Education: Education of a Debutante

While the home life of “Babs” Hutton made tabloid headlines last week (see p. 16) the genus U. S. Society Girl made another kind of copy. At University of Chicago, sober, 25-year-old Mary Elaine Ogden, no Social Registerite, submitted a learned master’s thesis: The Social Orientation of the Society Girl. Miss Ogden, who lives in Waterbury, Conn., made a laborious investigation of how the Society Girl is educated and with what results. Her report is almost as belittling as the magazine confessions of a deb gone commercial.

Miss Ogden says the steps in the Society Girl’s education (and the criteria of whether she is a Society Girl) are: 1) finishing school, 2) debut, 3) the Junior League. To Miss Ogden the debut is “a romantic escape from problems.” Junior League charitable work, she finds, is a well-intentioned, noblesse oblige gesture that “serves as a convenient justification of the existence of the elite” but waters the roots of neither the poor nor the Society Girl.

Miss Ogden pours her heaviest scorn on finishing schools. She studied nine of the most exclusive.* They go in, she reports, for uniforms, sports, compulsory chapel, languages (particularly French), literature, music, art, and keeping the girls away from boys.

Most exclusive of the finishing schools are Foxcroft and Farmington. Tuition and board at Farmington cost $1,800 a year. Farmington does not prepare girls for college (but will make exceptions to this rule beginning next fall). Some Farmington rules:

¶ “It should be clearly understood that the course of study at Farmington is not elective.”

¶ All electrical appliances are forbidden.

¶ Students may motor only with adult members of their immediate families, not with brothers.

¶ Girls may not receive daily papers or periodicals.

¶ They are not allowed to have novels in their rooms except at stated times and by special permission.

Result of such mid-Victorian restrictions and the finishing schools’ training, says Miss Ogden, is that their graduates: 1) become too much interested in men, 2) overemphasize their own importance, 3) become class-conscious, 4) know very little about the world. Farmington’s most famed alumna is Countess Barbara Hutton Haugwitz-Reventlow.

Miss Ogden concludes: “Today the chances are that better education [than Society Girls get in finishing schools] is available to their poor relations.”

*Ethel Walker, Rosemary Hall, Westover, Miss Hall’s, Miss Porter’s (Farmington), Chapin, Foxcroft, Brearley and Spence.