Free Girl Sleuth by Melanie Rehak Page B

member of the Ladora Band, for which she also played the slide trombone. On occasion, she played at the town Chautauqua, sometimes accompanied by her mother on the piano. She had done summer school in Iowa City in order to finish high school in three years, and she was ready for more urbane surroundings than the small town of Ladora. “Senior activities were dismal,” she recalled of her graduation week, “as four persons couldn’t stir up much excitement . . . no matter how hard we tried . . . I just wanted to forget about it and move on to better things.”
    Mildred was assigned to give the class prophecy—a speech imagining the futures of the foursome—“a fantastic document over which [she] labored many weeks.” This portion of the graduation proceedings took place in the town’s movie house. When Mildred rose to give her address, a “fringe of hang-abouts” outside began to honk their horns so loudly that it obscured all other sounds. Mildred was devastated. “I tried to speak above the honking but couldn’t. The tooting kept on without a break and no one inside the theater made any attempt to go after the hoodlums. Not until I finished the reading did the disturbance cease. No one inside heard a word of my speech. Hurt and angry, I tore up the manuscript.” Though she claimed later on that the experience had taught her never to take her writing too seriously, in truth, it was the idea that others might not take it as seriously as she did that she grasped for the first time that evening, and it made her furious.
    Mildred was headed west to the State University of Iowa in Iowa City, where she enrolled as a freshman in the fall of 1922. The big state colleges had been accepting women with great success for decades by now, and though it was still comparatively rare for girls to attend college, their numbers had doubled between 1910 and 1920. The previous generation of women had used the college campus as a place to organize for suffrage and assert themselves politically. Thanks to their efforts and the victories they had won, Mildred’s generation would use it to find themselves in a whole new way.

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Alma Mater
    â€œT HE H IGHER E DUCATION of Women is one of the great world battle cries for freedom,” thundered the founder of Wellesley College in the school’s opening sermon in 1875. “I believe that God’s hand is in it . . . that He is calling womanhood to come up higher, to prepare herself for great conflicts, for vast reforms in social life, for noblest usefulness.” Henry Fowle Durant was a true New England blue blood, descended from English immigrants who had come over in the 1660s. A lawyer, he had become rich after handling a claim for a rubber company and investing in their product, which he recognized as the future. The land just outside Boston that Wellesley College occupies—five hundred acres of rolling hills and forest, including a lake—was originally intended as a country estate where Durant and his wife, Pauline, planned to build a pleasure palace for their gifted young son. When the child died of diphtheria at the age of eight, Durant and Pauline, heartbroken, struggled to find meaning in their lives. For Henry Durant, the process included a religious conversion, and while he first thought to found an orphanage in his son’s memory, he came to believe that he could best do God’s work by educating women. During the recent Civil War, women had proved eager, among other things, to take over teaching duties from their absent men, only to find themselves ill prepared to do so. This was in great part the result of the prevailing attitude that, as one Boston physician put it, “woman’s brain was too delicate and fragile a thing to attempt the mastery of Greek and Latin.” Durant chose to believe otherwise, and he put his real estate behind his convictions.
    In 1875, twelve years