I Am My Own Odysseus - The Margaret Willis Story

I Am My Own Odysseus The Margaret Willis Story

By Samantha Maddox, Ph.D. Doctoral Dissertation The University of South Carolina

I Am My Own Odysseus

University School Series

Robert W. Butche General Editor Volume 1

AAUS Electronic Publishing Columbus, Ohio www.aaus.net

Samantha Maddox

I Am My Own Odysseus The Story of Margaret Willis

AAUS Electronic Publishing Columbus, Ohio www.aaus.net

eBook Version Copyright Š 2001 Alumni Association of University School, Inc.

Dedicated To My Husband, Zachary, and My Parents, Lawrence and Jo Lynn Kind

Acknowledgments I wish to thank those people whose personal and professional guidance contributed to my success as a graduate student and biographical researcher. Words are inadequate to express my gratitude for your confidence and support.

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My committee, Dr. Lorin Anderson, Dr. Rhonda Jeffries, Dr. Craig Kridel, Dr. Alan Wieder—their advice was expert and their patience was unflagging.

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Dr. Paul Klohr, a former colleague of Margaret Willis’ who enthusiastically assisted me with my project, and who was my personal tour guide during my time in Columbus, Ohio.

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Robert Butche, a former student and later friend of Margaret Willis’, whose impressive memory and eloquent reflections helped to add warmth to my study.

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Dr. Judith James, an English professor at the University of South Carolina who opened up a new world of thought to me.

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My family, who, for four years have patiently accepted the demands of my schedule.

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My husband, Zachary, my partner and avid supporter.

Table of Contents Chapter One 11 Introduction and Nature of the Study 11 Escaping the Stereotype—Why Willis? . . . . . . . 15 The Significance of Educational Biography . . . . 23 Generation Gap—The Dilemmas of a Younger Writer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Data Collection and Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Purpose of Study and Related Research Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Overview of the Design and Organization of the Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Chapter Two 37 The Private World of a Public Woman 37 How She Came to be Margaret Willis . . . . . . . . . 42 Education Made Her What She Was . . . . . . . . . . 46 The Groves of Academe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Exuberance is Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 To Love What Death May Touch . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 The Company She Kept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

Looking Homeward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 The Long Day’s Task is Done . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Chapter Three 65 The University School Years 65 University School Was Unique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 What Led Her There and Kept Her There . . . . . . 73 University School-Inspired Relationships . . . . . . 75 Teaching Assignments and Extra-Curricular

Activities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Senior Trips and Other Excursions . . . . . . . . . . . 85 No Despair for the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Chapter Four 89 Willis the Writer 89 The Task of Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 The Education of Veterans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Professional Women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Adult Study Camps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 The Guinea Pigs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 The University School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 World Travel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Miscellaneous Writing and Professional Activities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Chapter Five 121 A Life of Exploration 121 An Opportunity Too Good to Refuse . . . . . . . . . 127 The Call of Constantinople . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 A Sabbatical in Cairo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Tempting Gateway to New Adventures . . . . . . . 141 I See Wonderful Things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 Chapter Six 147 Can We Go Any Further with This?— In Search of Margaret Willis 147 Double Visage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 The Laugh of the Medusa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 The Cult of True Womanhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 The Genius/Madwoman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 What She Meant to Them . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 Appendix A Epilogue

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The Presence of Autobiography in Biography Bibliography

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Chapter One

Introduction and Nature of the Study

The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come. (Martindale & Root, 1963, p. 176)

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s the train carrying the Ohio State University Laboratory School class of 1955 and its chaperones was en route to its New York City destination that night in May, the lights flickered and then darkened. There was an immediate frenzy on the cars carrying the high school students, but an even greater panic erupted on the car transporting the chaperones. “Someone needs to get to the next car and separate the boys and girls,” said one chaperone, clearly concerned at what might transpire between the students in the dark.

“Why?” asked Margaret Willis. “They are going to do what they are going to do, and they aren’t always going to have us around to intervene. They must learn to make their own decisions” (Robert Butche, 2000a). And that was that! Shortly after, the lights came on, order was restored, and the senior trip was a success. Margaret Willis spoke, and people listened.

While liberal thought and a tolerance for teenage curiosity may not have been completely unheard of in 1955, one likely would

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not expect such from the petite, plainly dressed, unmarried social studies teacher who looked not unlike her friend Eleanor Roosevelt.

Margaret Willis was nothing if not practical. As former student Bill McCormick recalls, “Miss Willis was a realist. She knew fully well how things should be. She also knew fully well how things really were” (emphasis added) (2000). Willis held her students to the highest standards, yet she also appreciated the inherent nature of teens to test their boundaries.

While she understood that there was nothing she could do to alter the inquisitive nature inherent in adolescence, Margaret Willis (1899-1987) was a woman who believed in controlling her own fate.

This characteristic marked Willis’ personal as well as professional life. It did not diminish as Willis aged, either. At the close of her thirty-four year career at the Ohio State University Laboratory School, Willis received an invitation from Wellesley College, her alma mater, to become a guest lecturer of history. In a letter to Joan Fiss Bishop, Director of Placement, Willis wrote, The only kind of post-retirement job in which I might be conceivably interested is the extremely unusual one, and for that reason I cannot describe it. As you know, I have taught in Japan, Turkey, and Egypt, and have worked most of my life in experimental education. I do not intend to round out my career by taking some routine, “cushy” job just to fill time and earn money. Thank you for thinking of me. It is a morale booster to be approached about a position, even though I am not at all interested in it. (box 5/folder 2)

The path of least resistance was never one that

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter One: Introduction and Nature of the Study

interested Willis; she knew that “favourable conditions never come” to those who simply wait passively for them.

After graduating from high school, Willis, born in New York, but a lifetime resident of Mount Vernon, Washington, ventured cross-country to Massachusetts to attend Wellesley College. Upon graduating from Wellesley in 1919, she accepted a two-year position as governess to American children in Japan. The following three years were spent teaching social studies at her hometown high school.

Restlessness caused her to then move to New York to pursue an M. A. in political science from Columbia University, which she received in 1925. Additional degree in hand, Willis moved to Maryland where she taught for two years at the Maryland State Normal School. She spent her evenings studying at Johns Hopkins College for Teachers. In 1927, with no mention of suitors and no intention of settling into a prosaic job in the United States, Willis moved to Turkey to teach history at Constantinople Woman’s College. After a summer visit home in 1929, she returned to Turkey for another two years. During her time in Turkey, Willis spent her summer hiatus studying in Geneva at the Zimmern Institute of International Studies. She returned to the United States after four years in Turkey to teach at the Bennett School in Millbrook, New York. Once more, her evenings were devoted to her own studies; and once more, she returned to Columbia University, a school that had already proven it could provide Willis with the intellectual challenge she demanded.

In a faculty self-evaluation in 1940, Margaret Willis wrote that although she had not taken a course for credit in a few years, “I sometimes read a book [dealing with a particular problem]. In fact, I frequently read up on a problem just as if somebody were making me do it” (b5/f1). Keeping her mind

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sharp and her knowledge current was forever a priority with Willis. She was a woman who spoke her mind; it was essential for her to know that of which she spoke. The way she did this was to read, study, travel, and discuss—something she did from the time she was old enough until the time she was too old to do so.

In 1932 at the age of 33, Willis joined the staff of the University School at Ohio State University with as much experience, professional as well as personal, as many accrue in their entire lives. She accepted a social studies teaching position at this fledgling experimental school because it represented to her all that education could be, in its ideal state.

She remained at the University School for her entire thirtyfour-year career as a history teacher. Given Willis’ predilection for acquiring new experiences, her 1936 letter addressed to University School director Rudolph Lindquist is predictably “Willis” in tone: Insofar as I have a professional career it has resulted from a combination of accident and my personal philosophy that work is such a large part of life, and that there are so many interesting things that need doing that a person owes it to himself to work at something he likes. I have never had any ambition, in the usual sense, nor any well-defined long term aim. I enjoy doing things that present new problems or old problems in forms which are new enough to be challenging. When any job has become so familiar that understood routine bulks large, I have always gone to something else, taking what chance threw at my feet; my only demand of the new

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter One: Introduction and Nature of the Study

experience being that it should be new….It has rather surprised me to find my interest still enlisted so actively here in spite of the frustrations and disappointments of which we have all had our share. (b5/f2)

Lindquist had solicited a letter from each University School faculty that detailed their “professional goals and aspirations.” Willis, who, in the estimation of her colleagues and employers, wrote, studied, and taught tirelessly, was typically humble and without pretense in her self-reflection.

Could anyone doubt that Margaret Willis was a natural-born educator if ever there was one? In a time when teachers are accused of not knowing their subject matter, of being simply “warm bodies” to fill growing teaching vacancies in the country, of being apathetic and burned out,Margaret Willis seems to be an anomaly. What was it about Willis that made her so innately curious, passionate, and motivated to the degree that she is not only an anomaly in present times, but in her own time as well? How was this woman able to acquire such mobility in the times in which she lived? Moreover, in what ways did the courage with which she seemed innately gifted affect her life, travels, and teaching?

Escaping the Stereotype—Why Willis?

The detailed study of the life of any individual always begs the question, Why? The life of Margaret Willis would be an interesting one had she lived even from the mid to late twentieth century; it is even more fascinating to know that she lived the life she chose—spanning, to a large degree, the twentieth century—at a time when women’s lives typically

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were Procrustean beds conceived and designed by men.

As a culture, no less than the Greeks, we have occupied ourselves with mythologizing women.

Bookstore shelves are filled with works trying to understand women’s lives in terms of goddesses or ancient heroines. Simone de Beauvoir cautions us, however, that only by demythologizing women can we come to an understanding of their real nature and complexity. Instead of being able to contain in our consciousness the infinitely varied weavings of real living women, we have occupied ourselves as a society with stereotype, another form of mythology.

(Josselson, 1996, p. 8)

With her professional archives at the University of South Carolina’s Museum of Education and numerous students and several colleagues still living and eager to speak about her, now is the time to pursue the life of Margaret Willis beyond what stereotypes would have us believe about the lives of women during Willis’ time. For every Margaret Willis who lived life on her own terms, there were “dozens of others who felt trapped by the conflicts inherent in the combined lives of wife, mother, and writer…they abandoned their work; they left their husbands…they became embittered wives and mothers American culture is famous for” (Wagner-Martin, 1994, p.

27). Willis was no Penelope who stayed home while her Odysseus traveled; Willis became her own Odysseus.

Willis was certainly not the only woman educator with an independent spirit; Laura Zirbes and Lou LaBrant were contemporaries within Willis’ teaching community at the Ohio

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter One: Introduction and Nature of the Study

State University Laboratory School. Tony Reid (1993) explored the life of Zirbes, as Paul Thomas (1998) shed light on the achievements of Lou LaBrant. Margaret Willis’ life and work, or rather lifework, as the two for Willis were permanently enmeshed, deserve equal attention . Kliebard (1995) surveyed the history of what has been known as the progressive era in education, yet his compendium falls far from the mark in its inclusion of women educators during that time. The work of Reid and Thomas set about to add to the history of the progressive era; a biography of Margaret Willis would give further credence to the existence and indispensability of women educators at that time in American education.

Additionally, the need for women’s biographies has been addressed by a growing number of feminist writers. One may think that any step toward giving the lives of women equal attention is a step forward. However, some scholars warn of the dangers of men writing the lives of women. Not only does Wagner-Martin (1994) encourage the lives of more women to be told, she stresses the differences inherent in telling the life of a woman as opposed to telling the life of a man: While writing biography of men means concentrating on the subject’s accomplishments, one of the main questions in writing women’s biography is, What are the accomplishments in a woman’s life? What motivation has driven the subject’s choices?

What led the subject to do more than lead a traditional woman’s life?” (p. 6)

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For male biographers such as Reid and Thomas to write women’s lives, they must be ever aware of the ways in which men’s lives differ from women’s. Wagner-Martin (1998) asserts that the chief problem of writing the life of a woman is that “our traditional pattern of biography as we know it…is the narrative of a male life” (p. 91). Further, the “traditional” biography typically focuses on the subject’s public successes, and “the success of a biography depicting lives of great success…depends on…contemporary culture’s definitions of ‘success…’” (p. 93). Wagner-Martin would advise male biographers of female subjects such as Reid and Thomas to keep these differences foremost in their consciousness.

Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1997) would argue that the ways in which men understand their world is diametrically opposed to the ways in which women understand their world; therefore, any male biographer of a female subject is doomed to misrepresent, however unintentionally, her life. Men, according to Belenky et al., have always been associated with sources of “right,” “authority,” and “Truth;” whereas women have always been defined (and defined themselves) as receivers of knowledge (p.

37). Therefore, male biographers, by virtue of their gender, will write the lives of their female subjects through this lens, according to Belenky et al. The authors may also add that because of the roles with which women both are defined and define themselves, they have never questioned the legitimacy of the male biographer’s version of his female subject’s life. A biographer of Margaret Willis must be especially wary of the “traditional” biography, because Willis’ life was so public and because much of her success was publicly measured. In short, Willis’ life seemed to be measured in similar ways as her male

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counterparts, so the temptation is greater to focus on the outward events in her life instead of pulling aside the public mask to reveal the private woman, as Wagner-Martin and Belenky et al. believe the biographer of a woman must.

Willis, for reasons this biographer aspires to illuminate, lived more independently than women were expected to live at the time. She never married and bore no children. She traveled worldwide with no companion except on the few occasions she traveled with other women, and taught and wrote in surroundings largely dominated by men. Furthermore, she seemed to fare well in this environment. Wagner-Martin (1994), however, warns against the oversimplification of a woman’s life: “…for women subjects, whose lives nearly always bridge the public and the private, a biography that simplifies or ignores the complex would be inaccurate” (p. 97).

While a superficial study of Willis may reveal a woman fully satisfied with her work at the University School, a closer reading reveals a woman who clearly saw opportunities denied her because of her gender. Willis professionally and tenaciously protested what she perceived as instances of gender discrimination at the University School.

Correspondence revealed that she was displeased that Arthur Moehlman was appointed assistant professor while she remained an instructor. William Van Til was also named assistant professor before her. Willis believed that she was overlooked in these appointments. She never suggested that she receive promotions before others who also deserved them; rather, she expected to receive promotions along with her male colleagues (b1/f1). Willis, who was employed by Ohio State University to teach social studies in the laboratory school, eventually was named associate professor. Perhaps a reason for the delay in her appointment was that she did not

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technically teach at the university level; she remained a secondary school teacher throughout her career.

Although the word “feminist” was not part of Willis’ vocabulary, she clearly exhibited feminist beliefs in her teaching, travels, and writing. Willis’ determination to obtain promotions fairly due her suggests that she was resolved not to share the fate of Virginia Woolf’s Judith Shakespeare, William’s equally talented, yet overlooked, sister whose tragic life never received the respect it deserved. During Willis’ lifetime, university professors were predominantly male, and conditions for female university educators were not promising.

However, Willis proved that tenacity can pay off for a female intellectual in a male-dominated profession.

I believe that mankind’s future depends most on what he does, not on what he feels or guesses. New problems are always arising and always will arise. Improvements must always be made if mankind is to progress. We can’t just follow the past or dream of what the future might be. We have to work continually and with determination if we are ever to control the forces which threaten us. My goal in life is to solve my own and society’s problems. (b5/f6)

While she counted men and married women among her friends, Willis found value and kinship in fellow unmarried female colleagues. So dear were two friends in particular, Norma Albright and Lou LaBrant, that William Van Til recalls their being referred to by University School faculty as “the trio” (2000a). She, along with Albright and LaBrant, collaborated on reports and articles regarding the University

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter One: Introduction and Nature of the Study

School. They were early proof of the accomplishments women can achieve when they collaborate. Like Belenky et al., Willis and her female colleagues and co-authors researched matters they felt were important to themselves as well as to their students with the freedom that could be found only among women collaborators. Although there is no archival evidence to support that this point emerged in any of their discussions or correspondence, the authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing would assert that it must have: “It was our unwritten agreement to work ‘in the women’s way’ all the while we were trying to name what that way might be” (p. xii). Belenky et al. are careful to note that the “women’s way” does not translate as the “passive way” or “feel-good” way. They recall beginning their project with the intention of each woman’s voice being heard equally throughout, but soon realized that they each brought with them different skills and talents—interviewing, writing, organizing, editing—and that equality was not always possible or desired if they hoped to create a quality work (p. xii). Willis and her female co-authors would almost certainly have embraced the kind of collaboration practiced by the authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing.

The fact that Willis chose to co-author works with her female colleagues speaks to Gilbert and Gubar’s (1979) “anxiety of authorship” that women authors experience.

Gilbert and Gubar ask, “What does it mean to be a woman writer in a culture whose fundamental definitions of literary authority are, as we have seen, both overtly and covertly patriarchal?” (p. 21). Gilbert and Gubar cite Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” insofar as it has no practical application for women writers. Bloom explains that a “strong poet must engage in heroic warfare with his precursor, for, involved as

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he is in a literary Oedipal struggle, a man can only become a poet by somehow invalidating his poetic father” (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979, p. 22). However, Gilbert and Gubar suggest that the woman writer’s male precursors fail to define the ways in which she experiences her persona as an author; in fact, the woman writer perceives herself as a “pioneer” in ways that her male counterpart has not experienced “since the Renaissance, or at least since the Romantic era” (p. 25). This “pioneer” spirit links women writers in what may be called a “secret sisterhood” of a literary subculture (p. 25). Given the pioneer spirit of Albright, LaBrant, Willis, and Zirbes, it is no surprise that these kindred women worked together to forge standards for female authorship.

The story of Margaret Willis should appeal to educators, male and female, who long to abandon the fads in their profession in favor of a meaningful dialogue of pragmatic and philosophical questions. Willis’ story also speaks to females, decades later, who seek to transcend stereotypical roles in their professions. Willis strained against barriers and questioned the norm long before it was socially fashionable for women to do so.

The Significance of Educational Biography A biographer surely feels the pressure to justify her subject as worthy of a detailed study. However, this pressure must be experienced to a lesser degree if one’s subject is a newsworthy public figure. An educational biographer whose subject is not widely known must have a strong constitution or else she may suffer from an inferiority complex when her biography stands toe to toe with biographies of other, more

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter One: Introduction and Nature of the Study

widely known, educators. Leon Edel (1984) wrote, “Few ‘ordinary’ lives are written. One supposes that readers do not want to read about the ordinary but the extraordinary” (p. 14).

However, as those in the field of education have long known, an educator need not have world renown to have an impact in her classroom. Margaret Willis lived extraordinarily in a time that could have bred acquiescence and monotony in a woman had she allowed it. Craig Kridel (1998) wrote, “Biographical inquiry provides a fresh perspective on and new possibilities and dimensions for education—new ways to examine how one describes the behavior of others, new ways to appraise the impact of the pedagogical process on students and teachers, new ways to explain how educational policy manifests itself in the lives of individuals” (p. 4). At a time when lives of women educators are being acknowledged as significant and inherently different from their male counterparts, a biography of Margaret Willis, someone whose gender did not seem to impair her success, provides an especially “fresh perspective.”

Although much has been written about the time generally referred to as the progressive education movement, a biography that documents one educator’s thirty-four year experience at an experimental school can provide insight into the evolution of a progressive school. As Paul Murray Kendall (1986) wrote, “History deals in generalizations about a time…Biography deals in the particularities of one life (p. 33).

The self-reflective Willis, who documented her insights throughout her life, offers readers an insider’s perspective of one woman’s life in the field of education. A biography of Willis can also explore the contributions she made and the ways her own life was affected by one of the most successful experimental schools the nation has seen.

Margaret Willis’ passion for learning is apparent in the

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choices she made and in her correspondence with friends and colleagues. Learning, for Willis, was inextricably bound to living; for her, one could not exist without the other. Paul Murray Kendall (1986) wrote, “by and large, our best biographies present men of high action or men of letters…men of letters are schooled, by temperament and talent, to examine themselves rather more assiduously than other beings do” (p.

34). The records and writings of Margaret Willis trace a development of ideas and a change in personality. Her thoughts are permanently recorded for posterity. A biography of Willis will breathe warmth into a period of educational history and one teacher’s attempt to effect change, beginning in her classroom as well as her life. Perhaps Willis left an intentional trail of literary breadcrumbs, as did Rudyard Kipling (1942) who wrote, And for the little, little span The dead are borne in mind, Seek not to question other than The books I leave behind. (p. 836)

A biography of the strong-willed, career-minded Margaret Willis is especially timely given the mental game of tug-of-war many contemporary working women play on a daily basis. In Margaret Willis they will find the archetypal “working woman”—not a woman who necessarily “had it all,” for she never married or had children of her own, but a woman whose life was filled with meaning and passion. Many contemporary women would champion the causes of prefeminism feminists such as Margaret Willis, Laura Zirbes, and Lou La Brant. Paul Nagel (1986) wrote,

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter One: Introduction and Nature of the Study

I feel strongly that in biography the author…should lead the reader into a life, and at certain points leave the reader to reflect about what the story means. One of the great joys of biography is that if it succeeds, the author and the reader each have contributed to understanding some of the universals that are implicit in every life. (p. 104)

Andre Maurois (1986) wrote, “The biographer, like the portrait painter and the landscape painter, must pick out the essential qualities in the whole subject which he is contemplating” (p. 7). A comprehensive biography of Margaret Willis, in addition to being impossible to create, is also undesirable. As Maurois wrote, the biographer selects what is “essential” about her subject that will help the subject to rise, multi-dimensioned and breathing, from the page. In deference to the tradition of narrative biography, this biographer aims to narrate the life story of Margaret Willis; while she will provide a thorough list of the writings of Margaret Willis and will illuminate dominant themes in the works of Willis, she will not provide an analysis of the works themselves. Such discussions of reliability and validity of data may find themselves at home in another work dealing with Margaret Willis, but such matters will not be addressed at this time.

An educational biography of Margaret Willis may not necessarily represent the experiences of other professional women of the 1930s-1960s, but her biography will provide a juxtaposition of her experiences with those of her male peers and colleagues during the same time period. Leon Edel (1984) wrote, “The ways in which men and women handle their lives,

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their particular forms of sexual politics for example, their handling of human relations, their ways of wooing the world or disdaining it—all this is germane to biography, it is the very heart of a biography” (p. 30) To develop an understanding of Willis’s professional experiences, a biographer must search her private experiences for motivations and conflicts. To avoid reducing Willis’s life to the typical oppressed woman in a man’s world at the beginning of the twentieth century, attention must be paid to her unique personal experiences that led to her professional experiences. Henry James once said, “To live over people’s lives is nothing, unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the change, the varying intensity of the same—since it was by these things they themselves lived” (Strouse, 1986, p. 183). Henry James’ great theme in his writings was the confrontation of two worlds, American and European; perhaps a biographer’s great theme is the confrontation of two worlds, public and private. The life of Margaret Willis is rich with complexity and integrity that deserve meaningful examination at this time.

Generation Gap—The Dilemmas of a Younger Writer “Writing about another person’s life is an awesome task, so one must proceed with a gentleness born from knowing that the subject and the author share the frailties of human mortality” (Nagel, 1986, p. 115). A biographer’s challenge lies in not only revealing the subject’s “figure under the carpet,” but in also discovering her own hidden biases (Edel, 1984).

In the study of Margaret Willis, there is a temptation to reference feminist writings and ideologies that were never a part of Willis’ life. Without the aid of Gloria Steinem, Camille

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter One: Introduction and Nature of the Study

Paglia, Sandra Gilbert, or Susan Gubar, Margaret Willis made sense of her professional and personal lives. Although Willis’ life fairly shouts of feminist beliefs, it is almost certain that Willis never uttered the words, “I am woman, hear me roar.”

While it would be infinitely easier to align Willis with some feminist theory and be done with it, the fact is that for the majority of her life she was never privy to this phenomenon known as “feminism.” During pivotal moments in her life, Willis could not rely on the assistance of feminist teachings and writings. Perhaps she would not have relied on these even if they had been available to her.

Mark Schorer believes, like many others, that “the biography itself has two subjects, and two subjects only—the figure whose life is being re-created, of course, and the mind that is re-creating it…” (cited in Oates, 1986, p. 77). I am a female biographer. A reader of this biography may construe that I overly identify with Willis’ early “feminist” struggles or make concessions that a male biographer would not. Edel (1984) warns of over-identification: “If there ensues an emotional involvement on the part of the biographer he or she must be reminded that love is blind. Psychology calls this ‘transference’” (p. 14). Edel concedes that a biographer’s relation to her subject is “the very core of the biographical enterprise” (p. 14). A biographer must always keep present in her mind possible biases or concessions that may affect the viability of the biography.

However, shared gender aside, the experiences of a female biographer born in the 1970s and the experiences of a female educator born in 1899 are nearly polar opposites. The female biographer of the twenty-first century will read the experiences of Margaret Willis through a contemporary lens.

As far ahead of her time as Margaret Willis was, the times in

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which she lived limited her in ways with which a contemporary woman cannot empathize. Jean Strouse (1986) wrote, “[L]ife studies don’t tell only about the past; our approaches to history reflect the ideas and concerns of the present” (p. 164). Further, Nabokov suggests that biographers use their subjects to make sense of their own lives—to complete their lives somehow through the lives of their biographical subjects (Edel, 1984, p. 2).

Finally, Margaret Willis died in 1987; therefore, it is impossible to conclusively verify her thoughts, practices, and reactions. Although the study will involve those who knew Willis and were close to her, this will not yield the same dimension that speaking directly with Willis would. Margaret Willis’ former students themselves have long since graduated from high school and the likelihood that they have inaccurate memories of their high school experiences, as well as of specific memories of their history teacher, is a reality that must be addressed. Her former students, colleagues, and friends may have divergent memories or opinions of Willis given the necessity for a woman in the 1930s through the 1960s to conform to male standards in the workplace setting and perhaps disguise personality traits that seem “unsuitable” for a professional woman to display. Lastly, what Willis allowed herself to reveal to her students and colleagues may differ from what she revealed to her close friends.

Data Collection and Analysis Although Willis is no longer living, numerous former students and several colleagues are. In addition, Willis’ professional papers are housed in the University of South Carolina’s Museum of Education. The combination of

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter One: Introduction and Nature of the Study

interviews with former colleagues and students, and the examination of archival records, will assist in the recreation of Willis’ life, travels, and teaching.

The reunion of the Ohio State University School in July 2000 yielded anecdotes collected from Margaret Willis’ former students, Robert Butche, David Clark, Bill McCormick, and Kip Patterson, as well as their perceptions of her as a teacher at the experimental school. The interview setting at the reunion was semi-structured with several guiding questions that framed the interview. Willis’ former students answered questions such as: 1.

Was Willis aware of her importance during her lifetime? a.

Do you think she was the "heart" of the University School? If not, who was? b.

What do you think Willis contributed most to the University School? c.

Did she articulate her feminist beliefs? If so, how?

2.

What kind of personality did Willis possess? a.

What was her private demeanor? An example of typical behavior? b.

What was her public demeanor? An example of typical behavior? c.

What was the major difference

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between them?

3.

What were some of her physical attributes? a.

Were there any common gestures or expressions Willis used? b.

Was Willis traditionally "feminine" in her appearance?

4.

How did Willis teach? a.

What was a typical class, if there was one?

How did she handle discipline problems?

How did she grade students?

How did she relate to her students?

b. c. d.

One former student and later friend of Margaret Willis, Robert W. Butche, has written a book, Image of Excellence: The Ohio State University School. This book is unique for at least two reasons. First, it is the only published history of the University School; second, it is the only work about the University School that is told by a former student. Butche’s text provides contextual information that Willis’ other former students may have forgotten or may recall only vaguely. In addition, authoring a book that recalls the University School’s history, Butche also maintained a close friendship with Margaret Willis, visiting her at her home in Mount Vernon after her retirement from the University School. His perspective was especially helpful, as his relationship with Willis evolved over many years and his memories of Willis are quite vivid.

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter One: Introduction and Nature of the Study

The reunion at Ohio State University allowed for a discussion with Mary Tolbert, a former colleague of Margaret Willis’, an extended interview with Margaret Willis’ colleague and friend Paul Klohr. There were several semi-structured interviews with Dr. Klohr over the course of two days, as well as several conversations about Willis and her context at the University School. While Dr. Klohr addressed the same questions as Willis’ former students, his responses offered a different slant on Willis. As a contemporary of Willis’ he was privy to things not known.

Dr. William Van Til, a former history teacher at the University School and colleague of Willis’ for ten years, addressed Willis and the University School in his autobiography, My Way of Looking at It (1983). He also answered questions regarding Margaret Willis and his relationship with her.

Six linear feet of Willis’ correspondence, papers, photographs, and other professional and personal documents, are housed at the University of South Carolina’s Museum of Education. These archives, in part, helped to reconstruct Willis’ personal opinions and beliefs. Her documents helped to answer research questions; but as with the interviews, it was vital to maintain an open mind, and to know that what these documents reveal would affect the research questions.

The interviews of Margaret Willis’ former students and former colleagues, as well as the archival research, provided information that supplemented and clarified one another. The interviews gave dimension to Willis that was lacking in the sometimes-dry documents. Anecdotes collected during the interviews helped to give Willis “life.” A source of interest was in if/how the interviews refuted what was found

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in the Willis archives in the Museum of Education. The research questions guided how the data was treated, but they were malleable enough to accommodate unexpected information; the research questions evolved and became more precise through continued research. A “willing suspension of disbelief” was necessary as one moved through the research process.

The records and writings of Margaret Willis along with the interviews with colleagues, students, and friends, trace a development of her ideas and her personality. A biography of Willis breathes warmth into a period of educational history and one teacher’s attempt to effect change beginning in her classroom as well as her life. An educational biography of Margaret Willis does not necessarily represent the experiences of other professional women of the 1930s-1960s, but her biography provides a juxtaposition of her experiences with those of her male peers and colleagues during the same time period.

Purpose of Study and Related Research Questions The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of courage in Margaret Willis’ life, specifically as it relates to her commitment to progressive thought in her personal life, her career at the Ohio State University, and her travels.

Specifically, the study will address, but is not limited to, the following research questions: 1.

In what ways was Willis’ private life marked by her progressive beliefs?

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter One: Introduction and Nature of the Study

a.

2.

3.

4.

How did her early progressive beliefs lead to away from her home in Washington State to attend Wellesley? b.

In what ways did her progressive beliefs affect her relationships with her family, colleagues, and/or friends?

What led Willis to the University School at the Ohio State University?

In what way(s) did she contribute to the experimental school? a.

What did she hope to learn from the experimental school?

How did her travels influence Willis? a.

How did these affect the way Willis perceived the world? b.

How did these affect the way Willis

Overview of the Design and Organization of the Study Edel (1984) wrote, “Every life takes its own form and a biographer must find the ideal and unique literary form that will express it. In structure a biography need no longer be strictly chronological…Lives are rarely lived that way. An individual repeats patterns learned in childhood, and usually moves forward and backward through memory” (p. 31).

Consequently, a biography that is organized according to motifs will possess greater verisimilitude than a biography that reads like a calendar or daily planner. Biographers must “extract individuals from their chaos yet create and illusion

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that they are in the midst of life…the biographer who is unable to do this creates a waxworks…and often a caricature” (Edel, 1984, p. 15).

The organization of this biographical dissertation will be as follows. Following this introductory chapter, there is (A) a chapter devoted to Margaret Willis’ private life, (B) a chapter focused on her career at the Ohio State University School, (C) a descriptive chapter of the Willis’ writing, and (D) a chapter concerned with her extensive travels. An additional summative chapter (D) will address the dissertation experience and implications and questions for further study of the life of Margaret Willis.

Chapter Two

The Private World of a Public Woman

There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning, and yearning.

(Morley, 1989, p. 325)

T

he documents and memories left behind by Margaret Willis are representative of the enigma that was Willis. Her archives suggest a woman whose life was given over to her profession. School years were spent teaching at the University School, and summers, for the most part, were spent travelling to schools around the country and the world to further her own or others’ knowledge. Willis was not inclined to maintain extensive diaries or sentimental records; therefore, very little is known about the familial relationships, friendships, or romances of her life. Dr. William Van Til, a colleague of Willis’ at University School for over a decade, recalls no details of Willis’ personal life: From September 1934 to June 1943, I talked to Margaret Willis almost every working day of every academic year. But I can tell you practically nothing about her family, her religious beliefs, her social experience, her life

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away from school, her friends, etc…I do remember some conversations about current issues as to liberalism, but the closest I came to learning about her private life was when she and I talked about her teaching in Turkey.

(2000a)

Perhaps an explanation of Willis’ lack of verbal and written reflection lies in two letters she wrote—one to Joan Fiss Bishop from Wellesley College and another to Wilford Aikin, director of the Eight Year Study. At the time of her retirement she declined a lecturer position at Wellesley offered

by Fiss because such a position implied that Willis would no longer be out in the world “experiencing;” rather that she would become a stereotypical retiree who is forced into reliving the “good old days” because she was no longer as physically capable of new adventures. To Aikin, Willis wrote, “My own career in teaching had been largely accidental and pretty haphazard before I came to the University School. I had managed to accumulate a great many experiences, but had done little toward thinking them through” (b2/f2).

It is difficult to imagine that a woman with the reputation Willis developed at University School—her words and actions were so carefully measured—would have ever described her decision to teach as “haphazard.” However, had Willis not found a school such as University School that nurtured and enhanced her natural curiosity and desire to inspire a similar kind of passion for knowledge in others, she may well have moved on to another profession. Indeed, her students at The Cairo School for American Children noted in their 1947 yearbook that Margaret Willis, their principal, “never intended to be a teacher! (b5/f12) Willis herself

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Two: The Private World of a Public Woman

admitted after her retirement that, as the child of a former schoolteacher, she was sure she “didn’t want to teach!” (b5/f16) This opinion, however, was replaced with enthusiasm when, as a senior at Wellesley, Willis saw a job posting for someone to tutor American children in Japan. It was at this point in her life that Willis heeded the call to teach.

Without her wide experiences at home and abroad, Willis would have likely felt less qualified to teach, although, to hear Willis tell it, she was never satisfied with her teaching performance. In an interview she gave after her retirement, Willis said, “Any teacher who is satisfied that she has done a good year’s job is just kidding herself; a good teacher is one who is never satisfied with her own performance” (b5/f16).

Margaret Willis’ world travels made her uniquely suited to teaching world history; she was able to offer students an insight into the world as no other University School teacher could. For Willis, there was no substitute for living actively and intensely, and to resort to ruminating over days or memories past would mean certain stagnation. Willis needed to be in the midst of the action instead of in the wings reporting or reflecting on it. For Willis, the center of the “good” life must be learning; earning was a necessary aspect of living, and yearning should only occur if it preceded action.

Little is known of Margaret Willis’ private life perhaps because it was consumed by her public life. What John McManis said of writing Ella Flagg Young’s life could be said of writing Margaret Willis’: “Almost no help in such an undertaking can be derived directly from her… her interest is in her work and not in herself, making it impossible to secure personal touches needed to understand the meaning of her acts…”(1999, p.68). Willis herself would likely have found little in her own personal life she considered “worthy” of a

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biography. Her resume and archives of personal papers are filled with accounts of her countless and tireless public activities—teaching, traveling, and writing for professional journals.

It is rare to happen upon a random sheet of Willis’ private reflections or notes from or about family and other personal relationships. Rosemary Donatelli’s later observations about Young are also observations that may be made of Willis: Whether the circumstances of continuous involvement in educational activity and study prohibited a life other than a public one or whether she deliberately sought a personal life which appears to have been closed to further family or personal relationships in order to devote full time to education, is impossible to determine… There remains only the fact that Mrs. Young’s personal life was private and very much her own—and the speculation that at some point in her life the public figure and the private person became one and the same so that a life other than one of active professional concern was no longer desired or possible. (1999, p. 69).

As Wagner-Martin (1994) noted, it was not unusual for the biography of a man to be something of a “laundry list” of public deeds and accomplishments; his life was measured by his public successes and failures. However, when writing about a woman’s life, one must consider that much of her life was not of public record. Indeed she measured her successes and failures not by public accomplishments—very often there was no public role for a woman to hold—but by private accomplishments such as bearing children, raising a family,

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Two: The Private World of a Public Woman

and providing emotional support for a husband. Willis may be an anomaly in Wagner-Martin’s estimation because she did live so publicly. From the archives of Willis’ papers one will find such things as travel itineraries, professional correspondence, and curriculum guides for a variety of schools at home and abroad.

Although she revealed very few explicit details of her personal life to assist future researchers, Willis’ personality and demeanor may be reconstructed, to an extent, from a multitude of sources: her family life, her education, early jobs she took, her appearance, her choice of friends, her romantic experiences, her homes, and how she conducted herself after her retirement. Jackie M. Blount asserted that essentially, “even the seemingly smallest detail of a woman’s daily life contains patterns that radiate through the rest of her experience. Thus the private and the public are inextricably linked” (1999, p. 69).

As Willis’ personality is revealed through her choices and actions, one must be careful to allow room for readers to decide for themselves whether Willis’ choices and actions made sense, given the cultural norms of the time. Willis’ audacity to leave her family and home, to choose education and world travel over marrying and raising children, to refuse to bend her personality to meet that expected of a trite unmarried school marm, may well be construed as acts of defiance. Defiance on a woman’s part in the early twentieth century did not necessarily require that she commit a criminal act such as murder, or have an illicit affair: [I]t might well have been her decision not to marry…It took Adrienne Rich’s empathetic essay on Emily Dickinson, explaining her

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choice to withdraw as a reasonable means of giving herself time and space to be the poet she was, to change the years of censure of the “strange” poet. (Wagner-Martin, 1994, p. 9)

Readers of Willis’ biography may ask, “Does information regarding matter such as her home life, love life, and physical beauty belong in a biography?” Wagner-Martin would answer, “Yes; for a biography of less than the complex whole would be inaccurate” (1994, p. 11).

How She Came to be Margaret Willis One wonders what kind of early twentieth century environment grows a child who becomes a strongly independent woman such as Margaret Willis. By all accounts her childhood was not a radical one, although Willis seemed to inherit her parents’ courage and curiosity. Willis’ childhood and early youth, like other aspects of her personal life, were not openly discussed by the adult Willis, with the exception of three newspaper interviews she gave after her retirement. It could be that during the years she taught, Willis found little reason to reminisce about her childhood, as she felt it had no direct relevance to whatever was the task at hand. It could also be that she guarded her memories and her family home as a private refuge reserved only for herself and family members.

For the most part, the intimate details of Margaret Willis’ early life are lost; she has no surviving family to verify or elaborate upon those years. Although frustrating for the biographer of Willis, it is somehow fitting that much of the private life of this woman who lived much in the public eye remains hidden.

The second of three daughters born to teachers Herbert

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Two: The Private World of a Public Woman

L. and May Smith Willis, Margaret Miriam Willis was born in 1899 in upstate New York and lived on a Christmas tree farm owned by her family (Paul Klohr, 2000a). Before he took up farming, Willis’ father had been a schoolteacher in New York and a school principal in West Virginia. It was while he was teaching in New York that Herbert Willis met and married fellow teacher May Smith (b5/f16). Herbert eventually moved the family west, first to Seattle and then to Skagit County, and became something of an “experimenter in agricultural techniques” (b5/f16). Moving from one profession to another did not fill H. L. Willis with fear or apprehension; rather, he seemed to relish the excitement of the new experience. Her father’s spirit of adventure was apparently noted by Margaret Willis.

Although Willis called her family a “congenial group” and came home to visit during holidays and summers, she was clearly influenced by and most impressed by her mother. It was her mother who Willis focused on in her post-retirement newspaper interviews whenever the topic of family arose. May Smith grew up in Texas, but decided to attend Wellesley College after reading about it in a Harper’s magazine article.

After her graduation from Wellesley, May Smith taught in both Kentucky and New York before meeting and marrying Herbert L. Willis. After the family eventually moved to Seattle, Mrs. Willis became active in civic affairs, helping found the civic improvement club (b5/f16).

Willis’ mother, in the words of Margaret Willis, “was a pretty liberal thinker for her day” (b5/f16). According to Willis, “although she [Mrs. Willis] had three daughters and a friend had only sons, when the friend got pretentious and said she was rearing voters, my mother said, ‘Well so am I!’ and of course that was before women were enfranchised” (b5/f16).

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Clearly the young Margaret found a role model in her mother.

When, in 1919, Margaret Willis told her parents of her decision to move to Japan, her mother was most supportive. In fact, her mother even joined her in the summer of 1930 and they traveled around Europe together (b5/f16).

When Willis was six years old the family moved west to Skagit County, Washington, where prospects for farming were more favorable in the small community of Mount Vernon. There Willis’ father quickly became a leader in the community as well as a successful farmer (Butche, 2000, p.

56). In Mount Vernon the family turned from Christmas tree farming to tulips and later sweet peas, as tulips were and remain a large commercial crop in the Mount Vernon area of Skagit County (Kelley, 2000). The family called 1612 McLean Road home from the time they settled there in 1905 until Willis’ death in 1987 (b5/f16).

Willis left her family home in Washington for the first time to attend college back east at Wellesley College, her mother’s alma mater. While she would travel quite far from her home during her lifetime in search of the world, she always returned home—to teach at her hometown high school, to visit her family during holidays. She retired to the stately family home to live with her sister, Elizabeth, only a few miles from her elder sister, Virginia, and her husband. Margaret Willis was equally close to her sisters; however, Elizabeth, being widowed, lived with Willis, while Virginia lived close by with her husband. Not one to favor convenience or nostalgia, Willis’ choice to move back to Skagit County upon her retirement, to the family home, no less, implies that home possessed an attraction for her that exceeded the wanderlust that once carried her across the world from her family.

Although Willis made frequent trips home to visit

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Two: The Private World of a Public Woman

family and spent holidays with them, she was not given to easy displays of affection or maudlin sentimentality, recalls former student and later friend of Willis, Robert Butche. However, he recalls, The family was close-knit, for all were frequent guests at the old family homestead for holidays and summers for years before her parents’ deaths. I never saw Margaret physically affectionate; [but] I think historians are sentimental people and Margaret was an historian. She demonstrated very close and friendly relations with her sister Elizabeth, and they spoke warmly of one another. (2000c)

Butche’s use of the word “sentimental” to describe historians, and by extension, Margaret Willis, does not imply the negative, overemotional connotations that may be associated with the word; “sentimental suggests a melodramatic evocation of feeling, [and] that it is often applied to women’s lives or writings should be balanced with the reminder that not everything that evokes emotion is bad” (Wagner-Martin, 1994, p. 15). Additionally, Simone de Beauvoir knew that often the perception is “women prefer the emotions to reason,” and that “reason is never useful to them” (1952, p. 239). Willis was close to her family, and her friends considered her a loyal and concerned confidante. However in all matters, whether it was speaking her mind at a staff meeting, or expressing affection for her family, Willis acted with a degree of stoicism and reserve, never the unrestrained melodramatics that Wagner-Martin and de Beauvoir believe is regularly associated with women.

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Education Made Her What She Was In his 1719 essay “On the Education of Women,” Daniel Defoe wrote, [Women] should be brought to read books, and especially history; and so to read as to make them understand the world, and be able to know and judge of things when they hear of them…Women, in my observation, are generally quick and sharp. If a woman be well bred, and taught the proper management of her natural wit, she proves generally very sensible and retentive…a creature without comparison. (Halsall, 2000)

Margaret Willis would surely have been both amused by and in agreement with at least parts of Defoe’s proclamations in the essay that preceded her by over a century.

She certainly valued reading and education as a means for understanding the world, but to her credit she never acquired a “proper management of her natural wit.” While Defoe’s essay implies that the education of women makes them more delightful companions for their husbands, Willis construed education as a means to achieve independence of thought and action.

Simone de Beauvoir knew the kind of education of which Defoe wrote, and she recognized that “the worst handicap [women] have is the besotting education imposed upon them; the oppressor always strives to dwarf the oppressed; man intentionally deprives women of their opportunities” (1952, p. 239). At a time when it was still novelty for a woman to pursue a college degree, Willis refused

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Two: The Private World of a Public Woman

to take a “decorative” degree that would do nothing more useful than adorn a wall; neither would she willingly accept a “besotting education” in order to become a cleverer or more novel wife.

In 1936, Willis wrote to Rudolph Lindquist, “…[T]here are so many interesting things that need doing that a person owes it to himself to work at something he likes” (b5/f2). She wrote on several occasions that what she most sought in her life and work was a new challenge, with the only demand of the new challenge being that it should be new. Willis was a ceaseless and dauntless student; she continued her formal education at every chance she had at institutions such as Columbia University and Johns Hopkins College for Teachers.

She also made the world her school, seeking not comfort and rest on her vacations, but history and adventure.

Willis’ undergraduate records from Wellesley College in Massachusetts reveal surprisingly mediocre academic grades. In courses such as Biblical History, Chemistry, Philosophy, and Hygiene, Willis earned “C’s” (b1/f1). “A’s” spotted her transcripts, but by no means dominated her academic records from Wellesley. Her transcript may indicate a young woman not yet endowed with the passion for learning for which she was later known. Perhaps Willis found her required courses “besotting” and therefore expended little effort in them. Then again, Willis may have been a student whose interests were so diverse that she had difficulty focusing on one subject for long enough to earn an “A” that by the estimation of so many marks one’s intelligence.

After earning a degree in 1919, Willis accepted a position as a governess in Japan. Following her first experience abroad Willis returned to Mount Vernon to teach history for three years. She then moved back east to pursue a

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master’s degree in political science at Columbia University.

After writing her master’s thesis, “Some Aspects of Imperialism in Korea,” Willis graduated in 1925 from Columbia.

This return to school marked the beginning of a pattern in Willis’ life. After earning her degree from Columbia University, Willis moved to the Johns Hopkins College for Teachers where she studied evenings after teaching all day.

During her summer hiatus from teaching in Turkey, Willis attended the Zimmern Institute of International Studies in Geneva. Once she returned from her time abroad, Willis again devoted her evenings to study at Columbia University.

Margaret Willis’ zeal for acquiring knowledge spoke directly to the mission of the University School. In Three Dozen Years: A Report on the University School 1932-1968, Willis wrote, To the University School at all levels education meant growth, growth of individuals as scholars, as personalities, as effective participants in the on-going life of the groups with which they were associated. The dynamic element in that growth had to be within the individual himself if he was to make his best progress in school and to continue to learn after his formal education was complete…A teacher becomes superior as he keeps on year after year with his thoughtful growth and change. (1968, p. 70-71)

A drive to know propelled Willis to spend summers, evenings, and vacations studying at one institution or another, while her peers in the teaching community sought respite from

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Two: The Private World of a Public Woman

their jobs.

The Groves of Academe The Margaret Willis who was, in the estimation of many, the “backbone” of University School, did not initially intend to spend her life teaching. Willis wrote self-admittedly to Dr. Harold Alberty that her career in teaching had been “pretty haphazard” (b1/f1). It was not a life-long goal of Margaret Willis to teach. In fact, it was not a part of her plan until after she “fell into it.” Willis wrote that she “did not plan to teach; I just wanted to know what was going on in the world and why” (b5/f3). However, with the exception of her first job after graduating from Wellesley, which was not formally a teaching position, Willis did nothing else but teach during her career. The paths Willis traveled on her way to University School are as interesting as her experiences during the thirtysix years she spent there.

Although Willis did not claim the profession of teaching, it claimed her. After college, instead of opting for the comfort and security of a stable teaching job in the United States, Willis chose adventure. Upon graduating from Wellesley in 1919, Willis soon learned that teaching was the ticket to the travel and new adventure she craved. She accepted a position located for her by the Wellesley placement bureau as a governess in Japan for the children of an American Embassy staff member, Dr. Tuesler, head of St. Luke’s Hospital. In retrospect, she said that she did “a very bad job of teaching,” but the time abroad whetted her appetite for further world travel that she would continue throughout her life (b1/f1). Perhaps early in her career, Willis even perceived teaching as something she did more or less to finance her

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travel.

After her two-year tenure in Japan had ended, Willis returned home to Mount Vernon without definite plans for her professional life. She taught history at the local high school from 1921 to 1924, although Willis would have used the word “taught” only loosely, as she reflected that she “learned something and the children learned something, but none of us very much” (b1/f1). Three years of teaching at her hometown high school was enough to inspire the feelings of monotony that Willis loathed. She left her job in pursuit of something new.

“Something new” came in the form of an M.A. degree in Political Science from Columbia University in 1925, which then led Willis to her next foray into teaching at the Maryland State Normal School. Willis did not choose this position solely out of a love of teaching and desire to impart knowledge upon youth; rather, it was a challenge—something Willis could never refuse. She recalled her interview for the teaching position in Maryland with typical candor: “I spent all the time explaining how little I knew about education and educational theory, and when the director persisted in offering me the job, I accepted out of sheer amusement” (b1/f1). Willis taught there for two years before embarking on another enterprise abroad—this time in Turkey.

Willis’ time in Turkey marked the longest period of time she spent at any job prior to her position at University School; she remained in Turkey a total of four years. When Willis returned to the States in 1931, she took a job at the Bennett School in Millbrook, New York. This position held her attention for only one year. In 1932 Willis left New York for a job as a history teacher in a fledgling experimental school at Ohio State University.

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Two: The Private World of a Public Woman

The next chapter will be devoted to the career Willis carved for herself at University School; however, it is important to note that the fact that University School was a yet-untested experimental school likely appealed to the adventurer Willis. During her then thirteen-year career teaching, Willis had moved from job to job at a total of seven different institutions. University School provided a consistent challenge that never became monotonous for Willis. At University School Willis found a freedom to voice her opinions, test her theories, and travel to other institutions, in the United States as well as abroad, to renew her creative energy.

Exuberance is Beauty If given the choice between stunning intellect and stunning beauty, no doubt Margaret Willis would have chosen the former. Willis was interested in her body insofar as it housed her brain; the rest of her body was for functional use and physical beauty was, to her, no great concern. She would have found those people overly concerned with physical appearances, both theirs and others’, to be shallow and unworthy of her attention. Robert Butche recalls, Being long-legged, narrow of body, and nearly six feet tall, Willis could be very intimidating when she put her mind to it. Even as a youngster herself, in the early 1930’s, Willis was quick to size up people—not just staff, but her students as well. If she found someone no longer met her standards, she could turn cold and distant. Conversely, if someone showed progress toward goals Willis thought important,

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she could turn on a dime and become as engaging and warm as a new puppy. (2000d)

As Beerbohm wrote, beauty and a lust for learning are two traits not typically conjoined; for Willis this was just as well, as the latter was clearly superior to the former.

Compared to her sisters, Margaret Willis was more masculine in appearance; she had strong features—long legs, and an unwavering gaze that conjured sagacity more so than sexuality. Photographs reveal a face devoid, for the most part, of cosmetics; she was a woman whose smiles hinted at mild amusement over girlish coyness. Robert Butche wrote, “Willis was a very attractive woman. Not an immodest woman taken to gross makeup and provocative dress, but attractive to men nevertheless. The intense eyes and soft smile were most appealing” (2001). Willis dressed tastefully, choosing quality garments over fashionable or trendier items. However, on special occasions such as school dances or trips she was more likely to give up her “spartan appearance” for something decidedly more stylish—“when she put on her best suit, with long, pleated skirt and frilly shirt for presenting her students to Eleanor Roosevelt, she would have been regarded as very well dressed” (Robert Butche, 2000d).

Simone de Beauvoir wrote that women are too often enslaved by beauty: “Beauty is a worry, it is a frail treasure; the…body suffers pitiless depreciation with time…” (1952, p.

569). Willis’ hair was prematurely gray and, in addition to being long and rather stringy, began to grow sparse as she aged. Many women facing similar issues would have colored their hair or resorted to wearing wigs or caps. Again, de Beauvoir noted that women’s bodies, “are not their own…the color of their hair, their weight, their figure, their type; to

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change the curve of a cheek, their teeth may be pulled” (p.

570). Willis, ever unconcerned about matters of physical beauty, wore her hair in the same general style for the whole of her adult life. Function over fashion was a tacit belief of Willis’; she preferred to focus herself on something substantive. “Had she been a man, she might easily has been mistaken for Teddy Roosevelt, for Margaret loved to travel, be present at major events, and to share ideas and knowledge with others,” asserts Butche (2000d). Margaret Willis’ focus was on achievement and academia over fashion and beauty.

An automobile accident in 1937 left Willis with major injuries, some of which were cosmetic. Injuries to her hip and leg left her with an odd gait that remained even after her injuries healed and her walking cane was discarded. This unusual stride earned her the nickname among some of the University School students, “The Goose” (Robert Butche, 2000b). When asked if he thought Willis knew the name some students called her behind her back, Butche replied, “There’s very little that got past her. She probably would have thought that those immature people were not destined to always be so” (2000b).

The automobile crash left Willis with some facial disfigurement and a partial loss of control of her right eye.

Mary Tolbert, a former music teacher at University School, recalls that some students mocked Willis’ sporadic facial twitches. She, like Butche, believes that Willis knew fully well that some of her students mocked her: “[Willis] would have dismissed the mocking as students exerting their defiance in one of the only ways available to them—making fun of their teachers’ flaws. I don’t think she thought they were meanspirited, just young” (2000). Willis’ reaction to the insensitive nicknames assigned her by students is consistent with her

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disregard for outward appearances. Her brain, as well as her tongue, remained razor-sharp to the very end of her life. For Willis, this quality far exceeded the importance of ephemeral beauty.

To Love What Death May Touch On the subject of marriage and societal roles of women, Ruthellen Josselson wrote, A woman’s mission was to marry and raise children, though she might also be a teacher or a nurse before having children or after her children were grown. Her social place and value were defined by her husband, and young girls dreamed of one day becoming “Mrs. Someone.” (1996, p. 31)

Margaret Willis never married, nor did she have romantic relationships that were visible to the public eye, with one exception. Robert Butche recalls that Willis was in love once. This man, whose identity is no longer known, was Willis’ “true love,” according to Butche. The two were involved in the automobile accident that proved fatal to Willis’ beau and nearly cost Willis her own life.

The accident kept Willis out of school for the entire school year, and she returned only at the end of the school year to attend graduation activities. Although the accident caused numerous physical injuries as mentioned earlier, none of the physical injuries were as scarring as the emotional ones she sustained. No one can remember Willis ever maintaining a romantic relationship after this tragedy; neither did she have any children of her own.

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Her actions are open to speculation; perhaps Willis allowed herself one “true love,” and when he died so tragically she disbelieved the possibility of ever finding another relationship as meaningful. Perhaps Willis had no desire for children of her own, as she devoted her career to the education and care of other people’s children. There is also the possibility that Willis wanted children but had no socially acceptable options available to her other than devoting her life to her students, which she did.

According to Butche, Willis threw herself into her work with a new zeal once she returned after her accident.

While always important to her, her students and job took on a greater significance as the focal point of her life. William Van Til has similar recollections as Butche: What did we talk about? Her students. Their successes and failures, their projects, their love lives, their contributions in class, their opinions…Who did what with whom and why?

To amass such information she must have spent hours talking to students in her role as the counselor as well as teacher of those classes like those of 1938. I have never known a person so totally engrossed in the experiences and so dedicated to the wellbeing of her students as Margaret Willis.

(2000a)

The issue of lesbianism is one, according to Paul Klohr, cannot be escaped if one is dealing with a postmodernist biography. However, in discussing this issue, Klohr quickly noted that he never witnessed any romantic relationships, either with males or females, of Willis’. Klohr

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pointed out that there were numerous women faculty at University School who never married, but instead devoted their lives to their students and their friendships: You have a group of women, and it would be easy to label them as a “group of lesbians,” but in all the years I knew her I don’t have a single scrap of evidence that would imply a lesbian relationship. Women at that time had very little freedom, so when she traveled, she traveled with her sister—sometimes also with friends.

There will always be people who speculate that she had a woman friend, but in the capacity that I knew her, I never saw evidence of that kind of relationship. (2000a)

Robert Butche ardently agrees with Klohr’s estimation of Willis’ sexuality. Although it is difficult to avoid the issue of one’s sexuality in postmodern narrative biography, as Klohr noted, Butche feels that Willis was not an anomaly in her environment. The acts of remaining single, pursuing a career, developing female friendships, and disregarding the “importance” of one’s physical beauty should not rouse suspicions of one’s sexuality.

The observations and comments of Klohr and Butche are certainly contrary to what Simone de Beauvoir would generally expect from men. De Beauvoir believed that men frequently misinterpret the sexuality of a woman who deviates from the norm of behavior expected of them: “The chief misunderstanding…is that it is natural for the female human being to make herself a feminine woman…her presumed ‘instincts’ for coquetry and docility are indoctrinated…”

(1952, p. 408). A “revolt” from this “norm” by no means

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implies homosexuality, according to de Beauvoir: “It is perfectly natural for the woman to feel indignant at the limitations imposed upon her by her sex” (p. 409).

De Beauvoir would applaud Willis’ refusal to cultivate her physical beauty and her refusal to marry out of some feeling of social obligation: “Woman feels inferior because, in fact, the requirements of femininity do belittle her. She spontaneously chooses to be a complete person, a free being with the world and the future open before her…” (p. 409).

While this biographer does not dismiss the idea that Margaret Willis may have had lesbian relationships in her lifetime, she does concede that it is tempting to leap to conclusions regarding Willis’ sexuality, given the privacy with which Willis guarded her private affairs, and given the time in which this biography is being written.

The Company She Kept About social activity Margaret Willis wrote, I don’t want to hold onto myself, withdraw from people, keep aloof and self-centered. I would much rather merge into a social group, and enjoy cooperation and companionship. I want to live “outwardly” with gusto, enjoying the good things of life, working with other people to get the things which make a pleasant and energetic social life. Life can’t be too delicate and fastidious. (b5/f12)

Paul Klohr recalls that as a young, impressionable teacher, the parties Margaret Willis hosted fascinated him. She lived in Olentangy Village, a solid-looking, apartment

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complex that was home to numerous teachers. The colonialstyled complex opened just around the time of the Depression, and Willis gave elaborate and exotic dinner parties in her apartment there.

Klohr remembers, “Willis’ parties were so wellplanned. Not only were University School people invited, but other people from the University—a philosophy professor, a history professor—there was an eclectic mix” (2000a). Willis preferred a wide range of interests to be represented at her parties; she invited people with varying political views, religious beliefs, and social interests. According to Robert Butche, Willis enjoyed nothing more than intellectual sparring, given her opponent was a worthy one. There was nothing she disliked more than a person who took no stand on any matters (2000b).

Klohr also recalls Willis’ unique style of décor. Her apartment was filled with spoils from her world excursions.

Although she cared little for frivolous decorations, she loved the meaningful possessions she acquired on her ventures—an intricately designed rug from Morocco, a wall hanging from Egypt, ornaments from Turkey. “It was a really remarkable thing,” Klohr remarked, laughing, “Because there just wasn’t much exotic about Columbus at that time!”

Willis’ travels abroad lent themselves to foreign cuisine at her parties. The food she prepared for her parties always reflected her most recent excursion. “Margaret Willis took such care in preparing for her parties,” said Klohr, “You always knew that if you were invited to a Willis party you were in for a treat!”

William Van Til remembers Willis being a part of what he calls “the trio” both at University School and outside of school: “She was one of a trio of influential women—the other

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two being English teacher Lou LaBrant and home economics teacher Norma Albright—who thought alike and worked closely together” (2000a). Van Til remembers Willis as having the respect of her colleagues. She was forthright and blunt and the other teachers respected that. Her friendships with LaBrant and Albright were the closest she had. She had a friendly working relationship with the other teachers, but not the intimate friendship she treasured with the other two members of “the trio.”

Even though she certainly had meaningful friendships with colleagues and a close relationship with her sister Elizabeth, Van Til believes “there was a good deal of the loner in Margaret” (2000a). He remembers Willis taking long solitary trips during school vacations to drive to either coast.

So while Willis had no difficulty finding companionship, it seems she felt equally comfortable with her own company.

While Butche describes Willis as not being a “social animal,” by that he means that Willis did not appreciate the frivolous socializing and gossip that permeates many teacher workrooms. According to Butche, “She was not really a social person because most people did not live up to her intellectual expectations” (2000b). Interestingly, however, Butche remembers that Willis loved hearing about the lives of people who were doing interesting things: She lived a very extended life—not at all one would expect of a schoolteacher—for she knew famous people like Eleanor Roosevelt and was widely traveled…She was very interested in Lee Bailey’s activities; [she] asked me on nearly every visit, whether at

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Mount Vernon or when she would visit in Columbus, about Neil Armstrong. She was interested in everything Siamese, wanted to know what I was doing in Viet Nam and so on.

Part of her interest was due to the notoriety or fame of the person, but I’m certain in large measure, it was at least equally an interest in what a former student was doing in life.

(2000c)

Margaret Willis possessed an intense respect for and interest in people she perceived as leading adventurous lives—ones not necessarily bound by societal expectations.

While workroom gossip never appealed to her because of its banality, to hear about people, whether they be former students or famous entertainers, who lived actively, interested her immensely. Willis both inspired and was inspired by courageous living.

Looking Homeward After she retired from University School in 1968, Margaret Willis returned to the family home in Mount Vernon with her sister Elizabeth. The family farm, owned by her parents, was originally 240 acres, but additional acreage was bought and sold by Willis’ father over the years. There was more than 200 acres of the farm under Willis’ control in the 1970’s. Although it is not known whether the farm was inherited solely by Willis or whether ownership was shared among her siblings, it was clearly Willis’ domain. Robert Butche pondered, “I do not know whether she had legal ownership of the property, for it may well have been her very

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strong will and dominating personality that made her its master” (2000d). The way the family home was furnished during Willis’ lifetime never changed significantly; she maintained the high-backed chairs, sturdy tables, and odds and ends that she and her family had collected over the years.

Willis’ “dream” home, built overlooking Puget Sound and shared by Elizabeth, was her own vision through and through. Upon her retirement, she put into motion the plans she had made long before her retirement for building such a home. The family home, situated on top of a small hill in the midst of acres of sweet peas, did not provide the connection with the sea that Willis craved. The summer home was built at a place Willis had visited frequently as a child.

Butche remembers from his visits there that the house was situated on a sheer rock cliff along the Eastern Shore of Puget; the cliff was approximately 100 feet above the sea: We would park along the top of the cliff and make our way down many stairs. The stairs were wood, with sturdy handrails on both sides. Part way down the stairs was an entrance to the summer house which was literally hung from or built into the rocky cliffside. One entered into a great room which was open glass windows on the Western front.

You could see the great Puget Sound in nearly all directions. At the back of the building were the kitchen and sleeping areas, but this house was built to see Puget. The floors were all hardwood and the furnishings very informal.

(2000c)

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Willis’ dream home very apparently fed her spirit; what better representation of Willis’ spirit than the sea?

The Long Day’s Task is Done “Retirement” for Margaret Willis did not have the same definition as it does for most who have spent their careers selflessly giving themselves to their calling. While many would consider retirement a time to abandon schedules and duties, Willis wrote, “I think that life tends to become sluggish, too comfortable, unchanging because of too much thought and no action. I want to resist this tendency” (b5/f12) Willis’ “retirement” began with her joining several companions in a car trip across the Middle East.

Retirement for Willis was not about slowing down and reflecting on a life well lived. There was never enough time to go, see, learn, and do to suit Willis. “We can’t just follow the past or dream of what the future might be,” Willis wrote (b5/f12). She quickly reacquainted herself with her Mount Vernon community once she moved back home. Willis took an active part in local politics, attending politically oriented meetings and encouraging others to do likewise. She also became the town historian, maintaining records and documents for the town’s progeny.

Willis’ inclination to insert herself into projects and quickly take the lead was no indication that she longed for personal glory or recognition. Willis did not suffer from an inflated ego or a “busybody” personality. Rather, she had a very clear vision of how things should be and a dedication to see projects through to their completion. As Willis herself

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said, “There are so many interesting things that need doing that a person owes it to himself to work at something he likes” (b1/f1). Willis spent her life pursuing new windmills at which to charge, never once, it seems, doubting either her might or her right.

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Chapter Three

The University School Years

If progressive education is to fulfil its promise, it must become consciously representative of a distinctive way of life. (Bode, 1938, p. 5)

M

argaret Willis’ career at the Ohio State University School (1932-1967) spanned and succeeded the period of time known as the progressive era in education, and although this does not necessarily mean that she was a progressive educator, she, in fact, was. Like Willis herself, however, “progressive education” eludes a singular definition. In his book Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957, Lawrence A. Cremin (1961) concludes his preface with a renunciation of the entity known as “progressive education:” The reader will search these pages in vain for any capsule definition of progressive education. None exists, and none ever will; for throughout its history progressive education meant different things to different people, and these differences were only compounded by the remarkable diversity of American education. (p. x)

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Foremost in importance to University School teachers and administrators was the responsibility of educating deliberately. As Bode stated, progressive education must be “consciously representative of a distinctive way of life (p. 5)”.

Fads in education appeared and vanished, but University School remained focused on its progressive philosophy and its educators never adhered to those principles dogmatically.

University School educators acknowledged change in education and society as a whole, and they applied their progressive ideals to the continually changing faces of education and society. In her retrospective of University School, Three Dozen Years, Margaret Willis (1968) wrote, “Schools, like society, need to be self-regenerative, need to be so organized and staffed that continuous thought is given to what is taught so that it may be adapted to the new challenges of the world”(p. 20). It is very likely that a primary reason Margaret Willis remained enamored with University School for the life of the school and the duration of her career is because its beliefs were the very ones she lived by.

University School Was Unique William Van Til articulated the broadened and adapted Bode-inspired principles by which educators at University School taught. These principles indicate how this biographer defines and uses the idea of “democracy as a way of life.”

•

The overall purpose of American education is to develop the understanding and practice of democracy as a way of life.

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Three: The University School Years

•

The salient characteristic of democracy as a way of life is faith in the method of intelligence.

•

The best learning experiences are those that begin with the needs of the learner, illuminate the social realities of the times, and contrast competing ways of living.

•

Teacher-pupil planning is desirable and feasible.

•

Indoctrination of set answers to controversial issues is an abuse of the method of intelligence and thus undemocratic.

•

By thinking through problems, using facts and applying values, students can reach conclusion for themselves; they need not and must not be innocuous neutrals on human issues (Butche, 2000, pp. 129-30).

In William Van Til’s (1983) words, “The Ohio State University School was special”(p. 85). Indeed, how else could such an inspired cast of players as Lou LaBrant, Paul Klohr, William Van Til, Margaret Willis, and Laura Zirbes be assembled in one location? University School’s very inception was like none other; it was the product of philosophical

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discussions of the ideal laboratory school between Professor Boyd Bode and College of Education Dean George Arps.

According to Van Til (1983), “The new Ohio State University School, kindergarten through high school, was created to be a truly experimental school, a testing ground for the ideas being advanced by the progressive education movement” (p.

79). Although construction on the school began at the outset of the Depression in 1929, it opened in 1932. The College of Education’s faculty selected the school’s first director, Rudolph D. Lindquist, who in turn “employed promising individuals, each supportive of progressive education yet with a distinctive personality, set of experiences, and beliefs” (Van Til, 1983, p. 80).

The faculty was young and energetic, perhaps necessarily so. Their days began earlier and ended later than teachers’ in most other schools. Paul Klohr, a former director of University School, recalls, We all got there really early every morning, each grade level had a parent group that met at least once a quarter, and several nights a week we would meet with parents. We met as a faculty at least once a week. These people [teachers] worked like dogs; but the thing that made the work bearable is that they liked it—they loved their work. (2000a)

There were no ready-made texts by which teachers planned lessons; information was pulled from a variety of sources to develop curriculum. Teachers and students held planning sessions in which students’ interests within a subject matter were discussed for the purpose of “discovering the interests which offered educative leads and promoting them in

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every effective way” (Willis, 1968, p. 52). The planning sessions, along with field trips, science experiments, and library research, helped teachers and students to plan their units, in addition to providing learning experiences and lessons in democratic behavior in and of themselves. Any students who did not begin their formal education at University School would not be accustomed to their ideas having such rapt audience with their teachers and classmates.

According to Willis,

One of the difficulties in beginning planning with pupils who have had no experience with it is that, if they are conditioned to conformity and “right answers,” they are likely to conceal at school many of the interests and values which are most important to them. This separation between the school world and the real world, which every young person is grappling with and trying to understand, tends to make much of what is learned irrelevant to the learner. (1968, p. 65)

Collaboration among students and teachers instilled in students a sense of confidence in their own ideas and their abilities to accomplish tasks on their own. The University School student became a “fully self-directed person capable of applying problem-solving skills throughout his or her entire life” (Butche, 2000, p. 150). The self-direction inspired by University School may have surprised even the teachers from time to time. In the spring of 1945 Margaret Willis broached the subject of commencement speakers with her students; none of the names suggested inspired much excitement from

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the students. Winnie Fawcett, daughter of University School educator Harold Fawcett, felt the speaker should be very special, given that a number of her male classmates were away at war and morale was flagging. She called the most prominent Ohioan, Governor Frank J. Lausche, spoke with him personally, and solicited his presence as commencement speaker for her graduation ceremony.

When next Willis brought up the subject of commencement speakers, Fawcett announced that she had “taken care of it.”

Willis, a bit befuddled, inquired what Fawcett meant.

“Who is this person?” Willis demanded sternly.

Winnie smiled from ear to ear as she announced, “It’s the governor.” The pregnant pause that likely followed would have provided Miss Willis sufficient time to take off her glasses, fold them nervously in her right hand—all the better to point at Winnie Fawcett. “Governor who?” Willis demanded to know in her sometimes faltering New England brogue. “Governor Lausche,” Fawcett reassured Willis—“the one downtown.” “Oh,” we can imagine Willis responding, “that one.”

(Butche, 2000, p. 152)

Students were inculcated with the idea of collaboration with their teachers and peers from the time they began University School. According to Paul Klohr, a first grade teacher may begin class by saying “Let’s talk about what you saw on your way to school today,” and on a chart the teacher would begin transcribing what the students told her. Once the students were finished naming what they saw on their way to school, they would use their list to build a reading chart. Say,

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for example, that a student saw a squirrel on the way to school. The teacher would take the class to the library to look up books about squirrels and other members of that animal family. She may ask a veterinarian to visit the class to discuss scientific aspects of squirrels—their diets, their environments, their habits. The class may take a tour around the campus to observe squirrel behavior. A visitor to that class may say, “A first grader doesn’t know the nature and habits of squirrels;” but if something was part of students’ experience, it was part of their education, according to Klohr.

Teachers maintained charts of student interests, and they had access to a library that would provide materials on any subject that the students were interested in or were studying. Librarians would sit in on classes to learn what classes were studying and to provide suggestions for further research. From one curious student observation of squirrels, said Klohr, students developed writing, reading, and science skills, to name a few (2000a).

This concept of respecting and developing student ideas was further strengthened by core classes. Core classes, which provided interdisciplinary learning opportunities for students by joining, for example, social studies, home economics, and English, were also developed through teacherstudent planning. Willis wrote in Three Dozen Years that “in core classes, where the subject-matter-to-be-covered was relatively unstructured, an attempt was made to uncover the preoccupations of students which had little relation to the content of conventionally organized high school subject matter” (1968, p. 52). Students, facilitated by their core teachers, outlined a broad course of study that cut across conventional subject lines. Students spent one half of their school day in core classes during their elementary years, and

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one third of the school day was spent in core classes in secondary school.

Margaret Willis co-taught a core class with Lou LaBrant, an English teacher, with the occasional expertise of Norma Albright, a home economics teacher. Students chose to study topics as diverse as sex, delinquency, religion, and philosophy. The topics, no matter how “sensitive,” were given the same degree of academic inquiry. Willis was never particularly surprised or appalled by what she thought were “natural” interests of adolescents. Her stoic demeanor and liberal outlook had a twofold effect on her students: they did not broach subjects simply for their “shock value,” nor did they feel inhibited to voice opinions on topics that may be too sensitive to discuss with other teachers (Paul Klohr, 2000a).

To borrow the words of Klohr, “I say all this to set the scene of where Margaret Willis worked. She came in to this type of setting without help from other sources. She couldn’t look at how they were doing this somewhere else” (2000a).

But Willis, ever up for a challenge, was to become the voice of University School—the “right arm” of subsequent directors. Margaret Willis was the very kind of individual University School hoped to shape—a dauntless pursuer of knowledge.

What Led Her There and Kept Her There Margaret Willis was one of those “promising individuals” William Van Til wrote about—someone whose very life was representative of the progressive ideal. She was “a world traveler, an activity-oriented teacher, an unmarried woman whose whole life was given to her students, and a

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liberal in social persuasion” (Van Til, 1983, p. 80). At 33 years old, Margaret Willis had not herself ceased to be a student at the time she joined the new University School faculty. Willis, like Bode, likely realized that a life of courage and progress entailed a “continuous and frequently extensive reconstruction or revision of traditional beliefs and attitudes, in accordance with growing insight and changing circumstances” (Bode, 1938, p. 27). There are few better examples of “teacher as learner” than Margaret Willis.

One may look to Willis’ undergraduate alma mater for at least a partial explanation of what brought Willis to University School. The “Wellesley woman” described by Patricia Palmieri (1980) could very well be Margaret Willis: The women attracted to academe…were comfortable in what they termed their “Wellesley world;” they fashioned their professional and private lives around the college and each other. They formed not merely a collection of disparate individuals, but a discernable social group…who created…a cohesive intellectual and social community. (p. 234)

Willis’ time at Wellesley, her first experience with higher education, gave her a sense of an “intellectual community” that she could replicate at University School. To borrow from Palmieri’s essay, Willis may have thought of University School, “Here is fellowship.”

Of Wellesley women, Palmieri wrote that quite a few “emulated independent, spinster aunts who provided models for—and encouraged—their rebelliousness” (p. 240). Willis may have become the “independent spinster aunt” figure who

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encouraged rebelliousness in her students. Paul Klohr recalled a “radical” Willis who always encouraged her students to “question authority,” sometimes to the dismay of their parents! However, Willis was always allowed the freedom by University School to encourage her students to think independently. This freedom to speak her mind and to urge the same of her students would not have been afforded Willis at most other schools at which she may have taught. Indeed, it is likely that many schools would not have welcomed such freedom of speech from their teachers, or from their students.

Palmieri noted that the dedication to continuing education was one shared by Wellesley women: 90 per cent had Bachelors degrees, 35 per cent Masters degrees, and 40 per cent held Ph.D.s. In addition to formal degrees, over 80 per cent studied summers or during leaves both in this country and in Europe; many did so repeatedly. (p.

241) Willis was employed by an institution that found value in pursuing knowledge and experience. She was allowed a leave of absence to teach abroad; she spent summers teaching in secondary schools and universities in the United States.

University School prided itself on allowing its teachers such opportunities, likely because these proved that the school “practiced what it preached.”

To assume partial responsibility for the success of the new University School required a nearly single-minded dedication from Willis. Were it not for her continual intellectual renewal and insight, Margaret Willis would have likely become like the numerous others who left the faculty of University School after several years of teaching there. The level of intensity and dedication required of University School teachers was one that many teachers likely found difficult to

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maintain indefinitely. Willis herself wrote of the “weariness” experienced by the University School teacher: “Since the early days, University School faculty members were frequently weary because there were so many things each individual could see that needed to be done and that he wanted to do.”

(1968, p. 77). However, Willis found that her innate interest in her world was not only tolerated by University School, but was encouraged by it. This tolerance inspired fierce devotion from Willis throughout her life. The fact that University School’s philosophies were so aligned with her own later made the fight to save University School very personal. That the paths of Margaret Willis and University School crossed was an example of providence if ever there were one. It is probable that neither Willis nor University School would have been so inspired and inspiring had they not met.

University School-Inspired Relationships Mary Tolbert, who came to University School in 1944 as a music teacher, remembers Margaret Willis as one who could be as gruff as she could be charming; her capacity for abruptness inspired anxiety in younger faculty who lacked the worldly confidence of Willis. According to Tolbert, My predecessor, Dora, was a very young, very new teacher who didn’t get on with Margaret very well. She was very submissive, and on a particular day she had done something with which Margaret didn’t approve. Well, Margaret walked right into Dora’s class, and, right in front of her students, just blessed her out.

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Dora wasn’t feeling well that day, and she just upchucked onto her desk, in front of everyone!

It was too much for Dora, timid little thing. So, when I came onto the scene I decided I wasn’t going to let Margaret get away with such as that with me. As Bob [Butche] said, Margaret and I were very strong voices in the school.

But we had a respectful relationship that eventually evolved into friendship. (2000)

Among her colleagues, Margaret Willis was considered professional and respectful. Consequently, they saw in Willis someone who was experienced and trustworthy.

Mary Tolbert, perhaps because she admittedly shares many of Willis’ more obstinate qualities, remembers the occasional times Willis’ strong opinion clashed with those of her colleagues. According to Tolbert, “Margaret was basically very fair, but she was often willing to admit her own mistakes only after the heat of a disagreement” (2000).

Disagree Tolbert and Willis did from time to time.

Tolbert remembers that Willis’ enthusiasm for her senior core class caused her to keep her students well after the allotted time. Willis’ class often ran over into the time that was scheduled for Tolbert’s music class. Tolbert said, “Margaret had taken the kids somewhere off campus one day, and I didn’t know this. When I walked into class none of my students were there! I took this up with Mr. Ramseyer.

Margaret didn’t speak to me for some time after that” (2000).

Later Tolbert acquiesced that while Margaret Willis liked to have “her way,” if she realized that she was not communicating her ideas effectively or not convincing her colleagues of the sagacity of her opinions, she would back off.

“Sure, she liked having her way, especially when she was sure

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she was right” said Tolbert, “But if she was voted down, she would be respectful of the group’s consensus” (2000).

While Margaret Willis was a proponent of an “intellectual community,” there was very little she disliked more than redundant or unnecessary meetings with her colleagues. Paul Klohr recalls Willis frequently “multitasking” at faculty meetings; she would arrive at the last possible moment she could, with a stack of student papers under her arm that she was able to read during the parts of the meeting she found superfluous. According to Klohr, Willis was the “old warrior; she’d been through it all. People always listened to her. They’d ask her opinions because more than likely, she’d lived through whatever the problem or issue was they were discussing” (2000b).

Margaret Willis dutifully attended meetings, even the ones pertaining to issues she had already covered at some point during her extensive career at University School, but she was not beyond walking out of a meeting that, in her opinion, was an inexcusable waste of her time. Klohr remembers quite clearly a time in which Willis did just that. It was during a period in the early 1960s when young men were experimenting with longer hairstyles. Parents were beginning to call the school to complain and to solicit help from the school in dealing with this matter. A meeting of the whole faculty was called to decide what to do about this issue of long hair on young men. Paul Klohr remembers clearly what then transpired: Margaret Willis came in with her usual flurry of clipboard and papers—she was always working on something. When the meeting began, she asked, “What is the subject of this

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meeting?” The director replied, “There’s this issue about lengthening hair and we need to decide what we’re going to do; we need to make some policy about it.” Gathering her papers and her thoughts, Willis said, rising from her seat to depart, “This is the dumbest thing I have ever been asked to sit through; I think for a faculty to meet on such a silly issue such as the length of hair does not speak well of this faculty or of this school.” (2000b)

With that, she left.

Willis, according to Klohr, added a “toughness” to faculty meetings. She was dauntless when it came to telling her colleagues when they were, in Willis’ estimation, being petty. Even with her occasional curtness, her colleagues were appreciative of Willis’ motives. There were often new faculty members who had previously worked in public schools and were accustomed to a certain degree of redundancy. Willis, according to Klohr, kept the school on track of what it was supposed to be doing, even if it meant ruffling feathers from time to time.

William Van Til associates Willis with part of a “trio of influential women”—among whom were Norma Albright and Lou LaBrant—who “thought alike and worked closely together to foster in the meetings their views on curriculum for the University School” (2000a). Van Til recalls that when he was a new teacher at University School, Willis was one of the first people he identified, due to her rather strong and unique personality traits. Although he shared a courteous working relationship with Willis, he knows “practically nothing about the private woman.” However, adjectives Van

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Three: The University School Years

Til attributes to the Margaret Willis he did know—“forthright, positive, insistent, and sometimes abrasive”—create a vivid image that is consistent with the opinions of others who knew Willis.

While Van Til recalls no specific instances of speaking with Willis about her personal life, he does remember that the topic of most conversations was the students. There was no one so “totally engrossed” in the experiences of her students as Margaret Willis, wrote Van Til; in fact, he asserted that if he were writing a life story of Willis, he would title it “Margaret Willis and Her Students” (2000a). According to Van Til, Margaret Willis had an affinity and a gift for developing her students’ talents— Margaret had high expectations of her students. They were expected to work at their fullest potential.

Because she demanded living up to one’s individual potential, some students regarded her as a harsh taskmaster. But most appreciated her and a few even worshipped her. (2000a) Mary Tolbert concurs with Van Til’s assessment; she remembers that Willis got to know her students on a personal basis. She was very serious about her students; according to Tolbert, “Margaret gave them the best of every advantage; she counseled them very well. She would guide them; if they were having difficulty, she would stand behind them” (2000).

Willis’ dedication to her students was not lost on them.

Her former students recall her very similarly to how Van Til asserted they would—she was a “taskmaster” at times, but she opened doors for them that they would never be able to open themselves. If a student exhibited a strong interest or talent that Willis did not feel was being encouraged well enough at University School, she would arrange for them to take courses offered at the University. Former student David Clark credits

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Willis with changing his life: She sent me over to the campus when I was in high school. Before I knew it I was in the theater department; I was modeling in the art department. It changed my life. I’ve been in theater my whole life. I talked to Margaret about two months before she died. I was traveling with A Chorus Line and I was in Seattle, so I called her up. We talked for an hour. Granted, she was hard on me in high school. I had undiagnosed dyslexia, and she was always on me to spell correctly, but when she found something that was personally meaningful to me, she encouraged me at every turn. She sent me a Christmas card every year after I graduated until her death.

(2000)

Clark credits Willis with teaching him about more practical matters, specifically how to be a savvy traveler.

Willis, according to Clark, taught him that he should “carry only two bags, and not to pack them fuller than could be comfortably carried for two blocks without resting.” Clark admitted that every time he has ever packed more than those two bags recommended by Willis that he thinks of her and her advice (2000).

While at the time Clark found Willis’ demand for precision and perfection frustrating, he now reflects upon that time with a sense of humor: I remember having to write a creative paper for one of Margaret’s history courses, and I wrote that the reason men learned to walk

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Three: The University School Years

upright was because they needed to be able to see dinosaurs approaching. Margaret Willis corrected the usual spelling mistakes that filled my papers, and at the very end she wrote something like, “This is a very creative piece of writing, but I do hope you realize that dinosaurs preceded man by X number of years!” Of course I didn’t get a bad grade on the paper; it was a creative piece, for heaven’s sake. But Margaret just couldn’t let misinformation exist, even in a work of fiction!

(2000)

Mary Tolbert remembers Willis’ students being like her own children. The relationships Willis cultivated with her students transcended that of simply teacher and student. Willis inquired into territories that some may consider inappropriate; she wanted to know about students’ friendships and romantic relationships with one another, their aspirations in life, their opinions about religion. Her intense interest in the lives of her students gave them the sense that she truly cared about them as fellow human beings, not just as charges she would pass along at the end of a school year. Not only did Willis spend time speaking directly to the students about their concerns and interests, Paul Klohr recalls that even at parties Willis’ conversations would frequently turn to her students.

What a fascinating blend of personality traits comprised Margaret Willis. While it would be reasonable to assume, given her passion for knowledge, that she felt most comfortable in the realm of ideas and theories, she clearly felt an equal passion for counseling her students about more than just their academics. This she was able to do with a perfect blend of maternal concern and academic credibility. Willis’

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teaching style was a tribute to Dewey’s notion that teachers must begin with the experience of the whole child, noting that “not truth, but affection and sympathy is the keynote of his world” (1938, p. 92).

Teaching Assignments and Extra-Curricular Activities The ability and willingness to wear many hats was required of the University School teacher. Margaret Willis was no exception. Although she was formally considered a history teacher, she was much more. During her years at University School, Willis held the title of associate professor at Ohio State University. Although she held this title, she did not teach at the university level; she remained a teacher of University School students, grades seven through twelve, at OSU’s experimental school. Willis taught a variety of history courses at the experimental school: ancient history, American history, world history, non-Western studies, and frequently some specialized topic in social science. She also taught core classes.

In the high school, core teachers were also considered grade level counselors. Core teachers were expected to have somewhat of an understanding of a child’s life outside of the classroom, something Willis possessed even with the students who were not part of her core classes. In an unpublished work from November 1959, Willis wrote, The core teacher has varied responsibilities.

He is a counselor for his students, is familiar with their total school record and family situation, guides them in electives and

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personal problems and college plans, and arranges necessary conferences with parents.

He plans and works on the core unit with them, guides their leisure reading, sees to it that they write with enough regularity to provide continuing experience even though they may not be in an English elective, and helps them with their class and school organization. Usually a teacher follows a grade for two years. (b5/f9)

Jane Roland Martin believes that it is imperative for educators to include the “Three C’s” in their classrooms: “care, concern, and connection,” and to keep in mind a child’s home experience when planning curriculum (1999, p. 40). Not only were student experiences kept in mind during the planning of curriculum, students themselves were responsible for helping to plan the curriculum. The marriage of a student’s “real life” and “school life” was apparent at every turn, not just in Margaret Willis’ classroom, but especially so.

While students were valued and nurtured in Willis’ classroom, she had no qualms about making students work hard and return to assignments she felt they could do much better. The senior history classes were her favorite because she was able to help prepare them for their next big step—college. Paul Klohr recalls that if Willis could be called a “taskmaster” with other classes, she was downright militaristic in her zeal to prepare her seniors for college: “Willis’ standards for writing a theme were the same as if you were a freshman in a university. When kids got to the twelfth grade, they thought they could slack off somewhat, but Willis made them re-do work—edit and revise until it was collegelevel work (2000a).

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In an article titled “Implementing Critical Thinking in the Social Studies Program,” Willis wrote, “Our important job is teaching children to think about what they know, what they still need to learn, what they think they know which isn’t so, and what it all means” (b5/f9). Willis taught history not for the purpose of forcing students to memorize dates and battles and important figures; rather, she wanted students to internalize history and to think critically about what they learned. Willis wished to instill in her students the ability to make history meaningful to them, not to score well on an examination, but to infuse their lives with meaning and purpose. She wrote in the same article, “Facts are remembered more readily in meaningful relationships than in isolation. Information for which we feel a need is remembered better than that which is merely assigned” (b5/f9).

Margaret Willis was not the kind of teacher who cared only about the students during the times they were in her class. She was an avid supporter of extra-curricular activities.

In a letter recommending Margaret Willis for an alumni award for distinguished teaching, Willis was credited for placing “a high priority on participation in worthy student and community activities” (b1/f3). During her years at University School, Willis served as a faculty advisor for the student council and the public relations committee. Due to her loyal support of student athletics, Willis was awarded a football letter sweater, something she wore on many occasions, to the delight of students. “To all, in one way or another, it was a symbol of the kind of rapport she maintain[ed] with her students” (b1/f3).

Senior Trips and Other Excursions

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Three: The University School Years

The annual senior trip to New York that Margaret Willis orchestrated was one that University School graduates recollect with clarity and fondness. While the trip was a reward to seniors for their hard work leading up to their graduation, former students also recall that they were expected to “learn something” even on their senior trip. David Clark and his sister Cathy, both University School graduates, remember that the New York trip involved equal parts “fun” and “education;” they admit that often the two were indistinguishable. “We were so tired,” said David Clark, “Miss Willis had us studying during the day. We would go to the United Nations, to the Indian and Russian Embassies, for example; then we came back and wrote a paper!”

What students remember most fondly about their senior trip was meeting Eleanor Roosevelt. In fact, several of Willis’ former students brought up meeting Eleanor Roosevelt with no prompting whatsoever. June Renkin and Kip Patterson remember being in awe of both Willis and Roosevelt; of Willis because she was able to provide them a captive audience with Eleanor Roosevelt, arguably one of the most influential women in the world at the time, and of Roosevelt because of her commanding presence. Patterson said that even as a young person he was able to discern the striking similarities between the two women—both were assertive, dignified, and elegant (personal communication, July 7, 2000).

By her students Margaret Willis was considered a “liberal” and “open-minded” teacher, especially compared to other teachers they had known. Willis herself wrote in a paper titled “Sex Roles in America” that “there is very little evidence that freedom from chaperonage has increased sexual promiscuity” (b5/f8). This opinion was only strengthened by Willis’ relative lack of supervision of the boys and girls on the

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train ride to New York. June Renkin recalled that Willis did not make the boys sit at one end of the train car and the girls at the other. She was a realist. Furthermore, she expected the students to behave like responsible adults. The students, for the most part, did not let her down. David Clark, who admittedly “tested the limits,” said that there was no “unbecoming” behavior, that he recalls. “We knew how much work Miss Willis had put into planning this trip to make it just perfect for us; we didn’t want to disappoint her” (2000).

Margaret Willis, a veteran traveler, provided her students with lists and itineraries that rivaled those of any travel agent. Before the trip, Willis required students to have a checklist signed by parents. Items on this list ranged from “I agree to behave as would be expected of an intelligent person possessed of good judgement” to “I agree to limit my drinking of beverages to tea, coffee, milk, juice, or soda pop with the sole exception of the German restaurant where it is customary to give beer at meals” (b1/f19). Willis urged students, “Do your own packing; do not let either parent do it for you,” and “Leave Columbus wearing the clothes in which you will look presentable arriving in a New York hotel” (b1/f21).

Willis seemed to know perfectly well how to balance the fine line between giving students maternal advice and expecting them to behave in an adult fashion. Students never felt coddled by Willis, nor did they feel she condescended to them because of their age. Her genuine advice and concern was so apparent to students that in all ways, in the classroom and outside it, whether she was praising or scolding them, students never doubted Willis’ fascination with and sincere affection for them.

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Three: The University School Years

No Despair for the Future After seeing out the final graduating class, as any good host would, Margaret Willis retired in 1967. Retirement for Willis, though, implied only a cessation of teaching at University School; it certainly did not connote a cessation of activity. Willis would not be the kind of retiree whose life revolved around knitting and grandchildren. A grand tour of Turkey and Iran awaited Margaret Willis and her travel companions. This trip for Willis provided an opportunity to revisit places with new perspective and wisdom that came from living and experiencing widely. In a 1952 alumnae article for Wellesley College Willis wrote, “The solutions to the world’s problems do not look quite as simple to me now as they did in 1919, but I do not despair of the future.

Perspective is the thing!” (b5/f3) Each new stage of Willis’ life meant a new opportunity for learning—something she absolutely relished.

When Willis returned from her “retirement” tour of the Middle East in 1967, she and her sister Elizabeth returned to the family home in Mount Vernon, Washington, where Willis’ social calendar was filled with nearly-daily activities. A glance at her daily planner for 1977—a pictorial tribute to the treasures of Tutankhamun—reveals diverse activities. Opera Seattle frequently saw Willis, Tosca, Otello, and Don Giovanni were among her favorites. She took in biweekly travel films on places such as Italy, Greenland, and Belgium, to name a few. Willis hosted antiques shows and slide lectures; and she breakfasted and lunched with different companions each week. Long after she was unable to travel the world, Willis brought her “world neighbors” to her own town through foreign films, operas, and travel lectures. No

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doubt Margaret Willis would have laughed at anyone who called her “retired.”

Chapter Four

Willis the Writer [Some writers], possessed, I believe, powerful hearts. The work’s possibility excited them; the field’s complexities fired their imaginations. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure.

(Dillard, 1989, p. 71)

M

argaret Willis’ life was given over to her students during her years at the University School. So it is not surprising that her writing, and to some extent her professional affiliations, focused primarily on the lives and schooling of her students—whether they were traditional secondary school students or World War II veterans in search of closure of their high school careers—and the pursuit of knowledge in general.

Willis did, however, address other issues, such as the ones faced by working women in the 1940s, and after her retirement she helped to compile the history of her hometown in Skagit County, Washington. Willis wrote regularly, but not always for public consumption. The archives of Margaret Willis’ personal and professional papers reveal starts and stops of ideas that later became published papers, as well as nostalgic remembrances of her travels that were likely written for her eyes alone. Paul Klohr is of the opinion that Willis did not write more than she did because of the demands school

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placed on her time. Further, he believes that what she did manage to write was remarkable, given her numerous other obligations (2000a). In short, Margaret Willis’ relatively brief list of published writing in no way implies a lack of skill or a lack of reflection on her part. Rather, it should suggest that Willis was always first a teacher—of primary importance to her were the immediate needs of her students.

Her professional status at the University School was solid; Margaret Willis never needed to be concerned that she either “publish or perish.” She was a teacher who was adored by her students and respected by her colleagues. Willis’ focus was on assisting the development of independent thinkers who would become responsible citizens in a democratic society.

Willis was a world traveler, one whose spirit and intellect—not to mention her fervor as an educator—were regenerated by her trips abroad. One may reasonably ask, “Why, then, did Margaret Willis write, if not to move up a career ladder, if not as an artistic outlet?” A reasonable response to this question would be that Margaret Willis’ writing was an outgrowth of her experiences teaching and traveling; she wrote both to capture the essence of experiences for herself, as well as for others.

Annie Dillard (1989) wrote about an aspiring photographer who brought a stack of his best prints to an older, knowledgeable photographer, seeking his judgement of the photographs. The older man divided the photos into two stacks, bad and good. One particular landscape print kept emerging in the pile, and the sage photographer asked the younger, “Why do you have so many prints of this landscape?

Why do you like it so much?” The young photographer replied, “Because I had to climb a mountain to get it” (p. 6).

Margaret Willis’ writing reflects the mountains that she

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Four: Willis The Writer

climbed. Those who have climbed similar mountains find kinship with Willis. Those who have not may, after reading Willis’ works, begin to ponder the possibility of doing so. A reader of Margaret Willis’ works will find that certain “prints” keep emerging in the “stack”—certain ideas to which Margaret Willis the person and Margaret Willis the teacher were bound.

Ego was not a part of Margaret Willis’ life; she never felt that, should she write about her experiences in the classroom or abroad, others would know her “secrets” for being so well loved and admired, and therefore diminish her importance or esteem. Her mission to educate students about the need for insightful opinions, tolerance and understanding, and a global community was one she wished other teachers to share. Margaret Willis wrote about her experiences with students and her ventures abroad because she felt they possessed educative value. She never contrived experiences in order to write about them. Experience was most important; good writing, felt Willis, emerged from authentic experiences.

Writing then, for Willis, was not a tool with which to climb the mountain of academia to reach the ivory tower of intellectual exclusivity that balanced on the peak. Rather, Willis wrote to gather people round, to create a web of shared experiences. Jane Tompkins (1987) sees this purpose of writing as almost uniquely female. For too long, according to Tompkins, academic writing sought to create a dichotomy between public and private—a false dichotomy. There is no public-private split, wrote Tompkins; however, for too long, the academic community praised as superior the writing that could successfully divorce itself from the experiences of the person doing the writing (p. 1104). Tompkins wrote, “I love writers who write about their own experience. I feel I’m being

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nourished by them, that I’m being allowed to enter into a personal relationship with them. That I can match my own experience up with theirs, feel cousin to them, and say, yes, that’s how it is” (p. 1104).

Margaret Willis’ writing lacks the jargon and “exclusive” language that is sometimes found in professional journals and other professional publications. Those who have read Willis’ work call attention to her “thorough-going research,” her “scholarly pursuits,” and her “very readable writing” (b1/f3). Perhaps one reason for Willis’ dedication to “readability” stemmed from her motivation for writing in the first place. She did not measure her value as an educator by how many works she had published; Willis wrote for the purpose of expressing concern and sharing ideas. To alienate readers with pompous educational nomenclature would be counterproductive to her purposes. Margaret Willis was masterful in her field, and her written work reflects a love of and dedication to that field.

The subsequent sections divide Willis’ works by topic and will deal with them as such. Those topics are as follows: the general task of education, and specifically social studies and core education, the education of veterans, professional women, adult study camps, the Guinea Pigs, the University School, world travel, and miscellaneous writing and professional activities. Because many of the ideas and themes of Willis’ articles overlap, only representative articles will be specifically addressed in this chapter.

The Task of Education In “The Real Task of the Social Studies: Some

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Four: Willis The Writer

Implications” (1936), Margaret Willis expressed a belief that ran throughout her subsequent works, whether they addressed social studies methods, citizenship and values, core-centered programs, or the social studies program at University School.

This idea was that school, specifically the social studies, should “develop the kind of citizen who is aware of social problems, who feels a responsibility for their solution, and who has a habit of working cooperatively, tolerantly, openmindedly, and intelligently toward their solution” (p. 282).

While it should be the goal of all education to nurture such traits in the student, Willis found that it was especially the responsibility of the social studies teacher to work to this goal.

The social studies, perhaps more so than other courses that are somewhat divorced from lived experience, deal with the place and responsibility of the citizen in the world.

The problem for Willis was how to achieve the goal of developing what she considered a desirable global citizen, as defined above. Willis believed that social studies courses “trained children to talk about problems without doing anything about them, to feel that they will some day be responsible for action, but that now all they need to do is accumulate information and to make resolutions” (p. 282).

Willis was not the only thoughtful educator to recognize the problem of teaching past events in such a way as to make them immediately relevant. John Dewey (1938), too, asked, “How shall the young be acquainted with the past in such a way that the acquaintance is a potent agent in appreciation of the living present?” (p. 23). The answer for Willis was not to “equip [the students] with a picture of life so highly simplified and idealized that actual contact with reality destroys their faith in the validity of both the information and the idealism” (p. 282).

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Instead, Willis believed that it is best to present students with as many views of the world and its issues as possible, including the diverse opinions of their classmates, but to teach them skills to evaluate the information with which they are presented. This, for Willis, involved working cooperatively. Students need not agree with one another whole-heartedly all of the time, but, “the fullest development of the child as an individual can only be achieved as he is a valued and cooperative member of the group� (p. 283).

The ability and willingness of the student to examine and re-examine issues and beliefs he/she holds most dear reflects a truly tolerant and open-minded person. This skill is cultivated only with regards to problems that seem important to the student: His vital problems must be the center of the classroom work; the problems which compel him to collect and evaluate all the pertinent information he can find, sift and compare it in discussion with others, and base his conclusions and actions on his weighting of the evidence. (p. 284)

The idea of the student studying what is meaningful to him seems perhaps contrary to the democratic classroom; however, Willis addressed this query: Perhaps the time is not far off when we will recognize that a plan of study made by the teacher alone is just as absurd as a plan made by the children alone; that pupils will learn far more real social science if they participate with the teacher in planning, criticizing, and

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Four: Willis The Writer

evaluating their own work and procedures; that sound intellectual self-confidence can only come from such foundation in experience. (p.

284)

Humbly, Willis admitted that no one is ever an adequate teacher of the social sciences, if he/she is truly a thoughtful individual. At best, Willis wrote, the teacher can only “go as a learner a little ahead of younger learners” (p.

284). Ever modest, Willis recognized that teachers will never be able to teach children more than a small portion of what they need to know. Students are with their teachers for a finite period, during which time teachers “must help the child to learn to deal with facts and draw his own conclusions. Since that is slow, we must help him while he is with us to develop interests, habits, contacts, and skills such that he will continue his education after he leaves us” (p. 284).

A few years later in 1939 Margaret Willis composed an outline titled “Social Studies Program of University School.”

This unpublished work continued the theme of her 1936 article, that to develop active and responsible citizenship, “education should offer, at every level of interest and responsibility, constant experience in planning, assembling the information needed for decision, action on the basis of evidence, and further planning based on experience” (p. 1).

While Willis believed, as did the social studies department whom she represented with her outline, that the teacher must determine at each level how much accountability students are able to assume in a study, she also believed that students were far better equipped at handling such responsibility much earlier than some teachers may expect:

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Children should learn to help the group project according to their ability, to work with many others of varying abilities and skills, to select leaders discriminatingly, to assume an increasing measure of responsibility for personal and group successes and standards.

Pupils will be active and increasingly responsible citizens in their own world, and will be continuously enlarging that world both in space and time, accumulating experiences which are meaningful at the time and which lead to more mature experiences. (p. 5)

Margaret Willis’ specialty, social studies, “is not in its nature a separate area but rather a thoughtful way of looking at life whole” (p. 8). It is not surprising that Willis found the core program at the University School such a natural way to organize studies. Core classes are representative of any number of subject areas, and very early students learned that “subject matter areas are adult abstractions for purposes of study and analysis, and that they do not exist as such in real life where, for example, economics cannot be separated from geography, politics and science” (p.2). Willis’ later writing reflects how the core program of the University School married subjects without creating “abstractions” that students would never encounter outside of the school setting.

In 1940 Willis widened her focus from the social studies and core curricula to describe contemporary high schools as well as to prescribe what should take place in these institutions to better meet the needs of the students enrolled.

The theme of Willis’ article, “Adapting Our High Schools to Present Needs” comes as no surprise to any who knew her or her earlier writing. In short, Willis wrote that the job of high

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Four: Willis The Writer

schools is “general education—the development of individuals who are healthy, well-adjusted, interested in and well informed about their world, able to work alone or with others toward common ends, and able to estimate their own powers and abilities adequately” (p.463). A problem, as Willis saw it, was that high schools were still operating under the assumption that, as in the past, “not more than five percent of the children ever attended high school,” and that those five percent were academically inclined and bound for college education (p.461). Willis noted that the increase in high school attendance between the years of 1910 and 1930 had increased from five percent to sixty-five percent, and not all high school students currently enrolled were college bound, “nor should they be” according to Willis. When curriculum is designed to meet the needs of only five percent, the result is “ a school experience remote from the child’s real interests, beyond his understanding, and meaningless in his life” (p. 462). Such an experience, in Willis’ words, is “tragic.” “Too often,” Willis lamented, “Teachers and pupils, after some futile protests [to a myopic curriculum], slip into a deadly monotonous and meaningless routine” (p. 462).

To permit students to waste their high school years on material that has no relevance in their lives, either presently or in the future, was unforgivable, in Margaret Willis’ opinion.

Secondary schooling should provide students with the opportunities to extend their learning with adult experiences, and to test the opinions they spent earlier grades developing.

Regardless of the student, whether college bound or career bound, schools can and should heed Willis’ convictions, she believed: (1)Our high school courses, methods, and

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organization must be completely redesigned to meet our enormously increased opportunity for democratic service, and in that reorganization pupil interest, pupil needs, and pupil activity must become much more important than they are at present; (2) our schools must stop practicing dictatorship while they talk about democracy. Both teachers and administrators must learn to see themselves in new roles and learn to get their satisfactions from doing well the difficult job of offering democratic leadership, instead of enjoying the position of petty dictators; and (3) the curriculum and the whole school organization must be regarded merely as means to an end, and therefore of value only as they serve that end—the fostering of capable, independent, well balanced individuals who know how to work together and select leaders wisely, who value freedom and use it with consideration for the rights of others. (p. 461) It is only when teachers and administrators behave thoughtfully and democratically that, in Margaret Willis’ estimation, they may begin to offer meaningful curricula to their students instead of the “dead array of meaningless knowledge and useless skills with which our formal courses usually equip us” (p.464).

The chapter from Everett’s (1961) Programs for the Gifted that Margaret Willis co-wrote with Herbert Coon, “Learning in a Core-Centered Program,” reinforced her idea that the goal of each subject area, not only the social studies,

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Four: Willis The Writer

should be to foster individuals who could intelligently assess problems, evaluate solutions, and affect change in a democratic manner. This goal was exemplified nowhere better than in the core courses offered by University School.

Willis briefly explained that in the senior high program, core classes met nine periods each week, and the content was drawn primarily from English and social studies, but was not confined to these areas (p. 166). The content of the core classes in grades ten, eleven, and twelve, consisted of problems common to young people growing up in society at that time. Willis wrote, This definition is useful for some purposes, but if accepted literally, it tends to be misleading in at least two directions. First, many other courses are concerned with the common problems of young people in our society. Basic mathematics, American history, and physical education might be cited as examples. The core is thus not the whole general education program. Second, the definition seems to imply that the problems of young people have a common level, or that the core is concerned with the lowest common denominator of problems. Such an interpretation overlooks the fact that every common problem is common only in the sense that most young people are involved in it. (p. 168)

The nature of the student’s involvement in a core study was contingent upon his perception of the problem in his life.

Given some core studies, a particular student may take a prominent leadership role; in others, he may assume a more

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low-profile position, allowing others, for whom the problem was more relevant, to assume authority. At no time, however, did a student respond apathetically. He/She was always, at some level, involved, because the nature of the studies were such that they touched the lives of each student, however minimally.

The list of “problem areas” from which students developed ideas for study, were developed over the course of many faculty work studies from 1946-1948. According to Willis, the faculty identified the following areas of experience as those in which learning units might be sought, • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

School living Healthful living Communication Government Producer-consumer economics Conservation of resources Values and beliefs Human behavior (understanding self and others) Conflicting ideologies Education Oc c u p a t i o n s ( s e l e c t i n g a n d preparation) A developing cultural heritage Social relationships in a rapidly changing society Living in the Atomic Age (p. 168)

After a preliminary discussion and narrowing of the list

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to three or four manageable and interesting topics, “the teacher’s role becomes one of insisting that the class develop a practicable unit in that in can be handled in the class, that it takes account of the school situation, and that it considers the desires of all class members” (p. 170). Willis noted that while not every student will have his personally favorite topic selected by the group each time, he/she will be encouraged to work within the selected project using whatever talents he/she possesses; “the core unit often offers a student the opportunity to carry a deep interest into broader fields and see its relation to other areas” (p. 171). Always foremost in Willis’ mind was the quest for meaningful learning—seeking connections, figuring out one’s place in the world.

“Evaluation and guidance are continuous and are two sides of the same sheet of paper,” Willis wrote (p. 175). In core classes, as in all classes at the University School, students learned from the evaluations and suggestions from both their teachers and their peers, in addition to self-evaluation.

Teachers helped students keep in focus “the long-range personal significance of a learning situation,” however that may change during the course of a study (p. 186). Willis applauded the core program, specifically, at the University School for its “individual approach to teaching permits each student, regardless of the nature and quantity of his talent, to move forward as rapidly and purposefully as he can toward becoming a socially useful, unique self” (p. 188).

The Education of Veterans

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In the winter and early spring of 1945, the Ohio State University School began considering ideas for study during the summer quarter. Someone suggested the problem of veterans returning from World War II and re-entering the secondary school setting. Clearly, this issue deserved attention, for it certainly promised to be problematic for both the veteran who was a unique man-child, and for the secondary institution that welcomed this oddity into its classrooms. There were a number of young men who were drafted and sent to war before completing high school. During the war they had experienced horrors most adults hoped never to share during their lifetimes.

However, when the young men returned from war, they were once again treated as adolescents. The boys who had returned from war to continue their high school studies found that their needs were not met and subsequently, the rate of dropouts was very high. The young men returning from the war had to reacquaint themselves with their families, friends, and the lives they left behind. They were eager to assume adult responsibilities such as marriage, career, and home. However, as Willis saw it, the young men had “been badly confused in their general scheme of values—snatched from the sheltered world of adolescence into the hard realities of camp life and war. They went away boys: they have come back men, regardless of chronological age” (1945a, p. 7). On just that basis alone, the veterans were not suited to return to a regular high school classroom.

Just as Willis advocated for her traditional students meaningful learning experiences that developed democratic beliefs and practices, she advocated likewise for veterans in general and specifically the ones with whom she worked during the summer session of 1945 at the University School.

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Whereas Willis’ traditional students had the benefit of a “safe” environment in which to test ideas and voice opinions before assuming the responsibilities of adulthood, the veterans were, in many cases, torn from their safe—literally as well as figuratively—environments and given responsibilities that most adults would prefer never to possess; they were burdened with experiences before they were fully able to make sense of them. The task of educators, in Willis’ opinion, was to teach these young men the skills they had missed as well as to offer sympathetic and intelligent guidance; “veterans must be treated as adults and respected as individuals, though frequently they need help in learning to carry responsibilities and make decisions like adults” (1945a, p. 89). Specifically, teachers and administrators needed to help the veteran define his purposes and goals, and then help him to make a plan for achieving those goals. Always present in the teaching and writing of Margaret Willis is the focus on the importance of democracy: “The major aims of any veteran program should include readjustment of veterans to civilian life, and general education for a democratic society. These aims have important implications for all subject areas” (1945a, p. 89).

Margaret Willis eventually wrote three articles and cowrote a book on the experiences of World War II veterans who participated in a summer program offered by the University School in 1945. In “These Veterans Returned to High School,” Willis (1945) wrote, Briefly, the plan was to find a group of ten to twenty veterans, enough to be a reasonably fair sample of the men who needed education at the secondary level. We were to find out what they needed educationally, and then to

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strive to meet their needs during the summer quarter. (p. 73)

In reality, fourteen veterans registered for the program.

One of the fourteen dropped out after two days of class; another dropped out middle way through the program. The faculty consisted of two men and one woman, experienced in English, mathematics, science, social studies, guidance, and testing. Willis wrote that the faculty was pleased that the majority of young men remained in the summer program for its duration, eventually earning their high school diplomas.

She cited several reasons for the success: “The first is that the men were treated as adults and the whole experience was a mature one in which they felt pride and a deep interest…The second reason why the veterans stayed throughout the session was that each one had a purpose” (p. 74).

The faculty members, too, were credited with the success of the summer program for veterans. Willis wrote that the faculty understood that teaching history to young men with the world experiences of these veterans was in most ways different from teaching history to the typical high school student whose world had not yet physically extended much past their community. Had the faculty not accommodated their teaching methods to suit the experiences of the veterans, they likely would have been as dissatisfied as the drop-outs from other programs. Willis concluded, Veterans who have not completed high school need expert guidance, sympathetic teachers, groups of their own where they can be handled at their maturity level. They need to realize with constantly increasing clarity what further

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education they require and why, and they need to have calculated the cost to themselves in time, effort, and money and to have decided it is worth while. (P. 75)

Unlike Willis’ traditional students, these veterans had already experienced first hand what democracy, and perhaps a lack of democracy, looked like. They, rather forcibly, had been required to accept the opinions of others, as well as to accept their own limitations. These young men had been lifted from the secure monotony of their lives to the chaos of the complete unknown. Upon their return, they needed a safe place to express their ideas, continue their education, and return to the lives not constantly bound up with life and death. The twelve young men who remained with the University School summer program were able to do just that.

The summer program did not only help the twelve young men who participated; Margaret Willis’ (1945) “When the Veteran Returns to High School” attempted to generalize the behaviors of the participants for the purpose of advising other schools that considered similar programs. First, Willis noted that the veterans were more comfortable around one another and balked at the possibility of being divided into classes with the traditional high school students. She wrote, Their interest in current social problems is high, and discussions are easy to start and difficult to control and direct. Thinking is often original and creative, often confused and inconsistent, and seldom soundly based upon examination of all relevant data. This is all quite understandable if one considers how fast their personal experiences and contacts have

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grown…. There is a mixed sense of exasperation and futility, and very little knowledge of how intelligent and sincere democratic citizens work for the changes they desire…. The veterans are able to see relevance in much more of our history than high school students can, but they are much more impatient with irrelevant information than high school students are. (P. 300)

A re-visioning of the traditional high school experience must take place, according to Willis, before the veteran could be successful. An understanding of possible physical and mental ailments experienced by the young men must be present. In addition, an understanding that most veterans desired to be done with schooling as quickly as possible and were able to handle material more quickly than the traditional high school student would help the veterans to be successful.

In Willis’ opinion, “They deserve every assistance which can economize their time, and every encouragement which schools can offer to make them willing to return” (p. 300).

Professional Women Writer and traveler Harriet Chalmers Adams wrote, “I’ve never found my sex a hinderment; never faced a difficulty which a woman, as well as man, could not surmount” (2000, p. 197). While this may have been the case with Adams, Margaret Willis found it not to be entirely accurate with regards to working women in the 1940s. In 1944 Willis, along with Lou LaBrant authored an article, “Working Women,” that explored the implications of women working during and after World War II.

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More opportunities for women working outside of the home opened up when large numbers of men were drafted at the outset of World War II. Traditional positions held by women—secretarial jobs, teaching jobs, and some merchandizing jobs—were overshadowed by factory jobs that often paid more than the women were used to earning. It must be said that this salary was still lower than that of a man’s working the same job. However, when men began returning from the war, women, for any number of reasons, left these new jobs.

Interesting to Willis and LaBrant was how previously employed women would feel and behave once they were no longer needed to do the work they were involved in during wartime. For some unmarried women employed in factories and other “men’s” jobs during the war, Willis and LaBrant speculated disappointment at being unable to continue their jobs, as “that is where the available men are” (p. 476). For married women who returned to the home, Willis and LaBrant predicted feelings of being unfulfilled: “Woman’s functions as child-bearer and homemaker constituted a heavy burden, but one that gave her a clear and undisputed function all her days” (p. 476). Additionally, it was considered a sign of economic success and social position for a man to have a wife who lived a life of “leisure.” The odds were against such women who wished to continue their work outside the home. However, when the children grew up and the home no longer needed “making” in the same way it once did, these women were dissatisfied and unhappy. According to Willis and LaBrant, these women, still in possession of youth and good health, were destined to become interfering mothers-in-law, while others would turn to bridge, and still others to community service. Of the few who were “allowed” to venture back into

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the economic life of the community, they would find themselves woefully under-qualified.

Wrote Willis and LaBrant: If women are to be fully developed adults, they need to be assured of their status in society [separate from their identities as “wife” and “mother”]. Few sights are more tragic than the aging woman whose only claim to status has been her ability to attract men, and who clings desperately to the fading remnants of her beauty. (p. 477)

The implications of the war for women were an expanded range of experiences open to them as never before in history. Those who were girls during this time were afforded more opportunities than those who were grown women, some with families, because for these women, the opportunities arrived too late. The writers posed the question of whether these emerging women would be “more mature, more understanding, more sensitive to social responsibilities” than their mothers and grandmothers (p. 477). While the postwar period provided the freedom for “more women able to meet men on an equal footing because more women have shared a comparable range of adult experiences,” this “freedom” was not for every woman, namely the woman who sincerely derived pleasure and a sense of self-worth from her family and home. Willis and LaBrant certainly did not criticize the woman who found personal fulfillment in her family as opposed to a job that took her outside the home. Rather the writers wanted for the women who so desired equal opportunities for equal experiences with equal pay.

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Adult Study Camps Margaret Willis knew that, in order for students one day to become experience-seeking adults, there needed to be information readily available to them about interesting opportunities for continuing education. In 1951, together with Mary J. Alton, Margaret Willis compiled a small guide to various adult study camps across the country. In her introduction Willis wrote, We have found that many of these camps provide an opportunity to study a subject in the best possible way—on the spot. They also offer adults who teach a refreshing and stimulating change. It is true that these camps do not have all the comforts of city life; no one should expect to be pampered while attending one. For those who have an urge to continue growing mentally and culturally, course in an educational summer camp are a ready made answer. (p. 1) Willis knew firsthand the importance of teachers renewing themselves—their interests, their ideas, their beliefs—with experiences they would not have in the classroom. For Margaret Willis, being a dedicated teacher did not mean spending every minute in front of a classroom full of students. To the contrary, she believed the best teachers gave time to their own education so they would have something new to offer students. Teachers who renew themselves through continued education remain excited about learning. How better to become excited about learning than from a teacher who herself is loves knowledge?

The adult study camps listed in Willis and Alton’s book ranged in location from Nova Scotia to Alaska, and the topics ranged from music and art, to botany and archaeology.

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Amenities of home were not a fringe benefit of any of the camps. Authentic learning cannot take place, in Willis’ opinion, if one does not immerse herself in the new experience at hand. Not only must a learner be roused from intellectual complacency, but also physically removed from the comfortable and familiar. The adult study camps, Willis seems to imply in her introduction, are not for the faint of heart. For the indefatigable intellectual, though, Willis wished, “Good camping and happy learning!” (p. 1).

The Guinea Pigs The Guinea Pigs After Twenty Years (1961) was perhaps the greatest testament to the mutual love shared by Margaret Willis and her students. A book that followed up on the class of 1938—University School’s first graduating class that spent a full four years at the high school—that collectively wrote Were We Guinea Pigs?, Willis began the work with some trepidation; she wrote that while the class of 1938 had hoped their book would be followed up, “no definite or specific plans were made or responsibilities assigned…As the years passed it seemed increasingly clear to me that the study would never be made unless I did it” (1961, p.vii). Willis began the twenty-year follow up to the “Guinea Pigs’” book while she was working full time. She surrendered vacations and holidays to the project, which began in 1955 and ended in 1961. The year and a half it took Willis to collect data from the class of 1938 involved her visiting many of her former students, eating with their families, and sleeping in their homes. She spent hours interviewing former students on topics as diverse and probing as the ones she had inquired into many

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years earlier as their teacher.

There was no other individual as uniquely suited to the task of writing about the first graduating class of University School as Margaret Willis. The Eight Year Study sought to compare how students in experimental schools stacked up against students from conventional schools; Margaret Willis’ book sought to discover how University School graduates managed years later as adults. Many were surely curious about how students from an experimental high school were faring, none as curious as Willis herself. With The Guinea Pigs After Twenty Years, Willis hoped to illuminate such questions as: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Can teachers do justice to different ability levels in the same classroom?

Can the school teach moral and ethical values, not just preach them?

Can democratic give and take and concern for others be developed? If it can be, will it carry over into adult living?

Is a child’s sense of status, of being an individual person but also one who belongs, something of primary importance?

Can tolerance be taught so that it functions?

Can individual and social responsibility be taught?

How can academic learning in school be so organized that the individual will carry the responsibility for his own education into the out-of-school hours

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and into his life after he has left school? (pps.10-11) The thesis of her study, Willis wrote, was simple, “If basic high school curriculum reorganization is worth the effort, it should have results which are apparent in the adult living of the students who experience it” (p. 11). Willis was curious if a connection could be made between the experiences one has with a non-traditional school and the kind of adult one becomes.

This literary biographer has no reason to deal with issues such as the reliability and validity of Margaret Willis’ study; such matters are best left to quantitative studies. What is interesting, however, for this study, is the willingness of an entire graduating class to give over their lives, homes, and families to a high school teacher they may not have seen, in some cases, since their graduation. Willis’ former students were willing to answer questions on topics as personal and diverse as religion, financial income, and child-rearing beliefs.

Their responses, according to Willis, overwhelmingly supported the belief that a non-traditional school experience typically results in non-traditional views. Only one former student, Willis wrote, said, “In all probability there was too much stress on individualism. After all, we do have to conform to a certain degree when we get out in life” (p. 178). Most former students shared the opinion of one, who said, “It’s not so much what facts you retain from school, it’s your attitude on how to find out what you want to find out” (p. 195). Still others commented on the importance of learning how to think instead of simply memorizing arbitrarily-selected facts (p.

196). For Willis, who believed that “it is not enough that people should live democratically. They should know what

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they are about, in the sense that they should become increasingly aware of the value of such living, not only within school but in life outside the school,” such responses by former students certainly filled her with a sense of success in creating thoughtful, intelligent citizens (p. 245).

Willis noted that most of the former students she interviewed were quite aware of being individualists, and they liked other people who were as well. While a few interviewees expressed an appreciation for good, old-fashioned subject divisions and ability grouping, many others share the opinion of one former “Guinea Pig,” who wrote to Margaret Willis, I want you to know that I will never cease being truly grateful for my four years in University School. Those years began for me in a state of disturbance, confusion, and rebellion. They ended as golden years, exciting, absorbing, and rich beyond expression. Insights and perspective gained in my high school helped give me pointers and directives and opened up areas of intellectual and social interests that I should feel povertystricken without today. (p. 287)

Without a doubt, Margaret Willis, too would have felt “poverty-stricken” had she not been blessed with the experience the University School provided her.

The University School Plans for Margaret Willis’ next book, Three Dozen

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Years: A Report on the University School, Ohio State University 1932-1968, which she referred to as “the little book which Jeanne, Mary Jane, Herb, and I wrote about the University School” in a letter to director Dr. Alex Frazier, were begun after the administration of The Ohio State University announced the imminent closing of University School (b5/f2). According to Willis, “The faculty of the school felt that there were many things to record before the unity of the group was dissolved. The project of writing this book evolved from that feeling” (1968, p. iii).

The faculty met and was asked to put down in writing what they felt were the characteristics of the school that bore the most significant implications for American education.

From there, Willis organized more faculty meetings in which anyone who wished to could contribute to the project. Of the faculty who participated, Margaret Willis, Herbert Coon, Mary Jane Loomis, and Jeanne Orr, were the ones who remained from start to finish. The resulting work was a compilation from numerous sources regarding topics such as a description of the school, teaching at the school, creativity and the development of interests, and the school in historical perspective. The “little book” concluded with implications for other institutions that wished to test the methods of the University School. Again, most important to Willis was to appeal to a non-exclusive “intellectual community” that could possibly benefit from the topics about which she wrote.

While Three Dozen Years was a book written by many, Willis’ fingerprints are evident in the material she opted to include in the text. From Thirty Schools Tell Their Story (1943), Willis included, “The role of the teacher has changed from guide of a conducted tour to guide of a group of explorers” (p. 6). From student comments from the classes of

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1966 and 1967, Willis included, “If an education does not produce one who can think then he is badly educated in a true sense; a person full of facts and nothing else is of little real value…” (p. 14).

Willis herself wrote, “Schools, like society, need to be self-regenerative, need to be so organized and staffed that continuous thought is given to what is taught so that it may be adapted to the new challenges of the world” (p. 20). While it is imperative, in Willis’ estimation to intelligently use the past, it is dangerous to live in it, or use it as an excuse for not grappling with the issues of the present. The vitality of a democracy, according to Willis, “derives from the central role assigned to the individual as a fully developed member of the group” (p. 27). The individual must hold himself/herself accountable for the growth and change of society.

Seven points Willis believed were related to democratic values, but not unique to any one subject area, were elaborated upon both theoretically and practically, 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Developing social sensitivity Developing cooperativeness Developing the ability and zeal to utilize the method of intelligence in solving all problems of human concern Developing creativeness Developing skills in democratic living Interpreting democracy Developing self-direction (p. 29)

Typical of Willis’ writing is the focus on the everwidening experiences of the student. This belief is certainly both implied and stated throughout Three Dozen Years. The

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task of the teacher and school, according to Margaret Willis, is to expand the world of the student. New challenges must be faced; art, literature, science, and psychology, among a number of other subjects, must be introduced to young scholars, along with the tools necessary for evaluating the topics broached in these subjects, if they have any hope of becoming the students of life Margaret Willis expects us all to be.

World Travel In 1967, Margaret Willis kicked off her retirement from the University School with a tour of the Middle East.

Always the meticulous and fascinating storyteller, Willis submitted her account of her trip to the New York Times in 1968 for use in their Sunday foreign travel section. Her article was able to convey the mystique of Turkey and Iran, while also providing practical travel advice. Without a doubt, the reader of Willis’ travel writing comes away with the sense that she absolutely relished her adventures, saw the beauty of the natives, and in all ways took each place on its own terms, never trying to bend it to suit Western practices.

The real flavor of the countries can be savored much better through a more leisurely trip along the roads. A woman, in peasant dress but unveiled, comes in from a day’s work in the fields, carrying a modern transistor radio. A farmer uses the barrel vaults of an unidentified Roman building as the foundation for his barn and as a garage for his farm tractor. Village threshing floors are straight out of Bible times, while carts and trucks carry sugar beets to the

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railroad. (p. 1)

For all her poetic descriptions, Willis did not neglect more practical matters, such as which towns were more likely to have erratic plumbing or electricity. She made suggestions about what to pack (a pan, matches, powdered coffee, to name a few items), as well as provided amusing translations of dinner items—“educated trotter soup” was on the menu in Turkey (p.4). Willis’ descriptions of the adversities she and her travel partners faced only served to reinforce the reader’s opinion that Margaret Willis was a woman willing to face, without complaint, whatever fate brought. She wrote about experiencing 116 degree weather at 8 a.m. while crossing the Syrian Desert—“our lips parched and our teeth grinding on sand”—determined not to turn back (p.1).

In her travel writing, as with all of her writing, Margaret Willis communicated her deep wonder at the world, as well as her curiosity about her place in it and her responsibility for contributing to it. Her experiences abroad shaped the person and the teacher Margaret Willis was.

Miscellaneous Writing and Professional Activities Willis wrote only when she felt what she had to say was meaningful and well-informed. She was a regular contributor to The World Book Encyclopedia, but in 1969 Willis requested to retire as a contributor: Since I retired two years ago I no longer have easy access to a large university library, nor accessible scholarly colleagues with whom to consult. Neither do I have regular contact with

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the young people toward whose needs for information the World Book is directed. (b5/f2)

As always, Willis’ dedication to scholarly pursuits guided her actions, even when it meant humbly passing the torch she could have conceivably carried for much longer.

Margaret Willis, though not a feminist, per se, was interested in gender roles in the United States and the experiences of working women in the 1940s. She devoted several articles, including one co-written and published with colleague Lou LaBrant, to the study of these issues. In her unpublished work “Sex Roles,” Willis notes, “The women who have trained for a career and who go on with it, as architects, doctors, lawyers, teachers, expect in most cases to subordinate their own to their husband's career, letting his vocational choices determine their place of residence and their moves” (p. 2). Rather optimistically Willis wrote that the “old prejudice” against married women working has “practically disappeared” and that old stereotypes about “women’s work” (i. e. housework, caring for children) have mostly ceased to exist (p. 2). Interestingly, neither Margaret Willis nor Lou LaBrant were married.

University School held Margaret Willis’ attention for the duration of her thirty-four year career there, but she replenished her ideas and passion by visiting other institutions and serving on different committees. For three summers from 1937-1939 Willis taught a group of junior high students at Emory University, out of which grew one of the first team teaching experiments at Atlanta’s Bass Junior High School.

Thirteen summers beginning in 1950 were spent at Western Maryland College teaching a research problems course for graduate students. Regardless of the committees on which she

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served and the schools at which she taught during summer “vacations,” Willis’ choices made it clear that neither monetary gain nor professional glory were of primary importance to her. Rather, the opportunity to widen her intellectual community and acquire new experiences that would inform her teaching at University School were most significant. Margaret Willis’ passion for knowledge and love of fresh adventures were encouraged by University School, and Willis showed her appreciation for this encouragement by bringing a continually renewed vision to the school. The mutual admiration shared by Willis and The Ohio State University School remained strong until the very end of the relationship.

After her retirement from the University School, Margaret Willis returned to her hometown of Mount Vernon, Washington, where she quickly established herself as the county historian. She edited three works about Skagit Country history, as well as co-authored a book about the buildings of Skagit County. It would have been unfathomable for Willis not to immerse herself in whatever culture of which she was a part. The adage, “Bloom where you are planted” would not have been lost on Margaret Willis, keeper of the tulip farm, student and historian of the world.

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Chapter Five

A Life of Exploration

Teachers, rather than taking their children on conducted tours, should be leaders of groups of explorers.

(Margaret Willis, b5/f16)

E

xplorers have been overwhelmingly men. Most women marry. Those who marry an explorer are doomed to “keep the home fires burning� and play the long-suffering wife while their husbands go forth into the world. Unfathomable it would be for a man to allow his wife to adventure, unaccompanied, while he remained home; he would be a laughingstock. Unmarried women have typically been manacled to their conventional lives out of financial necessity.

What single woman possesses the financial means to travel, even minimally?

Traditionally, men have kissed their families goodbye and disappeared for the South China Sea or the goldfields for years with scarcely a backward glance. For a woman over age twenty, a week or two is all she thinks she can spare from her accustomed world. Even if she has neither job nor children, what will become of her house and garden without her, and will

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her cat starve and her friends forget her? Her heart drags its feet. Like Lot’s wife, she looks over her shoulder. (Holland, 2001, p. 120)

However, when women do travel, they tend to notice their surroundings differently than male travelers. They value differently; “women notice marriage customs, goats, chickens, cooking pots, and whether the natives beat their donkeys. They watch women pounding grain; they get to hear the old stories the old women tell” (Holland, 2001, p.118). Men notice men and the works of other men: “When a man carries letters of introduction, he gets interviews with prime ministers; a woman with letters gets to spend a few days with a local family and sit at the kitchen table” (p.118).

Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is remarkable for a person, especially a woman, to travel to the extent that Margaret Willis did in the 1920s and 1930s. Well-trodden paths in “tame” locales did not intrigue Willis nearly as much as mysterious, remote, and even at times dangerous, places as the Middle East and Asia. Japan, Egypt, Turkey, and Iran were certainly not places recommended for a single woman to travel alone; perhaps the fact that women travelers were uncommon to these locations challenged Willis the pioneer. At any rate, Margaret Willis did not perceive her gender or marital status as impediments to her travel; neither did she perceive her decision to travel widely and independently as anything extraordinary. In a letter recommending Willis for a distinguished teaching award, a former student wrote, When one exclaims about her globe trotting, she [Willis] simply explains, “I just started traveling before it was the fashionable thing to do.” Fortunately, too, Miss Willis has an admirable capacity for making her travel experiences vividly vicarious for others, and

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she is an enthusiastic resource person for students and colleagues alike. (b1/f3)

One wonders if Margaret Willis’ penchant for travel and exploration may be attributed to her own parents’ willingness to leave familiar comforts in search of something new. Willis’ curiosity was likely a result of both nature and nurture. Her parents, both adventurers in their own rights, encouraged their second eldest daughter to take the opportunities that arose, even when opportunity required their twenty-year-old daughter to travel around the world unaccompanied. Willis recalled that upon her graduation from Wellesley College in 1919, “There were a m illion other things I had in mind but I was offered the teaching job in Japan and I couldn’t pass it up” (b5/f16). As Willis remembered, there were numerous Wellesley graduates who applied for the posted job, but the parents of the other applicants refused to allow their unmarried daughters to move so far from home (b5/f16).

It was at this point in Margaret Willis’ life that she began to envision the world as a classroom, first only for herself and later for her students as well. Teaching students that the world extended beyond their myopic scope was, for Willis, of primary importance. What more credible source could students have than someone who had seen first hand the very things of which she taught? Just as Willis’ parents had inspired her to travel and explore, Willis’ students were impressed by someone whose fascination with the world moved beyond the classroom and textbooks.

The trip to Japan marked the first of many overseas travels for Willis. However, she did not merely travel; she investigated and took with her pieces of other cultures and

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their histories. She was compelled to integrate other people’s lives with her own. Her apartment in Olentangy Village was a physical manifestation of this practice: Her apartment represents her versatile tastes and cosmopolitan background. The accent is definitely Middle Eastern but there is a touch of the occupant’s homeland, too, in the several fine American antiques which she “picked up during the thirties when they were easy to find.” Every stick of furniture is a conversation piece, from a giant 200-year-old brass tray, typical of the type presented the Turkish harem women who bore a first son for the Shah, down to the smallest water colors of Istanbul street scenes by Russian refugee artists. (b5/f16)

Willis’ students at the Cairo School for American Children wrote of her in their 1947 yearbook, The Cairoglyph, that “traveling has been her favorite hobby, mania, and pastime; twenty-three countries have been honored by her presence” (b5/f10). While her students were likely being clever when they spoke of traveling being a “mania” for Willis, their assessment was close to the truth. One imagines that Willis would be insulted if her travels were labeled merely “holidays,” for she did not journey to the places she did to vegetate or meander through gift shops. In a letter to a former student in 1953 Willis wrote that she was never bored when she traveled; in fact, she said, “I’m always busier in ‘vacations’ than when I am working” (b5/f3). She visited museums, toured historical monuments, photographed the people with whom she spoke; her trips abroad would likely

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Five: A Life of Exploration

have been exhausting for anyone lacking Willis’ stamina.

Margaret Willis’ drive to know about the world she inhabited was never sated. It may even be argued that her spirit was fed by the numerous and varied adventures she acquired in her lifetime. Willis herself admitted that an urge to be on the go was always an underlying influence in her life; she called it “the biggest part of my life” (b5/f16).

Interestingly, one of the projects Margaret Willis pursued after her retirement to Mount Vernon involved “pioneer women” in the United States, specifically the Skagit Valley, at the time of World War I. She noted that during a period when men were largely absent, women stepped out of their traditional roles and moved into what had been for them previously uncharted territories. Willis said, “Women were never seen behind the wickets in banks, although they might have been working there…they were always upstairs somewhere doing the accounting, but they were never visible” (b5/f16). What both fascinated and troubled Willis was that women returned to their traditional roles when the men returned from the war.

The experiences of the women Willis studied represented what could have been her own reality; she was grateful that her parents had given her an altogether different experience. Willis said that her parents were “unusually supportive for that time,” but her mother was an “especially emancipated woman” (b5/f16). Willis acknowledged that for many of her contemporaries, simply moving from an “invisible” position to a “visible” position at a bank was for them pioneering and adventurous. Willis did not condescend to these women; rather she noted that each woman, herself included, worked to extend whatever parameters were set for

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her. Because she was blessed with such liberal-minded parents who encouraged her to live as she pleased, regardless of societal expectations, Margaret Willis, to some degree, felt she must take advantage of the opportunities that presented themselves. To do otherwise would dishonor those who were not privileged with supportive parents and circumstances conducive to independence.

Margaret Willis relished the intellectual disquietude that accompanied her extensive travels. Her explorations confirmed for her that there was still much about which she was ignorant; hence there was still much for her to learn.

Willis would have derided anyone who was too sure of his own wisdom; she embraced doubt and uncertainty and felt that recognition of her own ignorance was in itself a kind of wisdom. Of her travels Margaret Willis wrote, “The ultimate objective of [travel] should be the improvement of the learner” (b1/f15). Further, she embraced the sentiments of Aldous Huxley following his first trip around the world in 1927 as her very own: So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions, many perished certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Of knowledge and experience the fruit is generally doubt. It is doubt that grows profounder as knowledge more deeply burrows into the underlying mystery, that spreads in exact proportion as experience is widened and the perceptions of the experiencing individual are refined….I set out

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Five: A Life of Exploration

on my travels knowing or thinking that I knew, how men should live, how be governed, how educated, what they should believe. I had my views on every activity of life. Now, on my return, I find myself without any of these pleasing certainties…. The better you understand the significance of any question, the more difficult it becomes to answer it.

Those who like to feel that they are always right and who attach a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced. (b1/f15)

An Opportunity Too Good to Refuse To anyone who inquired, Margaret Willis admitted shamelessly that the primary reason she became a teacher was to travel. Her first teaching job—and she used the word “teaching” very loosely when referring to this experience—took her to Japan; more accurately, Willis’ first opportunity to travel required that she teach. She willingly admitted that she “went into teaching by the back door” (b5/f16). According to Willis, “I did not plan to teach; I just wanted to know what was going on in the world and why” (b5/f3). It can only be speculated that her first experience abroad whetted her appetite for a lifetime of exploration.

At the culmination of her senior year at Wellesley College in 1919, Margaret Willis visited the school’s

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placement office and learned that a medical missionary and member of the American Embassy Staff, Dr. Tuesler, was going to Japan and needed a tutor for his children. In a postretirement interview, Willis recalled, “Going to Japan sounded exotic, so along with most of the graduating class, I applied.

For one reason or another I got the job!” (b5/f16) She was enamored with Japan, and admittedly spent more time taking in her surroundings than rigorously tutoring her four charges.

Willis did not write much about her first teaching experience other than to say that she “did a very bad job of teaching” and that “it is an understatement to surmise that [she] learned more than the children did” (b5/f3). However, she maintained regular contact with Dr. Tuesler’s children long after her retirement—a testament to the lasting effect she had on the lives of her students.

Dr. Tuesler’s long hours at St. Luke’s International Hospital in Tokyo provided Willis the opportunity to shuttle the four children around the city; there was time for both Willis and the students to explore their new territory. Even the smallest details did not escape Willis: I remember Tokyo very vividly…. It was very crowded—none of the streets were paved.

And in the winter they were very muddy! There was very little ground outside the city that wasn’t planted with an edible crop, but there were always flowers growing someplace, even if it was in the roof of the thatched houses. (b5/f16)

Margaret Willis certainly did not allow the Japanese

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Five: A Life of Exploration

love of flowers and their orderly ways to escape the children’s notice, either. According to her, the most important thing educators can do for students is to “furnish [them] with learning attitudes” (b5/f16).

At the end of her two-year appointment with Dr. Tuesler’s children, Willis returned to the United States having had a positive experience on her first trip outside the country.

Japan remained dear to Willis throughout her life, and she, working with University School colleague Franklin Buchanan at the beginning of her final year at the school, created an opportunity for two University High seniors to study in Japan.

The chosen students worked with Willis at University School in an Asian Seminar class for a semester before they left for Japan, where they met Buchanan, who was conducting a research project in Japan. The two students studied in Japan with Mr. Buchanan for one month before they returned to share their experiences with the other University School students (b1/f22).

When Willis returned from Japan in 1921, she had no immediate plans for herself. In fact, all that she knew for sure was that her “interest in the world, its past, present, and future, had grown” (b5/f3). She had enjoyed “leading a group of explorers” and decided to take a job teaching high school history in her hometown of Mount Vernon for several reasons—she needed more teaching experience and more knowledge of history. Armed with these, Willis would have more choices for teaching abroad. After teaching in Mount Vernon for three years, she returned to school, enrolling in Columbia University’s graduate school. After graduating with a master’s degree, Willis spent two years training teachers at Maryland State Teachers College. However, the “waiting world” distracted her like a siren’s song, and soon she applied

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for and obtained a job teaching at the Constantinople Women’s College, now known as the American Girls College in Istanbul (b5/f16). Margaret Willis left for Turkey in 1927 and spent four “very happy” years teaching, traveling, and learning.

The Call of Constantinople The appeal of the exotic lured Margaret Willis once more from the familiar comforts of home; she signed a twoyear contract as an Associate Professor of history at the Constantinople Women’s College. She returned home in 1929 for the summer and returned to Istanbul for another two-year period with the rank of Professor. Willis recalled with amusement that she was “the entire history, economics, and international relations departments” (b5/f16). Her time in Turkey was not all work; she found time in the summers and other school holidays to travel around Turkey and other neighboring areas as well as to write rather poetic travel narratives.

As noted, Willis was an “all-purpose” history teacher at the college; she also presided over classes that represented fourteen different nationalities. According to Willis, “Modern history, international relations, and economics were very challenging subjects to teach in such a setting!” (b5/f3).

Diverse nationalities aside, Margaret Willis was challenged by the caliber of student she encountered with one specific class, something she mentions in a letter to her replacement, Miss Stickney in 1931: The first year that I taught here the freshman class was a very intelligent group…. The class

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Five: A Life of Exploration

which came up from the prep my second year was the last one of the old regime in one sense, for at the end of 1927-28, Miss Clarahan came to take charge of the school.

The new class was badly prepared and not half so bright as the first group I taught, and they inspired no thrill in their teachers…. The class you will know as juniors next year are almost utterly hopeless. (b5/f12)

Willis continued in her letter to Miss Stickney that the students she encountered from Turkish, Armenian, Greek, or French schools came to the college with “a vast amount of memorized factual knowledge but no ideas of how to use books, evaluate and criticize, and organize” (b5/f12). She was troubled by her students’ apparent lack of curiosity and aversion to intellectual pursuits. She warned Miss Stickney that very few students elected to take history classes, as they were “afraid of the reading and papers” (b5/f12). Another dilemma facing Willis at the school was how to build objectivity and impartiality in her students. “Just try telling the truth about the Greek Revolution to a group of girls from Greek schools who have not yet been inoculated against truculent nationalism,” Willis cautioned her successor (b5/f12). Willis’ own feelings had always echoed Aldous Huxley’s: “Those who like to feel that they are always right and who attach a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home” (b1/f15). It was a formidable goal for someone who accepted and even welcomed ambiguity in her life to teach the young women to separate their personal feelings from history.

Whatever challenges Margaret Willis may have faced

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with her students at the Constantinople Women’s College were exceeded by the awe she felt at her proximity to ancient history. The draw of exploration was even greater, on several occasions, than her need to return home to visit her family.

Willis wrote, I came home one summer, but the other summers I spent traveling. I wandered all over Asia Minor—on all kinds of railroads. Hotels then were very primitive. A second floor balcony would be built around an inner court on the first floor. Rooms would open off this balcony, but the lower floor would be for the animals and their loads. Then the outside doors would be shut and barred against intruders or robbers. There were public baths with different days for men and women. A large area would be sectioned off into separate areas, kind of, and you would take a pan of water and bathe yourself. Then an employee at the bath would come and rub you down with large Turkish towels and get off the remainder of the dirt! (b5/f16)

Her delight in such experiences was apparent.

Accommodations at a five-star, Westernized hotel never interested Willis; why bother to travel at all if one did not intend to step outside her own lived experience? Not a delicate creature who pined for the familiar comforts of home, Margaret Willis would set out on foot for a day of “wandering” with a canteen of water and a bag of figs for sustenance. Finding an off-the-beaten-path teahouse with a picturesque setting was a delightful surprise, but not requisite

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for Willis; among other adjectives her students used to describe her, “indefatigable” was at the top of the list (b5/f10).

Margaret Willis was a hearty as well as hardy traveler, something that on occasion surprised those with whom she worked. “But you can’t go! It isn’t safe without a man!” Willis recalled some reactions to her solitary excursions (b5/f9).

“Most of these dangers are in people’s heads or in doing silly things,” Willis wrote matter-of-factly. “People gathered around in a group of up to 30 people sometimes while we unloaded our bags at rural hotels, but I always found the Turks very friendly and very helpful” (b5/f16).

In addition to finding time to sate her own independent curiosities, Margaret Willis also arranged educational tours for her students at Constantinople Women’s College. One such trip came at the end of her tenure at the college and involved a one-month tour of Athens, Pompeii, Marseilles, Paris, Lucerne, Zurich, Vienna, Budapest, Danube, and Varna. Ever the savvy traveler, Willis provided her students with very practical advice for their trip: “Take underwear that you can wash out yourself….For the trip on the boat to Marseilles it is a good idea to wear old things which you are about to throw away; as they get dirty you can throw them into the sea” (b5/f12).

Turkey inspired Margaret Willis immeasurably. In her travel journals she wrote beautifully of the beauty she beheld in sights and treasures that most would certainly overlook.

Turkey was certainly magical to transform a practical-minded woman as Margaret Willis into a romantic poet whose subject was Constantinople: Ah, but come with me. The moon is full tonight.

I know a coffeehouse outside the Golden Gate

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where we may spread our supper on tables under young trees in the garden. There we will drink from little glasses and gaze down into the moat below us and gaze up at the walls above…. At first we will see vegetable gardens in the bottom of the moat and rifts in the ruined walls…. But slowly darkness falls; we are with the moon looking down upon the world. On the right hand the sleeping city, on the left the unnumbered dead. But now we see that the walls, too, are dead. Here is a great tower, rent by an earthquake five hundred years ago, and hanging together in spite of gaping fissures. (b5/f9)

The then thirty-two-year-old Willis implored her imagined audience to share her wonder of a beautiful city ravaged by time and battles. One must wonder if Margaret Willis found a kindred spirit in the ancient cities she visited.

The places she chose to sojourn, specifically Constantinople, represented power, grace, and wisdom borne of experience—characteristics not unlike those of Willis herself.

A marriage chest inspired a droll essay Willis entitled “I Miss My Worms” in which she extols the beauty of a piece she first spied in a crowded back room of an antique shop in Constantinople, and later acquired only to discover it was inhabited by worms. The chest was skillfully carved with a simple design of flowering trees and evergreens; vines twine along every edge, the stems of inlaid silver and the leaves of mother-of-pearl decorate the ends; the satin smooth wood of the top shows slight crinkles from the crude tool which smoothed the eighteen-inch board. Every Druse maiden had such a marriage chest, decorated with

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Five: A Life of Exploration

symbols from the strange, secret religion of their isolated mountain. (b5/f9) Willis appreciated the artisan whose dedication to quality and love for his craft led him to create such a piece of art. She also grew fond of the worms with which she became acquainted upon her return from Turkey, “They made a busy but gentle scraping noise as they chewed away at the wood.

The sound was continuous and purposeful, but so tiny that only complete stillness made it audible. The first night I lay awake and listened; it was soothing, and I fell asleep” (b5/f9).

In the light of morning, Willis examined the chest for signs of the worms, and finding no wormholes, grew accustomed to and even attached to the sound of the crunching worms.

After a summer abroad in which she sublet her Olentangy Village apartment to a young married couple, Willis returned to a note from the couple warning her of the danger of the woodworms, “You’d better do something about it quickly or they are liable to get in the other furniture!” (b5/f9) Familiar comfort or not, Willis knew that she must take measures to destroy the stowaways: Just about that time I used alcohol to disinfect a scratch on my hand and was startled at how it stung. It occurred to me that woodworms, living in dark holes, surely had very thin skins.

Why not alcohol? I asked a painter, and he suggested that turpentine would be better for the wood. I bought a gallon of turpentine and the painter brushed it on every surface and poured it into every wormhole. The chest and the apartment reeked of it. But that night as I lay and listened not a sound came from the chest. There was silence for six months. Then

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once more began a very faint scraping noise.

I got an ear syringe and squirted turpentine into every wormhole. There has never been a sound from the chest since. For nearly twenty years now the chest has stood in silent beauty…. But it has lost something, too. I miss the gentle scraping of the woodworms. As long as they were there the chest had a living connection with a home [in Constantinople]….

I miss my worms (b5/f9).

Turkey continued to charm Margaret Willis long after “her” worms had been banished from the chest. In a letter to Willis, Berceste Sezai, a resident of Istanbul, wrote, “You studied us and through us our societies…. You gained new experiences and conclusions and ‘educated’ your own self….

There are so many persons who see, or rather look at but do not see, the same things as you and go back as they came and are ‘uneducated’” (b5/f12).

Willis returned to the United States in 1931 and took a teaching position at the Bennett School in Millbrook, New York, and she later joined the faculty of the Ohio State University School, where she stayed for the remainder of her teaching career. However, the irresistible temptation to explore would not be ignored. Willis took a leave of absence from her teaching position at University School from 1946 to 1948 to teach history and English at the Cairo School for American Children as well as serve as their principal.

A Sabbatical in Cairo One would be hard pressed to decide what Margaret Willis loved more about teaching abroad at the Cairo School

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Five: A Life of Exploration

for American Children, the students or her eclectic housing accommodations. Willis, it seemed, was uniquely suited to administrate in a school in which emergencies ran the gamut from buses breaking down to political riots breaking out. Yet she was also fully able to appreciate the view from her villa which overlooked a small garden in which white chickens roamed among the chrysanthemums (b5/f9). Her duties at the school were seemingly endless, although given her predilection for being involved it is no surprise her time was so fully engaged.

The school was perpetually short-staffed with regards to secretarial help, so Willis found herself answering phone calls, typing letters, making files, maintaining cumulative records, and completing student transcripts. These activities she completed in addition to her teaching and administrative duties: There is, of course, the job of administering the school, arranging schedules, giving teachers the help, advice, and supervision they need…to ringing by hand the bells on which high school classes change…. Meeting Egyptian officials and representing the school on occasions such as lectures at the Higher Teacher Training Institute, or Book Exhibit committee meetings, or art exhibit openings, make up another phase of the principal’s activities. Along with all these activities the principal is also teaching classes, and presumably teaching them well enough to be satisfied that the results will bear the critical inspection of students, teachers, and parents…. (b5/f11)

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While many administrators find themselves so absorbed that they lose contact with the students, Margaret Willis developed personal relationships with the students by shuttling them to and from field trips, cooking for them, and learning their personal interests. She was known among the students as someone completely unflappable and inexhaustible (b5/f9). While it certainly does not diminish the magnitude of her responsibilities, Willis had had nearly fifteen years of experience teaching at University School by the time she took the teaching position in Cairo. If anyone knew about long hours and unusual circumstances, it was Margaret Willis.

Her time in Cairo was not always about hectic schedules, she often found time for Sunday drives with a few of the other women teachers at the school. These drives often involved Willis looking at a map, pointing to what seemed like an interesting name, and then seeking out the destination. One such Sunday drive resulted in Willis’ locating the city of Zagazig on her map, then driving unpaved roads until she came upon the “lovely town.” She and her fellow pioneers enjoyed the small town with “a lot of weeping willows along a canal” and spent the afternoon sightseeing. By late afternoon Willis suggested they head homeward, as she wanted to be traveling paved roads again before dark—the headlights on her 1939 Plymouth were at best unreliable. To everyone’s relief, they made it to paved highway just as night was falling, only to gasp at the sudden lurching of the car as one of the rear tires flattened. Willis recalled, “I got out with the greatest confidence, opened the trunk, and got out the jack. It was not until I got down on my knees and looked underneath that I realized I had never changed a rear tire on that car” (b5/f9).

After an hour or so of attempting to flag down help, one

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Five: A Life of Exploration

chauffeured car pulled to a stop beside them and a passenger stepped out and graciously helped the teachers change the rear tire. Willis remembered that he got “pretty dirty” in the process, but remained poised as he told them all the sights they should visit while in the area. When the gentleman was finished, he urged Willis and the others to “Stop and call on me in my office sometime when you are passing. I am the Vice-President of Parliament.” As Willis and her colleagues drove back to Cairo, the gentleman drove behind them so that if they encountered more problems “he could rescue us again” (b5/f9). Willis never went to call, but she did learn the man’s name and wrote him a note. In the following years Willis always thought of him whenever she read of “incidents” along Egyptian roadways: “I don’t know what we did for the relations between our countries, but I know that he made a lasting impression on four American school teachers!” (b5/f9) The housing provided for the teachers in Cairo was impressive even to Willis, who typically preferred simple, understated elegance. Her villa was furnished in a “grand manner” with gold furniture for the parlor, an ebony grand piano, Haviland china, and sumptuous rugs. A magnificent central hallway led to a broad stairway that ascended to the master bedroom on the second floor. Willis quickly “settled into a style of life to which [she] was not accustomed” (b5/f9).

For all its ornate styling, the lighting and water supply in the villa were temperamental. It was anybody’s guess if the lights would work on any given day; the same went for the hot water supply. On one occasion Willis received an electric shock from the stream of hot water in the bathroom as she attempted to wash her face (b5/f9). All of the idiosyncrasies of living abroad she took in stride, for they provided memorable experiences that she treasured.

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The staff who helped Willis manage the villa was delightful; her enthusiasm for the customs and practices of their society inspired them to dote on her at every opportunity to show their appreciation for her interest. One her first Christmas at the school, she decided to spend the break traveling through Palestine with a final destination of Jerusalem, where she would spend Christmas. Before she left, however, she told the gardener, Ali, in conversation that she would miss her traditional Christmas tree and poinsettias.

Thinking no more of the conversation, Willis left on some errand. When she returned, her apartment was spilling over with poinsettias and palm fronds tied with red ribbons. The archway into the villa was covered with red berries among glossy green leaves: “There were enough flowers to fill every vase in the house. I counted fifty poinsettias inside the house.

The gardeners were all very pleased with our delight” (b5/f9).

It is no wonder that despite her hectic and oftentimes demanding schedule at the Cairo School for American Children, Margaret Willis relished her time abroad. The unexpected surprises of meeting a vice president along an unpaved roadway while he changed her car’s tire, of finding her villa filled with Christmas cheer, and of locating a curious town called Zagazig, filled her with such exuberance that the minor inconveniences were forgotten. Willis did not make another trip abroad until after her retirement from University School, but what a trip it was. It was something she planned almost from the time she returned from Cairo. Her devotion was to the University School, but when she finally did retire she followed her heart back to the Middle East.

Tempting Gateway to New Adventures

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Five: A Life of Exploration

Margaret Willis wrote a former student in 1953 that each new place she visited proved “merely the tempting gateway to new adventures and new vistas” (b5/f3). No adventure could be more foreign to Willis than retirement. As early as 1953 she was already planning her “grand tour” along with her sister and four former colleagues from Istanbul. Their plans included driving down the Dalmatian Coast through Greece and into Turkey. The trip was anticipated to take four months, providing them time to revisit places once familiar, and of course, to visit former students (b5/f16). The group was wholly excited to be returning to such beloved locations, however, they were all too aware of the toll time had taken on them all: “All of us were hoping that we would not have to cope with the hardships which had been amusing in our youth but which looked rather rugged for people nearing seventy” (b5/f2). They were a constant source of amusement for the natives along the way “who were not used to seeing independent elderly women on the road” (b5/f2).

The 1967 trip began in the autumn following Margaret Willis’ retirement from University School and took her and her fellow adventurers through Turkey, Iran, and back again through Turkey. Among the stops were Istanbul, Chanakkale (ancient Troy), Ankara, Erzurum, Maku, Tehran, and Tabriz.

While they were traveling through regions that boasted traces of Alexander the Great and remains of Hittite, Persian, Greek, and earlier civilizations, Willis was also intrigued by the people she met along the way. She found that modern day practices in these places were in some ways not far removed from those of the past, yet in others were clearly centuries apart: The real flavor of the countries can be savored

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much better through a more leisurely trip along the roads. A woman, in peasant dress but unveiled, comes in from a day’s work in the fields, carrying a modern transistor radio.

Village threshing floors are straight out of Bible times, while carts and trucks carry sugar beets to the railhead. (b5/f2)

The coexistence of the ancient and the modern intrigued Margaret Willis. In many ways the appreciation other countries possessed for their history and their efforts to preserve the past was what led Willis to travel. While United States history is rich for its youthful existence, it is a “throwaway country” that tends to favor “new and improved” over old ways. As she aged, Willis became even more aware of this distinction. Granted, she did appreciate the modern conveniences of plumbing and elevators, which tended to be cranky in the regions she traveled (b5/f2).

This trip for Margaret Willis was the culmination of a lifetime of living on her own terms. Her choice of lifestyle, her methods of teaching, her accumulation of exotic experiences, and her diverse assortment of friends all testify to her pursuit of a meaningful life: Everywhere we went we found ourselves the objects of great interest—such old people so far from home and so obviously having a good time. The natives stared at us and we smiled and stared right back. Whenever we stopped by the roadside for lunch passing cars paused to make sure that we were not in any sort of trouble in which we needed help. Passing peasants smiled and waved, and once by a

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Chapter Five: A Life of Exploration

roadside fountain made us presents of fruit from their panniers. Motoring through the Middle East is for people who can enjoy that sort of experience. (b5/f2)

The secret of life, according to Margaret Willis, is not one she withheld from others—for those who could not discern it from the example of her life, she gladly articulated it, “Find a thing that society will pay you to do, and you don’t know when you’re working and when you’re playing, and you’ll have found your niche” (b5/f16). Even after her retirement she remained a teacher, one whose classroom was the world.

I See Wonderful Things Among Margaret Willis’ clippings of travel articles is an article on Egypt that begins with Howard Carter’s exclamation when he first encountered Tutankhamen’s burial chamber: “I see wonderful things” (b5/f20). Willis, too, saw wonderful things during her travels, and in addition to taking extensive notes of her observations, she captured the images as well. Her photographs reveal artisans hard at work in Syria, a blindfolded camel plowing fields near Alexandria, and a street barber in Baghdad, to name only a very few.

Historical monuments certainly fascinated Willis—a number of her photographs of Kalaat el Hosson, a twelfth century castle built by the knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, were copyrighted. The majority of her travel photographs capture the essence of daily living in Cairo, Lucerne, Athens, and Istanbul, among others. The pensive expression of the coffeehouse worker on the embankment of the Tigris was the focus of one photograph (b5/f21). A photograph of a girl

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leaning over the railings, inquisitively studying the sculptures under a bridge called “The Dance of Death” in Lucerne captured both the monument as well as human interaction with the monument (b5/f25).

Margaret Willis did not photograph landmarks simply to adorn her scrapbooks; like everything else in Willis’ life the photographs served educational purposes. Flip over any number of her photographs and one will find a detailed description of the action that she captured. For example, a photograph that, to the untrained eye, reveals a turbaned man walking to a raft through the shallow part of the Tigris with a load on his shoulders reveals in fact much more. Turn over this photograph and one will find a mini history lesson: The Tigris River as it flows through Baghdad, January, 1930. The circular boat is a goofah, a large, woven basket waterproofed with asphalt. Even camels can be ferried across the river in these boats, which have been used here since the dawn of history. The raft is almost as ancient…. (b5/f19)

One is not sure if nearly four decades in the classroom instilled in Willis the habit of elaborating the minutia of each photograph, or if she did so to satisfy her own curiosity. The latter justification is probably closer to the truth. Willis herself said, “Teaching is emphasized too much. Learning is the important thing. A good teacher simply stimulates learning” (b5/f16). Willis’ photographs serve as “instruments of discovery” for any who share her pioneering spirit (b5/f16).

Chapter Six

Can We Go Any Further with This?— In Search of Margaret Willis

One of Margaret’s favorite expressions was “We can’t go any further with this.” For any who knew her, it meant that we had come to the end of a debate, discussion, argument, etc….

We had, in her opinion, looked at the situation from a number of angles and had reached the point where decisions must be made. (Paul Klohr, 2000a)

A

dominant concern of any biographer is whether she was successful in pulling back the “mask” or revealing the “figure under the carpet” of which Leon Edel wrote (1986, p.

24). Certainly this is never an easy task; Edel himself called it a “difficult battle” to distinguish the individual from the face she puts on for the world (p. 24). There is no dramatic irony to assist the biographer of Margaret Willis, no occasion in which Willis, like a Shakespearean character, behaved one way, yet revealed to the “audience” her true feelings. At no point did she lift her mask to wink and nudge the biographer. While it is unfathomable to fully interpret Willis as one may Lady

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Macbeth or Gertrude—a biographer is not typically privy to the clever asides and soliloquies of her subject’s life—it is possible to conjure a limited understanding of her from what is left behind. Willis did not make this conjuring an effortless task; she wrote no lengthy autobiography that reflected upon her life and all it entailed. Neither did she publish as widely as her colleagues like Lou LaBrant. Yet she did leave former students and colleagues with opinions of and anecdotes about her that corroborate her professional papers and archival records housed at the University of South Carolina Museum of Education. Even if Margaret Willis had written memoirs or kept journals she would still remain enigmatic; as Mark Twain wrote, “What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself” (Kaplan, 1986, p. 72).

The onus of any biographer is knowing when, in the words of Margaret Willis, she “can’t go any further with this.”

Andre Maurois (1986) wrote, “Biography, in my view, does not consist in telling all one knows—but in taking stock of one’s knowledge and of choosing what is essential” (p. 12).

Information that is essential to one biographer may be considered non-essential by another. A biography is complete when the biographer has told, with integrity, the story she wished to tell about her subject using the resources she believed were essential, not when she has filled pages with laundry lists of accomplishments in the hopes that this will “define” her subject.

However, that no “definitive” biography exists is an opinion held by Richard Holmes (2000), and shared by this biographer. Holmes wrote, “I conclude that no biography is ever definitive, because that is not the nature of such journeys, nor of the human heart which is their territory. Sometimes all

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one achieves is another point of departure” (p. x). Perhaps what Holmes means is that from one person’s reading of a life, another may deem significant what was unnoticed by the earlier biographer. Indeed, this very biography of Margaret Willis will never be “complete” because with each new reading of her life this biographer sees another angle from which to approach her life, a new perspective from which to read Willis’ words and the events in her life. Each time Bastian, the protagonist of Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story (1979), opens his magical book of the same name, he learns that the story has continued without him, and will continue indefinitely with or without his attention; the characters do not rely upon Bastian to give them life and meaning. Just so, this biographer, upon revisiting the life of Margaret Willis, finds it not exactly as she left it. Added to Willis’ life is yet another layer, another dimension, that in some ways obscures as much as it reveals. With each new revelation about Margaret Willis comes another enigma to contemplate.

Margaret Willis—Seeker and Discoverer In his introduction to The Seekers: The Story of Man’s Continuing Quest to Understand His World, Daniel J. Boorstin (1998) wrote, “Caught between two eternities—the vanished past and the unknown future—we never cease to seek our bearings and our sense of direction” (p. 1). Although it was certainly not a comfortable existence—how much easier life would have been had she only accepted things as they were—Margaret Willis approached life as a

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seeker of the vanished past and a pioneer of the unknown future. Furthermore, she sought to understand how she fit into her world. Her life—whether it was in the classroom or off the beaten track in Istanbul—was a quest for knowledge, as well as a quest to inspire in others the desire to know.

Willis gravitated to the subject of history because it represented for her the widest body of knowledge. Perhaps she appreciated the challenge of studying a subject her entire life and never coming to the end of different ways of looking at it.

While such a fact may discourage those who wish to achieve some level of mastery in their field during their lifetime, Willis relished that her intellectual journey would be never-ending.

After she came to the teaching profession “through the back door” as she once said, she grew to appreciate her opportunity to inspire others to become “seekers,” “discoverers,” and perhaps even “creators.”

Medawar and Medawar (1977) wrote that Only human beings guide their behavior by a knowledge of what happened before they were born and a preconception of what may happen after they are dead; thus only human beings find their way by a light that illumines more than the patch of ground they stand on. (p.

557)

Medawar and Medawar’s assessment that humans live deliberately, conscious of their small, but certain, places in history may be a bit too optimistic. Most people likely do not live with such daily awareness. Margaret Willis did; this fact

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makes her an intriguing subject. How did her pioneering spirit color every area of her life?

Margaret Willis’ parents, both teachers, pulled up their roots and changed their professions several times during their lives. They, like their daughter, were naturally curious people; teaching seems an obvious profession for innately inquisitive people. Willis’ parents encouraged her to move across the country to attend Wellesley College. Why would they not?

Willis’ mother had herself traveled a great distance to attend Wellesley College years before. Similarly, they encouraged their daughter when she applied for a job in Japan. From her parents Margaret Willis always found support, even when her choices were not socially acceptable. Willis remembered her mother saying from the time she and her sisters were young that she was “raising voters.”

Progressive thinking undoubtedly ran in the Willis family. From childhood, Willis was instilled with the notion that the world was hers for the exploring, if she so chose. And she did.

What is known of Margaret Willis is that she was an explorer whose life, both by trade and avocation, was about leading fellow learners. What must be addressed at the close of this study is what that life of exploration meant for Willis, and what such leadership meant to those touched by Willis; and lest there be any doubt, those in Willis’ company were irrevocably changed by their association with her.

Double Visage The “point of departure” one person’s life provides, in this case, is a postmodern narrative biography written by one woman about another woman; and in the opinion of Helene

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Cixous (1975), this should be the case: “I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man” (p. 348). Man, according to Cixous, simply cannot tell the life of Woman, since it is from his clumsy grasp that she is escaping. Margaret Willis, however unconsciously she intended, successfully surmounted three major obstacles facing women of her time: the “either-or” dichotomy explained by Simone de Beauvoir and Helene Cixous in which a woman may be either “angel” or “monster;” the “cult of true womanhood” as defined by Barbara Welter in which women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must adhere to the virtues of the “true” woman; and finally, Margaret Willis escaped the fate of having to cloak her genius with a more socially acceptable mediocrity, as did most women, but more prominently, slaves—Phyllis Wheatley being but one, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and, for a time, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

At any point in her life, Margaret Willis was aware that while her body revealed her unmistakably as a woman, her intellect and ambition would have, at that time, been labeled masculine. Duality was a concept with which Willis was intimately acquainted. She refused the false dichotomies forced upon women by an anxious society. Instead of “eitheror,” Margaret Willis embraced “both-and.” Margaret Willis, even while she was exploring the world, explored new ways of being in the world as a woman. John Dewey wrote, “Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities” (1938, p. 17).

Margaret Willis’ very life was a model of the ideals she wished to impart to her students—that there are numerous ways of perceiving any given situation, and that democratic living demands thoughtful and intelligent responses to such

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situations. And theirs was a lesson well taught by Margaret Willis.

The Laugh of the Medusa As noted previously, Margaret Willis did not reflect, in writing, on the duality that was certainly present in her life—present in the lives of all women, some may argue—but it was there. To some she was “strong” and “independent;” to others she was “shrewish” and “proud.” Willis was demanding of her students on the one hand, yet accepting of them on the other. She had the capacity to browbeat a young colleague to the point that the poor woman lost her breakfast, yet those who worked with Willis recall her as professional and fair. Simone de Beavoir (1952) cited Kierkegaard’s Stages on the Road of Life: “To be a woman is something so strange, so confused, so complicated, that no one predicate comes near expressing it and that the multiple predicates that one would like to use are so contradictory that only a woman could put up with it” (p.

162). While society would have her be either “angel” or “monster;” and while that categorization may in fact be easier to grasp than the shadier areas of the continuum, Margaret Willis made no apologies for falling to one extreme, then the other, and any place in between the two. She knew how impractical and improbable it would be for her always to play the role of peacemaker, although she was at times; similarly impossible would be for Willis always to be the “emasculating” Medusa that Freud so feared, although she had no qualms about voicing opinions in direct contrast to those of her male colleagues.

In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Helene Cixous (1975) re-visioned the myth of the Medusa from that of the Gorgon

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with the ability to turn to stone any who met her gaze directly.

Cixous revealed that “Medusa” actually means “mistress” or “queen,” and that the serpents that writhed on Medusa’s head in place of hair were actually representative of wisdom (p.

361). Similarly, “A female face surrounded by serpent hair was an ancient, widely recognized symbol of divine female wisdom, and equally of the ‘wise blood’ that supposedly gave women their divine powers” (Walker,1983, p. 629). Medusa’s blood reportedly had the power to heal as well as to destroy: “With the blood from her left side [Asclepius] was said to be able to raise the dead, and with the blood from her right side he could destroy instantly” (Walker, 1983, p. 628).

Although labeled sometime “angel,” sometime “monster,” sometime “healer,” sometime “destroyer,” Margaret Willis, in her response to such categorization, stripped the labels of their power of being either good or bad.

Rather, for Willis these essentialized labels were simply different parts of the whole which made up her character, each necessary and useful at different times in her life. It is perhaps her refusal to be typecast that made Willis both an enigma even to those who knew her best, as well as powerful proof to her students of the ability for one person to effect change.

The Cult of True Womanhood To her life of frequently solitary exploration, Margaret Willis brought with her knowledge of the societal expectation that woman was linked with the body rather than the mind.

Willis refused traditional Western separation of body and mind; she did not perceive herself as a mindless vessel of a man’s legacy—a hapless brood mare. Neither did she subordinate her own mind to that of another’s. These actions

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must have resulted from a conscious decision on the part of Willis; otherwise she may have slipped into the niche carved for her by her society.

The mind/body duality faced by women did not originate, but was certainly exemplified by what Barbara Welter (1966) termed “the cult of true womanhood” that afflicted late nineteenth and early twentieth century women—Willis’ contemporaries. Welter identified four key characteristics of the “ideal” woman during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: piety, submissiveness, domesticity, and purity (p. 155). In all ways women subordinated themselves to the true “holders of knowledge”—men. As Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “hysterical” nameless wife in “The Yellow Wallpaper” ironically lost their sanity as they realized they possessed thoughts independent from those of their husbands, Margaret Willis was raised in a family of women who never lacked confidence in the power of their own opinions. The epiphany that shocked these fictional women into madness was considered commonplace knowledge in the Willis household.

The four characteristics of the “ideal woman” as noted

by Welter: piety, submissiveness, domesticity, and purity, are ones that may never be used, in their limited definitions at least, to describe Willis. An honest woman whose integrity was an example for all, Willis did not attend church and did not openly express any religious beliefs. At the point in a debate when Willis had been proven unmistakably errant, only then would she concede or “submit” to her opponent. Well known by her peers as being an immaculate hostess whose tastes were simultaneously elegant and eclectic, Willis did not fuss too much over household matters. Her tastes ran to

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simple, understated styles; her home was something of a shrine to her travels. While she counted numerous men as peers, Margaret Willis remained devoted to her single-minded pursuit of exploring new territories, either alone or with students. Romance, whether by fate or fashion, was not a prominent part of her life; she was by all accounts “pure,” sexually speaking.

As with any labels, Margaret Willis, had she acknowledged her “duty” to adopt these four, would most certainly have, in her typically efficient manner, scrutinized them, broken them down, reinvented them, promptly shipped them back to their creators, and subsequently ignored them.

The difference between Willis and other women of her time was that while other women may have unquestioningly accepted the male “authority” in their lives as possessing the “right” answer—and that, in fact, there was only one right answer—Margaret Willis, open-minded historian that she was, not only knew that there were always multiple sides and answers to issues, but knew that she possessed an equally insightful perspective as any man against whom she may be pitted.

Her practice of continually questioning the nature of things was what allowed Willis never to become trapped in societal roles. She would ask herself, for example, “Am I supposed to do x because I am a woman?” “What does it mean for me that I either do or do not do x?” “What in fact is represented by ‘x’?” “Who was it who gave ‘x’ its name and value?” This prodding of words, customs, and expectations, though certainly exhausting for the normal person, kept Margaret Willis’ eye keen and her mind sharp.

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The Genius/Madwoman Alice Walker (1983), in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens recounts a story of Jean Toomer’s that had him walking a Southern street, observing the vacancy in the eyes of the women he passed. These vacant women had “forced their minds to desert their bodies…. Our mothers and grandmothers, some of them: moving to music they had not yet written” (p. 232). Walker believes those women to be “Artists, driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release” (p. 233). Further, Walker believes that the reader almost certainly has a great-grandmother who labored raising children, cleaning houses, baking biscuits, while a masterpiece lay suffocating within, dying from a lack of artistic oxygen.

Walker urges her reader to just imagine “the agony of the lives of women who died with their real gifts stifled within them” (p. 234).

How easily it could have been Margaret Willis who was never taught that a world existed, larger than her imagination could fathom; or more cruel, she may have been shown the world and all its possibilities only to have them denied her. Willis may have lived a life similar to that of Emily Dickinson, had many elements not come together to create an environment conducive to intellectual freedom. Her parents, both freethinking educators, raised their daughters to value their freedom and opportunities for new experiences.

They sent their young daughter cross-country alone to attend college. They applauded her ambition when she decided to leave the country for several years after college. Willis’ mother even joined her daughter in a trip through Europe in

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the 1930s, with no regard for how they would fare without male supervision.

The Willis family was not uncommonly privileged or extraordinarily wealthy for their time. They did not live by a set of rules that comes from being a part of society’s elite.

They lived by a different set of rules than most of their peers because their beliefs and expectations differed from those of the people around them. It was because Margaret Willis’ parents taught her to create for herself a free environment to strip away any feelings of societal obligation that she was able to discover in her own time what Alice Walker would call her “soul’s work” (p.241). Guided by her parents’ heritage of love and respect for pursuits of the mind, Margaret Willis perpetuated that heritage for herself, her peers, and her students.

What She Meant to Them To be a student in Margaret Willis’ social studies class meant that one learned early on that history is a slippery concept. Students learned to ask such vital questions as “Whose history is this?” and “Whose history is of greater value?” Her students did not learn isolated facts and irrelevant events; rather, Margaret Willis modeled a democratic lifestyle that impressed upon students the importance of education and the pursuit of wisdom. She taught them to question established beliefs, but not only for the sake of questioning. She expected her students to think for themselves instead of lazily relying upon stereotypes and traditions. However extraordinary her practices inside the classroom and adventures outside the

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classroom, there was more to Margaret Willis—had to be more to Margaret Willis—that inspired such fierce loyalty from her students. Dewey wrote that a teacher must, If he is an educator, be able to judge what attitudes are actually conducive to continued growth and what are detrimental. He must, in addition, have that sympathetic understanding of individuals as individuals which gives him an idea of what is actually going on in the minds of those who are learning. (1938, p. 39).

What was it about Margaret Willis that was special and unique to those who knew her? Certainly in an historical sense she was one of few women at the time who lived lives on their own terms, guided by a sense of adventure and moral duty.

Four ideas are key to understanding what set Margaret Willis apart as an educator who had remarkable impact: She taught expectations and social responsibility; she modeled and nurtured a passion to understand; and she invited students and colleagues to share her journey (Kridel, Bullough, & Shaker, 1996).

Willis’ students knew that enrolling in her class would likely mean more work than they were accustomed to, and that taking her class as a senior would eliminate the possibility for an “easy ride” their final year. However, the students continued to fill her class, year after year, even after her reputation as a “perfectionist” and “task master” was common knowledge among the students. Willis expressed her expectations of the students from the first day of class, and certainly those expectations were high. Her former students now lovingly refer to her using the previously mentioned

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labels. Common among their responses about Willis is that she expected the best from them, but that whereas some teachers emotionally and intellectually abandon their students, expecting them to find their way to high levels of thinking and achievement on their own, Margaret Willis “walked beside” her students, showing them how to achieve more than they ever had before. She did not fill students with a premature sense of brilliance, but she showed them the possibilities of greatness that were attainable with their commitment. She wrote, “We as teachers need to protect children from a false sense of failure resulting from trying things beyond their powers, and from a false sense of success from choosing easy things which are certain to go well with a minimum of effort” (1940, p. 461). Willis simultaneously accepted her students as they were as well as provided the needed stimuli for their continued development. With standards so high and beliefs in her students so strong, they rose to her expectations, refusing to disappoint her.

Margaret Willis communicated the urgent need for social responsibility to her students. This had a two-fold effect on them: first, they correctly inferred that society is in need of intelligent citizens to effect meaningful change; and second, they realized that they could be the intelligent citizens to effect such changes. Willis put the power in the hands of her students, something they, as adolescents, were not wholly accustomed to receiving from powerful adults. The students knew that, for all her love of knowledge, Willis felt that knowledge without action was undesirable. Complacency was deplorable, in Willis’ opinion, and she effectively moved her students to action on several occasions, one example being the protest of the closing of University School (Klohr, 2000a). If she impressed no other idea upon her students—although she

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most certainly did—she impressed upon them that the function of education is to develop a citizen who feels a responsibility for his/her contribution to society. The students realized that this teacher cared about much more than how many dates and maps they could memorize in the course of a school year; this teacher cared about the kind of people they were to become and the kind of lives they would lead. She felt largely responsible for training them with the tools they needed to live happy and fulfilled lives.

Willis’ life perfectly represented the pursuit of wisdom and the invitation to join her on her adventures, open only to those with curious spirits and unwavering stamina. A woman who, whenever she felt her acumen in a particular subject flagging, would read up on that subject, imagining that someone had assigned her the task of becoming an expert on that subject, conveyed the need for, as well as the joy in, this pursuit. Margaret Willis did not presume to be the sole possessor of wisdom, or that her students should become carbon copies of herself. She encouraged them to develop their own passions and pursuits; what is more, she respected their sincere beliefs as equally important as any of her own. Her support only strengthened their confidence and stoked their passions. It has been said that people love who they love not because of how they feel about the person, but rather how that person makes them feel about themselves. Margaret Willis’ students loved her, at least in part, for how she made them feel about themselves.

Margaret Willis was as much a part of the Ohio State University School as the mortar and bricks of the buildings.

Students knew although her spirit demanded renewal and regeneration through new experiences, often in exotic locales, that she would return to the University School. This stability

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was, for them, comforting. Willis was always pushing at old boundaries—for teachers, for women, for explorers—but she had found in the Ohio State University School an academic institution that treasured her restlessness. Just as Margaret Willis continued to return, time and again, to the place that accepted her differences and fed her spirit, so, too, did her students return to her, the teacher who led them to explore the past and what it meant for them, and compelled them to pioneer the future as the democratic thinkers she encouraged them to be.

Appendix A

Epilogue The Presence of Autobiography in Biography

I defined a woman’s duty, “To look the world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes; to have an idea; to speak and act in defiance of convention.”

(Sanger, 1914, p. xiii)

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t the close of this, the first of what promises, for me, to be a number of studies of Margaret Willis, I felt that the work would be incomplete unless I added myself to the list of those touched and irrevocably changed by their association with her. My first meeting with Willis during the early summer of 2000 left me with initial estimates that shamed me as I dug deeper. Margaret Willis was one of those unmarried schoolteachers we read about but rarely encounter anymore.

Her life was her students; she had no children of her own, no family of her own. How very sad, but isn’t there a teacher like Margaret Willis in nearly every school, I asked myself, a holdover from times when women teachers were “old maids” who didn’t smile until Christmas vacation? It was serendipitous that at the same time I was in the early stages of making Margaret Willis’ acquaintance, I enrolled in a women’s literature class at the University of South Carolina

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taught by Dr. Judith James. My concurrent studies of women’s literature and feminist theory helped me to understand that I had been studying Margaret Willis with expectations I learned from male society; that is to say, “normal” expectations. The more I read of Linda Wagner Martin, Simone de Beauvoir, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Virginia Woolf, the more astounded I was that I, a woman, had never questioned my way of looking at the world as being colored by the male standard. To borrow the words of Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a woman?” How could a woman look at the world from anything but the perspective of a woman?

As it turns out, both Dr. James and Margaret Willis had quite a bit to teach me about women and what it has meant to be a woman throughout history. With the early help of Dr. James, I began to understand what, in part, made Margaret Willis remarkable. She was a woman who lived a life most people in her time would liken to that of a man; she took jobs that interested her, left when they ceased to interest her; she traveled when the spirit moved her to do so, going wherever the wind carried her, it seems; and she spoke with the confidence and authority allowed usually to men alone.

However, I dare say Margaret Willis never burned her brassiere in defiance of her “oppressors;” she did not count Gloria Steinem, who once said, “We are becoming the men we once wanted to marry,” among her personal heroes. I say without hesitation, though, that Willis probably did not feel compelled to act one way or another because of her gender; she didn’t not wear cosmetics because she felt they were “tools” of men’s oppression. When she wore dresses and highheeled shoes, she did not feel as though she were succumbing to the shackles her of gender. She behaved as she saw fitting, fixing any who blocked her path with a “go-to-hell” stare. It is

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this lack of formal association with feminism that makes me admire Willis’ character as being authentic and sincere. Unlike the political vegetarian who sneaks a hamburger when she thinks no one will see her, Margaret Willis did not perceive herself as aligned with pro-woman groups who had certain expectations for her behavior. Such an association, Willis would certainly feel, had equal power to hinder her actions as did any male-dominated association.

My woefully simplistic initial assessment of Willis inspired me all the more to treat her as fairly as I could. The commitment Willis inspired in me—not unlike the kind she inspired in her students—caused me to read beyond the required reading for the women’s literature/feminist theory class; it necessitated my reading the primary sources of Willis’ personal and professional philosophies—John Dewey and Boyd Bode, specifically; and it drove me to speak to a wide range of people who knew Margaret Willis. While I do no think Willis would have deemed herself necessarily interesting enough to warrant a biographical study, I think she would have been pleased that she once again helped a student to become a more responsible citizen by moving beyond her unquestioning acceptance of the way things are to a point that she asked, “Why are things this way?” Further, “What is my educated opinion about the status of the world?” And finally, “What am I going to do to either support the way things are or change the way things are?”

At the risk of sounding like a writer of hagiography, I learned that Margaret Willis had her faults; however, this revelation only drew her closer to me, made her real. For, as I studied, and continue to study, Margaret Willis, I also studied and continue to study myself—as a woman, as an educator, and as a neophyte explorer. Margaret Willis was a woman who

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liked to be right, and why wouldn’t she? She devoted her life to pursuing wisdom; she took great care in developing her ideas and beliefs. To be debated, and worse, to be proven wrong, was not something Willis took lightly. She could be abrasive with her colleagues and demanding of her students.

She was human. This seems to be a statement of the obvious, yet in the midst of discovering the causes to which Willis devoted her life, it is easy to forget that she was not some amalgam of the ideal educator.

To study the life of Margaret Willis and come away unchanged is impossible. She embodied what, for Bode, was the ideal of progressive education. Progressive education, wrote Bode, must be “consciously representative of a distinctive way of life” (1971, p. 5). Progressive education, per say, has long ceased to be the “fashionable” approach to education, but what true educator could deny the critical importance of the tenets of progressive education, and by extension, of Margaret Willis? No thoughtful educator could advocate teaching isolated facts that are irrelevant to the lives of her students, in lieu of cultivating critical thinkers who have a sense of their social responsibility to be intelligent and insightful. Yet, even the most dedicated of teachers, myself included, realize how difficult it is to maintain a high level of curiosity and excitement about learning. However tempting it may be on some days to take the path of least resistance, to photocopy a worksheet that by its nature encourages rote memorization, it really is not an option for a teacher who sees the bigger picture.

I am almost certain that Margaret Willis never experienced a student going into labor in her class, or a student who was seized by police officers from her class because only the night before he had set fire to someone’s car, while the car

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was occupied; these are the challenges of teaching in the twenty-first century in a public school system. However, even in 1940 Willis noted that “the overcrowding, the conflicting demands on teachers, the shadow of college entrance requirements, and uncertainty as to the function of school” inspired professional schizophrenia in teachers (p. 463).

Certainly, any school, at least in its mission statement if not its daily practices wishes to provide the kind of world in which students “actively participate in solving problems—a world which extends beyond the confines of school walls” (1940, p.

463). However, when teachers are assigned a group of students, ones who read and write at least three years below grade level, three months prior to a state exit exam that tests basic proficiency in reading and writing, they feel the pressure to teach to the test first, not to develop critical thinkers who feel a social responsibility to pursue education.

During my year-long relationship with Margaret Willis, I have often caught myself wondering, during redundant staff meetings, during classes in which students ask, “Why do we have to learn about what’s going on in Madagascar; we’re all the way over here in the United States?” what would Margaret Willis do or say? Would she hold her tongue? Would she assign the student an independent study in which he discovers the important connection between all people of the world? Certainly times are different now than during Willis’ lifetime. Is it possible, even desirable, to capture the essence of Margaret Willis, though? I do not feel, even though Willis was an undeniably remarkable and unique woman and educator, that my life needs to become a carbon copy of hers. She would undoubtedly disapprove of such an aspiration anyway. However, I do feel that my life—personally and professionally—would benefit from a dialogue with

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Willis, just as any young woman would benefit from a dialogue with a woman who is wiser.

As I began this reflection, I noted that this would be the first of many studies of Margaret Willis. I see Margaret Willis as the doorjamb from my childhood home by which my mother frequently charted my growth. Each return visit I make to Margaret Willis will help me to chart my own intellectual development based on my earlier interpretations of her. Things that I do not understand or appreciate at the age of twenty-nine may become perfectly clear to me at the age of thirty-nine or seventy-nine.

Alice Walker (1983), in her essay “Saving the Life that is Your Own,” impresses upon her readers the absolute necessity for people—artists, writers, educators—to have models in their lives. We need what she calls “the larger perspective” (p.5): Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one’s glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. (p. 5)

Walker recalled an incident in which someone asked Toni Morrison why she writes the kinds of books she writes, and that she replied, “Because they are the kind of books I want to read” (p. 7). When people ask me why I studied the life of Margaret Willis, I must reply, “Because hers is the kind of life I want to have.” I do not crave to duplicate her experiences; however, to approach my life in the way that

I Am My Own Odysseus –The Margaret Willis Story Appendix – Epilogue

Willis did her own—that is to say sincerely, authentically, passionately—what more could I desire?

At the very least, I studied Margaret Willis so that I could, in a small way, help to place her among other women who spent their lives pushing the limits. In the year of Margaret Willis’ birth, 1899, Gertrude Bell made her first of several desert journeys. She traveled to Jebel Druze, becoming the first European woman to travel in remote parts of the Middle East. During the span of Margaret Willis’ life, Margaret Mead began her life of anthropological studies as she traveled to New Guinea and the Pacific Islands in 1920; Amelia Earhart flew solo across the Atlantic in 1932; and in 1978 the first all-woman teams ascends Annapurna under the leadership of Arlene Blum. They raised funds for the expedition by selling t-shirts that said, “A woman’s place is on top” (Slung, 2000, p.236). I think Margaret Willis would be pleased to find herself among the likes of such women, as well she should be; nearly two decades after her death, she still inspires her students to explore their past and be pioneers of the future.

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