During my 10th grade year at Exeter, I was reading The Great Gatsby in my English class. Classes at Exeter are taught around an oval shaped table and the teacher facilitates the discussion, but the students lead it. For what seemed like weeks on end, one of the boys in the class dominated the discussion. I remember looking at the clock and thinking, he hasn’t let anyone get a word in for 35 minutes. The teacher, who was a woman, did not intervene to curb his domination of the discussion. At some point, I know that I jumped in and voiced my frustration. I don’t remember what I said all these years later, but what I do remember is that my teacher put in my end of semester comments that I “needed to watch how I spoke to my peers in class because I could come off as shrill.” The message at Exeter was clear: as a young woman, do not take up space. Lucky for me I am the only daughter in a family of five children, and both of my parents made clear to me my entire life that I should be outspoken and to take up space.

It will probably be of little surprise that I made the decision to attend Wellesley College. When I walked into Alumnae Hall for convocation, I stopped to take in the photographs of all the women who had attended Wellesley before me: Nora Ephron, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Diane Sawyer, Ophelia Dahl–it was like breathing oxygen for the first time. Here was an institution where women took up all of the space. During my four years at Wellesley I learned that women could openly argue with one another, women's sports could be the only sporting events that students went to support on a Saturday afternoon, and they could have parties and fun on campus that felt safe and freeing at the same time. In essence, we could take up all of the space.


I have watched two women run for president in the last 10 years, both incredibly accomplished, both more experienced than their adversary. Both lost. Because the truth is that while they were not perfect candidates, they were women taking up space. And that is one of the cultural milestones that we still cannot seem to cross in this country. I am no longer sure that I will live to see a female president in my lifetime. I have watched women’s rights being rolled back in a concerted effort to ensure that women take up even less space than they have in the past hundred years in this country. I have listened to young men, my age, speak openly about revoking the 19th Amendment in an effort to return America to some former glory where women don’t have a voice in our democratic systems.

And so I am at the Ellis School by choice. When I interviewed here last spring, I knew that I would probably fall in love with the School because I have been most fulfilled and happiest in my career working in girls’ schools where my students have taken up all of the space. But what made me really fall in love with Ellis was a clear articulation—by everyone I spoke to, from the Head of School to the teachers and the administrators—they want girls to take up space. As the last all-girls institution in Western Pennsylvania, Ellis takes up a rather important piece of real estate. My sense so far is that not everyone knows why a girls’ school should still exist, it may feel a bit retro when our colleagues have all gone coed, and, after all, isn’t the marker of success whether or not a girl can compete against boys? I would like to challenge that idea and say that the project we are embarking on at Ellis is actually more audacious than that—we actually are designing programs and outcomes for girls that go beyond what a girl would get in a coed school, and are thinking about what systems and structures would support girls and young women in becoming successful in their lives (college, careers, relationships, engagement in democratic processes). In essence, we are educating girls to take up space, and that might be the boldest project of all.