The Working World

Boston University, class of 1967

Troubled Esther Greenwood "had always looked down on" the city college where her mother taught, because "it was coed, and filled with people who couldn't get scholarships to the big eastern colleges." We now know author Sylvia Plath was imperfectly disguising Boston University, a private  university where her mother Aurelia was a tenure-track professor, although The Bell Jar doesn't say that. And if all we know about its students is Sylvia Plath's impression, we don't know them at all.

Boston University yearbooks for female College of Business graduates 1967 and 1968 gave me names, photos, and hometowns, allowing me to trace about 40 alumnae and mail requests for an interview about Boston University's campus life and its College of Business Secretarial Studies degree program in its waning days, the middle 1960s, when Aurelia taught there.

So far, one graduate responded: Rose Casparro Williams, B.U. College of Business, 1967; M.S. in counseling, Northeastern University. She still has her B.U. transcript, diploma, and class ring. In her hometown, Lowell, Mass., Rose says it was taken for granted that women had to get jobs and support themselves.

Interview with Rose Casparro Williams

You’re one of the Business Education secretarial-program graduates who actually went on to a business education teaching career. After graduating I taught in New Hampshire for three years at a business college, then for twenty years in Medford, Mass., then worked in New Hampshire guidance counseling.

Courses you taught? Typing, shorthand, accounting, business math, business English and Office Practice, where we ran the classroom as an office and the students each had positions with my company, so to speak.

How did you choose a business education major? We started at B.U. at the College of Basic Studies and took our liberal arts courses for the first two years, and then transferred to our specialty school in the B.U. system. One day there was a sign at B.U. looking for young ladies – they didn’t include the guys then – to type papers, for extra cash. Most of the girls could type but the guys couldn’t, and they paid to have their papers typed. It was fun and interesting. We tried to teach the boys how to type, but then it clicked in my mind that teaching was something I could pursue. And I did.

What B.U. courses do you remember? Another typing class, shorthand, and some marketing and accounting classes. I failed economics and had to repeat the class, but the second professor approached it from a mathematics angle and I aced it.

Who was on the faculty? I had Virginia Waller as a typing instructor. She was tough. She made it tough on us so that we really learned from her. The other was Elizabeth Hemmerley. She was excellent as well.

As you planned your career did you ever consult with faculty members about your future or your opportunities? Virginia Wallers used to say she was preparing us for a world of work, whether we chose to be secretaries or to teach business courses. And she would find out what you wanted and steer you toward what classes you needed or how to approach things so you would be either a good secretary or a good teacher. If you were going to teach, you were going to do it well.

Do you remember your shorthand? My group of friends -- we were referred to as the "Uneven Dozen," because the thirteen of us hung out together. One of them lives now in London, and we still communicate back and forth and do it in shorthand. We still do!

I was mystified by shorthand. Like, wow: I can do this! We used to get a magazine every month that was tied in with one of our courses, a whole magazine in shorthand, and it had a story in shorthand, and we couldn’t wait to get that magazine to read the next installment.

Did people look down on you for studying secretarial work rather than studying to be a business executive? I would always say to them, if you know how to type you could always get a job no matter what. And from there you can go anywhere. If you have an accounting background, that’s a door opening.

What swayed you to the educational rather than the secretarial track? I can remember my mother telling me that when we used to play school I wouldn’t let anybody else be the teacher. It was either that or nursing, and I gravitated more toward teaching. I can’t say teaching is magical, but it is. When you teach a concept and they finally get it, it’s like, wow, I gave them something they can hold onto and take with them.

Tell me more about The Uneven Dozen. We were all in business ed, and all commuter students. I came from Lowell, 45 or 50 miles from B.U. We talked about our classes and the instructors, and all hoped to find a teaching position close by and not lose contact with each other. Our goals were to get through school, graduate, and take the next step of finding a position, a job. Some of the girls said, we’re gonna find a husband, find a husband, and two of my friends married, but the rest took time to work before settling down.

Did you have  a scholarship, or did you pay your way? My parents helped me out and I worked during the summers and I also worked for a temporary agency, and for two summers in Bedford, Massachusetts, for the aerospace industry.  There was also a company called Miter that did government work, and I worked for them one summer.

I can't believe you commuted 45 miles each way every school day. It wasn’t bad. We got to know the people on the train who were going to Boston to work, and they were delightful. On the days they knew we were having exams, nobody on the train spoke, it was very quiet, because they saw us studying our books. They really knew us. Lots of times they would bring us coffee or doughnuts or a little something. We got to know them very well over the course of our commuting time. And a couple of times, like, if we forgot to buy a pass – instead of a daily ticket, we would buy a pass, it was easier -- the conductor would just let us take the train and get our pass later.

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.