593 Riverside Drive - 3. Chapter 3

When Papa suggested I become a stenographer, at least he was admitting I was too young to be married. That was one of his arguments against my graduating from high school early. But just because he knew what he wanted to do at fourteen didn’t mean he ever asked me. And he never thought that I’d want to go to college, let alone law school.

Other people in our family had finished high school and gone further. Papa’s just younger sister, Alberta, had gone to Hunter College for two years, when that was all she needed to teach elementary school. And Papa would never dare say, “Well, no one wanted to marry Alberta anyway, so what else could she do? Our father wouldn’t let her be a shop girl or work in a factory.”

“She could’ve become a secretary,” I pointed out. At sixteen, that seemed better than being a stenographer – just a typist. But that was before I took typing, and shorthand, and stenography myself, both because I thought they’d make Papa happy and be useful to me in college. Then I realized how complicated they were. Still, when I asked Alberta why she chose teaching over working in an office, she said she’d much rather be in a classroom, thinking for herself.

“Fourth grade students are good,” she went on. “They’re beginning to make decisions for themselves, but their minds can still be influenced. In an office, I’d mainly be keeping things organized.”

Aunt Alberta had picked Hunter because there weren’t many choices. Even in advanced New York, almost no colleges accepted women, and no law schools. That was in 1902. Also, my otherwise cultured grandparents saw no reason to spend money for education. As my grandmother later said, “The city did a very job of teaching Alberta, and she probably had four more years of schooling than she needed. Besides, we had other children to raise.” They would be my uncle Herbert and my twin aunts Elsie and Edna. Papa was the oldest, which was partly why my grandparents let him go off to Barnum and Bailey.

“He certainly wasn’t ready to be a salesman in my store,” Grandpa lamented.

“Not even a salesman,” Papa said smiling. “I would’ve been a stock boy. Or worse – the boy on the bicycle making deliveries.”

Grandfather had gone on. “Your father didn’t have good enough manners yet to be in sales. He wasn’t patient, and I hadn’t taught him enough about how to dress. And we do sell men’s clothes.”

For college, if my parents hadn’t approved of nearby Barnard, I’d also planned to go to Hunter. Though that meant taking buses or the subway, which Mama didn’t like.

“New York was so different when I was a girl,” she remembered. “Quieter.”

I’d agreed, putting that in my favor, and had gently reminded her that Barnard was a peaceful, fifteen minute walk, mostly through Morningside Park. But I knew it also cost more than Hunter – far more – and while I had money saved from presents and my allowance – and even from occasionally working at Papa’s store, helping Uncle Herbert take inventory or put up Christmas decorations – I didn’t have enough for even one year.

But there was a little of “Over my dead body” weighing on my side. Papa never talked about it, but I’d used it in my case for Barnard and was doing the same for Columbia.

He and Mama valued quality and preferred “the best” or at least “the very good” when we couldn’t afford the top. Not that they bragged, because they felt quality should be obvious. And faced with their stubborn, if admittedly intelligent daughter, who been raised to stand on her own more than my polite mother, well, if I was going to insist on college, I should definitely go to a school associated with Columbia.

But law school? Even if it actually was at Columbia? The school already allowed women to study for several graduate degrees and was almost ready to let them study law. But Papa and Mama had been sure that once I finished Barnard, I’d do the sensible thing and get married. After all, I was educated, and pretty – though not as elegant as my Gibson Girl mother because there was too much of my father’s handsomeness mixed in.

I had Mama’s style, but not the beauty that showed in her early photographs and the sketches one of her suitors had made. Those filled a thick scrapbook and a larger portrait hung in a gilded oval frame in our music room. “Lady Hirschler,” her friends called her, even now, at nearly forty.

Instead, I’d quickly finished Barnard and was now having the same discussion with them about Columbia. I had two other things in my favor. This time my alternative was Fordham Law School, which on the good side had been accepting women for six years. But on the bad, it was at the far end of Manhattan, down near Wall Street, so that meant taking busses or the subway again. It was also more expensive than Hunter but not as high as Columbia, so that wasn’t an even fight. But there was my final eliminating argument: Fordham had been founded by the Catholic church.