As a biographer, I’m most intrigued by people on whom history has turned its back—yet who nevertheless made a big difference in public life. People like Katharine Gibbs, who started a school for young women that helped revolutionize the mid-twentieth century American workplace. Every woman who came of age during the Eisenhower Era knew her name and every executive looking for top-notch secretarial help back then knew it too. Of course, these forgotten figures, who lack archives full of letters, diaries, photos, and other documents, present a challenge for a researcher.
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I wrote about Mrs. Gibbs in my recent book Expect Great Things! (Algonquin Books, March 2025). Like 20th Century Fox founder William Fox, the subject of my first book, The Man Who Made the Movies (HarperCollins, 2017), Katharine Gibbs left no personal papers, gave scant interviews, and had been dead too long to have any remaining family members or friends who knew her.
Still, these two weren’t lost causes. As I discovered, even if a person didn’t donate stacks of papers to a library with comfortable chairs and a good scanner, every life intersects with public record keeping and every life of achievement leaves a wide and deep impact on others.
These forgotten figures, who lack archives full of letters, diaries, photos, and other documents, present a challenge for a researcher.
I was drawn to Katharine Gibbs by the broad outlines of her story. In an era when young women were supposed to busy themselves before marriage in low-paying jobs with minimal prestige—primarily schoolteachers, nurses, and librarians—the Gibbs School trained them for leadership in all fields as well as for financial independence. Secretarial work was merely the doorway into the halls of power. I knew also that by the late 1960s, the Gibbs school had an astounding 50,000 graduates. And that was about all I knew.
A cursory Internet search revealed only one central source of information: a collection of Gibbs School records at Brown University, consisting mainly of an incomplete set of student yearbooks, school brochures, random school photos, and artifacts like a silver tea service. No personal correspondence from Katharine Gibbs herself, nor photos of her early life, although she was 48 when she started her school in 1911, a widow with two young sons. Today, someone with her accomplishments would receive glowing profiles in women’s magazines and business journals spotlighting her as a successful entrepreneur. After all, within a decade, she’d established elegant locations on New York’s Park Avenue and in Boston’s Back Bay, with students nationwide vying for admission. But the archive contained no press interviews, either.
Still, I was convinced that even if scattered and buried, information about Katharine Gibbs had to exist. Pushing ahead, I learned lessons that may help others uncover hidden regions of the past:
Let the absence of information shape the story. Although I originally planned to write a traditional cradle-to-grave biography of Katharine Gibbs, I soon discovered another problem alongside the lack of personal information: Mrs. Gibbs (as she was always called) died in 1934 and the school reached its heyday from the forties through the sixties. This second problem meant that either I’d write a short pamphlet that ended before most of the reason for telling the story, or I’d have to re-think the structure.
By looking at what I had instead of what I wanted to have, I found the answer: write a group biography where Katharine’s vision was reflected and amplified in the lives of those she influenced. This approach canceled the need for fine-grain details about Katharine Gibbs’s life, extended the timeline, and widened the focus to include other highly accomplished women. Among them, as it turned out, were a head writer of Wonder Woman comic books; a World War II Army Air Forces pilot; a national disability rights advocate; a college president, a bank president, and an advisor to four US presidents. Altogether: a broader, richer piece of history than the one I had originally envisioned.
Search in unexpected corners. Ancestry.com, newspapers.com, and ProQuest Historical Newspapers were great starting points to outline the story, but I found decorative color—quotes, anecdotes, descriptions—via sideways thinking. State newspaper databases include small town publications that hadn’t made it into larger collections but whose bread-and-butter was chronicling the daily activities of local folk. For Katharine Gibbs, the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection yielded chatty articles that brought to life her childhood in the frontier town of Galena, where her father owned a hog slaughtering business. Archive Grid identified other people’s archival collections that mentioned Katharine Gibbs or her school in letters, oral histories, and diaries. And The Internet Archive, while duly criticized for frequent copyright infringement, nevertheless has public domain items like far-back copies of magazines. That’s how I found one of my subjects, because she’d written a letter to the editor of Gourmet magazine and mentioned that she’d attended Katharine Gibbs. I subsequently located and interviewed her.
These research methods will probably produce a thousand jigsaw puzzle pieces of information. But putting them together can actually be fun.
Listen to the pictures. They’ll talk. Contrary to assumptions that Gibbs was just a secretarial school, yearbook photos told a different story. Faculty pages boasted professors from elite colleges, while candid images of students showed them poring over stacks of books at small group tables, mingling with famous guest lecturers, or heading off on field trips to places like the New York Stock Exchange. Neither did Gibbs have stark institutional décor. Brochures displayed lobbies that looked like upper-class drawing rooms, spacious dorm rooms with elegant furniture, and dining rooms resembling fancy restaurants. While the school called itself special, pictures proved it so.
Embrace lawsuits! I first discovered how spicy legal documents can be while researching my William Fox biography. Fox and one of his directors sued each other over credits on a big budget movie. Suddenly, it seemed obvious: people who take each other to court are red-hot angry and willing to put on the record thoughts they would never otherwise reveal publicly. Further, as evidence of how friendly they’d once been, the director submitted personal letters from Fox. For Katharine Gibbs, a fight with her brothers over their late father’s estate revealed themes of male privilege and arrogance that would ultimately galvanize her determination to educate women to earn and keep their own money, lots of it.
Yes, these research methods will probably produce a thousand jigsaw puzzle pieces of information. But putting them together can actually be fun—and more than that, deeply rewarding. When the last piece locks into place, you’ll have a picture no one else knew was there. As Katharine Gibbs constantly exhorted her students: however daunting the odds, expect great things!
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Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women by Vanda Krefft is available from Algonquin Books, a division of Hachette Book Group.
