By Gigi Esposito
In its 106-year long reign, Canterbury has welcomed women onto campus for only 50 of those years. The first female students stepped foot on campus in 1972, and the first female Head of School began her job in the fall of 2015. Although Canterbury School has made wonderful strides to eliminate sexism, as the co-president of Woman of Canterbury, I still hear stories of daily microaggressions and stereotypes which hinder the female students’ success on this hilltop. Rachel Stone and I have had lengthy conversations about the root cause of this, and it has become clear that it stems from Canterbury’s history as an all-boys boarding school.
Whether it is obvious or not, Canterbury’s history means the school has a gender imbalance. There is only one sustainable and effective solution to balance out the gender biases present on campus, which has been thoughtfully planned by the members of Women of Canterbury and the seven female board members, and overseen by Mrs. Stone. For the next 56 years, Canterbury will be a college preparatory all-girls boarding and day school for students grade 9-12. After the 56 boy-free years, the community will return to the co-ed environment we currently have.
This decision has been unanimously voted by all the Canterbury Staff members, and student leaders. Peter LaVigne added, “The female members of this community ask for one thing: fairness. I can think of no better solution to spearhead the problem of sexism at Canterbury than to look into the past, and rewrite our future.” (Mr. LaVigne was not aware that he will be losing his job at the time of this quote and he has declined to comment after the news was broken to him.) Head of School Rachel Stone has also been in communication with Peter Becker, Head of School of Gunnery, a historically co-ed school, and current male students will join in Gunnery’s current class. Mr. Becker said “Federick William Gunn had welcomed all genders and ethnicities from the very first day of school, and would embrace doing the right thing, even when faced with adversity, in the name of justice.”
This motion will take place in the fall of 2022. The three boys’ dorms, Sheehan, Havemeyer, and Carmody, will be used as girls’ dorms. Students will be happy to hear that this summer, all of the six dorms will be undergoing construction after boarding students move out. The walls separating each dorm will be knocked down to create larger, suite-style dorms: 1,000 square feet for singles, and 1,500 square feet for doubles.
With this news, we hope that the male members of this community will embrace this opportunity to show their solidarity for not only the females of this hilltop, but for the modern-day feminist movement as a whole.
The OSH Overseer 