Finch & Current Events

Fashionable Finch, which has been one of the most famed of U.S. girls' finishing schools, has decided that its debutante students need starting off rather than finishing. Founder-President Jessica Garretson Finch Cosgrave announced a new policy: every Finch girl, before she graduates, must know how to make a living.

Finch (annual fee for boarders: $1,800; day students, $700) caters to the daughters of wealthy families who like their girls to be artified and musicked. But Mrs. Cosgrave, who believes in feminine independence, has tried since 1929 to persuade parents that, in a world of disappearing wealth, practical arts would do rich girls no harm. In 1937 she transformed Finch from a pure finishing school into a junior college (like Sarah Lawrence, Stephens).

Finch will give each new girl vocational tests. Girls who go in for painting will be required also to study commercial art; those who major in theater arts must study community recreation or radio. To see that its girls get jobs, Finch will establish a placement office.

When stocky Jessica Cosgrave, who does not look her years (seventy-ish), graduated from Barnard College in 1893, a group of Junior Leaguers asked her to lecture to them on world affairs. She coined the now common term "current events" to describe her subject, soon had to start another class for the girls' mothers. In 1900 she opened a full-fledged school in a Manhattan apartment, named it for her first husband.

Many a notable family on both sides of the Atlantic has sent its daughters to Finch--e.g., the Manhattan Whitneys and Lewisohns, the London Selfridges. Jessica, who divorced the school's namesake and married John O'Hara Cosgrave, longtime Sunday editor of the old New York World, created a new pattern for finishing schools: Finch girls spent half their time on academic work, half on painting, music, theater.

Mrs. Cosgrave used to have her girls chaperoned wherever they went, made them walk in Central Park every morning. They still take part in such urban sports as riding, swimming, tennis, dancing. Finch girls also take turns practicing housekeeping and interior decorating in a model apartment (Mrs. Cosgrave likes to tell about the Southern belle who once rushed excitedly into the dean's office and announced: "I've just cracked an egg"), visit settlement houses to tell children stories. They can take courses in income management, secretarial work, business law.

Today young men may present themselves evenings at Finch's famed, chaste, grey stone entrance on East 77th Street and squire Finch's pretty girls around the town without a chaperone (at Finch a date is known as "the little man"). Mrs. Cosgrave does not expect her new plan to change the character of her school. Twinkles she: "Finch will continue to have snob appeal."

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