Where Aurelia Plath Went to College

Voyeur Arthur Inman lived across from Aurelia's all-female college, its campus here portrayed in its handbook, 1932.

Boston University in 1900 didn't want a business college. The word "business" itself was tainted; it stank of corruption and money-grubbing, and only grudgingly--responding to a survey of what male high-school seniors wanted, because female B.U. graduates outnumbered males--did B.U. allow in 1913 a College of Business Administration. The university's president and board of trustees, holding their noses, imposed certain conditions: 1) Night classes only. 2) The business college, being "unacademic," must be strictly separate from B.U.'s College of Liberal Arts. 3) The business college must fund itself; B.U. allowed the use of its classrooms but none of its money.

Hundreds of males enrolled. At last, a college that taught something practical: accounting, business law, economics, advertising, and also Spanish, because trade with Latin America was trending and Pan-Americanism was a live ideal. In three years the college more than paid for itself, and B.U. made it full-time and degree-granting. It was the first undergraduate business college in New England, its first graduates the class of 1917. [1]

During the Great War, men enlisted and women had to fill their office jobs. Without any fuss, B.U. in 1919 opened for women the College of Secretarial Sciences, degree-granting but with many options. College graduates and those with some college could earn secretarial credentials in one year or two. With two more years of literature and languages, women as cultured as they were self-supporting received a bachelor's degree. In its first semester 300 women enrolled. Aurelia Schober enrolled in 1924, when the school, offering a four-year teaching track, renamed itself the College of Practical Arts and Letters (CPAL). Aurelia earned the two-year secretarial certificate, as her father required, and could then have found a job, but the flourishing college where she was a star inspired her to want a career.

B.U.'s CPAL was first located in the old Massachusetts College of Pharmacy building on Garrison Street in Boston's Back Bay. In short order CPAL expanded into three adjacent buildings. One was the dormitory Aurelia lived in during her senior year. [2] [3] [4] In 1942, CPAL hired its own alumna, now named Aurelia Plath, to develop a medical-secretarial program at its new location, Dunn Hall on B.U.'s more picturesque Charles River campus [color photo]. CPAL in the 1940s had other specialty majors: business education, applied art, home economics, and retailing. But secretarial studies was its bread and butter and that was what Professor Aurelia Plath taught.

Where Aurelia Plath taught: Dunn Hall, Boston University

As crucial as such training was to women who needed it, at universities "secretarial science" was reduced to "skills" that high schools and vocational schools could teach in less time and with fewer books. CPAL was dissolved in 1955, its courses and faculty portioned out to B.U.'s art school, school of education, and thriving College of Business Administration, where Aurelia was promoted to associate professor. Dunn Hall today houses the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies.

[1] https://www.bu.edu/articles/2015/birth-of-a-college/

[2]

The Journal of Education, Sept. 29, 1922.

[3] Recluse and diarist Arthur Inman lived from 1919 until the 1960s in Garrison Hall, a residential hotel at 8 Garrison Street. His September 21, 1921 diary entry describes looking through field glasses from his sixth-floor apartment down into Boston University's gymnasium, where, in an office, naked female students were being measured and examined. The Inman Diary (Harvard Univ. Press, 1985).

[4] After CPAL left Garrison Street, two other colleges moved in. The buildings were razed in the 1970s for apartments and senior housing. Garrison Hall, on the next block, still stands.

Aurelia Plath Vowed Not to Make Her Kids Do This

Aurelia at 18 worked "the summer after high school [1924] in an insurance company, typing dull form letters eight hours a day five and a half days a week from wax dictation cylinders--a grim experience I vowed no child of mine would ever have to endure." [Letters Home, 3]. The woman in this 1920s photo is not Aurelia; she would not have been smiling. Aurelia Plath long remembered the sweltering office and cane-bottomed chair. [1]

In 1924, office air conditioning was decades in the future for most. The cylinders, in the photo conveniently racked, are cardboard coated with wax, and thus reusable. For those who don't remember, wax cylinders were first marketed for sound recording in 1889. While recorded music moved to discs, wax cylinders persisted in offices until after World War II. View a demonstration of a restored wax-cylinder dictation machine here. Basically, the boss spoke into a horn that scratched the sound of his voice onto a rotating cylinder, and the "Ediphone" operator, when ready to type out what he said, put that horn to her ear or maybe had a headset, like the lady in the photo, and controlled the playback with a foot pedal.

When working her part-time job at Massachusetts General Hospital (much easier than grimly writing or not writing), Sylvia Plath transcribed medical reports from a similar but updated dictation machine called an audiograph, commonly trademarked Audograph, that etched the boss's voice permanently onto vinyl discs. That job inspired Sylvia's stories "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" and "The Daughters of Blossom Street." In both, the business office is where fearful things happen.

[1] Aurelia to Max Gaebler, 7 June 1939. (Smith)

How Otto Plath Divorced His First Wife Without Telling Her

Where Otto Plath was divorced and Otto and Aurelia were married, Ormsby County Courthouse. Flickr.com

Daylight was at its briefest, but December of 1931 was mild, more rainy than snowy, and late that month three Bostonians headed west to Reno, Nevada, “Sin City,” just under 3000 miles away. They were a married man of 46, Otto Plath; his 25-year-old fiancée Aurelia Schober; and her mother Aurelia Greenwood Schober, 44, who drove the car.

Otto Plath sought a quick divorce from a wife he hadn’t seen for years and didn’t care to hear from. Socialites and movie stars had been shedding spouses in Reno since a scandal in 1906 made it famous. It so happened that in 1931, the year Otto and Aurelia were ready to marry, Nevada cut its three-month residency requirement for divorce seekers to an unheard-of six weeks. That was headline news, and the year’s B-movies such as Peach O’Reno and The Road to Reno and Night Life in Reno showed how it was done.

Bound by a deadline and a budget, the three could not stay six weeks, but Otto—who was rarely so lucky—had relatives in Reno he had visited before. Those relatives could testify almost honestly that Otto on visits had spent six weeks there in aggregate, or fib that he had been their guest since November. Someone arranged—amazingly—to hire as Otto’s divorce lawyer Reno’s mayor, E. E. Roberts, a colorful public servant who lost more elections than he won, but not for lack of trying.

Nevada divorces worked like this: You or your spouse filed papers charging adultery or cruelty or such, and on your court date, spouse present or not, your lawyer told the judge the charges were true. Judges ignored lies that were not too obvious. But Otto did not have to file any charges, so his wife was never served with papers or notified. Along with Nevada’s six-week law, there was in 1931 a brand-new grounds for divorce, no charges needed: non-cohabitation for five years or more. Otto and his first wife Lydia had lived apart for fifteen years. In the courtroom another attorney simply stood in for her and agreed that the marriage was over.

By chance or by stratagem, the presiding judge was Clark J. Guild, chief proponent of Nevada’s non-cohabitation rule and Mayor Roberts’ crony. Otto’s divorce decree says “Ormsby County” and therefore was granted in Carson City, population 1,600, rather than glitzy Reno, of well-deserved ill fame, in the county next door.

It was Monday, January 4, 1932. No waiting, no blood tests required: Otto Plath and Aurelia Schober were married at the same courthouse that same day. We don’t know what they paid for the divorce, but the cheapest price for a lawyer plus the defendant’s lawyer plus court costs was $150. The wedding announcement sent out later says they married in Winthrop, Massachusetts.

The required legal notice was published only in Nevada, so Lydia Plath in Wisconsin learned of her divorce another way.

Sources: Nevada court costs in 1931: Mella Harmon, M.A. thesis, University of Nevada-Reno, 1998; Winter weather 1931-32; Wikimedia photo via Flickr used under CC by 2.0 license; wedding announcement, Smith College Plath archives; Aurelia S. Plath, preface to Letters Home; Clark J. Guild, Memoirs of Career (1971), University of Nevada Oral History Program; Renodivorcehistory.org. Ormsby County was absorbed into Carson City in 1969.

Soul Murder By Toxic Astro-Babble: Ted and Olwyn

Space bathmat with dust clouds, Walmart.com

 

Olwyn Hughes gloried in playing malicious games to shut out her brothers’ wives and girlfriends and redirect their attention to herself. Sylvia Plath said that on a visit to her in-laws Olwyn talked around and through her as if she were not there, and Ted Hughes, as if mesmerized, ignored Sylvia’s desperate signals to end it. Olwyn’s hostility drove Gerald Hughes’s wife to pack her bags and head for the train station. On occasion Olwyn snagged Ted’s attention by “talking astrology,” highly technical discourse that astrologers Olwyn and Ted understood, but Sylvia and most people did not.

Suzette Macedo, friend to both Sylvia and Assia Wevill, told interviewer Harriet Rosenstein that Olwyn shut out Sylvia by saying, “‘Ted, Teddy—you remember Neptune in the seventh house.” They’d continue to talk astrology as if no one else was present. Macedo said, “It creates an entity, a mystery, binding them together. And she spins this and draws him in.” Macedo guessed that the siblings had shared a private language in childhood.

Monopolizing Ted was the point. At a gathering in the 1960s, Macedo saw Olwyn triangulate Ted’s girlfriend Assia, who broke down crying:

Nobody could say actually what had happened. It sounds completely crazy and irrational but everybody who was present had felt it. . . All that was happening was that Olwyn was talking to Ted in this code language. Unless you’ve seen her do it—it’s something you have to experience to see what it is—she calls up a time in their lives when they communicated through—I don’t know what it is—and it’s just horrible, absolutely horrible. Everybody in that room was ill. [1]

Olwyn taught Ted astrology. That is not so weird given their time and place and their mother’s interest in the occult. British astrologers gave astrology its modern form. Sun-sign astrology dawned when a London paper in 1930 had an astrologer read Princess Margaret’s character and future through her birth chart. [2] In the 1950s Ted sent Olwyn letters studded with astrological symbols and hand-drawn astrological charts as spot-on as today’s computerized charts. But whoever taught Olwyn how to chart did not convince her that astrology ought never to be weaponized.

Yes, astrologers have ethics. Professionals learn they must do no harm. They may not share the birth data of living private individuals, precisely because this data, revealing a person’s proclivities, can be weaponized. [3] Ted shared with Olwyn Sylvia’s birth chart soon after they married, pointing out Sylvia’s “suicidal” Saturn placement. [4] Maybe Hughes thought it casual, but a chart is private info you don’t want a jealous sister-in-law to know and savor.

When Olwyn said in Sylvia’s presence, “‘Ted, Teddy—you remember Neptune in the seventh house,’” she was covertly criticizing Sylvia as a wife and reminding him she was a mental case. Sylvia’s birth chart in fact has Neptune in the astrological seventh house that represents marriage and partnerships. In astro-lore that signifies inflated expectations or delusions regarding marriage and the spouse. Sylvia really did say that she had found the perfect husband and marriage was to her “the central experience of life.” [5] But responsible astrologers don’t judge character using only one factor in a birth chart. If they did, they’d point out that Olwyn had a pretty sad Neptune herself.

Sylvia was angered, and Assia very hurt, by the Hughes’s astro-babble, which Macedo says Ted did not call a halt to. It made Olwyn smile. Macedo called it evil.

[1] Collection 1489, folder “Macedo, S.” Rose Library, Emory.

[2] https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/princess-margaret-horoscopes. Both Olwyn (b. 1928) and Ted (b. 1930) were born before Sun-sign astrology was invented, but as an adult Ted came under its influence.

[3] So well known for astrological references in his art, Ted Hughes closely guarded his own birth data. See Diane Wood Middlebrook, Her Husband, chapter “His Family.”

[4] Ted Hughes to Olwyn Hughes, October 1956.

[5] Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, May 7, 1957.

Aurelia Plath, Young Wife and Mother: 24 Prince Street, Jamaica Plain

Newlyweds Aurelia Schober and Otto Plath rented here the lower left unit from 1932 until 1936. This was where the couple rewrote for publication Otto's dissertation about bees. Here Aurelia studied Latin for a college course Otto had her take so she could better draft his paper about insects. Sylvia Plath was born in a Boston hospital, but this house in the Boston neighborhood called Jamaica Plain was her first home. In a little pink baby book Aurelia chronicled her daughter's growth and milestones. Sylvia spoke her first words at eight months old. At 14 months Aurelia noted that Sylvia said, "Daddy," "specially when someone shakes the furnace!" Back then, someone had to shake the house's furnace about every 12 hours to knock the ashes off the burning coals.

In this house Sylvia learned to walk, talk, and read. Little Sylvia, using tiles, here copied onto the living-room carpet an image of the Taj Mahal, artwork that delighted her father. Built in 1916, 24 Prince Street is a short walk from the Arnold Arboretum, a botanical garden and haven for bees, where Otto had dwelt for years with a houseful of fellow Harvard graduate students. Sylvia could recall from her very early childhood her grandparents' house in Winthrop, by the ocean, but only Aurelia recalled in writing some of the events that took place here.

Aurelia's Platinum Summer

In April 1954, Sylvia Plath mailed her mother Aurelia a birthday card picturing a witch. Back at Smith College after her breakdown, Sylvia, 21, was growing up and away, changing and thriving, and in case Mother didn’t get the message, she came home for the summer bleached blond and loaded for bear. 

“Kindnesses and loving acts were now viewed cynically, analyzed for underlying motives,” Aurelia wrote in Letters Home, using the passive voice to soften the truth: Sylvia had confronted her with a new, independent-from-her-mother personality. “One had to stand back and hope that neither she nor anyone else would be deeply hurt,” Aurelia wrote, but she was the one deeply hurt. (LH, 138)

The issue was Sylvia’s sex life. Aurelia worried that Sylvia might have sex. Parents of daughters still harp about that, but Aurelia got very ugly and grilled Sylvia about where she went and with whom. In mid-June Sylvia told her psychiatrist that Aurelia threatened to withdraw financial support unless Sylvia stayed a virgin. Sylvia, probably not a virgin even then, chose to tell her mother nothing rather than lie. Hearing about another mother-daughter argument on June 21, Sylvia’s psychiatrist advised her not to confuse defiance with true independence. [1]

That summer too Aurelia’s ulcer was bleeding, her mother had stomach cancer, her employer was closing the college she worked for, and she worried that Sylvia might try suicide again. Sylvia pleased Aurelia by accepting a suitor’s proposal but strung him along while having affairs with men she met at summer school. In an August 7 letter to her fiancé Gordon Lameyer, Sylvia claimed to have won her independence from her mother. What she had actually done was pick up a stranger and have a fling with him.

Back at Smith for her final year there, she wrote Aurelia as usual, at times sounding contrite, but avoided seeing her mother for the rest of the year while Aurelia’s ulcer raged out of control.

Known for smiling through her pain, Aurelia in summer 1954 gave in to self-pity showy enough that 20 years later Lameyer recalled that Aurelia would say to Sylvia, “you love ____, or you kiss ____, but you don’t like me.” [2] Aurelia was very bad at fishing for sympathy. In late 1954, feeling a bit better after a hospital stay, Aurelia told her woes to her sister Dorothy “Dotty” Benotti and her husband Joe. Devoutly Catholic Dotty told Aurelia that God was punishing her for leaving the Catholic church and her other sins.

Aurelia was so outraged she vomited blood. She wrote Sylvia that Dotty said something cutting which Sylvia’s return letter of January 29, 1955, does not specify. But Aurelia preserved what Dotty said in angry Gregg shorthand annotations in a book of Bible stories, in the margins alongside the story of Job:

And now upon the scene appeared a group of Job’s friends who said they came to be his comforters, but who turned into his tormentors because they kept on insisting that his afflictions must be a sign that he was very wicked, and that the first thing he needed to do was to repent. To the left of this passage, Aurelia penciled, in shorthand, “My sister Dorothy in 1954!”

As reinforcement, Aurelia wrote “1954” and circled it. She underlined nevertheless upon this good man all sorts of sorrow and bereavement descended, and next to it wrote “tell Dot!” [3]

Sylvia’s January 29 letter to her mother opened with six full paragraphs of consolation, saying Dotty was just jealous: of Aurelia’s children (Dotty’s were adopted), of Aurelia’s better looks despite her much harder life, and of driving lessons that were going badly but would lead to Aurelia’s greater independence. It is the lengthiest and most empathetic expression of sympathy Sylvia Plath ever sent her mother. She had indeed grown up, if just a little.

Aurelia had a long memory for slights but a longer one for kindnesses. On Sylvia’s comforting January letter she wrote in shorthand, “specially fine and kind to my bruised ego.” Dotty and Aurelia forgave each other, and Aurelia sped to her sister’s side in the 1970s when Dotty became terminally ill.

[1] Harriet Rosenstein’s undated taped interview with Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher, Collection 1489, Emory University, Stuart A. Rose Library.

[2] Collection 1489, Box 2, folder 13, "Lameyer" p. 2.

[3] pages 359-360, Stories of the Bible (Abingdon Press, 1934), in the Sylvia Plath collection, Smith College. The book is inscribed “Love to Sylvia & Warren from their ‘other mother.’ Marion Freeman Christmas 1940”. The underlining of "sorrow and bereavement" and annotations on another Bible story in the book indicate that Aurelia wrote the annotations after Sylvia's death.

Aurelia Plath's Trips Abroad

Aurelia Plath traveled quite often, but only in later life. In 1956, she was 50 years old. In 1981, she was 75.

1981: Bermuda, May 18-25

1979: Antigua with Roberta Wood, April

1978: Antigua, with Roberta Wood

1973: England, Aug. 23-Sept. 5

1970: European Tour with Dot and Joe Benotti, June 4-30

1969: Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia with Marion Freeman, May 31-June 22

1967: England, July-August

1965: England, June 10-c. July 23

1964: England, June 10-July 1

1963: England, June 6-July 11

1962: England, June 21-August 4

1961: England, June 18-July 14

1958: Bermuda with Francis Schober, Sr. (father), arriving May 31

1956: England, France (eight days in Paris), Netherlands (five days in Amsterdam), Germany, Austria (three weeks), Switzerland (three weeks), England (nine days), June 13-August 14 [1]

1908: San Remo, Italy, with Aurelia Schober, Sr. (mother), according to Francis Schober's citizenship papers, and returning to the U.S. in May 1909, according to a ship's manifest. Aurelia was a toddler at the time and never mentioned this trip.

[1] Itinerary according to Aurelia's Christmas letter 1956 to Miriam Baggett (archive, Smith).