In the pantheon of twentieth-century American institutions, few have been so influential yet so overlooked as the Katharine Gibbs School. In “Expect Great Things!” Vanda Krefft delivers a meticulously researched, eye-opening account of how this “secretarial school” served as a Trojan horse for female empowerment across decades when professional doors remained firmly shut to women.
The notion of a secretarial school as a vehicle for feminist revolution might seem contradictory. After all, weren’t these institutions training women to be glorified assistants—to take dictation, type memos, and fetch coffee for male bosses? Krefft brilliantly dismantles this misconception, revealing how Katharine Gibbs created not just a school but a sophisticated strategy for women to infiltrate male-dominated power structures from within, one perfectly typed memo at a time.
From Personal Tragedy to Educational Vision
The book begins with Katharine Gibbs’s own story—a tale that embodies the very vulnerability she sought to protect other women from experiencing. At 46, Gibbs became widowed when her husband died in a sailing accident, leaving her nearly destitute with two young sons. The shock was compounded when she discovered she had no legal right even to her own household furniture, as her husband had left no will.
This personal catastrophe transformed Gibbs. As Krefft writes: “It had taken her forty-six years to learn the lesson, but Katharine knew it now. The only way for a woman to be secure was to have her own money. And the only way a woman could be sure to keep her money was to earn it herself.” From this realization, a revolutionary educational institution was born.
The Curriculum: More Than Just Typing
What distinguishes Krefft’s account is her detailed exploration of the Gibbs curriculum, which was far more comprehensive than mere secretarial training:
- Technical Skills: Students underwent rigorous training in typing and shorthand, with standards so exacting that a single misplaced comma meant redoing entire documents
- Cultural Capital: Courses in art appreciation, literature, economics, and world affairs were taught by professors poached from elite universities like Harvard and Columbia
- Social Graces: Instruction in proper attire, speech, and deportment wasn’t about conformity but about arming women with the tools to navigate upper-class professional environments
- Strategic Thinking: Perhaps most importantly, students learned to analyze workplace dynamics and plan career trajectories years in advance
As Krefft astutely observes, this curriculum gave graduates a comprehensive toolkit for success that many men never received.
Tracing the Impact Through Lives Changed
The true strength of “Expect Great Things!” lies in Krefft’s exploration of individual stories. Rather than offering abstract assertions about the school’s impact, she meticulously documents the lives of dozens of graduates who leveraged their Gibbs education to achieve remarkable success.
These stories are diverse and fascinating:
- Katherine Towle, who rose to become the first director of women in the regular US Marine Corps
- Joye Hummel, the first female writer of Wonder Woman comics
- Natalie Stark Crouter, who kept a secret diary during her imprisonment in Japanese internment camps in the Philippines
- Marie Zenorini, who served as executive secretary to Olivetti’s president and later lived in Italy as part of the company’s elite leadership
- Mary Spencer Watkins, who worked with the Red Cross during WWII and encountered both the horrors of buzz-bomb attacks in London and the moral complexities of meeting their designer after the war
Through these and many other narratives, Krefft creates a tapestry that reveals the school’s extraordinary reach and impact. These weren’t just secretaries—they were pioneers who broke barriers in business, government, entertainment, military service, and nearly every professional field.
Critical Assessment: Strengths and Limitations
Krefft’s work excels in several areas:
- Research Depth: The author has clearly conducted exhaustive research, drawing on archives, personal papers, interviews, and contemporary accounts to reconstruct both the school’s institutional history and the lives of its graduates.
- Narrative Skill: Rather than presenting a dry institutional history, Krefft weaves compelling personal stories that keep the reader engaged while illustrating broader historical patterns.
- Historical Context: The book skillfully situates the Katharine Gibbs School within the larger social, economic, and political forces of the twentieth century.
However, the book does have some limitations:
- Racial Blindspot: While Krefft acknowledges the school’s lack of racial diversity (noting that records show only one Black student in the 1950s), the book would benefit from more critical analysis of how this exclusivity reflected and perpetuated racial hierarchies.
- Classism Questions: Although Krefft touches on issues of class—noting the school’s high tuition—there’s insufficient examination of how the Gibbs approach may have reinforced certain class distinctions while breaking down gender barriers.
- Romanticization Risk: At times, Krefft’s admiration for the institution risks glossing over some of its more problematic aspects, including its emphasis on conformity to certain feminine ideals.
A Place in Feminist and Educational History
Where “Expect Great Things!” particularly shines is in repositioning the Katharine Gibbs School within feminist history. Krefft persuasively argues that while the more confrontational feminist movements of the 1960s and 70s might have dismissed Gibbs as perpetuating traditional gender roles, the school was actually pursuing a different but equally effective liberation strategy.
“They infiltrated. They worked hard. They earned respect,” Krefft writes. “Part of a great, subversive revolutionary force operating on the inside, they opened minds and changed attitudes among all but the most hardened so-called male chauvinist pigs.”
This thesis challenges readers to reconsider simplistic narratives about second-wave feminism as the first significant assault on workplace gender barriers. Instead, Krefft reveals the quiet revolution that had been underway for decades through the strategic placement of highly trained, ambitious women in positions where they could observe, learn, and ultimately disrupt male power structures from within.
Style and Accessibility
Krefft’s prose is lively and accessible, managing to be scholarly without being academic. Her background as the author of “The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox” is evident in her ability to balance narrative flow with factual rigor.
“Expect Great Things!” includes numerous photographs that enhance the text, allowing readers to see not just the school’s impressive facilities but also the women whose lives were transformed by their time there. These visual elements help make concrete what might otherwise feel like distant history.
Comparative Context
“Expect Great Things!” sits comfortably alongside other recent explorations of women’s institutions and their social impact, such as:
- “The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free” by Paulina Bren
- “Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am” by Julia Cooke
- “The Secret History of Home Economics” by Danielle Dreilinger
Like these works, Krefft’s book reclaims overlooked female-centered institutions as sites of meaningful social change rather than mere footnotes in male-dominated historical narratives.
Conclusion: A Necessary Corrective
Ultimately, “Expect Great Things!” serves as an important corrective to our understanding of twentieth-century feminism and women’s educational history. It reveals how, decades before women openly demanded equality in the workplace, Katharine Gibbs and her graduates were quietly creating pathways to power and influence.
For contemporary readers, the book offers valuable insights about institutional change. Rather than focusing solely on breaking down barriers through frontal assault, Krefft’s account suggests the effectiveness of strategic infiltration—working within systems while gradually transforming them.
As the author concludes, “Yes, in the twenty-first century, when a woman’s place is every place, it is easy to forget that a mere seventy-five years ago, possession of a Katharine Gibbs certificate, lightning-fast typing skills, and a great hat and suit were weapons that would help radically change the working world.”
Through Krefft’s engaging storytelling and rigorous research, those weapons and the women who wielded them receive the recognition they’ve long deserved. For anyone interested in women’s history, educational institutions, or the subtle mechanics of social change, “Expect Great Things!” is an illuminating and essential read.