Womanschool

The curriculum is unpretentious but practical. It includes courses on such subjects as how to fix a faucet, prepare a tax return or get a better job. The teachers seem eminently well qualified. Heidi Fiske, vice president of Institutional Investors Systems, presides over a course entitled "How to Leverage Your Talents into Working for Yourself or Starting Your Own Small Business"; Lynn Caine, who wrote the best-selling autobiographical Widow, teaches "The Widow." All this and more is available at Womanschool, a newly opened institution designed to teach women how to cope in a male-dominated society.

Established in classrooms rented from Manhattan's tony Finch College, Womanschool is the invention of petite, intense Elaine First Sharpe, 38, an assistant professor of English at coeducational Jersey City State College. After eleven years at Jersey, Sharpe decided that many women lack self-confidence. "They don't like themselves," she says. What they need to boost their selfesteem, she feels, is to learn more skills. With her husband Donald, 40, an associate law professor at Fordham, she took a small ad in the New York Times last year to recruit female teachers for an informal school that would "offer women options." They had planned to hold classes in friends' living rooms, but when the ad drew more than 400 enthusiastic responses, the Sharpes realized that they had to raise their sights and promptly began making plans for a larger institution. Womanschool now has 24 courses, 30 faculty members, and an overflow enrollment of 500 students.

One of the most popular courses is "The Self-Confident Home Mechanic," designed to teach students how to repair light switches, calk pipes and fix appliances. One student, Blossom Gottlieb, 26, is taking the course so she and her husband can renovate their hot-dog stand in the seashore community of Cape May, N.J. Her mother-in-law Virginia, 60, is also enrolled because she rents out two summer cottages there. "It's impossible to get a plumber on July 4," she explains, "and the toilets are always stopped up on holidays." Another student, Pat Ortiz, enrolled because she has knocked seven holes in her bedroom wall trying to put up shelves. "I'm all thumbs, and my husband is all feet," she says. In the next classroom, about 50 women taking "Mastering the Art of Investing" are studying the intricacies of Treasury notes, municipal bonds and mutual funds. In "Being and Becoming Single," a class of 15 women talk about living by themselves. Teacher Betty Kronsky, a therapist, has handed out assigned reading "because I want them to take away something concrete."

Not Accredited. Womanschool is nonprofit and not accredited. Tuition is $60 for the ten-week courses, and as low as $25 for a six-session lecture series. So far the Sharpes have met the original costs of about $7,000 out of their own pockets. Says Sharpe: "I haven't bought clothes for my daughter for a year." They are applying to foundations and the Federal Government for help.

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