In September 1912, a rather reluctant Helen Bird left her home in East Smithfield, Pennsylvania to attend West Chester Normal School. She wrote her mother extensive letters twice a week, chock full of complaints about her situation and anxiety about the people she had left behind in rural Bradford County. Whether grumpusing about her life at school or expressing her love and concern for her overworked mother, Helen's irrepressible spirit comes through each letter. Her melodramatics, histrionics, and overall sense of humor keep this correspondence entertaining, sometimes unintentionally. When she first arrived at West Chester, Helen plaintively asked her mother if she should write, "just exactly how I feel or pretend to like it?" The outpourings of this young woman living away from home followed a typical trajectory, gradually becoming more positive as Helen grew accustomed to her life as a boarding student.

Helen apparently did not intend to become a teacher, and her stint at Normal seemed to be more of a "finishing" process for the nineteen year old. Early on she commented, "I surely will not be able to learn anything about etiquette, for there is nothing like that here. How would you like to eat with steel knives, and when you wipe them off, the rust comes off?" (1912 September 9). In January, after deciding she would not return the next fall, she told her mother, "I'm glad you want me at home even if I'm not educated, for this one year down here won't educate me very highly" intimating either that the schooling was on a par with the etiquette training, or that Helen realized the life of the frosh was just the beginning of a college career (1913 January 19).

Much of her despairing commentary focused on the dining table and what appeared upon it -- and what did not. She detailed dreary menus for her mother and fantasized about strawberry shortcakes and bananas with whipped cream. Even though she often could not bear to eat the "horrid" food, and had phases of sleeping through breakfast, Helen worried that she was getting fat (she weighed 149 pounds "stripped for gym"), and her clothes were so tight she was ashamed to wear them (1913 March 9). She supplemented the institutional diet with frequent trips to eat "I-tream" at the Roof Garden Cafe, on the seventh story of a building in downtown West Chester. People at home responded to her tales of flies in the cream of wheat and pronouncements that she could "eat the leg off from a dead mule" by sending barrels of "eats" on a regular basis (1912 September 9, 1913 May 11). Whenever a girl got a care package, there would be an after hours feast in her room, and these illicit "lunches" helped the "greenies" make friends as they filled their stomachs with comforting home cooking.

Helen roomed with her friend (or possibly cousin) from home, Harriet, and Madalene, who fell in and out of the East Smithfield girls' good graces. Helen and Harriet commiserated in their dismal homesickness, and sense of being different. Although reading letters from home made them cry, Helen declared "I would die if I didn't get mail." Helen had a series of disturbing dreams, imagining the house burned down, her father drowned, and her mother dead. Even though she was gradually assimilated into the boarding school way of life, she never got used to being away from her home community, and lived in dread of not knowing or not being told that something bad had happened to someone she loved. Much as she dreaded the idea of returning to school after Christmas, Helen was determined to complete the year: "I don't want people to think I haven't any grit" she wrote, and once she was back in January, overcome with homesickness yet again, she vowed, "I'm going to stick it out down here if it takes my head off" (1912 November 17, 1913 January 1).

Helen and Harriet attended various churches, believing that "down here it doesn't make any difference where you go, you are a stranger everywhere, so one place is as good as another. . . . Nobody speaks to you here, and you feel just like an outcast" (1912 September 9). Whether a Presbyterian, Baptist, Catholic, Episcopal or Methodist service, Helen fell asleep in church nearly every Sunday, until finally she started taking preventive naps. She usually stayed awake long enough to form an opinion to share with her mother; after attending a Catholic service, for instance, she wrote, "It is a beautiful church, but I can't see any real worship in the way they do things" (1913 January 19). As for the Episcopalians, "I enjoyed hearing the choir boys sing, but I think there is altogether too much form about it. One woman in front of us nearly fell over when she got up from kneeling" (1912 October 13). She preferred the Presbyterians, but her energies remained focused on the activities of the Disciple Church back in East Smithfield.

Helen tempered her initial judgments of how "awfully queer" the other girls were by expressing the hope that they would care for each other once they were better acquainted, but she wished her mother could hear them talk: "They pronounce "brown" just as of it were "brawn", and all words like that in the same way. It sounds awful." By December, some of the girls were regularly slipping into their room for feasts and general carrying on, and even sleeping over. Miss Cropsey, the house mother, occasionally "squelched" them when their laughing streaks gave them away but they miraculously evaded squelching much of the time (1912 December 8). Making friends made the entire school experience better, and soon Helen was regaling her mother with more and more accounts of illustrious guest speakers, "dandy" entertainments, and heated debates -- often about whether women should have the right to vote -- hosted by the thriving student societies at Normal.

Even with the increased absorption in the activities and personalities of the place, there were still causes for complaint and anxiety. Helen and Harriet, who shared a bed, were plagued by bedbugs, and they bit Harriet so badly she had to sleep on the table (1913 March 30). Jerry, the "old darkey" handyman who sprayed the mattress a few times, finally had to resort to sulphur bombing the room, which seemed to do the trick. Taking exams made Helen "shake in her shoes," even though she usually received good marks. Once she admitted to "bluffing" on an exam -- "I just wrote a lot of stuff and let it go" -- and she was amazed that she got a 90% (1912 December 15). Although her marks concerned her, she did not discuss her classes in any great detail. The only one she seemed to really like was "Nature Study." She touched a snake (but did not put it around her neck like some of the girls did), happily poked around a pond, and collected specimens in the woods.

Being apart from her mother caused other anxiety-inducing situations that had nothing to do with being at school. When she first arrived at school she suffered from dizzy spells and diarrhea and had to go to the doctor. "Mama you don't know how I longed to have you with me when I went to him, I dreaded it awfully. He asked me all sorts of questions. I miss you so much." She elaborated in another letter, relating how she had tried twice to deliver a urine sample to him, but he hadn't had the time to test it.

Shopping without her mother also made Helen very nervous. Her two most important purchases, a winter coat and a summer hat, filled her with trepidation. She spent $18.50 for a light gray chinchilla and then fretted that her mother would think she spent too much. "Oh! mama I wanted you there to help me decide, I just didn't know what to get. I'm afraid you won't like it, but I did the best I could." After that trip to Philadelphia she wrote, "It is awful to shop in such a large city. There is so much to buy, and a person doesn't know what to get, and there is such a crowd to push through all the time." When it came time to contemplate a new hat, Helen decided to get last summer's hat made over, which still cost $4.85, and she was greatly disappointed by the results, thinking it "looks awfully cheap." She wrote about the hat repeatedly, and her half-joking query to her mother -- "You'll love me just the same, even if my hat doesn't look good on me, won't you?" -- seemed to be posed with a certain degree of seriousness.

Other than her suave "city cousin" Charlie McCabe, who visited her a couple times and made her feel "as if I had never seen nor heard anything," boys did not figure in her letters home (1913 January 12). The head of the school, Dr. G. M. Phillips, was renamed the "Great Marriage Preventer," and his rules for the school lived up to the nickname. Although a coed institution, boys and girls were segregated whenever possible, and couples were not even allowed to skate more than two times around the pond together (1913 February 9).

What Helen did after she left school is not known. A letter from her brother Richard to his son George, written in the 1930s, intimates that she married and ran a store with her husband in Bradford County.

Subject index:

Adolescent Behavior

Anxiety in adolescence

Bedbugs

Bispham, David Scull, 1857-1921

1912 October 20

Boarding schools--Pennsylvania

Body image in women

Church and education--Pennsylvania

Coeducation--Pennsylvania

Department stores--Pennsylvania

Dreams

Etiquette for women

Food--Social aspects

Fortune tellers

Hale, Beatrice Forbes-Robertson, b. 1883

1913 January 12

Health behavior in adolescence

Homesickness

Ice cream parlors--Pennsylvania

Normal schools

Pennypacker, Samuel W. (Samuel Whitaker), 1843-1916

1913 March 2

Philips, G. M. (George Morris), 1851-1920

1913 February 9

Schools--Exercises and recreations

Self-esteem in women

Singing--Instruction and study

Students--Language (New words, slang, etc.)

Students--Societies, etc.

Teachers--Training of

Weight gain

West Chester (Pa.)

West Chester Normal School

Women--Education

Correspondents:

Bird, Helen
Bird, Frankie Rowe (Mrs. George N.)

Provenance:

Acquired, 1991.

M-2711
cat. 4/98 rko

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