Lee Bailey, and American-born Queen Noor of Jordan also relied on the secretarial talents of “Gibbs Girls,” as did top administrators at Warner Brothers, MIT, Lever Brothers, American Express, and the Walt Disney Corporation. Footnote 1 Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters, Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsay, Edward Kennedy, F. In December 1940, when the Duke and Duchess of Windsor sought to hire a social secretary, they selected a graduate of the Katharine Gibbs School. Thriving at a time when educated women had few opportunities, the school declined when the feminist upheavals of the 1960s sparked a new ethos of workplace egalitarianism and widening cultural definitions of self-fulfillment for women. Promoting the career secretary as a desirable career path for women, Gibbs used class and gender-based marketing to separate itself from competitors. In presenting a secretarial career as an attractive option for women, the school developed a gender-specific message that was very much in keeping with the vocationalism that became a major component of women's education in both public high schools and proprietary institutions. This essay examines the origin, development, and ultimate demise of the chain, placing it within the context of the expansion of office work and the growth of clerical education. Established in 1911 as a simple owner-operated commercial school in Providence, Rhode Island, the Katharine Gibbs School expanded over the decades to acquire an international reputation for excellence in secretarial training.

College Girls by Lynn Peril