Business Class: Aurelia's Final Years at Boston University

Boston University yearbook, 1967

Aurelia Plath’s teaching job at Boston University’s College of Business Administration began dissolving in 1959 when a new dean dismissed all secretarial-program faculty except for five aging tenured females. Aurelia was 52.

With 13 years left before BU retired her, Aurelia prepared to teach in a different department, taking a night course in German and then courses in teaching remedial reading. [1] She could have quit BU for a medical-secretarial job, her field of expertise, but even in her teens Aurelia wanted a teaching career, ideally in languages and literature. Her daughter Sylvia wrote that Aurelia secretly hated teaching typing and shorthand, yet 1) Aurelia taught more advanced courses than those, and 2) regardless of subject, Aurelia liked educating and advising young people. It was Sylvia who had secretly hated teaching.

 

Shocked in September 1962 by the new College of Business course catalog with none of her courses in it, Aurelia was not sure she was still employed. Sylvia in England was “appalled to hear your department is closing.” Secretarial studies as a college major was everywhere dying on the vine. Yet however marginalized, BU’s secretarial major persisted and so did Aurelia’s job. She was lucky; she needed the money a tenured associate professor could make. During 1962 she bought Sylvia a Bendix and lent her 500 English pounds to pay off Sylvia's house in Devon and paid her own way there and back; and Aurelia then offered a very troubled Sylvia, deserted by her husband, $50 a month.

 

BU’s yearbook for 1967 pictures 232 College of Business Administration graduates, 53 of them female. Of these, ten had secretarial degrees: nine “executive secretarial,” and a lone “medical secretarial.” One would think Aurelia sat around with no students. Yet 22 more of the 53 graduating females were Business Education majors. Taught secretarial and business skills and communications, they were also educated to teach those subjects in high schools or vocational programs where typing and shorthand were flourishing.

 

Business Education graduates thus bypassed secretarial jobs for teaching careers better respected and paid. Essentially they studied to become new Aurelias. Freshmen from Aurelia’s 1963-64 shorthand courses were in 1967 taking her course, limited to Bus Ed seniors, in how to teach shorthand. BU’s 1967 yearbook lists seven College of Business fields of concentration. Secretarial and Business Education were not among them. The end had come: the last secretarial students enrolled in 1968, and Bus Ed moved to the School of Education. [2]

 

Entitled to a leave of absence, Aurelia took it in fall 1970, six months before she turned 65, when BU would retire her. During her leave Aurelia quietly worked at her new job: teaching medical-secretarial at a community college eager to have her teach until she was 70.

[1] ASP to Miriam Baggett, 6 February 1960; Sylvia Plath to ASP, 17 March 1960.

[2] Thus the College of Business Administration (later, School of Business; later, School of Management) was purged of female faculty, as the 1973-74 Bulletin shows, and of a large percentage of its female students. For a time.

Aurelia Moves Out of the House

Built in 1925

Aurelia Schober roomed her first year after college at 86 Vinton Street in Melrose, Massachusetts, teaching at Melrose High School in 1928-29. In the group photo of the faculty she looks older than 22. Melrose, where no windows look out upon the sea, isn't far from her parents' and siblings' house in Winthrop. But she'd lived during her senior year in her college dormitory in mid-town Boston, and instead of moving back in with her family, the novice teacher roomed in this house perched on a hill, with the elderly homeowner, his wife, their grown daughter, and a seamstress.

Vinton Street was a half-hour walk from Melrose High School, then at 585 Main Street. One of her students, Mary Stetson (1911-1994), later known as novelist Mary Stetson Clarke, became Aurelia's good friend and correspondent. [1]

Whether teaching at Melrose was a one-year appointment, or what the rooming arrangements were, we do not know. On November 5, 1928, as Aurelia and her boyfriend of two years, her first love, Karl, were hiking in the Middlesex Fells Reservation just west of Melrose, he broke up with her. She cried and was horribly grieved. Karl moved on to date and marry a Radcliffe graduate student. Fifty years later, Aurelia incorrectly remembered their painful parting as taking place in 1927. We know it was autumn 1928 and the exact date and place because he kept a diary.

Aurelia waited tables in New Hampshire in summer 1929 and attended Boston University graduate school during the academic year 1929-1930 (while Mary Stetson was a freshman there). Aurelia lived in Winthrop with her parents while earning her master's degree, and remained at home after securing a very good full-time teaching job at Brookline High School. In 1932 Aurelia quit her job and moved in with her new husband Otto Plath. But we cannot say Aurelia otherwise ever really left her parents. They rented out their Winthrop house and stayed with Aurelia and Otto during the summer of 1932, while Aurelia was pregnant with Sylvia, and also in summer 1933.

[1] Aurelia S. Plath to Mary Stetson Clarke, letter 15 March 1959.

Sylvia Plath's Only Gregg Shorthand, Transcribed

Sylvia Plath wrote some Gregg shorthand after all! Her July 5, 1945 letter to Aurelia Plath, written from Camp Helen Storrow, includes three shorthand characters indicated but not transcribed in the Letters vol.1. Curious, I had a look at the original letter in the Lilly Library's Plath mss. II.

Twelve-year-old Sylvia had written to her mother, “Can you tell me what-these signs in shorthand mean?” and drew three shorthand characters. The first two are linked by “and,” and the final character is in parentheses, followed by a period. Why these shorthand characters and not others? Sylvia was asking what they said, so did not know. But she copied them from a grid of 154 Gregg shorthand characters pre-printed on the back cover of the steno notebook she was using as her 1945 summer camp diary.

Sylvia, using her thick black ink, made four checkmarks on this grid. They mark two pairs of symbols that look near-identical. Sylvia chose one of each pair to copy into her letter. The third symbol Sylvia asked about, the one in parentheses, is the same as the second. The first character means both “far” and “favor.” Which of those two would depend on their context. Sylvia's second shorthand character says “got.” The third says “got” in parentheses. So go fill in the blanks in your copy of Letters vol. 1, page 24.

Ergo: “Can you tell me what these signs in shorthand mean? Far/favor and got (got)."

The other two checkmarked characters in the grid that look so similar:

In Aurelia’s lighter ink and elegant hand, on this notebook’s back cover, up top, two Gregg shorthand characters say “medical texts.” Aurelia had been hired in 1942 to teach a Medical Secretarial Procedures course at Boston University’s College of Practical Arts and Letters (Letters Home, 28-29).

These characters are from the Anniversary Edition of Gregg, taught from 1930 to 1949. I await permission to show on this blog a photo of the notebook's back cover.

Bless us, now we know three more words Sylvia wrote.

Images of the shorthand are from gregg.angelfishy.net. The diary’s official location at the Lilly: Plath mss. II, Series: Diaries and Calendars 1944-1957, Box 7, Folder 2, “Daily Journal at Camp Helen Storrow, July 1-14, 1945."

Which Shorthand Did Aurelia Teach?

Gregg shorthand, its first manual published in 1888 by Robert Gregg, who initially called his phonetic shorthand system "Light-Line Phonography," evolved along with the business world’s requirements and vocabulary. Periodic revisions also made it leaner and easier to learn. 

Aurelia Schober (b. 1906) was probably schooled in what is now called “Pre-Anniversary” Gregg, likely that edition’s fifth and final iteration (1916). In 1929 the “Anniversary” edition superseded it. Mrs. Plath would have taught that edition at Boston University’s College of Practical Arts and Letters from the time she was hired in 1942 until the “Simplified” edition of Gregg came out in 1949. The “Simplified” edition was later superseded by the “Diamond Anniversary” edition (1963-1978), the edition I learned.

No iteration of Gregg is a truly radical departure, but each can be different enough so that, for example, a single shorthand character formerly transcribed as “love” now represents the phrase “will have.” Gregg’s efficiency is such that the stroke representing “d” can also be read as “would,” “did,” “dear,” “date,” “dollars,” or the suffixes “-ward” or “-hood”; pre-1963 it might also represent the diphthong “ch”. Context is everything. Change the angle slightly and write it as a downstroke instead of an upstroke and it's the letter "j." How to know an upstroke from a downstroke? Context is everything.

"Aurelia Plath Had No Self"

From Salon.com, 2000, in an article called "The Real Sylvia Plath," by novelist Kate Moses:

"Aurelia Plath had no self; she lived for and through her children. From Sylvia Plath’s infancy, her primary parent’s selflessness gave Plath no model for a self that could maintain its autonomy or exist beyond meeting other people’s needs. What Plath had instead was one big boundariless, free-floating ego, a self utterly dependent on the inflation by the selfless parent, and all psychic roads, ultimately, led right back to Sylvia. Plath spent her entire adult life trying to trace the ego boundaries for herself that her mother neglected to impose."

Moses is a novelist, not a journalist. The novelist deals in fiction, the journalist in facts. Salon.com, as a journalistic venue, should have asked if Moses could prove her assertions that:

• Aurelia had no self?
• although Aurelia worked part-time from January 1941 to 1942, and full-time from 1942 to 1970, she lived for and through her children?
• she "gave Sylvia no model for a self that could maintain its autonomy or exist beyond meeting other people's needs"? (How can anyone ever know what what Aurelia didn't give?)
• Sylvia "spent her entire adult life trying to trace her ego boundaries"? That's obvious exaggeration. And when, precisely, did Sylvia's adulthood begin?

Aurelia and also Sylvia ('like an empty vessel") are treated in this article and others as if they were fictional characters who can be outfitted with motives and judged without facts. I call this "emo-scholarship." Hugh Kenner, contributor to Modern Critical Views: Sylvia Plath (1989), calls it "parlor psychiatry" (page 68).

Aurelia Plath and Shorthand's Evolution

The Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified, second edition (1955) arrived in the mail today, and will be used to sharpen my shorthand transcription skills before I visit the Sylvia Plath archives at the University of Indiana. Aurelia Plath made shorthand and longhand annotations on her famous daughter’s letters and books. Although Plath scholars are many and avid, no scholar has ever transcribed the shorthand annotations. That is up to me and I accept the challenge.

The version of Gregg shorthand Aurelia learned depends on when she learned it, and that is not yet known. The first Gregg shorthand textbook, a pamphlet titled Light Line Phonography: The Phonetic Handwriting (1888) was published in England by John Robert Gregg in an edition of 500 copies, and in the U.S. in 1898 as a book, Gregg’s Shorthand Manual. Succeeding editions presented refinements—the 1929 edition is the most lauded—but the 1949 edition had a new title: Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified. “Simplified” emphasized speed and accurate transcription. All earlier versions of Gregg shorthand are called “pre-Simplified.” The 1949 version would have appeared during Aurelia Plath's business-school teaching career, when she was 43.

I was taught from the eighth edition, called the Diamond Jubilee Series (1963-1977), edited to “make shorthand easier to learn.” Even so it wasn’t easy to learn: in high school I studied it for two years.

The Gregg shorthand versions Aurelia learned or taught await discovery. But last autumn in Sylvia’s archives I saw and read Aurelia’s annotations (they are of textbook quality) and think that they will be of interest when transcribed.