough and kid-like enough

to get it: that by making that one choice—let’s enter into this—that all sorts of fun and valuable things could come out of it. And they were in and they were in for the whole day. And that is a cool moment.

Emma Willard is a historic place.

We are celebrating 200 years, after all. Did this history draw you to the school? I have always felt like I was the luckiest person in the world and more than the cherry on top is the fact that we are in this place! I mean just last week, I stepped out of class and picked up off the hallway wall a reproduction of a letter from Jefferson to Emma Willard!

She is corresponding with all these people. She is a major presence at a key point in our history and then the school has intersected with our history so amazingly from that point forward. And we have an archive to support that that I can just bring our kids down to.

It is amazing. So much is rooted in these local and school records.

I don’t think there is a school in the country that has the rich context for studying US history that we do. It is a history laboratory.

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Th! Classroom

BY GA BRIELLE DEMARCO

By Girls, For Girls

Girls Write Here “I recall very well what is was to be a teenaged girl and write and just be in love with writing, but not really know what to do with it once it was on the page,” English Instructor Frances O’Connor said. “One can share stories with their mother, but what after that?”

A younger Frances had a piece of poetry published after winning a contest as a teenager. She cites this as a proud moment, but not a learning experience.

“I also see our very talented writers here at Emma win these types of competitions. But those wins don’t come with any appropriate critique, no exposure to the editing process, and so it becomes a one-off experience.”

She set out to find a writing and editing platform that would give the Emma students in her writing classes the richer and more professional publishing opportunities she felt they sorely needed to stretch their already outstanding abilities.

The problem: nothing was out there.

So she built it.

Girls Write Here was launched in the fall semester of 2013. The course is seemingly like other writing courses at Emma: it holds students to the highest standards and requires them to stretch their writing prowess.

And yet Girls Write Here is like nothing ever taught at Emma Willard School, or anywhere else for that matter. The course is centered around a website that is dedicated to the creation, editing, and publishing of writing for girls. During the course, students write, edit, design layout, and publish all writing on GirlsWriteHere.com for a global audience of readers.

During a class, Frances scans through several websites in quick succession. The large smartboard behind her mirrors the image on

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her laptop. The dozen girls in the class watch as she rapidly scrolls through headlines on the screen.

Frances is teaching them the basics of writing a catchy headline. She shows them several examples from various highand low-brow media, pushing them to consider the merits of puns over descriptive headlines. She then moves the discussion to their most recent writing submissions and asks them to discuss headlines for the website. Their assignment is to approve or improve a headline. And then Frances does something nearly imperceptible, but so vital to the creative process of the course—she stands back.

Together, with only gentle nudges, the students discuss the pros and cons of strong words like “feminazi,” and how humor can play a role in grabbing readers’ attention. In the end, the girls vote on a new headline. They update the website and conclude yet another successful editorial board meeting.

Each class is either a workshop, where girls labor over their own personal writing or edit another student’s piece; a lecture, where they learn the basics of writing

TH E CLASS RO O M

well; an editorial board meeting; or sometimes a combination of all of the above.

“These publishing processes are things I didn’t get to experience until I was out of college and a professional writer in my first editorial board meeting,” Frances said.

A class begins with a check for submissions to the website from classmates not enrolled in the course as well as from students outside the school. Any teenaged girl seeking to write with the Emma Girls can submit their writing to the website. Submissions have come from Dallas, California, Virginia, India, Denmark, and Armenia. They are then distributed to members of the class, and each girl will play several roles including writer, editor, and web designer. Some of the girls have also taken on roles as graphic designers, illustrators, and stock photographers to complement the writing with art.

Frances keeps tabs on the editing process in real time through a shared Google document.

“We work hard to model the appropriate language of criticism as we edit,” she said. “But we also don’t write ‘maybe’ everywhere.

We critique with purpose.”

Critiquing a fellow student’s writing didn’t come easily at first,

she explained. Nervous giggles abounded. Putting themselves out there in public space and then taking the resulting criticism was even harder.

“We talk so much about girls finding their voices, but what does that mean in actual practice?”

Frances asked. “They have to grow and we have to give them a place to use that voice in a safe, real-life way, and then be critiqued. Without critique, they won’t grow or at least not until a university or professional writing situation where a critique might seem foreign to their ears.”

That builds confidence for the writers, as each final piece doesn’t go into their mothers’ email inbox or even a stack of papers for Frances to grade. Instead, it immediately goes public.

“Writing to the site requires the writer to take a certain amount of risk because she is putting her work out there, part of her identity,” Frances said.

And they have blossomed along with the website, which is now filled with their fan fiction, memoirs, and flash fiction. What was begun as a writing experience for Emma Girls has now grown into a publishing platform for girls anywhere.

“This can be a place that allows another girl halfway around the

world to become a better writer,” said Meg McClellan, Margaret Wing Dodge Chair in Literature and English department chair.

“And unlike other opportunities where you just dump stuff, here you get feedback and you get better and better, and our students are right in the center of that global, literary interaction.”

And Frances has even bigger plans for both the course and the website.

“I hope it will one day act as a small printing press for girls’ writing,” she said. “I would like to produce anthologies of writing by girls, for girls and to teach our student editors how to continue conversations with girls everywhere via Skype or Google Hangout.”

Even more critically, Frances hopes it helps each of her girls to stand up for the unique perspectives they, as teenaged girls, can bring to the discussion.

“I am always hearing myself telling girls to hold fast to their thinking as girls, and as intellectuals. There is a whole world out there in which different narratives run very counter to the experience of being a young, thinking, feeling woman in the world who is sensitive, but also an artist. I think to talk back to those narratives and cultural expectations when they leave the classroom is critical.

“So writing can become that tool that we use to find self and then to hold on to that self permanently.”

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#

Our Shared History On a Tuesday morning in the spring of 1861, Troy Female Seminary student Isabel McKennan wrote to a friend back home about the world gone turbulent. Her letter is dated April 23, 1861. The previous days had brought the first shots of the Civil War with the bombing of Fort Sumter and its eventual surrender to Confederate troops.

She wrote in elegant cursive in the whisp-thin letters of a steel nib pen dipped in ink,

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“When I left home last September how little I thought so many changes would take place before I returned, that I was bidding many of my friends bye for the last time. For surely we cannot expect them all to return from such as bloody war (as everyone predicts this is going to be) alive.â€? Ť

Ť

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Ť Ť Ť Ť Ť ĖŤ Ť Ť Ť

#

From her window, McKennan watched new troops— “some of them are so young”—gather to leave for war.

A band played a farewell tune. Adding to her letter the next evening, she described how 20 Troy Female Seminary students and teachers started making lint for the wounds of soldiers, using linen sheets torn into strips by the school nurse.

“We were very happy for we felt as if we were doing some good.I would like to write you more but the bell has rung and I must stop….Your most loving friend, Bell.”

McKennan’s letter is one of thousands of documents, photographs, and objects illuminating the history of Emma Willard School (formerly Troy Female Seminary) and its students that have been preserved in the school’s 200-year-old archives. Emma Willard School Archivist Nancy Iannucci once called the archives, housed in three unassuming rooms in the basement of Dietel Library & Gallery, the “chamber of secrets.”

The Emma Willard School Archives include early 19th- and 20th-century student letters and diaries, scrapbooks, catalogs (the 1831–1832 Catalogue proscribes a dress code of “calico, gingham, or ‘crape,’ made in plain style”), yearbooks, Emma Hart Willard’s correspondence, old uniforms, dresses, photographs, and blueprints detailing the evolution of the Mount Ida campus. A 1919 student scrapbook includes programs from dances, napkins, and a small dance card noting the names of the gentlemen she danced with, at what time, and which dance. Perhaps the most unexpected item is a broken bottle of champagne, wrapped in a red, white, and blue ribbon in a wooden box, from the 1943 christening of the S.S. Emma Willard, a World War II vessel.

“It’s absolutely incredible we have this,” said Emagin Tanaschuk ’14, who is creating an independent project on how the Emma Girl has evolved over 200 years based on archival material in a new, year-long independent study program for seniors called Signature.

“It changes the whole Emma experience,” she said. “You already feel special because you are getting this education, but now I feel like it’s much more important because it’s been going on for so long. You hear about the traditions, but to actually see it, you feel it. I'm touching something a girl my age touched over a 100 years ago.”

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The archives are gathering no dust from infrequent use. Rather, instructors, like Iannucci, frequently use student letters and other documents in their history classes to help bring American history to life.

“It personalizes it for the girls,” Iannucci said. “They see a national event affecting their school and students like themselves and see how they went about dealing with it.”

Beyond the students, archival material has been used by many scholars and writers, including bestselling author David McCullough, filmmaker Ken Burns, and graduate students conducting doctoral research on women’s education.

“The value of an archive such as you have [at Emma Willard School] is immeasurable, there is no way to

measure its worth,” McCullough said, who wrote about Emma Hart Willard’s 1830 trip to Paris in his best-selling book, The Greater Journey. “It’s one of a kind. It represents not just one of the outstanding people in our history, but an institution that has been part of our history for 200 years.

“I was delighted when I learned there was an archives,” he said.

“Emma Willard was the first American woman to seriously champion education for women and to do so very effectively, both in what she said and what she wrote and published. And the way she lived out her life, she devoted her life to it. She’s a truly heroic American who left her mark in no uncertain terms.”

And, thanks to Iannucci’s enthusiasm, the halls of Slocum are lined with blown-up photos of archival material in honor of the Bicentennial this year. In one, a student in the 1940s writes home about being allowed to wear ankle socks for the first time without silk stockings, “[w]ill wonders never cease!,” and dancing with the boys from Deerfield. One afternoon, Newell Chair of Humanities and Head of History and Social Science at Emma Robert Naeher, Ph.D. strode out of his A.P. US History classroom, returning excitedly with the blow-up of President Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Emma Willard from the hall to show his students. Jefferson wrote, “The subject [female education] is of great importance and of lamentable

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deficiency in this country….[I am] happy to see it brought before the public so ably and eloquently by Miss Willard.”

In the archives, dozens of labeled, acid-free boxes fill closely spaced metal shelves. The sound you hear is the soft blowing of the air conditioner, maintaining ideal preservation conditions. Despite the modern sights and sounds, once you open a box, voices from the past lift off the pages. The many, distinct voices of students are filled with energy and excitement at discovering new friends and strengths, anxiety and fatigue over the heavy academic load, homesickness, and the highs and lows of navigating young womanhood.

In a December 11, 1856, diary entry, a student exudes excitement at her “Sweet Sixteen,” “This noon, I received an elegant present from darling Johnnie, of two gold bracelets! Lizzie also got me a bottle of perfumery!”

In 1825, a student writes about a visitor arriving by canal boat, the first one that had gone clear through the Erie Canal.

Another: a 19th-century student laments the morning routine of being woken by a bell at 4:30, then walking in formation in town. The Troy boys would sometimes taunt them, “Shoo, sheep!”

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In the 1940s, a student from Savannah struggles with homesickness exacerbated by culture shock, but, later, writes with pride and excitement at her initiation into art club, “It’s a great honor so I feel very proud,” news of dances at other schools, her Latin class field trip to see a matinee of Antigone in Manhattan, her war work, knitting socks on No. 2 needles, and the surprising discovery of her love of chemistry.

“I can’t even describe how excited I was that we were going to be really using the archives,” said Erin Hogan ’15, a student in Iannucci’s class. “The whole process of finding letters…It was really cool, reading what girls wrote 100-plus years ago.

There are so many similarities.”

In the final weeks of the fall semester, the archives were filled with students in Iannucci’s US History class consulting primary documents for their research papers, which must be based on at least four primary documents. Hogan wrote about slavery, and, like many before her, was surprised to learn of Emma Hart Willard’s position on slavery as detailed in her pamphlet Via Media and an 1861 letter to a “Dr. Washington” in which she distances herself from abolitionists.

“This letter is a gold mine.

Students are really surprised by her views,” said Iannucci. “It shows the students how the remnants of the American Revolution are still in the feeling of it. She is very statesrights…I tell them it’s generational thinking. Emma Willard originally refused to sign Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s petition. But, she produced a student like Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”

At a table in the archives reading room, Katie Archambault, director of research at Emma, talked with her students as part of their Signature projects. Senior Alyssa Maier said she wanted to focus on how the Emma Willard academic program evolved over the school’s 200 years.

“Have you looked at the classes Elizabeth Cady Stanton took?”

Archambault asked.

“We have that!?” Maier’s voice jumped an octave.

These are in fact the same records used in the research of the 1999 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) film, Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, produced by filmmakers Ken Burns and Paul Barnes.

The two looked at early photos of the school and archival records pertaining to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s education. One document lists Cady Stanton’s September 1831 course load as “criticism, arithmetic, chemistry, French, music.”

“The school’s archival collection is an absolute treasure for any historian interested in researching the early struggles to educate women in our country and in telling the stories of the many remarkable women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton who passed through the doors of Emma Willard School,” producers Burns and Barnes wrote.

The efforts of many are responsible for creating the school’s archives, which are unusually rich and deep for an independent school of Emma Willard School’s size. The first “archives” was a closet in Slocum.

“It’s a blessing the school kept this material,” said Barbara Wiley, head librarian at Emma for 36 years until her retirement from the school in 2012.

The 1890s marks the first time the school community began to consciously preserve its history, thanks to the efforts of 1847 alumna Olivia Slocum Sage, said Trudy Hanmer, associate head emerita and author of Wrought With Steadfast Will: A History of Emma Willard School. Sage, whose philanthropy is responsible for many of the buildings on campus, chaired a committee of alumnae who captured the biographies of the school’s students in the published Emma Willard and her pupils, or, Fifty years of Troy Female Seminary: 1822–1872.

“There is such a richness in all of this, to think about the lives of some of these women,” said Hanmer, who has her history students read and write about these alumna profiles. “I see our archives as critical to further scholarship and introducing the students to the legacy they are now a part of. The girls are not passive recipients of American history, they are part of a tradition that made American history.”

With the building of Dietel Library & Gallery in the late 1960s, the archives found its home.

Over the next several decades, the school managed the archives on a very part-time basis, for just 30 days a year. Several people, including retired archivist Marion Munzer, volunteered their time to tend to the documents.

In 2001, the archives began to blossom with the hiring of Nancy Iannucci, who devotes 40 percent of her time to the archives, the rest as a history instructor.

“Iannucci was heaven-sent,” said Wiley, who continues to volunteer in the archives.

Iannucci created a reading room for research, oversaw the digitization of thousands of archival photographs, and is now working on creating a virtual archive database of alumnae bulletins and student publications including The Clock, Triangle, and yearbooks.

“You hear about the traditions, but to actually see it, you feel it. You’re touching something a girl my age touched over a 100 years ago.”

The keystone of the archives are the Emma Hart Willard papers with some 1,000 of her correspondences, family papers, copies of the textbooks she authored, her published letters and journals, and copies of her published pieces and advocacy pamphlets. Each document in her collection was hard-won for the school.

In 1999, Wiley began working with Northern Illinois University Professor Lucy Townsend to gather as much of Willard’s correspondence as possible. Townsend had been considering writing an updated biography of Emma Hart Willard and was eager to help gather new primary sources. And there were many.

Willard worked exhaustively to promote her ideas for improving female education through frequent correspondence with influential people of her time, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, DeWitt Clinton, William Henry Seward, Amos Eaton, and the Marquis de Lafayette. As a

result of Willard’s proclivity for the pen, there were hundreds of documents spread around the country.

The story behind how the school’s impressive collection of her works was assembled reads like a script for an episode of the PBS series History Detectives. The story includes a Passat wagon, a bidding war with a graduate student, chance discoveries, and a gated room in the bowels of the Library of Congress.

Wiley and Townsend wrote to more than 2,000 institutions that housed the papers of Willard’s correspondents and eventually visited dozens of universities, historical collections, and made one memorable visit to the Library of Congress to read Willard’s Peace Petition.

During one archival mission, a trove of letters passed down to a Willard descendant was donated to Amherst College, which agreed to let Emma Willard School copy them. Rather than risking loss or damage to the documents via the postal service, Wiley put the

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priceless collection in the back of her Passat to deliver them safely to LexisNexis offices 400 miles away in Bethesda, Maryland, for micro-filming.

Another dozen letters joined the collection rather unexpectedly.

One summer day, a woman walked into the school library, explaining she had decided not to do the laundry that particular morning and, instead, went up into her attic.

Her dirty socks resulted in the discovery of 13 Willard letters in a dusty trunk. She asked if the school wanted them. The answer was an enthusiastic, yes!

The countless hours pursuing each new document have helped to put another lens on the life of the dynamic Emma Hart Willard.

When writer David McCullough was researching his book, The Greater Journey, on the many Americans who were greatly impacted by a 19th-century journey to Paris, he looked to Emma Hart Willard’s published letters and journals from her trip. McCullough quotes at length from Willard’s description of her first view of the cathedral in Rouen, France:

“She’s a marvelous writer,” McCullough said. “Let me point out that I cite other well-known writers of the time, including Charles Sumner, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and James Fenimore Cooper… but none of them compare to Emma Willard’s account. She was changed by the experience….She had a lot more courage because she was a woman and women weren’t supposed to do that sort of thing and very, very few did.”

Beyond Emma Hart Willard’s correspondence, the archivists have been able to compile a trove of primary sources from students across the generations. One rare treasure now housed in the archives is the Anna S. Kellogg Collection, a collection of 620 letters, 10 diaries, notebooks, and documents written while Kellogg was a student at Troy Female Seminary. The collection was originally sent under the name of Anna’s husband to a historical society. After its contents turned out to relate mostly to his wife, the school quickly bought the collection and Iannucci changed its name.

In the documents, Kellogg writes of her very first trip to the seminary

I had heard of fifty or a hundred years being spent in the erection of a building, and I had often wondered how it could be; but when I saw even the outside of this majestic and venerable temple, the doubt ceased…when I entered the interior, and saw by the yet dim and shadowy light, the long, long, aisles—the high raised vaults— the immense pillars which supported them… my mind was smitten with a feeling of sublimity almost too intense for mortality.

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from Utica, meeting Mrs. Willard, stressing over a major research paper (topic: the Ministry of Angels), eating nuts and oranges in a classmate’s room, cutting out a whale bone skirt, and of her confusing feelings for a young man, whom her mother did not feel befitting of her position from a prominent Utica family.

One student who has read the letters in depth is Victoria Albert ’17, who is helping transcribe the letters into type-written copies in an archives Practicum, the Emma Willard School internship program.

Kellogg’s sloping cursive can be hard to decipher and some of her letters are cross-hatched with sentences written at right angles over the body of the letters, a common 19th-century method to save on postage.

In one letter Albert worked on, dated April 12, 1866, Kellogg wrote, “My darling Sister, I am as sleepy as I can be, but I think I must write you a few lines, because I am in the habit of doing so on Sunday.”

“Oh, that’s every Emma Willard student now. We are all so tired,” said Albert in the week before her own exams. “I love the voice, that authentic way she has of talking. It’s tender, between family members.

It’s kind of a moment, meant to be between the two of them, that is trapped in time.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m part of the secret society,” she said, smiling, propped on one of the library’s fireside banquettes. “Sometimes I feel like I’m looking at the snow globe from the outside and other times it’s the complete opposite. I relate so much to her.”

Robyn Pforr Ryan is an awardwinning writer and journalist based outside Albany, New York. She has a deep love of history, and has spent many happy hours in the archives at Wellesley and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as well as the New York State Archives researching her first novel.

She is also parent to Emma Girl Chandler Ryan ’15.

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STORY BY GABRIELLE DEMARCO P H OTOS BY ERI N SC HA F F ’ 07

Fae Jencks ’06 and Laura Hendrickson ’07 have established themselves within the highest levels of D.C. politics.

young

The flight into Reagan National Airport is the perfect entrée into the pomp, circumstance, and power of Washington, D.C. Flying in toward the capital there are signs of a simple suburban existence—rows of modest homes, a sewage treatment plant. Slowly, the ordered streets of suburbia (a grueling hour and a half commute into D.C. on a good day) make room for the less crowded dominion of the Washington elite just outside the city limits. There are tennis courts by the dozen, gated corporate headquarters, mansions with sprawling grounds, and so many prep school football fields. The engines quiet as the plane slows for its descent. The mansions get closer together as we pass the weighty, block-sized Georgian brick buildings of countless museums and government agency headquarters. Each building is filled with eager young people, honed Washington veterans, and some of the most powerful policy makers in the world. We overtake the monolith of the Washington Monument as the landing gear starts down, glimpsing the spire of the Capitol Rotunda in the distance seconds before landing.

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hese structures have witnessed the birth of one of the most powerful nations in history. If any location was deserving of pomp and circumstance—from the presidential motorcade to the uncanny depths of Senate procedure—this is the city.

And in a city that loves grandstanding and often frowns on compromise, making your way into D.C. isn’t easy. It certainly wasn’t smooth sailing for two tenacious young women who, once upon a time, arrived with dreams of making a difference in Washington and without jobs to accomplish it.

Despite the odds and a literal minion of other eager interns that were shoveled in and out of D.C. on a quarterly basis around them, two Emma Girls, not even halfway through their twenties, have established themselves within the highest levels of D.C. politics. Fae Jencks ’06 is in the Obama White House, hanging with Nobel laureates and astronauts between her work to support the administration’s energy and environment policies, and Laura Hendrickson ’07 walks the halls of the Capitol chatting with Senators on her way to and from the press office of Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitchell McConnell.

If you are expecting a Crossfire-style back-and-forth of Republican conservatism and liberal Democratic retorts given the highly oppositional men Fae and Laura work for, you will be sorely disappointed. As with several of their espoused role models, the women of the Senate (who meet regularly over dinner with members of all parties to discuss the many things they do have in common), Fae and Laura barely spoke about personal political beliefs during the interview in Laura’s Capitol Hill office. Instead, the pair, who were joined by fellow

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Washingtonian and article photographer, Erin Schaff ’07, laughed over times at Emma (their fights together on Student Council against “The Administration” over the loss of soda in the dining hall offered particularly hilarious fodder) and the cost of D.C. rent (“too damn high”).

On the surface, Fae and Laura’s differences go deeper than even their divergent political parties. Laura, a tenth generation Kentuckian and espoused “sorority girl,” is quietly strong, tailored, and exceptionally gracious, with an ever-so-slight Southern accent. Fae, a New Hampshire native, is pure New England, arriving in flats with a pair of heels tucked sensibly into her bag, a bold necklace, open and inviting personality, and an insatiable urge to check her buzzing Blackberry. Yet, as Laura led us on a quick tour of the Republican portion of the Senate with a stop in The Republican Cloakroom (surprisingly small) and onto the actual Senate floor (tingling with pent-up power and also surprisingly small), the differences melted away. Gregarious and authentic Erin helped accomplish this as both photographer and hilarious storyteller.

Together we joked that Laura and Fae could be the next James Carville and Mary Matalin.

Laura is press assistant for Senator McConnell. It is a position she proudly worked up to since beginning in his office soon after her graduation from Sewanee: The University of the South. She started off in his personal office answering phone calls from both enormously happy and bitterly angry Americans.

“I found that people from Kentucky were usually nice to me, even if they didn’t agree with me.

Others…not so much,” she said with a smile. “I learned a lot about myself in that role. I learned how to defend my positions and his positions.”

Learning how to represent those positions was a great training ground for the work she now does in the press office, fielding calls from national and international journalists, formulating media responses, issuing press releases, staffing caucus Senators for the weekly radio address, and being the final editor of all of the Senator’s floor speeches.

While hallway chats with the affable Wyoming Senator John Barrasso are always a highlight of any day, Laura reported that some of her favorite moments are much less glamorous.

“I love Senate procedure,” she laughed. “Why we need to get cloture on one thing and then not another and why time is equally divided and we can set some time back and not other times is just really cool.” She offered up a book on it to anyone interested. There were no takers. She also spends vast amounts of time watching C-SPAN. Through even C-SPAN, she tries not to lose sight of how incredible it feels to work in the Capitol.

Her office is just steps from the

I am a history nerd and it is amazing to see how one single piece of legislation can change the course of the whole nation. I love what I do.” famed Capitol Rotunda filled with tourists from all over the world. When she walks the halls, she steps on the same beautifully painted tiles Presidents and Senators have crossed over since Thomas Jefferson was in office.

“Sometimes I have to remind myself that what I do is pretty cool,”

she said. “I am a history nerd and it is amazing to see how one single piece of legislation can change the course of the whole nation. I love every aspect of what I do. I don’t know if anything didn’t live up to my expectations.”

Fae agreed. Working on the grounds of the White House never

gets boring from her standpoint as (get ready for one those long D.C. job titles with plenty of abbreviations) Confidential Assistant to the Associate Director of the Environment and Energy (E&E) Division at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

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H I STORIC CO N N ECT ION S TO D.C .

While alumnae Kirsten Gillibrand ’84 holds the highest political office of any current Emma Willard School graduate in Washington, D.C., the school has several historical connections to our capital in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In the 19th century, a large number of Emma women were the wives, sisters, and daughters of D.C. politicians. Among them were the Cass sisters, whose father, Lewis, made an unsuccessful run for the presidency. Also notable was Mary Arthur, an 1856 graduate, who served as her widowed brother Chester’s First Lady during his presidency. Many of her actions in that role have been preserved by First Ladies ever since. Moving into the 20th century, Emma Willard School alumnae played an early role in shaping the new dynamic for women in D.C. Among them were Eliza Cass Kercheval ’39 who received a clerkship in D.C. during the Civil War, and Martha Bell Hamilton ’58 who had a clerkship working at the Census Bureau. Julia Arnold Warner ’56 worked as a clerk and copyist for the treasury department. These roles made them some of the first women to hold such offices.

“Honestly, walking through the gates of the White House every day doesn’t get old. It doesn’t get old,” she repeated with a smile. “The access and proximity to seeing how decisions are made and all the different opinions that are invited into the process is just a really cool thing.”

OSTP is the White House office tasked with advising the President and others within the Executive Office of the President on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international policies.

Her division focuses on topics ranging from clean energy research to water conservation, and, to a large extent, climate change. Located in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building just off the West Wing of the White House, Fae works alongside most of the executive staff of the President.

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The access and proximity to seeing how decisions are made and all the different opinions that are invited into the process is just a really cool thing.”

In her role, Fae supports her division in developing and implementing environmental policies like the President’s Climate Action Plan. She is also the OSTP lead on Presidential science awards, helping the President honor some of the greatest scientific minds and teachers in the nation for their contributions.

To do so, she accepts nominations, reviews each submission, plans the award ceremonies, prepares briefing materials for the President and the Director of OSTP, and helps with the writing of award press releases.

“My job is basically ‘geeking out’ all day,” Fae said describing how her office is filled with decorations like replicas of the Mars rover, Curiosity, and even an ancient meteorite.

Both Fae and Laura cite their rise into politics as one part familial legacy and another part Emma-honed.

Unbeknownst to Fae until after she announced her desire to go into politics in her sophomore year at Emma, her father was the family’s original D.C. power player.

He started out in the 1970s as the Senators’ only elevator operator. Actively pursuing the Senators face-to-face for a promotion (a self-promotional process he heavily encouraged in his daughter, and she later employed), he rose to work in the office of a young Senator on his first term on the Hill, Joseph Biden.

Her mother, Dennett Page ’69, was also a source of encouragement as she brought a young Fae to work with her often at the Strawbery Banke Museum in their hometown of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

The outdoor history museum, filled with houses and artifacts dating as far back as the 1600s, inspired a love of American history in Fae. “It was amazing to see where we had come from and how we developed,” she said. “So my love of the American political system was subliminal through my mother and then learning from my dad and hearing all his D.C. stories.”

Laura, who is also a multigeneration Emma Girl, was also influenced by both parents.

Laura’s mother, Kathryn Browning Hendrickson ’75, was voted in as Commonwealth’s Attorney for the 19th Judicial Circuit in Kentucky in 2006, giving Laura a front-seat view of campaigning, political procedure, and how a strong woman can make it in politics despite the odds.

“My mom started as a nurse and then went back to law school an hour away with four children under the age of 10 at home. She was second in her class, and she was always home for dinner,” Laura said with clear awe for her mother.

Her father’s deep commitment to his community and the caring relationship of her parents—

who happen to sit on opposite sides of the political aisle—were also inspiring.

“With my family, we always say my mom is the elected official and my dad is the politician,” she laughed. “Despite the fact that they were from different political parties, they were never at each others’ throats. And that really got me in a good place with politics. Understanding other people’s perspectives really comes from them.”

With generations of Emma Girls before them (Fae is actually a fourth generation Emma Girl), the pull to Emma Willard School was strong. But, it was their personal Emma experiences that sealed the political deal for each of them.

Both cite an Emma history class as transformational. For Fae it was A.P. US History with current Head of History and Social Science Robert Naeher, Ph.D. “I just loved that class. I mean it. I totally, totally loved his class,” she said. “That is how I got really interested in politics, especially talking about the primary in New Hampshire. It was shortly after the invasion of Iraq, and everyone was just so fired up, talking about politics and issues like climate change… we were like, let’s change the world.

Come on! Let’s do it!”

For Laura, she was inspired by her A.P. Government class taught by former Assistant Head of School Eric Niles.

“I really became interested in politics my senior year in that class.

It was one of those classes where, finally, something I was really good at and something that I really enjoyed combined,” she recalled.

“After that class, I knew I was going to major in [political science] in college. It kind of lit something up inside of me.”

“It was a eureka moment,” Fae agreed.

Erin, who sat in the same class with Laura, also fondly recalls the course.

“I remember in that class it was just so real-world applicable and it made reading the news just make sense in a way that it didn’t before.”

During their time at Emma, the three women came together during more than class. Fae and Laura played on the tennis team together, although, as they set up a match on the Senate courts for a later date, they couldn’t recall if they had ever played doubles together at Emma. All three of the women were also on Student Council together, fighting the good fight over vending machine options. They each also recalled the horror of campaigning in front of the whole school during election season.

“I just remember being terrified during my campaign speech and I was up there in Kiggins and my paper was just shaking…I actually wrote my college essay about it!”

Fae recalled.

“I wish I knew what I said in my speech,” Laura said. “I was probably like, ‘I will bring back soda.’”

“That was big,” Erin grinned and suddenly they all giggled and were immediately transported back to the Emma dining hall. “Some girls would be drinking soda at breakfast. They totally ruined it for everyone else.”

“And then there was the outlawing of sweatpants,” Fae chimed in.

They all sighed in agreement. “That was a big deal.”

For each of them, Student Council at Emma was simply the first political spark that spread through college.

Laura began in D.C. as an unpaid summer intern for her local Representative, Geoff Davis, in the summer before her senior year of college, after being inspired by his work while researching a 20-page paper on him. Upon graduation from Swanee without a job, she nevertheless returned to D.C. determined. She interned with the Representative again briefly before earning her starting position with Senator McConnell.

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I remember her saying, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but you went to a Southern school…you were in a sorority…I was expecting you to be up in the clouds and you are just so down to earth.’ I think a lot of that comes from Emma Willard.”

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Fae’s experience includes a multitude of internships and positions, which led to a job at President Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago (fulfilling an important personal dream) before her eventual arrival at the White House.

“I feel like working at the White House was always your track, even when you were at Emma,” Erin recalled. “We were always like, ‘Fae is going to work in the White House.’”

Even before leaving George Washington University (GWU), a school she chose for its proximity to the White House, Fae had already completed internships with her New Hampshire Representative, Carol Shea-Porter, another at a D.C. political consultation firm helping craft campaign advertising, and yet another doing research at the White House (an internship she applied to twice before admission). Throughout all these experiences, she itched to play a role on a Presidential campaign. With the 2012 election cycle not-yet in full gear, she graduated from GWU and moved from the White House internship to her first job at Media Matters for America where she honed her skills as a political researcher, fact checking campaign ads and analyzing the validity of media reporting.

After working for the organization’s political side during the 2010 election cycle, Fae became one-half of Media Matters’ two-person team specializing in energy and environment research. This specialization earned her a spot as the energy and environment researcher at Obama’s 2012 campaign headquarters in Chicago. After that rewarding, yet exhausting, year and half stint on the campaign trail, she recalled her most cherished memory— hugging the President the day after his re-election.

“What I have really liked about research is you get to delve into an issue and find the nuances, and

I think that is sometimes lost in other political communications, particularly campaign communications,” she said.

After the election, still hopeful for a permanent position at the White House, Fae moved to D.C. After several weeks of searching, she landed a job as senior policy and communications specialist for the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. It was there that she first worked with her future boss at OSTP. Three days after the report was complete, she walked through the gates of the White House for her first day of work.

Fae isn’t so sure where she will go after this, but she is pretty convinced it won’t be on the campaign trail.

“I think I will stay in the energy and environment field though, but I don’t necessarily know where that will take me. Where I go from here will be where I think I will make the biggest difference, as cliché as it sounds.”

For Laura, she has found what she truly wants to do—communications.

“I see myself doing this in five to 10 years,” she mused. “I don’t know if I will stay in politics forever, but definitely doing press.”

Fae’s advice to other young women looking for a position in D.C.: “Just get out there and get your hands dirty…It is really about voicing what you can bring to the table and showing the people who you look up to that you are value-add and that you are capable, and that is the thing about Emma Girls: we just are!”

“It is so true,” Laura affirmed, sharing a story of how her Emma education helped free her of some of the stereotypes that could have plagued her political career during a networking meeting with a powerful D.C. woman.

“I remember her saying, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but you went to a Southern school…you were in a sorority…I was expecting you to be up in the clouds and you are just so down to earth.’ I think a lot of that comes from Emma Willard,” Laura said. “[At Emma], we were comfort-

able calling each other’s B.S. We didn’t have to make an impression…

I never felt that I had to be the best or grandstand in any way.”

“People just know the difference,” Erin added. “When I got [to D.C.], people where like, ‘you don’t seem like you just graduated from college.

You have too much self-confidence.’

Then I would say that I went to an all-girls’ boarding school and people would be like, ‘There it is.’”

As we walked out of the Capitol to take photos, the three alumnae made dinner plans together, compared notes on engagements and weddings of other Emma classmates, and discussed the experience of coming back to Emma Willard School for a recent Reunion.

Erin expertly hailed a cab to take us to the Lincoln Memorial for photos. The heavy long-lensed camera dangled from her hands.

As we hopped into the cab, Laura’s office in the Capitol faded into the distance of heavy mid-day traffic. We passed the front lawn of the White House where Fae had come from earlier in the morning and arrived at the white marble steps of the memorial.

Together, the two women, doing work for two men with deeply divergent visions for the country, laughed and joked, leaning against Lincoln’s marble monument for their photo. They easily put politics aside. It never mattered.

It never mattered because of their shared connection to a school 375 miles and years away.

As they got ready to depart in separate cabs back to the White House and the Capitol, they gave each other a big hug, and I remembered Lincoln’s famous quote, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Hopefully Emma can set that model for the rest of D.C.

Seeing D.C. from a New Angle Erin Schaff ’07 snaps photos with a mixture of quick wit and an even quicker perception of her subjects. There is nonchalance about her process that puts you at ease, and comes through in her authentic and wide-open photography.

She moved to D.C. for a non-traditional cause.

She wanted to empower women in politics and she knew just the woman who could do it—fellow alumna Kirsten Gillibrand ’84 who spoke to Erin’s class while she was at Emma.

Erin majored in politics at Kenyon College, immediately moved to D.C, and applied to and earned an internship with Senator Gillibrand.

She showed her out-going nature and work ethic from the start (she arrived four days early, ready to go) and was given a choice spot with one of Gillibrand’s senior advisors on women’s issues. In that role, she helped plan the Senator’s first annual Women’s Economic Empowerment Summit. The women she met working within the office would later become some of her first client leads when she took a turn away from traditional politics and started her own business in D.C. She credits her mom for inspiring her to make the shift to try something else she was equally passionate about—photography.

“She was constantly showing me that I could do anything I wanted to do.”

With her new business, Erin Schaff Photography, now off the ground, Erin gets enviable access to Washington elite doing both campaign photography and social scene photography for local D.C. newspapers. She was also the creative director for a massive outdoor photography display called FotoDC, which ran outside National Geographic headquarters. Erin was in charge of creating the exhibit of 200 images and coordinating a 1,000-person party around it. The opportunity earned her an invitation to National Geographic’s highly competitive annual seminar for their photographers.

Her favorite photographic subjects: political women.

“I love showing them as powerful, but still feminine,” she said of her process. “I love what I do now. It brings together photography, branding, and politics in such an awesome way.”

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P R O G R E S S

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2 0 2 0

V I S I O N

A Clear View O F

O U R

Here we are. 200 years. And through it all, thanks to the proud vision of our founder, Emma Willard School has never been afraid of change.

Time and again we have boldly adapted to the needs of our girls while maintaining the essential elements that have been the foundation of our community since our humble beginnings around Madame Willard’s Vermont hearth.

As we prepared for our Bicentennial year, we thought big again with the creation of the 2020 Vision in December 2012. It was our map to prepare this great school for its next major transition—its third century in girls’ education—while maintaining the community values that are in the DNA of the Emma experience: Deep Personalization because each girl should be given the opportunity to be her best self.

Authentic Culture because while we might have a classic castle as our setting, our girls have never been damsels in distress.

Distinctive Worldview because, from Jamaica to New Haven, every girl who comes to Emma

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E M M A WI L L AR D SC HO O L

F U T U R E

has the ability to change her perspective and the world around her.

As we said when we launched the vision, “Emma will no longer sit humbly in an enlightened corner of the educational world. We will fully embrace who we are and shout it clearly from the top of Mount Ida.” A year and a half after the launch of the 2020 Vision, we provide you an update on our significant progress. Never, in my fifteen years as head, have I seen our school so aligned, so ready to take on the new challenges and opportunities before us, so poised to shout triumphantly from the hilltop. As we prepare for our May festivities, join me in maintaining this exceptional forward momentum. Our wheels are turning and there is so much open road before us.

Trudy E. Hall

P H OTOS BY KR I ST I N R E HDE R

Spring 2014

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V I S I O N 2 0 2 0 T H E O N P R O G R E S S

Deep Personalization Create a curriculum that provides a sound interdisciplinary foundation partnered with opportunities for personalization based on the individual strengths and weaknesses of each girl as well as opportunities for deep exploration within subject areas.

Major changes within our new graduation requirements include the integration of history and English instruction through the Correlated Curriculum program for both the freshman and sophomore years.

Beyond academics, we also saw the need to even more effectively provide our girls with the life skills they will need to thrive inside and outside the classroom. These skills, which we call Serve and Shape Her World Skills, are vital to a successful educational outcome. We need to look beyond A.P. credits and SAT scores to assess the real learning that happens at Emma. Much discussion was centered on what skills defined an Emma graduate—from resilience to creativity—and how to fully incorporate these skills into our new curriculum.

Launch the Signature program to create a focused and individualized educational experience for every girl. Signature is our newest and

strongest way to not only uncover our seniors’ individual passions and prowess before graduation, but herald those unique abilities to

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E M M A W I LL AR D SC HO O L

future colleges. The new program provides seniors with an educational experience or project individual enough and rich enough to be called her “Signature.” It allows her to leave Emma with forward momentum in a chosen college and career path. The 2014 spring semester marked the program’s pilot, with 26 upperclasswomen working hard on Emma’s very first Signatures. Their projects include work in emergency room medicine, philanthropic giving, journalism, visual arts, economics, biotechnology research, history, film, and finance. The program, along with its partner program, Practicum, takes full advantage of the many resources offered within the surrounding Capital Region with internships at local top universities, hospitals, government offices, and businesses

from healthcare to high-tech. Within one to two years, the majority of our seniors will be participating in this unique program.

tinue their growth, college counselors also become an important part of the advisory process.

Reshape the daily and yearly schedules to provide flexibility, personalization, and balance. In

Design and implement a wellness program that looks at the whole girl, balancing a rigorous academic program with emotional and social development and team-building physical education experiences.

2 0 2 0 V I S I O N

ing students and implement our third-century version of what an Emma education must include for those future girls, we needed to fully understand the infrastructure changes required to get there. To help accomplish this, a six-month-long campus planning effort was completed. The effort focused on finding ways to reinterpret our historic structures in the context of modern program needs. Assuring that our spaces respect our history, telegraph our program, and support the needs of our students is no small challenge for a campus designed over 100 years ago. Among the options brought up by the study: new community gathering/arts spaces; reimagined academic resource centers; variety and flexibility within our learning spaces to accommodate everything from individual-

sure our girls are exposed to the universe outside the protective bubble of the campus remains of utmost importance as we prepare our girls to not only work in the world at-large, but lead the push for change in that world. The Practicum and Signature programs provide our girls the offcampus experiences they need by hurtling them into new, life-altering experiences outside Emma. With approximately 75 percent of the students already having done at least one Practicum during their time at Emma and similar participation rates anticpated for Signature, individualized off-campus study is growing at Emma. Practicum is a place for students to explore their passions.

And those passions have ranged from sword fighting and tango to architecture and music engineering to community service. Practicum allows any Emma student to experience a career, new language, athletic or life experience outside the classroom. It sets up partnerships with Emma and local businesses, non-profits, universities, and professionals that allow students to safely explore a variety of career paths and potential passions. It is also a breeding ground for Signature projects. It allows girls to try a variety of things before deciding on something they can truly be passionate about for their Signature.

T H E

program is to ensure each girl has an experienced and caring guide. Within the newly created advisory system, a girl begins her Emma experience with advisors who form a 9th-grade advisory team, a team designed to anticipate the needs of our newest students. This team travels with the girls as they move on to 10th grade, helping them to identify and build on their strengths. At the end of the 10th grade, a girl has some idea of where her journey will take her in her final two years, so she selects a new advisor to accompany her along the way. As girls look to college to con-

Complete and implement a campus assessment to plan for the gradual growth of the student body to 360 girls. To accommodate our incom-

Implement a comprehensive curriculum that includes learning and life experiences that extend well beyond the classroom. Making

O N

Define and implement an enhanced advisory system necessary to guide each girl through her educational journey. The aim of the advisory

In December, Shelley Maher became our first director of wellness and athletics. The new position marks a transition from a solely athletics and physical education focus to one that extends to the entire community. One of the biggest challenges in wellness, for both our girls and our employees, is to facilitate balance. As part of our efforts, we will promote the health center as less of a place to visit when you are sick and more of a place that keeps the Emma community well, ensuring there are a wide variety of physical activity and movement options offered, and keeping the notion of whole-life balance at the forefront of everyone’s minds.

Distinctive Worldview

P R O G R E S S

September, our girls will begin the school year with a new daily schedule. The community came together around three priorities: creating a more personalized education experience; scheduling time for community groups to meet during the school day; and providing flexibility for experimentation with pedagogy. To personalize the education experience, several periods throughout the week were paired together. The pairings allow classes to connect across the disciplines as part of the Correlated Curriculum and give juniors and seniors the opportunity to have large blocks of free time to engage in extended projects on or off campus as part of a Practicum, work on their Signature, or to participate in online coursework. To create time for community groups, the traditional lunch period was lengthened three days a week to allow clubs and faculty to meet during the day. A new yearly calendar is expected to be in place by the 2015–2016 academic year.

Authentic Culture

ized Signature work to lecture-style learning; improved wellness, dance, and athletics facilities; and upgraded residential spaces.

Establish a global network of support for our students with alumnae, the Capital Region, and other partners in the workforce and the world of women’s rights and global education.

Increasing the connections with and between our alumnae and current students remains an important goal for our Bicentennial events. We see this

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year as an opportunity to bring alumnae together to support each other and our future graduates in their lives and careers. A large portion of the upcoming Bicentennial Celebration (May 9–11, 2014) will focus on connections, with more than 50 different workshops, all to build a more powerful connection between Emma Girls.

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V I S I O N

Create a diverse cultural and global community of both students and adults on our campus. Creating

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diversity in all ways—race, country of origin, geography, interests, culture—is critical to preserving the type of student body our girls thrive in. To accomplish this, Emma has sought to increase the number of countries, but not the overall international population each year. As a result, the students entering in the 2013-14 school year represented 34 countries, a jump from 29 the year before, and 26 states, up from 21. Emma also increased the number of students of color from 19 to 20 percent.

Define and develop a strategy to increase student awareness of problems facing the world and how they can be involved in their solutions. Through our global pro-

grams we hope to provide our girls with transformative, perspectivechanging experiences that will increase their awareness and understanding of issues and opportunities beyond their normal radius of operations. Among the greatest achievements in global programming was Emma’s admission this year as the only American all-girls’ member to the prestigious Round Square organization. This global consortium of 100 schools shares a commitment to the Round Square IDEALS of Internationalism, Democracy, Environmentalism, Adventure, Leadership, and Service. As members of the organization, Emma students and faculty now have access to school exchanges, global service projects, regional and global conferences, and collaboration through distancelearning methods. In addition, our

E M M A WI L L AR D SC HO O L

Away programs continue to grow, with nearly 20 percent of our students traveling off campus in 2013 to participate in Emma programs in India, England, Spain, and China.

Additionally, the curriculum and opportunities on campus continue to provide a global perspective, including a two-year world history sequence as well as new electives such as African and Caribbean Literature.

To add to current language courses in Chinese, Spanish, French, and Latin, students also participate in Language Peer Practicums in Korean, Russian, Portuguese, German, and Japanese, taking advantage of the depth of linguistic and cultural perspectives within the student body. In short, we want global education to be a part of Emma’s DNA.

Unabashedly Emma Design and execute an enrollment and marketing strategy to increase applications domestically and internationally with a goal of reaching a student body of 360 girls.

In December 2012, Emma launched a new logo, all new messaging and materials, a revamped marketing plan, and a new website. It was all part of a concerted effort to herald to the world just how different the Emma Experience is to anything else out there. Emma was no longer content to sit quietly in the corner. Since that time, our messaging has resonated on a much greater level, and applications from prospective students are up more than 150 percent since the launch of the new strategy.

Implement an alumnae relations program that enhances the networking potential of alumnae and increases alumnae participation in giving to the school. With a 12

percent increase in alumnae participation in regional events, we are seeing increases in alumnae engagement and positive feelings toward the school from all generations. We have also seen record-breaking participation in the annual fund with a three percent increase over last year thanks to a

more focused and personalized fundraising strategy. In November 2013, we surveyed more than 3,700 alumnae on their feelings about the school.

From that survey, we learned that 95 percent of our alumnae from all generations agreed Emma provided them a strong educational foundation; 87 percent agreed Emma allowed them to put a distinct mark on their life; and 86% agreed Emma actually made them the person they are today—even decades later!

Research and implement the school’s next major gift thrust. We stand

ready to joyfully share our new fundraising priorities with our whole community at the Bicentennial Celebration. Focuses of the first fundraising phase will include: t #PME BOE SJHPSPVT BDBEFNJD JOOPvations that provide our students with the most deeply personalized educational experience ever available to girls t 4UVEFOU TDIPMBSTIJQ UP QSFTFSWF our distinctive worldview t 3FJOWJHPSBUJOH PVS JOTQJSJOH TQBDFT to maintain what truly makes us unabashedly Emma t ɨF DSFBUJPO PG B 2020 Vision Fund to support research and development, entrepreneurial thinking, and innovative actions that anticipate changes in the educational landscape Stay tuned at the Bicentennial Celebration for more details. It is exciting to witness the pace of change at Emma and thrilling to think of even more effective ways our parents and alumnae can engage and support the opportunities to sustain and enhance Emma’s position as the absolute best in girls’ education.

Celebrate 200 years in true Emma style. See you for the fireworks,

where together we will launch the next phase of our 2020 Vision!

Signing Off HEAD OF SCHOOL TRUDY HALL

The Emma Brand I came to Emma for one year as its interim head. 15 years later, I still consider myself “interim,” readying Emma for the future. I am on a mission; I may be here for a while.

So much is right: there is a best-in-class energy; the girls are amazing; the staff and teachers are girl-centric and rigor-focused; and the campus is stunning. Adding to the “good stuff,” Emma employs 200 years of proud, decisive moments to tell a formidable story of perseverance and intelligent vision.

So why am I still here? I am frustrated beyond belief that Emma Willard does not have a world-class brand.

The word “brand” crept stealthily, but relentlessly, into the education industry over the last decade as tuition costs increased. Given the cost, what is the “value-added” of the independent school experience?

Our class size? Character education? Guaranteed college acceptance?

The authors of The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, Al and Laura Ries, remind us that the object of branding is to create “the perception that there is no other product on the market quite like yours.” Since most schools resent the idea of education as a “product,” you can imagine the fierce resistance to the gerund “branding.”

Educators everywhere were silly to resist the inevitable. With independent school enrollments nationwide decreasing and schooling options increasing, it is clear that telling our compelling story—proving our value—is critical to our success in the current educational landscape.

From Starbucks to Amazon, from Rolex to Nike, a brand calls forth passionate loyalty. As schools identify their compelling distinctiveness, it would behoove us to understand superb brand creation is a disciplined, mission-appropriate strategy for sustainability.

Brands that survive decades—or centuries—do so by design. The successful establishment of a brand is the enlightened awareness that everyone associated with the institution is a touch point of its quality; that all who produce the product are aligned on substantive core values; and that those committed to its excellence can be nimble as necessary while adhering to foundational principles. This is Emma Willard’s truth and the story behind its trademark excellence.

So why doesn’t the world know “We have made about Emma? progress in telling That is the mission I am on—with your help. I want the world to know this uniquely Emma Emma Willard is the place for girls to hone the habits of an intellectual life story, but there is and the gumption and character that work to do. And, will enable them to put those habits to good use in the world; that Emma our Bicentennial provides a deeply personalized educational experience in an authentic year is the perfect community, producing a girl with a time to get serious distinctive worldview—a girl who will change the world. about this mission.”

We have made progress in telling this uniquely Emma story, but there is work to do. And, our Bicentennial year is the perfect time to get serious about this mission. The Emma brand is sustainable, memorable, and compels loyalty. We are Emma. Authentic and open. Personal. Committed to creating women equipped to alter the course of global history. Help me tell the world.

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