The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [20]
The focus on sports and an emphasis on horseback riding as a suitable occupation for students was not particular to Knox. Many influential women educators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had attended schools of physical education, and they incorporated gymnasiums as integral parts of their schools. Charlotte Haxall Noland, who founded Foxcroft, a girls’ school in Virginia well known for its riding program, studied at the Sargent School of Physical Education at Harvard. M. Carey Thomas, another early proponent of girls’ education, built a state-of-the-art gymnasium in downtown Baltimore when she founded the Bryn Mawr School in 1884. In the nineteenth century, college preparatory education, such as that afforded to boys, was believed to divert energy toward women’s brains at the expense of their reproductive organs, sapping their strength and rendering them unhealthy. Early female educators, believing that girls needed to be both healthy and well educated, favored including rigorous physical education in their curriculums, and horseback riding, with its perceived health-promoting benefits, was often included in the mix.
Horsemanship promoted posture, grace, and confidence, while providing exercise and fresh air. At an all-girls school, there were opportunities to play other sports, but perhaps none that provided the exhilaration, challenge, and freedom of riding, and certainly none that allowed girls to participate in a sport that was fast, dangerous, and thrilling. Horseback riding was equally popular with boys and men at that time, and girls experienced much more parity with boys in riding than in other sports. Girls wore breeches and boots instead of tunics or dresses, got muddy and dirty, and often took dramatic spills. Sprains, concussions, and broken bones were thought to go with the territory. Horseback riding afforded girls a unique opportunity—it was both feminine and socially graceful, and at the same time, it was exciting and rough-and-tumble.
At Knox, the riding program provided a place where girls could escape the school’s confining environment. Some girls, like Wendy Plumb, whose father was an expert horseman and whose brother was an eight-time member of the United States Olympic equestrian team, had come to the school as skilled riders. Wendy spent her summers racking up ribbons on the horse show circuit and devoted her year at Knox to keeping up her technique.
In Harry de Leyer’s stables, the rules were different from those in the rest of the school. No doubt the handsome young riding master was an additional draw to the afternoon program. Among a faculty of dour, serious, mostly spinster women, Mr. D, as he was known, stood out—he was younger, more fun, and male. Harry was not worried about the girls’ dress or manners, their deportment or social etiquette. He wanted to make riders out of them.
It was rumored that after his job interview, a healthy debate had gone on among the teachers, many of whom were unmarried women “of a certain age.” Was it really appropriate to leave him alone with the girls up at the stables? Of course, he was married and he was a family man, but he was also young, and once he was hired, he was like a lightning bolt cutting through that school, always smiling and quick with a laugh. The girls loved Mr. D, sensing immediately that he was on their side. But from around every corner, a woman with a tight bun, horn-rimmed glasses, and a disapproving air watched him, immediately summoning him to the manor house whenever anything seemed amiss.
Bonnie Cornelius was one of Mr. D’s best riders—quick to lend a hand around the barn, always one of the first to arrive and one of the last to leave. Each day, when the girls arrived at the stables, Mr. D called out a stall number. Bonnie never knew which horse she’d have to ride that day, but she was always game for a challenge.
In the narrow track that ringed the inside of the circular stable courtyard, Mr. D set up fences for the girls to jump. Some days, he’d keep raising the fences