Penwoman

In Manhattan's Hotel Pennsylvania last week an elderly salesman for a pencil company was waiting for the National Association of Penmanship Teachers and Supervisors to close the first session of its annual convention. Said he, softly: ''Penmanship is sort of dying out. Typewriters, you know. It's a shame, too."

As quickly as if she had overheard the salesman, Brooklyn's Assistant School Superintendent Lizzie Rector picked up the challenge. Despite the typewriter interests, cried she, handwriting must never be driven from the schools.

Blithely undisturbed by the typewriter issue was Miss Bertha Agnes Connor, a plump, blonde lady who supervises the penmanship work of 6,000 Boston teachers. As president of the Association, Miss Connor outlined her Theory of the History of Penmanship.

"Handwriting," said she, "has almost always expressed the age in which it was practiced. In Colonial days, when travel was cumbersome ... the writing was cumbersome and inartistic. Jumping about 100 years, in the middle of the Victorian period Spencerian writing became the vogue. . .

"Then a tremendous tragedy happened around 1900. It was worse than the last dust storm because it covered the whole country. Some men thought that they could make money out of handwriting, and they published copybooks with a stylized, vertical Germanic script, which were adopted in every school in the country. Every teacher had to learn the method, which consisted of slow, laborious finger movements. It used to take a child half an hour to write the same amount that he can now put out in three minutes."

For 15 years teachers and pupils fussed over the. Germanic script. While Miss Connor was in school, a devastating reaction set in. Standards collapsed right & left. Youngsters were allowed to run riot with pen and paper, express their personalities in rough squiggles, gross curlicues, boorish scrawls. "Horace Greeley's writing was responsible for this horrid idea," explained Miss Connor. "Just because he was a great man with a dreadful handwriting, it followed that all great men must have dreadful hands."

Bertha Connor's own hand was a nasty little squiggle which made her mother ashamed to read her letters. Ashamed herself, Bertha ten years ago took up the new cursive style, based on long, slanting strokes. So pleased was she with her flowing hand that she resolved to spend all her time propagating the cursive system.

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