HAL LWAYS


Mrs. Ethel Christie assists students with


their English homework during study hall in the school library in 1951.


Studying English in the1950s


English classes included “directed reading, grammar, composition, letter writing, word attack (spelling, phonics, vocabulary) and literature.” “We had exposure to a wide variety of


E


literature, and we learned to write,” said Marietta Kuykendall ’55. “Oh, did we learn to write. I remember writing, revising, rewriting and finally recopying in ink. Typewriters were used for some papers, but pen and paper were the norm. We were expected to use excellent writing skills in our other classes as well as English. I was well prepared to do whatever writing was required in college.” The focus was on expository writing,


and Marietta said she doesn’t remember any specific instruction in creative writing. Professional author Virginia Euwer Wolff ’55 says she never wrote fiction at St. Helen’s Hall but started writing creatively when she


28 OES MAGAZINE SUMMER 2010 28


nglish was always an important subject at St. Helen’s Hall. In the 1950s, according to the school catalog, Upper School


was almost 40 and has published a number of award-winning books for young readers, including True Believer, which won the National Book Award in 2001. She believes creative writing was lacking at St. Helen’s Hall at least partly because women in the 1950s were not encouraged to be creative and express their worldview. “Much of what later generations of women


have been writing down, we were completely discouraged from mentioning, or, actually, even thinking about,” Virginia said. “We were a hat-and-gloves generation. True, we could have written sincere meditations on the beauty and power of the natural world, or elegiac broodings on the evils of war, but it’s important to remember that Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique wasn’t published until 1963. That single publication would end up opening the valves in lots of women’s minds, helping make possible the f lood of women’s writing that has so viscerally inf luenced the world’s literary climate ever since.”


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