affirmative side of the argument and was declared the winner by the judges. The subject of the debate was: “resolved that throughout the United States proper, full suffrage should be extended to women equal to that now enjoyed by men.” The Agora Society argued that a woman is man’s equal and that therefore she deserved the ballot, stating, “Women’s suffrage has been continually advancing and has met with success everywhere, as proved by figures from the Suffrage States and foreign countries where it has been tried and therefore as it is a right movement and proved successful and practical, there is no reason why women should not have the ballot, and therefore it should be given to them.” It would not be until more than a half-century later that women became the subject of numerous School debates and administrative battles. This time the argument centered on whether the School should become coeducational. By 1974, the die was cast: Hotchkiss opened its doors to female students. In the early days of coeducation, girls were sometimes outnumbered ten-to-one in the classroom, and they likely were taught by a male teacher. The first female instructor was Katherine Davies, who taught Russian from 1963-64, according to the Hotchkiss Archives. There would not be another until 1967, when Annette Hunt was hired to teach music.
PHOTO LEF T: THE LIT, 1918
PHOTO: RG 101 CONNECTICUT WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION RECORDS. CONNECTICUT STATE LIBRARY
Suffragettes toured the state’s northwest corner in 1911 to bolster support for voting rights.
As World War I raged on, the boys at Hotchkiss practiced marching around the playing fields with wooden guns.
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N 1917, WH E N T H E U. S . E N T E R E D WO R L D WA R I ,
representatives from 35 boarding schools, including Headmaster Buehler, met in Hartford, CT, and Lawrenceville, NJ, to consider how to harness their students’ “energy and patriotic spirit” for service to the United States, according to Ernest Kolowrat ’53, writing in Hotchkiss, A Chronicle of an American School. The group focused on food production, asking each school to organize a unit of the School League for National Service by farming their own land or aiding local farmers. Buehler charged a committee of faculty with everything from gathering supplies, drafting letters to parents, and recruiting and organizing student volunteers, as well as housing and feeding them. The School had a Battalion Squad, and boys took to marching around with wooden guns on the athletic fields, Kolowrat wrote. Those who got an acceptable academic average at the end of senior year stayed at the School and planted a victory garden that summer. Instead of requiring entrance exams, Yale accepted a certificate that confirmed that they had farmed for 60 days. In September 1919, Buehler reflected: “Like all other headmasters of my acquaintance, the last 12 months have been the most difficult and trying period of my Head Mastership. I would not have believed in advance that a world war could so disturb academic shades. There was not a nook or cranny of our life, official or private, that the upheaval did not disturb in some way.” When Memorial Hall was completed in 1922, the cost of the construction was donated in memory of the 22 Hotchkiss students who gave their lives in the Great War.
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