By Talia Ziblatt and Leila Andermann, Contributing Writers

Every year on October 31st, Winsor celebrates Founders Day with cider and donuts in honor of founder, Mary Pickett Winsor. Ms. Winsor was born October 31, 1860 in Salem, Massachusetts and founded Winsor in 1886 in Beacon Hill. Winsor was relocated in 1908 to Longwood where she was the head of school until 1922. Despite Winsor’s rich history, many students aren’t aware of the school’s past. According to Ms. Pelmas, “[Mary Winsor] was a visionary, a change agent, and an ethical leader who loved her students and knew they could help change the world.” Ms. Pelmas also mentions that “I love the opportunity to remind the community how lucky we are as a school to have social justice in our founding principles, and to be reminded about how crucial girls’ and womens’ voices are at this time, and always!” Health teacher Ms. Joy believes that even though Winsor is an institution that was created to foster and teach young women in a time where “women were not able to open their own bank accounts, [or] vote” it is also crucial to teach Winsor students about the history of its past alumnae and who its doors were opened to. Ms. Joy wrote to us questions that she had including “who was welcomed into Winsor’s doors and who was not?” and “​what did early Winsor alumnae go on to accomplish?”. In Ms. Joy’s words, “I think that Winsor would greatly benefit from knowing how our school went on a journey from being a white-only school for Boston’s wealthy elite to what it is today. It is important to know where we came from to know where we are going.” 

As we read through Winsor’s 1950 Founder’s Day Service speeches, a sense of pride and awe washed over us both. The speeches about the history of the school were able to capture the feeling that we knew Ms. Winsor well. She believed in her students and “she was also a friend with whom you brushed elbows with everyday.” She was connected to the student body, and had “a special Class I day when many little girls would sit at her feet in her office and she would tell them some story of her childhood”. Later, she became increasingly deaf, at a financial loss, and gave up her independence to the Board of Trustees, and yet “she [had taken] on a larger school simply because it was the right thing to do”. Ms. Winsor founded the school because “upon her conviction…girls deserved an education…Miss Winsor’s school was not a ‘finishing school’, it was a beginning.”