On Wednesday, September 20, Classes 4-7 gathered for a special Middle School “Community Time” Assembly to mark our founder Maria Bowen Chapin’s 160th birthday and to celebrate the history of our 123-year-old school.
To share the School’s illustrious history and more about Miss Chapin, Eleanor (Ellie) Southworth – a retired Professional Community member and honorary alumna – gave a robust keynote presentation titled “Voices From The Archives: A Tribute to Maria Bowen Chapin.”
Mrs. Southworth, who worked at Chapin for 35 years, also had 11 family members, including two daughters, who attended or taught at the School between 1909 and 2018. “Being an honorary alumna means more to me than I can express,” she commented.
Beginning with Miss Chapin’s early life, Mrs. Southworth explained that Maria Bowen Chapin was born in Warwick, Rhode Island, on September 13, 1863, the fourth of seven children. In 1888, when Miss Chapin was 25 years old, she moved to New York and began teaching her first students in a friend’s parlor. Just 13 years later, in 1901, she started her own school, Miss Chapin’s School for Girls and Kindergarten for Boys and Girls, at 12 West 47th Street.
After two moves, the school settled in 1928 at 100 East End Avenue, where it remains today. (Mrs. Southworth also clarified that the School’s name changed to Miss Chapin’s School, Ltd. in 1925 after incorporation, before becoming, at Miss Chapin’s request, The Chapin School, Ltd. shortly before her death on March 8, 1934.)
To underscore Miss Chapin’s intelligence, vision and values, Mrs. Southworth shared quotations from Miss Chapin and from those who knew her. Some past students, for example, stated that our founder was “brilliant,” “calm and dignified,” “distinguished” and was known for her “beautiful voice.” Others noted that she was “stern and strict, but wonderfully fair. She gave the sense of always having time [for us].” A member of the Class of 1924 once recalled, “Miss Chapin’s classes were a great privilege. Whenever she was with us, she gave us generously of her deep culture, her warm humor, her insight and her understanding.”
Ethel Grey Stringfellow, Chapin’s third Headmistress, once noted that Miss Chapin “knew and taught every child….She was the most brilliant teacher… Whatever came along, we had to know about it… she was always looking into the future.”
Miss Chapin was a person of broad interests, and she was particularly concerned about the condition of working girls. When Miss Chapin first came to New York, before founding her school, she was an editor of Far and Near, a periodical which circulated widely throughout the Northeast. Mrs. Southworth explained that its aim was “to help relatively uneducated working girls by explaining new, higher standards to its readers and enable them to be more educated people in the process.”
Ever the trailblazer, Miss Chapin, with Miss Stringfellow, marched in the New York City suffragette parade in 1915 – all the way from Washington Square Park to 96th Street. Miss Chapin also believed strongly in physical education for girls – which was unusual for the time – instituting visits to Hartsdale, NY, for exercise on Saturdays and holding the School’s first Field Day there in 1912.
“In the early 1920’s,” Mrs. Southworth noted, “Miss Chapin founded The Scholarship Foundation, which still exists, to help girls and women ‘to obtain and carry on their education in any department and to maintain and award scholarships for girls and women.'" She was also one of the founders of the Head Mistresses Association of the East and its president from 1920-1924. An enthusiastic traveler, Miss Chapin also found time to visit Greece, Egypt, Austria and England, among other countries.
After her death, The Head Mistresses Association of the East remembered Miss Chapin with the following tribute: “Her clear vision and balanced judgement, her fine sense of justice, her splendid courage, her glorious integrity and constancy of noble purpose, her beauty of spirit and modesty of soul, her force of presence and grace of bearing, illumining her personality, set her apart for signal leadership….For distinguished service as an educator she takes her place among the great Head Mistresses of our country. The Chapin School is a noble monument to its founder’s rare powers.”
Following Mrs. Southworth were three alumnae members of the Professional Community – Muriel Isaac ’01, Ilana Pergam ’86 and Anneli Ballard ’86 – who shared the ways in which their connection to Chapin was, and remains, deep and special for them. Students also could examine uniforms from years past, which were hung throughout the back of the Assembly Room. An enlightening morning, indeed!
