‘Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women’
By Vanda Krefft
Algonquin Books, 320 Pages

What was Katharine Gibbs to do? At 46, she was a widow with two young sons whose husband had not left a will, so that she had to actually petition a court to retain custody of her sons. Meanwhile she had to deal with two brothers who deprived her of an inheritance from a wealthy father who had also neglected to make a will. 

This was 1910, and like most women Gibbs had not been prepared to support herself. After all, men were the providers, and she had been content with that regime — until realizing she simply could not depend on them. They might be in charge, but there had to be a way to make women self-sufficient.  

Gibbs was not a rebel, yet something in her character stood out from those of most women of her class. By 1911, the self-sufficient Gibbs, with the help of her sister, had established a secretarial school, even though she had not been so trained. She treated education as both a practical and personal way for women to become essential members of the business world.

Women who went to a Gibbs school (there were several locations over several decades) were taught not only typing and shorthand in rigorous classes several hours a day, but also how to carry themselves, how to speak clearly, and to become knowledgeable not merely about business but about local, national, and international affairs.

Such was the success of Gibbs graduates that even Ivy Leaguers came to the school and were often taught by Ivy League professors impressed with Gibbs. Women who had been barred from careers in academe, denied admission to schools of law and medicine, became not merely secretaries but administrative assistants, executives, and heads of departments as businessmen realized they had female employees not only with secretarial skills but with diplomatic prowess and initiative that proved indispensable.

Vanda Krefft has an inspiring story to tell, and she tells it well, drawing on interviews with Gibbs graduates and several archives. Her narrative is studded with accounts of women stymied at other schools and jobs who came to Gibbs and became powerhouses, employable almost anywhere and able to move to better and better positions of authority.

By the 1960s, though, the Gibbs cadre of professional women, pejoratively labeled “career women,” had begun to be despised by feminists and social activists who saw Gibbs schooling as subservient to the status quo of male hegemony. They did not appreciate the Gibbs strategy, which became, in effect, a subversion of male hierarchy.  

A Gibbs graduate was no dissenter or disrupter, yet by showing businessmen how well women could fit into their enterprises, she in effect undermined the idea that only men should rule. Women were not supposed to say so, if they were Gibbs-trained, but they often knew better than their bosses. They could spell better, negotiate better, and were tougher.

One Gibbs graduate, Loretta Swit, also known as Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan in the television series “M*A*S*H,” a comedy set in a U.S. Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the war in Korea, parlayed a Gibbs education into jobs that supported what her family regarded as an unreal quest to become an actress. 

Of course, there were failures — women who did not make the most of their Gibbs opportunities, women who could not cope with the school regimen, even though they were treated well, including sumptuous meals in a high-toned setting that made them feel society proud. 

The Gibbs schools foundered by the late 1960s after Katharine’s astute son sold out to a conglomerate. The school needed a guiding light, an inspirational figure, and the corporations who sold and resold the school simply could not sustain the winning formula that Katharine and her son had supplied.

Ms. Krefft does not say so, but her group biography demonstrates that there are many different ways to thrive in a society that does not support you, and that there are ways to change that society without anyone noticing how much fitting in can become a way of creating a new outfit.

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is a biography of Eve Arden.

Correction: Krefft is the spelling of the author’s last name. An earlier version contained a misspelling.