Education Innovator May Close

It was 1963. John F. Kennedy was president. Betty Friedan had recently published “The Feminine Mystique,” igniting the feminist movement. And in a vacant lot in Van Nuys with a couple of rundown bungalows, three homemakers opened a school where women could learn without the pressures of academia.

“It was like a bridge from being in the house to being out in the world again,” said Chris Edwards, 67, a co-founder of Everywoman’s Village, which became a model for the changing face of women’s education.

Fast forward to 1999. Institutions from university extension programs to local YMCAs offer women paths to career or personal advancement. Despite the growing competition, the Village has kept going, relying on student fees to pay the bills.

But after subsidizing its deficits for several years by selling parcels of the original property, the nonprofit school’s board of directors recently announced that it will close in November unless it can cover an anticipated $80,000 deficit.

Their last hope seems to be finding a corporate or individual sponsor. Executive Director Laura Selwyn, daughter of the late co-founder Lynn Selwyn, said she will send a letter within the week to Mayor Richard Riordan seeking help. “I’m hoping people at that level will know of high-level contributors who can step forward,” she said.

The founders--sisters Lynn Selwyn and Edwards and friend Diane Rosner--were young homemakers with children when they brainstormed the idea for a school where women could learn without having to compete with younger students or professionals. At the time, Selwyn was a part-time student at UCLA, Rosner was a lay therapist and Edwards was attending an art institute part time.

“I felt terribly inadequate as a pregnant housewife,” Edwards recalled. “I really enjoyed it but felt pressure.”

The women transformed the modest bungalows into 13 classrooms and workshops on land at Sepulveda and Burbank boulevards that they leased from the husbands of Selwyn and Edwards.

They persuaded friends to donate paint and typewriters, and joined volunteers in remodeling the buildings, hammering, scraping paint and laying new floors. And they collected $2,500 to start the school.

“It’s like my child,” said Edwards, the only surviving co-founder. “We worked on it as much as on our children, down on our hands and knees, and we worked harder on it than on ourselves, I’ll tell you.”

They mailed 4,000 announcements, and 200 students enrolled the first week. A dozen teachers taught 20 classes. In its heyday, up to 200 courses were offered in a semester, reflecting the times: existentialism, languages, politics, psychology, literature, belly dancing, finance, yoga, cooking and sculpture.

“The message was learning for the sake of love,” Edwards said. “It was amazing how everybody grabbed onto the idea. It was a very needed thing.”

Enrollment grew the first two decades at the unaccredited institution, reaching a high of 2,500 in 1979.

Men were never excluded, and they trickled into classes from the beginning and eventually made up about 20% of the student body.

The Village first ran into trouble about a decade after it opened because of financial mismanagement and had to take out a $150,000 loan, Laura Selwyn said. In 1985, shortly after she took charge, it was forced to sell some of its property to repay the loan.

“If we sell more land, there’s no campus,” Selwyn said. “That’s no longer an option for us.”

The school took a hit from the Northridge earthquake in 1994; enrollment dropped 25% as students retreated to make home repairs, Selwyn said.

The Village always had a tougher time getting local support than international fame. After Life magazine published an article on the innovative institution in 1966, its informal slogan became: “Today the world, tomorrow Van Nuys.”

“We are not the news flash commodity we were in 1963,” Selwyn, 52, conceded. “It’s incredible how many people live in our ZIP Code and don’t know we’re here.”

The brightly colored bungalows adorned with murals painted by students are easy to miss, nestled between office buildings on busy Sepulveda Boulevard. People have mistaken the site for a birth control center, a home for unwed mothers, a religious retreat and a motel.

Teachers and students have taken the imminent closing hard.

“We’ve lost our foundation, our central gathering place,” said Jeanne Hahn of Northridge, who teaches watercolor painting and is a member of the Village’s artists’ cooperative.

It is, Selwyn said, “a sad, sad thing. Every day when we come in, it’s been an emotional roller coaster to accept the reality of what’s going on. Yet we remain hopeful.”