Education: Brearley’s 50th

Proud would Samuel Brearley have been if he could have returned to Earth last week for a banquet at Manhattan’s Hotel Astor. Proud were the 1,000 handsome, well-dressed people who gathered there to celebrate the 50th birthday of the famed Manhattan girls’ school which he started in a small brownstone house on East 45th Street. They were proud that Brearley had attracted the daughters of Cleveland H. Dodge, Herbert L. Satterlee, Oswald Garrison Villard, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Felix M. Warburg, Owen D. Young. They were proud that Brearley had schooled such distinguished personages as Dean Virginia Gildersleeve of Barnard, Mrs. Charles Carey Rumsey, Sculptress Malvina Hoffman, Actresses Michael Strange and Hope Williams, Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney.

With many another college president on hand to listen, Smith’s urbane William Allan Neilson urged the cultivation of feeling and imagination as Education’s next step. “The incuriousness of the girl of college age,” declared he, “is one of the most appalling things I know of.” Brearley’s trustee president, Lawyer George W. Martin, proudly told how Brearley was developing feeling and imagination among its girls through sculpturing, dramatics, woodworking, painting. Five hours passed and the banqueters went home convinced more firmly than ever that in Brearley’s the girls’ private school had reached its zenith.

Socialite but not smart is Brearley School. It has never wanted to be smart. The fathers who persuaded Samuel Brearley of Harvard and Balliol to found it were disgusted with the genteel finishing schools of the 1880s. They wanted their daughters to be as well prepared as their sons for college. When Founder Brearley died in 1886 they got for headmaster, James G. Croswell, an old-school classicist from Harvard. In 28 years he set a scholarly tone which Brearley has never lost. In the select sisterhood of Manhattan’s half-dozen famed private schools for girls it retains a first-rank reputation for scholarship.

In 1912 Brearley moved to a new home on Park Avenue at 61st Street. Then began the parade of Brearley fathers marching their Brearley daughters to school before proceeding to business. Girls who arrived by automobile were thought pretentious. The parade stopped in 1929 when Brearley built and moved again, this time to a sumptuous ten-story structure overlooking the East River at 83rd Street.

Tuition fees are above the Manhattan sisterhood’s average. Upped $100 in 1928 and another $100 in 1930, they now run from $400 for the preliminary school to $800 for the six upper classes. But of this year’s 412 students, 52 are on scholarships, against nine in 1929.

Appointed Brearley’s headmistress in 1930 was Millicent Carey, onetime English professor and acting dean at Bryn Mawr. Young, personable, friendly, moderately progressive, Headmistress Carey increased her popularity with students in 1932 by marrying able Pediatrician Rustin McIntosh, sent it sky-high last year when she bore twin boys.