Carmelita Hinton

Carmelita Chase Hinton (1890 - January 16, 1983) was an American progressive educator. She is best known as the founder in 1935 of The Putney School, a progressive boarding school in Vermont.

She was born Carmelita Chase in Omaha, Nebraska. Her parents were Clement Chase, a bookseller and newspaper owner and editor, and Lula Belle Edwards, an Episcopalian philanthropist from an old Kentucky family. She attended Bryn Mawr College, where she trained as a teacher. After graduating in 1912, she moved to Chicago, where she lived at Hull House in 1913 as secretary to Jane Addams. At Hull House she enrolled in a two-year course on the playground, and soon after married Sebastian Hinton, a lawyer. In Chicago she opened a nursery school (where Sebastian Hinton invented and patented the first playground jungle gym) and bore three children. Later the family moved to Winnetka, Illinois.

In 1923 her husband Sebastian committed suicide, though Carmelita concealed the cause of his death even from her children for decades. She began teaching kindergarten at the North Shore Country Day School. In 1925 she moved with her three children to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she taught at the Shady Hill School. She later moved again to a farm in Weston, Massachusetts.

In 1934 a Hull House friend arranged the sale of Elm Lea Farm in Putney, Vermont for a reduced price for Hinton to found a school. There in 1935 she founded The Putney School, the first coeducational New England boarding school, an experiment in progressive education, and a working farm, which she was to direct until 1955. She based its structure on her belief in the value of manual labor, art and music, and scholarship as equally necessary components of a healthy adult life. At first it enrolled the children of wealthy progressives and liberals; and though all its students, staff, and faculty were heeded and treated as constituents by Hinton, she was the sole director of every aspect of the school.

The school's early success depended largely on her forceful personality; in the late 1940s and early 1950s, though, many of the school's teachers began to resent her complete authority over its running. Eventually Hinton was forced to compromise with a nascent teachers' union on matters of salary, conditions, and procedure. After 1955 she continued to attend the school's meetings, though she was officially retired, and travelled, led trips, founded other education projects and summer camps, and gave speeches.

Hinton had three children. Her daughter Jean Hinton Rosner (1917-2002) was a civil rights and peace activist. Her daughter Joan and her son William H. Hinton lived for decades in China before and after the revolution. William H. Hinton was a Marxist Sinologist. William's daughter and Carmelita's granddaughter Carma Hinton is a documentary filmmaker ("The Gate of Heavenly Peace").

References

* Kennedy, Shawn G.. "Carmelita Hinton, Educator Who Founded Putney School" (obituary). "The New York Times" January 23, 1983: Section 1, page 28.
* Lloyd, Susan McIntosh. "Carmelita Chase Hinton and the Putney School." In "Founding Mothers and Others: Women Educational Leaders During the Progressive Era", ed. Alan R. Sadovnik and Susan F. Semel. Palgrave, 2002. ISBN 0-312-29502-2.