1896 - 1920

The Calhoun School was founded in 1896 by Laura Jacobi as The Jacobi School. Miss Jacobi came to this country from Germany at around the age of 18 with the help of her uncle, Dr. Abraham Jacobi, professor of pediatrics at New York Medical College and Columbia. Through her uncle and her aunt Mary Putnam Jacobi, the young Miss Jacobi was exposed to a progressive circle committed to women’s rights, community health and civil service reform.

Initially Miss Jacobi began her program as a “brother-and-sister” school in a brownstone at 158–160 West 80th Street, counting among its first students the son and daughter of Franz Boas, one of the founders of American cultural anthropology. It gradually evolved into a girls school, attracting the daughters of socially prominent families. “All the girls from ‘Our Crowd’ came here,” a Trustee was once quoted as saying, “from Peggy Guggenheim to the Morgenthaus to the Strausses.” The school’s nonsectarian curriculum emphasized languages and history, and had a reputation for a strong faculty with high standards. Eleanor Steiner Gimbel ’14 remembered Miss Jacobi’s commitment to civil liberties and her “teaching of race understanding as one of the high points of her school days.”

Four young women became the first graduating class of The Jacobi School in 1905. Despite the strong sense in that time that a “woman’s place is in the home” and the fact that many girls were not expected to go on to college, an impressive number of Jacobi alumnae had professional careers, engaged in settlement work and participated in volunteer efforts. Helene Boas Yampolsky ’05 worked as a research botanist in the New York Botanical Garden and collaborated with her husband in botany and anthropology. Edith Altschul Lehman ’07 was a close political advisor to her husband, New York Governor and Senator Herbert Lehman, and as a philanthropist donated the funds for the Children’s Zoo in Central Park. Josette Frank ’10 worked as a clerk in Theodore Roosevelt’s New York City office, wrote about children’s literature and the status of Indian girls, and kept her own name after her marriage. Peggy Guggenheim ’15, spurred on by her friend Peggy David Waldman ’14, became an influential advocate of modern art. The Model Yacht Boathouse at the Conservatory Pond in Central Park was donated by Jeanne Kerbs ’13, as was The Kerbs Memorial Hall at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Lita Annenberg Hazen, who attended Calhoun in the 1920s, was a great patron of science, medicine and education, while her sister Evelyn Annenberg Hall continues to support the arts and horticultural organizations.

In 1916, Laura Jacobi chose Mary Edwards Calhoun to succeed her as headmistress. A member of a Philadelphia Quaker family, Miss Calhoun was a former editor of the Women’s Page at the Herald Tribune as well as a teacher at various schools before coming to The Jacobi School. Miss Calhoun supported curricular change and higher academic pursuits for the Jacobi girls. She hired Ella Cannon Levis to teach economics. Miss Levis, who had worked for the National Women’s Suffrage Publishing Company in 1914, also established a new Student League at The Jacobi School in 1919.