Girls' Latin School

The Girls' Latin School stands in Mary Antin's memoir as the crowning institution of her American education, the place where the immigrant child who had entered the Chelsea public school as a stranger to the English language was prepared for college. It was the school she chose deliberately, after a personal consultation with Mr. Tetlow, who was principal of both the High and the Latin School, and it was the institution that carried her from the slums of Dover Street to the threshold of higher learning. In the arc of her narrative, the Latin School is the point where her Americanization ceases to be a matter of learning to spell and cipher and becomes a matter of intellectual distinction, where the daughter of a failed grocer takes her place among the socially superior pupils of Boston.

Choosing the Latin School

The decision to attend the Girls' Latin School was made with characteristic boldness. When it was debated whether Mary would be best fitted for college at the High or the Latin School, she went in person to Mr. Tetlow, who was principal of both schools, to get the most expert opinion on the subject. It was vacation time, and she had to find him at his home, making her way out to the wilds of Roxbury, perhaps half an hour's ride on the electric car from Dover Street. She grew an inch taller and broader between the corner of Cedar Street and Mr. Tetlow's house, such was the charm of the clean, green suburb on a cramped waif from the slums. Her faded calico dress, her rusty straw sailor hat, the color of her skin and all bespoke the waif, but she went up the steps to the porch, rang the bell, and asked for the great man with as much assurance as if she were a daily visitor on Cedar Street. She calmly awaited his appearance in the reception room and stated her errand without trepidation, and Mr. Tetlow discussed her business with gravity and showed her to the door with courtesy, seeing that she was not the least bit conscious of her shabby dress.

An Aristocratic World

A new life began for Mary when she entered the Latin School in September. Until then she had gone to school with her equals, and as a matter of course; now it was distinctly a feat for her to keep in school, and her schoolmates were socially so far superior to her that her poverty became conspicuous. The pupils of the Latin School, from the nature of the institution, are an aristocratic set, coming from refined homes, dressing well, and spending the recess hour talking about parties, beaux, and the matinée. As students they are either very quick or very hard-working, for the course of study is considered stiff; the girl with half her brain asleep, or with too many beaux, drops out by the end of the first year. At the end of the course the weeding process has reduced the once numerous tribe of academic candidates to a cozy little family. By all these tokens Mary should have had serious business on her hands, but she did not find it hard. Making herself letter-perfect in her lessons required long hours of study, but that was her delight; making herself at home in an alien world was also within her talents, for she had been practising it day and night for the past four years. Remaining unconscious of her shabby and ill-fitting clothes when the rustle of silk petticoats in the schoolroom protested against them was a matter still within her moral reach, for half a dress a year had been her allowance for many seasons.

The Father's Vicarious Ambition

The Latin School was the fulfillment of her father's dream as much as her own. Joseph Antin, who had failed in his primary quest to make a living in America and who could never learn to write English correctly, had found a means whereby he could draw one step nearer to the shining things of education and culture: he could send his children to school, to learn all those things that he knew by fame to be desirable. The common school, at least, perhaps high school; for one or two, perhaps even college. His children should be students, should fill his house with books and intellectual company, and thus he would walk by proxy in the Elysian Fields of liberal learning. Since Graduation Day, and the school-committeeman's speech, and half a column about her in the paper, his ambition had soared even higher; he was going to keep her at school till she was prepared for college, never for a moment doubting the wisdom or justice of this course. Her mother was just as loyal to her cause, and her brother, and her sister, and even the baby cheered her on, answering without hesitation when asked whether she believed in higher education.

The Path to College and Beyond

The Latin School was the last institution named in Mary's traced path from the ship through the public schools, passed on from hand to hand by the ready teachers, through free libraries and lecture halls, dragging through the slums the weight of private disadvantage but heartened for the effort by public opportunity. From the Latin School on, she lived very much as her American schoolmates lived, having overcome her foreign idiosyncrasies. She went to college as she proposed, though not to Radcliffe; receiving an invitation to live in New York that she did not like to refuse, she went to Barnard College instead, where she took all the honors that she deserved, and learned at least to think in English without an accent. The Latin School thus stands as the hinge between her immigrant childhood and her American adulthood, the place where the promise of America, which her father had crossed the ocean to secure, was finally and fully kept.