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2692
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https://www.amazon.com/Road-Coorain-Jill-Ker-Conway/dp/B000U3TZ0I
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Amazon.com
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https://www.acappellabooks.com/pages/books/255047/jill-ker-conway-brian-ed-conway/true-north-a-memoir
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en
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True North: A Memoir
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Vintage, August 1995. Trade Paperback. Used - Very Good. Item #255047 ISBN: 0679744614 With all the openness to life, all the largeness of spirit, that made her girlhood memoir, The Road from Coorain, an acclaimed - and beloved - bestseller, Jill Ker Conway continues her story. She was twenty-five when we left her, driven by a hunger to know and to understand, boarding a plane that would
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/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png
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A Cappella Books
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https://www.acappellabooks.com/pages/books/255047/jill-ker-conway-brian-ed-conway/true-north-a-memoir
|
Vintage, August 1995. Trade Paperback. Used - Very Good. Item #255047
ISBN: 0679744614
With all the openness to life, all the largeness of spirit, that made her girlhood memoir, The Road from Coorain, an acclaimed - and beloved - bestseller, Jill Ker Conway continues her story. She was twenty-five when we left her, driven by a hunger to know and to understand, boarding a plane that would carry her far from her Australian homeland. As True North begins she lands, appropriately enough, in a hurricane, in New York. And is soon at Harvard, a graduate student in history experiencing both exhilaration and culture shock; discovering among friends of many backgrounds an easier sociability than she has ever known; delighting in classes that seem charged with energy, and in the perception that ideas were being taken seriously - yet still feeling like an extraterrestrial on the American planet. We see her joining with five other women to form a household that becomes an "almost magical, " hilarious, and harmonious community - the community that functions as her family when she meets the Harvard professor and housemaster who will become her husband, John Conway, himself a historian, Canadian born and bred, decorated for heroism in World War II - the complex man whose mind and spirit complement her own. We see them marrying and learning to live together - during a year at Oxford, in Rome, and as they settle into the new world of Canadian university life - happy with each other, while coping, not always well, with her classically obsessive thesis writing, her as-yet-unresolved conflict with her mother, his periodic bouts of depression, and her realization that even though John's integrity, courage, and devotion to humanistic learning have become the compass point - the true north - bywhich she steers, there will be times when she has to navigate alone. We witness the moment of her spiritual arrival on this continent and her discovery of her warrior self - fighting for equity in her own career and for other women. This is how a most private woman found for hers.
Conway's The Road from Coorain presents a vivid memoir of coming of age in Australia. In 1960, however, she had reached the limits of that provincial--and irredeemably sexist--society and set off for America. True North--the testament of an extraordinary woman living in an extraordinary time--te lls the profound story of the challenges that confronted Conway, as she sought to establish her public self.
Used Book
Price: $6.00
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2692
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https://www.ncronline.org/news/guest-voices/jill-ker-conway-pioneered-opportunities-womens-education
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en
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Jill Ker Conway pioneered opportunities for women's education
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Jill Ker Conway, historian and memoirist who served as Smith College's first woman president, created an environment in academia in which women could flourish and find their own vocations.
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/files/NCR%20Blue%20avatars%2016X16%20pixels.jpg
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National Catholic Reporter
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https://www.ncronline.org/news/guest-voices/jill-ker-conway-pioneered-opportunities-womens-education
|
Conway lived on a family ranch of 32,000 acres, far removed from any town, school or church. Her life was solitary, the nearest neighbor being 50 miles away. Other than her two brothers, she had no playmates. She claimed not to have met another girl until she was 7 years old. Her work was herding and tending sheep, helping to maintain her family's hard-scrabble life.
Tragedy struck when the ranch failed. Her father, a devout Catholic, died, as did one of her brothers, forcing her mother to move what remained of the family to Sydney. There Conway began her formal education and attended the Catholic Church. But the outback had already formed her. The vastness of nature, the comfort of solitude, and hard physical labor all molded her.
Intellectually self-confident and chastened by difficult experiences, she completed her education at the University of Sydney, graduating first in her class. However, she quickly realized she would not find employment commensurate with her ambition in Australia. This limitation, plus her desire to free herself from the grip of a psychologically dependent mother, led her to apply to Harvard University, where she would earn a doctoral degree in history. She claimed she studied history in order to understand the social forces which diminished her mother's life. It was these early years in Australia and her decision to leave that she chronicled in The Road from Coorain, one of the best loved memoirs of the 20th century.
True North, her second memoir, tells of her years at Harvard and her marriage to one of her professors, the historian John Conway. Although he was 18 years her senior, during their 33 years of marriage, which ended with his death in 1995, John Conway proved to be an immensely supportive partner, irrespective of his debilitating depression. In 1964, the Conways left Harvard for Toronto where she began teaching at the University of Toronto and subsequently was appointed its first woman vice president.
The last of her trio of memoirs, A Woman's Education: The Road from Coorain Leads to Smith College, is the story of her presidency of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, which began in 1975 when she was 40. She stayed 10 years. Academia's full intransigence to change was the background against which Conway attempted to institute a curriculum which would serve the contemporary needs of women students.
During her tenure, courses in women's studies, business and engineering were added; athletics was supported; non-traditional age students were enrolled; and financial aid was extended. What A Woman's Education makes clear is that Conway harnessed her personal ambition, intellectual acuity, and ability to take risks in order to advance the ambitions of other women. Her innate shyness allowed her to do all she did with humility.
After she left Smith, Conway was named a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute for Technology, served on the boards of Nike and Merrill Lynch, and continued to write about male and female autobiographies and how and why they differed. She expanded the field of life-writing by editing Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women and In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, and authoring When Memory Speaks.
If grit characterized Jill Ker Conway's personality, so too did graciousness toward others. Intellectual, tenacious and fearless, she nonetheless cared about individuals and treated all she met with respect. Over the course of her life she drew on various sources of inspiration. Her early life in the Australian outback gave her an appreciation of solitude and of the natural world. Her father's Catholicism impressed her, as did her reading of the Bible. The remoteness of her life with its absence of ecclesial authority allowed her to freely ask questions of meaning and to form an independent conscience.
Her advanced study of history, especially her doctoral dissertation on American female reformers like Jane Addams, was also a formative element in her life. She credited Catholic influences in giving her a sense of vocation. In her case this was to uncover the history of women as revealed in their autobiographical writings and to create an intellectual environment in which women could flourish and find their own vocations.
She took seriously the importance of women mystics, especially St. Julian of Norwich and St. Teresa of Avila. Believing as she did in the value of community, she derived encouragement from the achievements of women's religious communities; she rejoiced when her parish, St. Mark's in Conway, Massachusetts, a small, diverse mission church, was able to create a vibrant spiritual community largely independent of ecclesial direction. Her commitment to social issues expressed itself in her long-standing concern for homeless veterans, which resulted in the opening of the John and Jill Ker Conway Residence in Washington, D.C., in 2017.
Conway died June 1 at age 83. Her funeral service was held at her much-loved St. Mark's. Unable to have children, her progeny were the multitude of women whom she inspired, pioneered opportunities for their education, and left a trove of writing to motivate them. An avowed feminist, her life was whole and integrated, liberated and realized; it was grounded both in grit and grace.
Fully alive, Jill Ker Conway in her living fulfilled her father's admonition, to "do something," and Irenaeus' claim that the one fully alive gives glory to God.
[Dana Greene's latest biography, Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War, is to be released in November from Oxford University Press.]
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https://whisperinggums.com/2018/08/05/vale-jill-ker-conway/
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Vale Jill Ker Conway
|
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2018-08-05T00:00:00
|
Just before Mr Gums and I set off for our Arnhem Land holiday in early July, I came across an obituary for the Australian-born academic, educator and writer Jill Ker Conway (1934-2018). She had died on June 1, but I hadn't heard. Why not? Her first memoir, The road from Coorain, was a best-seller, and…
|
en
|
https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/8c3588ce3b1916fc8408adba735c6f2541d3e4cb0cbfbbb52cad346cb33a4360?s=32
|
Whispering Gums
|
https://whisperinggums.com/2018/08/05/vale-jill-ker-conway/
|
Just before Mr Gums and I set off for our Arnhem Land holiday in early July, I came across an obituary for the Australian-born academic, educator and writer Jill Ker Conway (1934-2018). She had died on June 1, but I hadn’t heard. Why not? Her first memoir, The road from Coorain, was a best-seller, and I think her second one, True north, was also well received. I’ve read, and enjoyed, them both, but long, long before blogging. Her final memoir, A woman’s education, a slimmer volume, is on my TBR.
Those who know Jill Ker Conway will know why her passing didn’t make big news here. It’s because she made her name in the USA … added to which she was a woman. Or, am I being too paranoid?
So, who was Jill Ker Conway? Well, for a start she was born on a sheep station her parents named Coorain (Aboriginal for “windy place”) in outback New South Wales. Although more often hot, dry and dusty than not, Ker Conway loved it, as she shares in her first memoir.
Now, though, I’ll quickly summarise her career. She was, says Wikipedia, “an Australian-American scholar and author”. She was “well-known” for her autobiographies/memoirs, particularly for The Road from Coorain, but she also made history by becoming the prestigious Smith College‘s first woman president (1975-1985). She made history, of course, because she was its first woman president, but it’s fascinating to me that she was also Australian. She was 40 when appointed to this role, and in her first year was named Time magazine’s “woman of the year”. That’s impressive.
She was, later, a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004, she was named a Women’s History Month Honoree by the National Women’s History Project, and in 2013 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. She was, in other words, a bit of a mover-and-shaker!
I have, though, exaggerated the lack of news of her death here. There were some reports, including two in The Sydney Morning Herald. To give you a sense of how she was viewed, here are some of the titles of her obituaries:
Jill Ker Conway, 83, Feminist Author and Smith President, Dies (New York Times)
Jill Ker Conway, trailblazing historian and Smith College president, dies at 83 (Washington Post)
Jill Ker Conway, chairman and trailblazer, dies at 83 (The Sydney Morning Herald Business section)
Jill Ker Conway: author, historian and Smith College president (The Sydney Morning Herald National section)
Did you notice the odd one out? Yes, the SMH Business section report which identifies her as “chairman and trailblazer”. Chairman? Apparently, in addition to being an educator, academic, author and historian, she was a “business woman”. She was, in fact, “the first female chairman of global property group, Lendlease”. The Sydney Morning Herald says of her business career:
Dr Conway served on the boards of businesses including Merrill Lynch, Nike, Colgate-Palmolive and Lendlease. She was also a former chairman of the American Antiquarian Society.
In 2000 she was appointed as chair of Lendlease at a time when the company needed a firm hand.
Interesting woman eh? For an excellent obituary, do read the SMH National Section one.
She was also one of that wave of Australian intellectuals who left our shores in the 1960s and never really returned, mostly because of the stultifying academic lives they found here. Others included Germaine Greer (1939-), Robert Hughes (1938-2012), Clive James (1939-), not to mention writers like Randolph Stow (1935-2010). They went to England, while Ker Conway made the USA her home.
Ker Conway chronicles exactly why she left Australia in her first two autobiographies/memoirs. It was because she was regularly overlooked for significant jobs – or any job – in favour of men, and because she could not find the sort of intellectual enquiry she sought. Here she is, near the end of The road from Coorain, describing Sydney’s academic circles around 1959, and the group she thought most interesting because they were “iconoclasts, cultural rebels, and radical critics of Australian society”:
When I rejected the inevitable sexual advances, I was looked at with pained tolerance, told to overcome my father fixation, and urged to become less bourgeois. It was a bore to have to spend my time with this group rebuffing people’s sexual propositions when what I really wanted to do was explore new ideas and to clarify my thoughts by explaining them to others. I didn’t know then that I was encountering the standard Australian left view of women, but I could see that the so-called sexual revolution had asymmetrical results.
By the end of True north, she had her Harvard degree in history, and was living with her husband in Toronto when the Smith College job came up. She writes:
I’d been pushed out of Australia by family circumstances [all chronicled in the first memoir], the experience of discrimination, frustration with the culture I was born in. Nothing was pushing me out of this wonderful setting but a cause, and the hope to serve it.
And what was that cause? Well, as she also writes in True north, her main consideration when choosing whether or not to accept Smith College’s offer was “where my work would have the greatest impact on women’s education”. That “impact”, she explains, was not just about numbers. It was about proving that a woman’s institution was not only valid but valid and relevant in a modern world, and about the potential for making it “an intellectual centre for research on women’s lives and women’s issues, research that could have influence far beyond Smith’s lyrical New England campus”. She was there for 10 years, and made her mark.
Ker Conway was, then, a significant woman whose achievements I’ve only touched on. Check the Wikipedia article linked above for more, including a list of her books. Meanwhile, I’m ending with her final words in The road from Coorain, as she’s departing Australia:
Where I wondered would by bones come to rest? It pained me to think of them not fertilising Australian soil. Then I comforted myself with the notion that wherever on the earth was my final resting place, my body would return to the restless red dust of the western plains. I could see how it would blow about and get in people’s eyes, and I was content with that.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s (National section) obituary concludes:
Her love for her two worlds was reflected in her final wishes. Half her ashes will rest in a small private cemetery with John’s, near their beloved house and garden in Massachusetts. The other half are to be scattered by the big tree beside the roadway into the house at Coorain.
How good is that?
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The acclaimed author of the best-selling The Road from Coorain and True North now gives us the third book in her remarkable continuing memoir—describing the pleasures, the challenges, and the constant surprises (good and bad) of her years as the first woman president of Smith College.
The story opens in 1973 as Conway, unbeknownst to her, is first “looked over” as a prospective candidate by members of the Smith community, and continues as she assesses her passions and possibilities and agrees to the new challenge of heading the college in 1975. The jolt of energy she gets from being surrounded by several thousand young women enables her to take on the difficulties that arise in dealing with the diverse Smith constituencies—from the self-appointed protectors of the great male tradition of humanistic learning to the equally determined young feminists insisting on change. We see Conway juggling the needs and concerns of faculty, students, parents, trustees, and alumnae, and re-defining and redesigning aspects of the college to create programs in line with the new realities of women’s lives. We sense the urgency of her efforts to shape an institution that will attract students of the 1990s and beyond.
Through it all we see Jill Ker Conway coping with her husband’s illness, and learning to protect and sustain her inner self. As the end of a decade at Smith approaches, we see her realizing that she has both had her education and made her contributions, and that it is time now for her to graduate.
"One of the leading educators of our time - Jill Ker Conway - had described the challenges and the benefits of a first rate university for women in contemporary society. Her path as President of Smith College gives us an insider's view not only of the institutional side but the personal demands and their burdens. It is a fascinating and important story."
--Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, U.S. Supreme Court
"Jill Ker Conway offers an elegant and highly readable narrative of both women's education and her own amidst the feminist revolution of the late twentieth century. This is a personal as well as a social and cultural history -- and a compelling story besides."
-- Drew Gilpin Faust, Dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and author of Mothers of Invention
"A WOMAN'S EDUCATION is another inspiring chapter in Jill Ker Conway's life. This time she recounts the struggle and triumphs as the first woman president of Smith College. It is a story of strengths and hope and success in a woman's education. Nothing came easy to this gallant woman."
-- Thomas Winship, former Editor of The Boston Globe
"In A WOMAN'S EDUCATION Jill Ker Conway continues her fiercely introspective and fearless study of her own life, public role and intellectual development. It is a compelling story of an active, ambitious and intellectually forceful woman who has shaped her own life. And along the way, she provides an invaluable and frank history of how a women's college met the challenges of the second wave of feminism under the direction of a thoroughly independent thinker who was determined to build a modern, feminist institution. As her successor, I was constantly aware of my debt to her, and found her own story of her years at Smith entirely fascinating and instructive."
-- Mary Maples Dunn, President Emerita, Smith College
"Jill Ker Conway continues the absorbing and beautifully crafted account of her life's journey with her experiences as president of Smith. As always, her autobiography is an excellent read for anyone who cares about interesting lives, thoughtfully described. This particular volume should appeal to anyone who has ever wondered what college and university presidents actually do, and why anyone would want such a job. Jill gives her own answers to these questions with candor, humor, and acute attentiveness to the multifaceted nature of the sometimes bizarre and apparently impenetrable office of the president."
-- Nannerl O. Keohane, President, Duke University
"Jill Conway gives the reader that rare glimpse of a whole person tacking historic events. Her language is clear and crisp, her observations astute, her understanding of history remarkable, even as she is making it, yet all this from a woman's point of view -- not only about success or failure, but the larger issues of living.... Ultimately, Jill Conway, like any great author, leaves us better off for our journey through A Woman's Education. Her deep respect for life, her careful, honest, open exploration of how we live our lives and her unrelenting belief in a set of values that have the power to take root in people and institutions makes us take stock of our own lives. She does this graciously, joyfully, and enjoyably."
-- F Baron Harvey III, CEO, The Enterprise Foundation
"A Woman's Education provides a rare insider's view of what it means and what it takes to be a college president, as well as a unique perspective on an institution many of us have come to know and love. It was the first thing I handed to Carol Christ, the moment after she was elected the new President of Smith College."
-- Shelly Lazarus, CEO, Oglesby & Mather, and Chair of the Smith College Trustees
Jill Ker Conway is the the first to have written of years as a college or university president. In this book, nonetheless, she has set a standard to which all in the future will have to conform. In diversly interesting English, with penetrating insight and memory, she has told of the problems and prospects of leading a much admired college. And of doing it very well. No one can think that they have a full understanding of women's rights, scholarly conflict, required personal commitment and true accomplishment who hasn't read these pages. And further, no one can know what enjoyment was missed. On education, not to say also personal biography, it is truly the book of the year.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"To be president of Smith from 1975 to 1985 required guts and resilience; Conway met the challenge. Her compelling account of that roller-coaster ride prompts amazement. There is much to marvel at here; my favorite gem is her portrayal of the aging male conservative faculty defending their cozy turf."
-- Carolyn Heilbrun, author of Writing a Woman's Life
"This masterful story interweaves lives with institutional history and modern times. The backdrop is a renowned woman's college that was fated to be hidebound by tradition until it captured a president whose past dictated her future and that of the college. Challenged by the opportunity, she led courageous innovations and, amazingly agile in neutralizing foes, and intellectually honest, she chose to act on what mattered most to the long-term viability of the college. In the process, she captured the imagination and support of a disparate gang -- students, trustees, faculties, and administrators. It is a poignant tale of personal and professional courage that should be read because it is all so human and so profound. Lessons are there for the young and the old because she dares to tell the truth."
-- Margaret F. Mahoney, MEM Associates, Inc.
"As a Smith alumna and a fellow laborer in the groves of women's colleges, I found Jill Ker Conway's book both absorbing and touching....Her educational vision and personal courage stood her, and eventually the institution she served so well, in very good stead. A Woman's Education is an engaging personal study of a complicated period in the women's movement and in the development of selective women's colleges."
-- Mary Patterson McPherson, The Andrew Mellon Foundation and President Emeritus, Bryn Mawr College
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Australian-American scholar and author (1934-2018)
Jill Ker Conway (9 October 1934 – 1 June 2018) was an Australian-American scholar and author. Well known for her autobiographies, in particular her first memoir, The Road from Coorain, she also was Smith College's first woman president (1975–1985) and most recently served as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project.[1] She was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.
Biography
[edit]
Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, in the outback of Australia. Together with her two brothers, Ker Conway was raised in near-total isolation on a family-owned 73 square kilometres (18,000 acres) tract of land called Coorain (the Aboriginal word for "windy place"), which eventually grew to encompass 129 square kilometres (32,000 acres). On Coorain, she lived a lonely life, and grew up without playmates except for her brothers. In her early years, she was schooled entirely by her mother, with the aid of correspondence class material for her primary school and early grade school education.[2]
Ker Conway spent her youth working the sheep station; by age seven, she was an important member of the workforce, helping with such activities as herding and tending the sheep, checking the perimeter fences and transporting heavy farm supplies. The farm prospered until it was crippled by a drought that lasted seven years. This and her father's worsening health put an increasing burden on her shoulders. When she was eleven, her father drowned in a diving accident while trying to extend the farm's water piping.
Initially Jill Ker Conway's mother, a nurse by profession, refused to leave Coorain. But after three more years of drought, she was compelled to move Jill and her brothers to Sydney, where the children attended school.
Ker Conway found the local state school a rough environment. The British manners and accent ingrained by her parents clashed with her peers' Australian habits, provoking taunts and jeers. This resulted in her mother enrolling her at Abbotsleigh, a private girls school, where Ker Conway found intellectual challenge and social acceptance. After finishing her education at Abbotsleigh, she enrolled at the University of Sydney, where she studied History and English and graduated with honours in 1958. Upon graduation, Ker Conway sought a trainee post in the Department of External Affairs, but the all-male committee turned down her application.
After this setback, she travelled through Europe with her now emotionally volatile mother. In 1960, she decided to strike out on her own and move to the United States. At age 25, she was accepted into the history program of Harvard University's Radcliffe College,[3] where she devoted her studies to women's history, not yet an established historical discipline, and wrote her dissertation on Jane Addams and the establishment of Hull House.[4] Her interest in Addams and Hull House was sparked by her neighbor and friend, former Librarian of Congress, Archibald Macleish.[5] At Harvard, she also assisted a Canadian professor, John Conway, who was her husband from 1962 until his death in 1995. Ker Conway received her Ph.D. at Harvard in 1969 and taught at the University of Toronto from 1964 to 1975. Her book True North details her life in Toronto.
From 1975 to 1985, Ker Conway was the president of Smith College. After 1985, she was a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received thirty-eight honorary degrees and awards from North American and Australian colleges, universities and women's organizations.[3]
Throughout her career, Ker Conway served as director on a variety of corporate boards. These include stints of more than a decade on the boards of Nike, Colgate-Palmolive, and Merrill Lynch.[6] Ker Conway was also the first female Chairman of Lendlease.[7]
After 2011, Ker Conway served as the Board Chair of Community Solutions.[8] It is a non-profit organization with a focus on homelessness and related issues, based in New York City.
Conway died on 1 June 2018 at her home in Boston at the age of 83.[9]
President of Smith College
[edit]
In 1975, Ker Conway became the first female president of Smith College, the largest women's college in the United States. Located in Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith, a private liberal arts college, is the only women's college in the U.S. to grant its own degrees in engineering.
Ker Conway launched the Ada Comstock Scholars program, initially proposed by her predecessor Thomas Mendenhall. This program allows non-traditional students, many with work and family obligations, to study full or part-time, depending on their family and work schedules. These women can take classes for a bachelor's degree over a longer period of time. Conway House, dedicated in 2006, a residence for Ada Comstock Scholars was named in honor of Ker Conway.
One of Ker Conway's more notable accomplishments is a program she initiated to help Ada Comstock Scholars on welfare. At the time, many students who were also welfare mothers were not pursuing higher education, as accepting a scholarship would cause them to lose their welfare benefits. The mothers were forced to choose between supporting their children or furthering their education. By not giving them scholarships but paying their rent instead, Ker Conway circumvented the state's system. She also gave the students access to an account at local stores, access to physicians and so on. ABC's Good Morning America profiled graduates of the program, giving it national exposure. Eventually the state of Massachusetts, convinced about the importance of the program, changed its welfare system so that scholarship students wouldn't lose their benefits.[10]
She also led the creation of the Smith Management Program (now called Smith Executive Education) and the Project on Women and Social Change. She worked to expand the curriculum leading to the development of programs in women's studies, comparative literature, and engineering. Conway took a keen interest in fundraising and under her presidency the endowment nearly tripled from $82 million to $222 million. These efforts enabled several large-scale projects including the construction of the Ainsworth Gymnasium, and expansion of the Neilson Library. The Career Development Office was also expanded under her tenure to better educate alumnae about career opportunities and graduate training.
In 1975, Jill Ker Conway was named by Time as a Woman of the Year.[11]
The Road from Coorain
[edit]
Ker Conway started writing her first memoir after leaving Smith College, during her period at MIT. The Road from Coorain was published in 1989 (ISBN 0-394-57456-7) and details her early life, from Coorain in Australia to Harvard in the United States.
The book begins with her early childhood at the remote sheep station Coorain near Mossgiel, New South Wales. Ker Conway writes about her teenage years in Sydney and especially her education at the University of Sydney, where university studies were open to women but the culture was focused heavily on the men. She describes her intellectual development and later her feelings when she realizes that there is a bias against women; based upon her sex, she is denied a traineeship at the Australian foreign service.
In 2001, Chapman Pictures produced a television film, The Road from Coorain, featuring Katherine Slattery as the grown-up Jill and Juliet Stevenson as her mother.
Awards and honors
[edit]
1960 Jill Ker Conway was a 1960 Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar in History from the University of Sydney to Harvard University.
1975 In the first year of her presidency at Smith College, Conway was named a "woman of the year", one of a small group of notable women selected for that award by Time magazine.[12]
1989 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, The Road from Coorain
Ker Conway was appointed a Companion (AC) in the General Division of the Order of Australia on 10 June 2013 for her eminent service to the community, particularly women, as an author, academic and through leadership roles with corporations, foundations, universities and philanthropic groups.[13] On 12 June, she was removed as a 'Companion' and invested as an 'Honorary Companion' of the Order of Australia, because she no longer held Australian citizenship.[14]
On July 10, 2013, she received a 2012 National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.[15]
Legacy
[edit]
In 2017 the John and Jill Ker Conway residence for veterans was opened in Washington DC.[16]
Selected bibliography
[edit]
Books
[edit]
Conway, Jill (1977). Modern Feminism: An Intellectual History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Conway, Jill; Kealey, Linda; Schulte, Janet E. (1982). The Female Experience in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America: A Guide to the History of American Women. New York: Garland Pub. ISBN 9780691005997.
Conway, Jill (1987). Utopian Dream or Dystopian Nightmare?: Nineteenth-Century Feminist Ideas about Equality. Worcester, Massachusetts: American Antiquarian Society. ISBN 9780912296890.
Conway, Jill; Scott, Joan W.; Bourque, Susan C. (1989). Learning about Women: Gender, Politics and Power. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 9780472063987.
Conway, Jill (1989). The Road from Coorain (1st ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf Distributed by Random House. ISBN 9780749303600.
Reprinted as: Conway, Jill (1992). The Road from Coorain (2nd ed.). London: Minerva. ISBN 9780749398941.
Conway, Jill (1992). Written by Herself: An Anthology. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679736332.
Conway, Jill; Bourque, Susan C. (1995). The Politics of Women's Education: Perspectives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 9780472083282.
Conway, Jill (1995). True North: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679744610.
Conway, Jill (1992). Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women. An Anthology. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679736332.
Conway, Jill (1992). Written by Herself: Women's Memoirs From Britain, Africa, Asia and the United States, volume 2: an anthology. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679751090.
Conway, Jill (1998). When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 9780679766452.
Conway, Jill (1999). In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679781530.
Conway, Jill; Kennan, Elizabeth; Munnings, Clare (2001). Overnight Float. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 9780142000113.
Conway, Jill; Marx, Leo; Keniston, Kenneth (1999). Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 9781558492219.
Conway, Jill (2001). A Woman's Education. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 9780679744627.
Conway, Jill (Author); Millis, Lokken (Illustrator) (2006). Felipe the Flamingo. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing. ISBN 9781555915476.
Chapters in books
[edit]
Conway, Jill (1998), "Points of departure", in Zinsser, William (ed.), Inventing the truth: the art and craft of memoir, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 41–60, ISBN 9780395901502
Conway, Jill (2001), "Foreword", in Freeman, Sue J.M.; Bourque, Susan C.; Shelton, Christine M. (eds.), Women on power: leadership redefined, Boston: Northeastern University Press, ISBN 9781555534783
Journal articles
[edit]
Ker, Jill (1960). "Merchants and merinos". Royal Australian Historical Society Journal. 46 (4). Royal Australian Historical Society: 206–233.
Conway, Jill (Winter 1971–1972). "Women reformers and American culture, 1870-1930". Journal of Social History. 5 (2): 164–177. doi:10.1353/jsh/5.2.164. Pdf.[dead link]
References
[edit]
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Jill Ker Conway, remarkable tale of a champion of women in the workplace
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They will scatter Jill Ker Conway's ashes next week across the semi-arid plains of far western NSW.
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Australian Financial Review
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|
They will scatter Jill Ker Conway's ashes next week across the semi-arid plains of far western NSW. It's country where the odd oasis-like clump of trees surrounds billabongs, but much of it is bare and harsh.
It's fitting, however, that such an unforgiving landscape will be her final resting place. This is not just because far western NSW was the early home of one of the most remarkable women in Australia's history, but because it is an area that imbued Jill Ker Conway with the strength and willpower to become a leading international academic, university administrator, historian, company board director, author, feminist, philanthropist, dinner-time conversationalist and gardener.
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Jill Ker Conway OA (9 October 1934 – 1 June 2018) was an Australian-American author. She was born in Hillston, New South Wales.
Conway was known for her autobiographies, in particular her first memoir, The Road from Coorain. She was also Smith College's first female president, from 1975 to 1985, and served as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project.[1] In 2013, she received a 2012 National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.[2]
Conway died on 1 June 2018 at her home in Boston, Massachusetts at the age of 83.[3]
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1994-09-12T12:00:00+00:00
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Conway grew up in a remote sheep station in the Australian outback, and later became the president of Smith College. Her girlhood memoir, "The Road from Coorain," was a bestseller, In her new book, "True North," she continues her story, writing about organizing for women's rights on campus, and creating a marriage in which she and her husband are equal partners. Conway was the first female vice president of The University of Toronto, and from 1975 to 1985 was the president of Smith.
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Fresh Air Archive: Interviews with Terry Gross
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https://freshairarchive.org/segments/jill-ker-conway-continues-her-story-true-north
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Conway grew up in a remote sheep station in the Australian outback, and later became the president of Smith College. Her girlhood memoir, "The Road from Coorain," was a bestseller, In her new book, "True North," she continues her story, writing about organizing for women's rights on campus, and creating a marriage in which she and her husband are equal partners. Conway was the first female vice president of The University of Toronto, and from 1975 to 1985 was the president of Smith. Since then, she has been a visiting scholar and professor at M.I.T.'s Program in Science, Technology and Society.
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https://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-the-road-from-coorain/
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The Road from Coorain Summary & Study Guide
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The Road from Coorain Summary & Study Guide includes detailed chapter summaries and analysis, quotes, character descriptions, themes, and more.
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https://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-the-road-from-coorain/
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The Road from Coorain is the autobiography of Jill Ker Conway, a native Australian, historian and the first female president of Smith College. Conway was born in 1934 in Hillston, New South Wales, in the "bush," or Australian "outback," to parents who operated a large sheep station that they named Coorain. Conway had two older brothers, Bob and Barry. While her life in the bush was not filled with other children, she was still happy, social and able to pursue her interests. Her mother, an avid reader and self-educator, taught Conway to read at an early age and Conway read voraciously as a child. She also became familiar with the hard chores required to maintain Coorain.
Conway's parents had taken a risk with Coorain, which had struggled because they had founded it at the beginning of the Great Depression. However Coorain began to flourish and Conway became an integral part of the workforce. When Conway was six, a massive drought began in the bush that lasted for seven years. Conway's father's dream had always been to own and operate a country farm like Coorain; he could not psychologically handle the stress of watching his lifetime investment die before his eyes. In 1944, Conway's father died and appeared to Conway to have killed himself.
The family was devastated by Conway's father's death but her mother would not sell Coorain. Yet three more years without sufficient rain forced Conway's mother, Bob, Barry and Conway into Sydney. Conway's brothers were already used to formal schooling, but Conway was not and found life in Sydney schools difficult at first. Eventually she gained admittance to Abbotsleigh, an elite private girls' school, where she finally started to feel comfortable. Conway also pursued her education avidly, graduating and going to the University of Sydney. She would graduate with honors in history and English in 1958. At college she developed a deep passion for history, particularly for Australian history, along with an interest in the social barriers faced by women in her day.
While Conway was in school, her brother Bob died in a car accident, further devastating their family but particularly devastating Conway's mother. Afterwards, Conway's mother became increasingly interested in the paranormal and developed an alcohol and tranquilizer addiction which made her behavior increasingly volatile. Conway felt obligated to care for her mother, given that her father had charged her with her mother's care before his death. However, through her studies she realized that her mother was manipulative and controlling. After a trip to England and Europe with her mother, Conway decided that she would simply leave Australia and study Australian history at Radcliffe College.
The Road from Coorain is 238 pages and is divided into nine chapters with an uncomplicated chronological structure. It ranges from before Conway was born (giving the necessary background on her parents) to 1960, when Conway is twenty-five. The book was published in 1989.
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I usually keep reviews here as to the point as possible, but this book is so rich and rewarding, it deserves more. The Road From Coorain is the coming of age story of Jill Ker, a child whose whole world was an isolated farm in western NSW in the 1940s. She grew up confident in her family and her environment, and was able to negotiate her work around the farm to the extent that at eight years old she could ride for miles to herd hundreds of sheep on her own. When she first met another little girl, she didn’t really know how to socialise with her.
When the death of her father thrust the family into life in suburban Sydney during WWII, she underwent many cultural shocks. Jill met a working class people who were unashamedly Australian in accent and manners, as opposed to the British patterns of behaviour and attitude she had grown up with, and she began to see that there were other perspectives on life.
The wonder of this book is not only the beautiful prose and the wise steadiness of the voice, but the growing awareness of the narrator and her willingness to see a more rounded view of the world.
Jill soon learns she has to ‘manage’ her strong-willed mother and she takes refuge in her discovery of the pleasure of learning at her new school, a private Church of England establishment for girls. Here she already begins to observe the short comings of some of the teachers and the strengths of some of the others who, she notes, must have been frustrated spending their robust intellect on merely teaching young girls when they could have done so much more with their minds.
Over her time in school and university, Jill has revelation after revelation about how society treated women and Australia’s conservative culture limited growth and imagination, and stunted original academic endeavour. The revelations are shocking enough for Jill, but for a modern (Australian) reader seventy years on, it is even more shocking to realise some of these limitations and attitudes still exist, albeit more subtly.
Jill learns about life by reading, and two of the books that educate her about her controlling relationship with her mother are Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, and Carl Jung’s writings on the mother. Eventually Jill investigates Australian literature, although there is little encouragement to do so, as anything valid is only produced overseas. She witnesses the play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and her heart opens with wonder to see the Australian experience rendered universal with characters as large as those from a Greek epic. She leaves the theatre with new feelings of pride and possibility that Australian life, too, was worthy of artistic interpretation and analysis. She notes that seeing this play ‘helped to undo a lifetime of lessons in geography’. Given that Australia has always invested millions in winning gold medals and international trophies, it was gratifying to read about Jill’s corroboration that the stories we tell ourselves are the most powerful way to communicate and build a culture and its values. Likewise, ignoring those stories in favour of some other perceived superior option, communicate its lack of value.
Jill proves herself an academic star at university, but her achievements create conflict with how she is expected to conduct herself. She and another are contenders for the university medal and they and the next in line go to Canberra to interview for jobs with the Department of Foreign Affairs. The men are employed and Jill is not. She finds out later it is because she is ‘too good looking’, ‘too intellectually aggressive’ (something she knows she has in common with her two friends), and also that ‘she’d be married within a year.’ It is also around this time she takes on a man friend who, while enjoying the stimulating company of someone intelligent, does not respect her need to work taking priority over him.
Jill is at a loss in a world where she perceives merit is of no use for getting along in life. She takes time off to go to Europe with her mother thinking she will find the answers in the academia of England. There she is even further disillusioned when she witnesses the rudeness towards women in professional life and the constant active undermining of their intellect. She goes back to Sydney University to focus on her academic career.
Jill’s final revelation comes in the form of a visiting American mining speculator. Their 16-month affair teaches her that it is possible to be loved for all aspects of her character including her mind and to be with a man who encourages her to reach her full potential. It is a short step from here to her application to study at Harvard.
This is an ultimately uplifting and triumphant story of how one person slowly becomes aware of the world around her and learns to deal with it, but also how not to give up when she realises that world does not approve of how she needs to live. To see Jill lift herself above the nay-sayers and fly off at the end is a happy ending, but what of the 1950s Australian culture that she has left behind?
Training as an historian, Jill learns how Australian history had been written to date through the lenses of politics and settlement, not through the eyes of individuals so much, and certainly not from the perspectives of minor players who lived it, which included women; how Australian life has been shaped by colonialism and the bureaucratic layers of British government.
It isn’t difficult to see the remnants of what Jill describes in today’s Australia; certainly the legacy of it. While our history is increasingly told through personal stories and women now get to retell some stories from their own perspectives (Fellow academics told Clare Wright she was wasting her time writing about the Eureka stockade as there was nothing left to say. Her book, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, tells a story heretofore untold from the female perspective), the limited bureaucratic mindset has in large part simply shifted from British thinking to US thinking. The same old cultural cringe is still there when you scrape back that thin skin.
Jill’s story for me, put an anchor in time in the fifties, and said here, after WWII, Australia changed dramatically. But as you read her examples seventy years later, you are left wondering if much of the change has been superficial or whether those strong undercurrents from the fifties are still there stunting progress?
This book is a delight as a story without taking in all the social and political contexts, the prose flows comfortingly and the narrator good company to keep. My only nit-pick, and it jarred me out of the story several times, was the realisation that Conway has been living in the US for the majority of her life now, and it seem has long forgotten some things. Her use of the words ‘cookie’ and ‘gasoline’, and her US spelling of the proper name for Sydney Harbour as ‘Harbor’ were jarring, not least because, as she tells us, her upbringing was very British and correct, so these words would have had no place in her then-vocabulary, in fact the word ‘cookie’ has only come into regular use here in the last ten to twenty years and ‘gasoline’, still not. But good editing should have picked this up; it was first published in Britain after all.
This is an uplifting story of passion, strength, intelligence and quiet courage and should continue to be read by future generations of girls and women who have lost touch with how far we have come in our fight for equality and how strong yesterday’s women had to be to ensure change.
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Jill Ker Conway
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Jill Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia, graduated from the University of Sydney in 1958, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard...
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PenguinRandomhouse.com
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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/5580/jill-ker-conway/
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Jill Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia, graduated from the University of Sydney in 1958, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1969. In 1962 she married John Conway and moved with him to his native Canada. From 1964 to 1975 she taught at the University of Toronto, where she was also Vice President, before going to Smith College. Since 1985 she has been a visiting scholar and professor in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. She serves on the boards of Nike, Merrill Lynch, and Colgate-Palmolive, and as Chairman of Lend Lease Corporation. She lived in Boston.
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https://www.thestar.com/news/world/jill-ker-conway-trail-blazing-historian-and-smith-college-president-dies-at-83/article_bb6eab57-0078-557f-bf85-091d4c8cbdf6.html
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Jill Ker Conway, trail-blazing historian and Smith College president, dies at 83
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2018-06-04T08:31:03-04:00
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In a wide-ranging career, Conway was an accomplished scholar who focused on early-20th-century women’s reformers but later wrote a trio of critically acclaimed memoirs
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https://www.thestar.com/content/tncms/site/icon.ico
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Toronto Star
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https://www.thestar.com/news/world/jill-ker-conway-trail-blazing-historian-and-smith-college-president-dies-at-83/article_bb6eab57-0078-557f-bf85-091d4c8cbdf6.html
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https://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers/2018-06-15/rediscover:_the_road_from_coorain.html
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Rediscover: The Road from Coorain
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2018-06-15T00:00:00
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Jill Ker Conway, an Australian-American author who was also the first woman president of Smith College, died on June 1 at age 83. She was born
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https://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers/2018-06-15/rediscover:_the_road_from_coorain.html
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Jill Ker Conway, an Australian-American author who was also the first woman president of Smith College, died on June 1 at age 83. She was born on a 32,000-acre sheep ranch deep in the Australian outback, with little company growing up except her parents, brothers and a teacher. The ranch, called Coorain (an Aboriginal word for windy place), prospered until a seven-year drought. When Conway was 11, her father drowned while attempting to expand Coorain's irrigation system. After a further three years of drought, Conway's mother moved the family to Sydney, where Jill struggled to integrate with her new peers. She went on to graduate from the University of Sydney and moved to the United States in 1960. She received a Ph.D. from Harvard, met a Canadian professor who later became her husband, and taught at the University of Toronto from 1964 to 1975. Conway was the president of Smith College from 1975 to 1985, and thereafter a visiting professor at MIT.
Conway's writing career began with the publication of her first memoir, The Road from Coorain, in 1989. It tracks her early life in the outback and her moves to Sydney and the U.S. Her second memoir, True North (1994), follows Conway's time teaching in Toronto. She also wrote A Woman's Education (2001) and When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (1998), and was the editor of several books, including Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women (1992) and In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States (1999). She received a National Humanities Medal in 2013. The Road from Coorain was last published in 1990 by Vintage Departures ($15.95, 9780679724360). --Tobias Mutter
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https://www.amazon.com/Road-Coorain-Jill-Ker-Conway/dp/0394574567
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https://www.brownandhickey.com/obituary/DrJill-Conway
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Brown & Hickey Funeral Home - Belmont, MA
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2018-06-03T09:06:07-04:00
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Obituary for Dr. Jill Ker Conway | On the road from a childhood herding sheep in the lonely Australian Outback to becoming the first woman to serve as president of Smith College, Jill Ker Conway found that her intellectual gifts...
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Dr. Jill Conway Obituary | June 1, 2018 | Brown & Hickey Funeral Home - Belmont, MA
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https://www.brownandhickey.com/obituary/DrJill-Conway
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On the road from a childhood herding sheep in the lonely Australian Outback to becoming the first woman to serve as president of Smith College, Jill Ker Conway found that her intellectual gifts matched her personal ambition.
“I had a talent for history,” she told the Globe in 1989, when she published “The Road From Coorain,” the first of her trio of best-selling memoirs, “and the fates were prodding me toward putting it into use.”
Dr. Conway, who was 83 when she died Friday in her Boston home, made use of that academic talent while making history herself.
Along with her groundbreaking role at Smith, she previously served as a vice president at the University of Toronto. Initiatives she pioneered as Smith’s president from 1975 to 1985, meanwhile, continue to open doors for women decades later, and her scholarship, writings, and service on corporate boards were equally innovative.
None of that might have happened had she not faced gender discrimination when she finished college and was rejected upon trying to enter the foreign service in Australia, where she was born. Years later, she found reports that had termed her “too good looking” and “too intellectually aggressive.” Other assessments predicted “she’d be married within a year,” and “she’d never do for diplomacy.”
In 1960, she left Australia for graduate work at Harvard University, and by age 40 was president of Smith.
“Jill Ker Conway came to Smith at a time when gender roles were being transformed — and there were people here who tried to stand in her way,” said Kathleen McCartney, Smith’s president. “But at a time when the academy didn’t see women as college presidents — or as leaders at all — she demonstrated a leadership that was innovative and effective. From her, I learned to work over, under, around, and through to advance women’s position in the world.”
When Dr. Conway arrived in 1975, the faculty was dominated by men, many of whom resisted the changes she would institute. Smith’s situation was not unique.
“The whole structure of higher education for women was built without any attempt to relate the educated person to the occupational structure of society outside,” she told The New York Times after her appointment as president was announced.
The many changes she instituted included the Ada Comstock Scholars Program for women returning to college past the traditional undergraduate age. Dr. Conway also helped launch what is now the Smith Executive Education Program and the Project on Women and Social Change. In addition, the college expanded course offerings in women’s studies and engineering.
“She knew the world was changing for women and wanted Smith to change so that it could support women in all careers, including business,” McCartney said.
During Dr. Conway’s tenure, Smith’s endowment nearly tripled, to $222 million, according to the college, and capital expansion included renovation of Neilson Library and construction of Ainsworth Gymnasium. These endeavors were possible in no small part to her success as a fund-raiser.
The college established the Jill Ker Conway Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center in 2016, and a decade earlier dedicated the Conway House, Smith’s first residence for Ada Comstock scholars and their families.
In retirement, she was a visiting professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also wrote prolifically — her other two memoirs are “True North” (1994) and “A Woman’s Education” (2001) — and served on the boards of companies including Nike and Merrill Lynch in the United States, and as managing director of Lend Lease Corp. Ltd. in Australia.
When Nike created a committee in 2001 to oversee its labor, environmental, and diversity policies, Dr. Conway was chosen as its leader.
Susan C. Bourque, former provost and dean of the faculty at Smith, said Dr. Conway “was every bit as proud” of her work opening doors for women into corporate leadership as she was of her other endeavors. “I don’t think she ever left a board without it having more women on it than when she arrived.”
President Barack Obama awarded Dr. Conway the National Humanities Medal in 2013, the same year she was named a Companion of the Order of Australia, that country’s highest civic honor.
“She had a very powerful mind and shared it in the most gracious ways,” Bourque said.
The youngest of three siblings, Jill Ker was born in Hillston in the New South Wales state in Australia, a few years after her family started a sheep ranch that covered thousands of acres on a windy desolate plain. The nearest neighbor was 50 miles away, and much of each day was spent on horseback herding sheep.
Her father, William Ker, died when she was 10. The maiden name of her mother, Evelyn, is alternately spelled Adames or A’Dames, and in her memoirs, Dr. Conway often examined the strained relationship between mother and daughter.
In evocative prose that earned readers and fans worldwide, Dr. Conway described the terrain that defined her childhood.
“On the plains, the earth meets the sky in a sharp black line so regular that it seems as though drawn by a creator interested more in geometry than the hills and valleys of the Old Testament,” she wrote in her first memoir. “Human purposes are dwarfed by such a blank horizon.”
Upon learning that her father had drowned in a work accident, “my eyes began to fill with tears,” Dr. Conway wrote. Her mother, however, “looked at me accusingly. ‘Your father wouldn’t want you to cry,’ she said.”
Dr. Conway’s mother then brought her to Sydney, where her education changed from Saturday morning correspondence courses to a formal school.
“I was as intellectually precocious as I was socially inept,” she wrote of those years. Because of her sheep ranch background, “I never understood the unspoken rule which required that one display false modesty and hang back when there was a task to be done.”
She graduated from the University of Sydney, where she took honors courses “because I loved them,” never intending to seek an academic life, she told the Globe in 1975. Instead, she wanted to work as a lawyer or in the foreign service.
Though she graduated first in her class, gender discrimination blocked her path. She recalled that she wasn’t allowed to apprentice “with the kind of firms my male friends were offered,” and she was rejected by what was then Australia’s Department of External Affairs, its foreign service.
Taking a year to travel in Europe, she briefly considered modeling. “I thought, ‘What the hell, I’ll try this,’ ” she said in 1975 with a smile, adding: “I never got a modeling job.”
Returning to the University of Sydney as a graduate student, she became interested in American history and went to Harvard for doctoral studies.
Arriving in September 1960, she found that “in the intellectual community of Cambridge I was taken seriously as a scholar” — a departure from back home. “In Australia, the perception of me was first as a woman, then maybe with a mind.” Her doctoral dissertation was on “Women Reformers and American Culture.”
As part of her work as a teaching fellow at Harvard, she took over a section of a large social science course taught by John J. Conway. They married in 1962. Nearly two decades her senior, John was a history professor and college administrator. He also was a World War II hero whose right hand had been blown off while he was protecting the men in his command.
“The woman who marries a much older man can become a target of the Pygmalion syndrome,” she later wrote. “But I didn’t. I had the good sense to marry a teacher of genius when I still had a lot to learn about the self and work.”
They moved to Toronto in 1964 when he began teaching at York University. At the University of Toronto, she rose from lecturer to become vice president for internal affairs.
Dr. Conway’s husband died, at 79, in 1995. She leaves no immediate survivors.
Smith College said a funeral will be held next Saturday in St. Mark’s Church in Conway, Mass., and that a campus memorial gathering will be announced.
Through much of her career, Dr. Conway’s ambition was driven by the echo of her father’s oft-spoken words: “Do something, Jill. Don’t just put in time on this earth.” Yet she was always known for her impeccable presence, and for her exceedingly polite demeanor.
“As far as personal style goes, you can’t escape your past,” she said with a laugh in a 1988 Globe interview. “Until the day I die, I’m going to look like a nice English lady going to take tea with the vicar.”
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Jill Ker Conway, historian and memoirist who served as Smith College's first woman president, created an environment in academia in which women could flourish and find their own vocations.
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/files/NCR%20Blue%20avatars%2016X16%20pixels.jpg
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National Catholic Reporter
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https://www.ncronline.org/news/guest-voices/jill-ker-conway-pioneered-opportunities-womens-education
|
Conway lived on a family ranch of 32,000 acres, far removed from any town, school or church. Her life was solitary, the nearest neighbor being 50 miles away. Other than her two brothers, she had no playmates. She claimed not to have met another girl until she was 7 years old. Her work was herding and tending sheep, helping to maintain her family's hard-scrabble life.
Tragedy struck when the ranch failed. Her father, a devout Catholic, died, as did one of her brothers, forcing her mother to move what remained of the family to Sydney. There Conway began her formal education and attended the Catholic Church. But the outback had already formed her. The vastness of nature, the comfort of solitude, and hard physical labor all molded her.
Intellectually self-confident and chastened by difficult experiences, she completed her education at the University of Sydney, graduating first in her class. However, she quickly realized she would not find employment commensurate with her ambition in Australia. This limitation, plus her desire to free herself from the grip of a psychologically dependent mother, led her to apply to Harvard University, where she would earn a doctoral degree in history. She claimed she studied history in order to understand the social forces which diminished her mother's life. It was these early years in Australia and her decision to leave that she chronicled in The Road from Coorain, one of the best loved memoirs of the 20th century.
True North, her second memoir, tells of her years at Harvard and her marriage to one of her professors, the historian John Conway. Although he was 18 years her senior, during their 33 years of marriage, which ended with his death in 1995, John Conway proved to be an immensely supportive partner, irrespective of his debilitating depression. In 1964, the Conways left Harvard for Toronto where she began teaching at the University of Toronto and subsequently was appointed its first woman vice president.
The last of her trio of memoirs, A Woman's Education: The Road from Coorain Leads to Smith College, is the story of her presidency of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, which began in 1975 when she was 40. She stayed 10 years. Academia's full intransigence to change was the background against which Conway attempted to institute a curriculum which would serve the contemporary needs of women students.
During her tenure, courses in women's studies, business and engineering were added; athletics was supported; non-traditional age students were enrolled; and financial aid was extended. What A Woman's Education makes clear is that Conway harnessed her personal ambition, intellectual acuity, and ability to take risks in order to advance the ambitions of other women. Her innate shyness allowed her to do all she did with humility.
After she left Smith, Conway was named a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute for Technology, served on the boards of Nike and Merrill Lynch, and continued to write about male and female autobiographies and how and why they differed. She expanded the field of life-writing by editing Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women and In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, and authoring When Memory Speaks.
If grit characterized Jill Ker Conway's personality, so too did graciousness toward others. Intellectual, tenacious and fearless, she nonetheless cared about individuals and treated all she met with respect. Over the course of her life she drew on various sources of inspiration. Her early life in the Australian outback gave her an appreciation of solitude and of the natural world. Her father's Catholicism impressed her, as did her reading of the Bible. The remoteness of her life with its absence of ecclesial authority allowed her to freely ask questions of meaning and to form an independent conscience.
Her advanced study of history, especially her doctoral dissertation on American female reformers like Jane Addams, was also a formative element in her life. She credited Catholic influences in giving her a sense of vocation. In her case this was to uncover the history of women as revealed in their autobiographical writings and to create an intellectual environment in which women could flourish and find their own vocations.
She took seriously the importance of women mystics, especially St. Julian of Norwich and St. Teresa of Avila. Believing as she did in the value of community, she derived encouragement from the achievements of women's religious communities; she rejoiced when her parish, St. Mark's in Conway, Massachusetts, a small, diverse mission church, was able to create a vibrant spiritual community largely independent of ecclesial direction. Her commitment to social issues expressed itself in her long-standing concern for homeless veterans, which resulted in the opening of the John and Jill Ker Conway Residence in Washington, D.C., in 2017.
Conway died June 1 at age 83. Her funeral service was held at her much-loved St. Mark's. Unable to have children, her progeny were the multitude of women whom she inspired, pioneered opportunities for their education, and left a trove of writing to motivate them. An avowed feminist, her life was whole and integrated, liberated and realized; it was grounded both in grit and grace.
Fully alive, Jill Ker Conway in her living fulfilled her father's admonition, to "do something," and Irenaeus' claim that the one fully alive gives glory to God.
[Dana Greene's latest biography, Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War, is to be released in November from Oxford University Press.]
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https://www.paperplus.co.nz/shop/books/non-fiction/biography-memoir/the-road-from-coorain
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en
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The Road From Coorain
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This account of an Australian childhood in the outback, and subsequently in Sydney, encompasses family tragedy, a devastating, NON FICTION
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Paper Plus
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https://www.paperplus.co.nz/shop/books/non-fiction/biography-memoir/the-road-from-coorain
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Products can be returned in store, or by post, for exchange or credit as long as they are returned in saleable condition within 28 days.
For the full returns policy, please refer to Returns & Exchange
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https://adayinthelifeonthefarm.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-road-to-coorain-book-review.html
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A Day in the Life on the Farm: The Road to Coorain; A Book Review
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A blog about two retired cops who went in search of peace and quiet and got more chaos than they could ever imagine.
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https://adayinthelifeonthefarm.blogspot.com/favicon.ico
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https://adayinthelifeonthefarm.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-road-to-coorain-book-review.html
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https://www.wiareport.com/2018/06/in-memoriam-jill-kathryn-ker-conway-1934-2018/
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en
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In Memoriam: Jill Kathryn Ker Conway, 1934-2018
|
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2018-06-06T14:47:22+00:00
|
Dr. Conway was appointed the firt woman president of Smith College in 1974 at a time when most of the faculty were men. She served in that role until 1985 and nearly tripled the college’s end…
|
Women In Academia Report
|
https://www.wiareport.com/2018/06/in-memoriam-jill-kathryn-ker-conway-1934-2018/
|
Jill Ker Conway, an Australian native who became the first woman president of Smith College, the highly rated liberal arts educational institution for women in Northampton, Massachusetts, died on June 1 at her home in Boston. She was 83 years old.
A graduate of the University of Sydney, Dr. Conway came to the United States in 1960 to pursue a Ph.D. in history at Harvard University. Her research was focused on women reformers in the United States. She began her academic career at the University of Toronto, where she taught history and served as vice president for internal affairs.
Dr. Conway was appointed president of Smith College in 1974 at a time when most of the faculty were men. She served in that post until 1985. During her presidency, the Smith College endowment grew from $82 million to $222 million. Her memoir A Woman’s Education (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001) detailed her years as Smith’s president.
Kathleen McCartney, the current president of Smith College, said in a statement that “Jill Ker Conway came to Smith at a time when gender roles were being transformed — and there were people here who tried to stand in her way. But at a time when the academy didn’t see women as college presidents — or as leaders at all — she demonstrated a leadership that was innovative and effective.”
After retiring from Smith, Dr. Conway wrote three books and served on the board of directors of several large corporations, foundations and nonprofit organizations. In 2013 she was presented with the National Humanities Medal by President Obama.
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https://www.harvardmagazine.com/node/1120
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Review of Jill Ker Conway’s "True North"
|
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2002-05-01T08:00:00-04:00
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Since 1989, Jill Ker Conway has been fascinating readers, especially women, with the compelling story of her journey from sheep ranchers'...
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/themes/custom/harvard_magazine/images/favicons/apple-touch-icon.png
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Harvard Magazine
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https://www.harvardmagazine.com/node/1120
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Since 1989, Jill Ker Conway has been fascinating readers, especially women, with the compelling story of her journey from sheep ranchers' daughter in the wilds of Australia to president of one of this country's foremost liberal-arts institutions, Smith College. The Road from Coorain (1989) was a lyrical, at times magical, presentation of how this "born risk-taker" tore herself from a beloved but enervating family to pursue a dream of adventure through scholarship. True North (1994) brought the story to American shores, as Conway earned a Harvard Ph.D. in history, found her "true north" in marriage and intellectual fulfillment, and then, during 11 years at the University of Toronto, expanded her career beyond the growing pleasures of teaching and research into the newly satisfying arena of academic management.
A Woman's Education (2001) completes this captivating trilogy of memoir, taking Conway from her 1974 decision to accept the Smith presidency to her equally firm determination to leave after 10 years and follow an individualized plan for fulfilling other interests. The end of A Woman's Education is almost startling in its bold and unsentimental explanation of how she has conceived these three books of autobiography.
In the last chapter, "Sostenuto," she outlines the tripartite agenda she drew up for her postpresidential years that could be the envy of other powerful people retiring from public life. A clear theme runs through that agenda: she will use what she has learned as a woman leader, and she will capitalize on the visibility she has gained. After Smith, Conway spent one-third of her time in helping to manage organizations (corporations, now, as well as familiar nonprofits like hospitals and schools). Her growing appreciation of technology led her to spend another third as a scholar at MIT, exploring the connections among science, technology, and society. There, she challenged the "ecofeminism" she has grown to distrust for its view of women as "earth mothers" who must protect the planet from the disruptions of male-directed industry and environmental disregard. The third part of the agenda nourished her artistic side. She decided to explore and record her own story--perhaps, she intimates here, less for self-understanding than as a "counter-record" to certain feminist approaches that worry her.
As this volume makes clear, Conway questions feminism that emphasizes women's difference from men, especially their presumed softer side that might lead institutions in new ways. Using her own autobiography as evidence, Conway resolves to "write about what women were not supposed to acknowledge--ambition, love of adventure, the quest for intellectual power, physical courage and endurance, risk taking, the negative aspects of mother/daughter relations always so relentlessly sentimentalized." Hers, then, will be a record of women's pains and pleasures, with no hiding of ambition for public leadership.
On reading this determined declaration, I initially felt some of the warmth recede from my previous assessments of Conway's books. Never romantic, these volumes nonetheless inspire as Conway explores the difficulties of life, love, work, and career. However, on reflection, I began to understand that she wants readers--both those who share her stage of life and younger ones looking for a model--to see feminism and leadership with clarity and independent thinking. Conway's particular approach to feminism values freedom of choice for women on personal, professional, and intellectual fronts. She will offer readers one carefully examined story of how a talented woman pursued life's challenges.
Above all, A Woman's Education is a story of leadership, framed by Conway's decade at Smith College. She draws us in immediately with the engaging story of how she unwittingly auditioned for the job. Invited with her husband, John, to spend a weekend at the always vibrant Berkshire home of their friends Archibald and Ada MacLeish, Conway wondered why every question in their normally eclectic conversation turned to women's education. She also noticed that every guest at the MacLeish table stopped speaking and focused on her answers. Only at the end of the weekend did Conway realize that all the other guests were Smith-connected--members of an informal team quietly recruiting a replacement for the college's retiring president.
When an invitation for an actual interview arrived six months later, Conway was prepared, yet she notes that she accepted the overture mostly to please her husband. But citing only that part of her decision makes Conway seem disingenuous. How could a woman so committed to feminism and her own managerial strengths pretend that only her husband's encouragement prompted this exciting move? To think this, however, would miss a vital strand in Conway's story: her deeply fulfilling marriage. In her second volume, Conway explored her growing love with John, how he nurtured her intellectually and personally. Thus, saying that she accepted Smith's invitation "to please him" never diminishes her own agency. Rather, it reveals and honors their tradition of joint consideration of how this opportunity--like various others--might satisfy her needs, ambitions, and skills. The decision was mutual, with her best interests at the fore.
Arriving at Smith in the summer of 1975, Conway found the presidency predictable in its professional challenges, but unexpectedly provocative in its personal challenge to her sense of herself as a woman. This academic historian, who has spent a career analyzing the history of progressive women, describes the unexpected "jolt of energy" she felt, discovering in Smith "a literal manifestation of a century of work on women." The first female Smith College president depicts in striking detail her first convocation, "when 2,200 Smith women began chanting, 'Jill! Jill!' and drumming on the floor to accentuate the shout." Although she had begun by assuming her accustomed asexual public demeanor, she "realized there could be no hiding behind a formal role. They and I were entering a little-known and rarely experienced relationship of woman leader and idealistic young followers." When a male colleague expressed astonishment at feeling left out of this connection, recognizing his distance from these students for the first time, Conway began to realize the potential of her work not only for inspiring young women students, but for learning new truths about herself at midlife.
The book offers unabashedly positive views of students. Conway is both tolerant and supportive of young adult self-exploration. Further, she refuses to blame that generation of women for being rowdy, confused, impatient with authority, and sexually experimental. Her sense of history, honed through studying women fighting for a place in a resistant world, teaches her that issues go in cycles, and that 1970s women were challenging a particular set of barriers around curriculum and student life.
Concerning the latter, Conway unblinkingly discusses the frequent challenges she faced over homosexuality on the Smith campus. In fact, she credits the incessant demands that she "fix" Smith's sexual experimentation for developing her commitment to lesbian and gay rights. Blaming the Puritan legacy for people's discomfort with homoeroticism, and further noting the long existence of homosexuality, Conway essentially told complainants "that this is a fact of life." Although this seldom satisfied homophobes, Conway asserted her presidential conviction that adult women can make their own decisions about sexuality, about education, and about their futures.
Outside challengers were not the only ones who questioned Conway's methods. Her effort to infuse the curriculum with new attention to women's studies, non-Western content, technology, and professional training met with horror from a faculty group that she calls "the dinosaurs." People who taught at Smith during the Conway years must open this book with a slight frisson, hoping not to find themselves categorized too meanly. The former president is harsh in describing these hopeless males trying to wait out the tides of feminism, as well as a younger group of men who patronized female intellectuality and valued themselves as patriarchal sources of knowledge. Nor do female faculty escape presidential skewering. Conway laments the "honorary male scholars" who copied a traditionally "male" approach to teaching and thinking. She also dismisses those "lady scholars" with a penchant for detailed and fine-grained work that strikes her as "intellectual petit point." Although Conway's long journey toward an academic persona might suggest why she is so impatient with these styles, former Columbia University literature professor Carolyn Heilbrun has recently explored this issue more sympathetically in When Men Were the Only Models We Had (University of Pennsylvania Press). Both authors, now among the country's senior female scholars, recall the uncomfortable, tense environment encountered by women trying to extend feminist gains into academe.
Happily, Conway also found a group of activist female scholars who helped her bring a new feeling to Smith. Providing a historical case study of curriculum transformation, Conway describes how they strategically instituted a sort of shadow curriculum, offering new approaches in noncredit or nonrequired courses that drew large numbers of students. Conway then generated funding to help faculty update their knowledge, create a research center, and find ways to make their teaching more innovative. Before long, students excited about the new curriculum upped the ante for all courses, pushing the edge of curricular change.
Besides the students and this smallish group of like-minded women faculty, Conway found welcome support from Smith alumnae--both the leaders and the general group of many devoted graduates. She describes the unexpected boosts she felt during otherwise-exhausting cross-country fundraising: as committed alumnae offered testimonies to Smith's success, followed by promises of help, Conway was humbled by the cumulative power of a strong woman's institution. She also came to realize her prejudice--perhaps fed by her own professional decisions--against women's volunteer work. Although she does not seem to connect the legacy of powerful volunteerism to the Progressive era she studied historically, Conway now appreciates how this alternate track produces female influence.
Throughout A Woman's Education, Conway's perspective as a historian informs both her approach to living a professional life and her understanding of Smith's issues--including the omnipresent question of whether Smith should join the 1970s march to coeducation. (Her answer: No, the tide will turn.) Like her earlier books, which explored her unshakable connection to the land, Conway here takes a chapter to describe the Berkshire retreat home and garden that she and John transformed in 10 years. She sees their house within the sweep of Massachusetts history that domesticated western New England, then moved through phases of settlement, bustle, farming, and tourism. Conway is her most introspective, personal, and poetic in this chapter, as she explores her need to retreat from presidential duties. But she also reveals the extent of her "public role and private sadness" as John's longstanding and recurrent clinical depression, so movingly detailed in her second book, continues to plague their marriage. Her work successes are punctuated by the disorienting periods of John's hospitalization. Just as the book validates the blessings of companionable marriage, it also explores Conway's fears of losing the security of this partnership.
Both gardening and sculpting are powerful metaphors throughout the book that gain strength in the chapter on the retreat, but resonate throughout her descriptions of presidential life. They balance and soften Conway's discussion of tasks, sections that tend toward the prosaic as she lets her obligation to describe overcome her pleasure in metaphor and introspection. With her Smith garden successfully blooming, Conway began preparations to leave. Again offering a case study of managerial competence and leadership bravado, she presented a challenging new campus strategic plan, and, for three years, marshaled resources to accomplish it. She left Smith with its all-female traditions intact, yet transformed by growth fostered by that heady decade of American feminism.
The great pleasure of this book, as it completes Conway's trilogy, is the clear centering in its time period. Although autobiography is necessarily retrospective, Conway avoids the temptation to let her present accomplishments and understandings color her presentation of the past. Even while explaining her intentions for her postpresidential life, she keeps herself and her readers rooted in the bustling feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. Because of her training, Conway values the historical record enough to record that era's effort to define a woman's education. She values the importance of memoir enough to infuse that presentation with the personal story of one woman's education.
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https://kelseycleveland.com/jill-ker-conway/
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Jill Ker Conway: Reflections on the chapters of her life
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2018-06-21T16:20:59+00:00
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Dr. Jill Ker Conway modeled for women a life divided into distinct chapters during her 83 years. All woman can learn from her example.
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en
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Kelsey Cleveland LLC
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https://kelseycleveland.com/jill-ker-conway/
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Photo courtesy of Smith College
Your body of work is everything you create, contribute, affect, and impact. For individuals, it is the personal legacy you leave at the end of your life, including all tangible and intangible things you have created. Individuals who structure their careers around autonomy, mastery, and purpose will have a powerful body of work.
Pamela Slim, Body of Work: Finding the Thread That Ties Your Story Together (p. 7)
A girl from the Outback, who grew up to become one of my role models, died this month. Dr. Jill Ker Conway served as the first female president of my alma mater, Smith College, from 1975 until 1985. Even though our paths only intersected the one time I heard her speak on campus, I followed her career. I felt a kinship with her due to our shared connection to both Australia and Smith College. Although not a student during her tenure, I benefitted from her legacy. Her death gave me the opportunity to reflect on the lessons I take from her life and career.
As both a scholar of woman’s history and in designing her own life, Dr. Ker Conway took the long-range view on women’s lives. She modeled for women a life divided into distinct chapters during her 83 years. All woman can learn from her body of work and the chapters of her life.
Fail fast and learn from it.
The Australian government passed Jill Ker Conway over for a job in the foreign service. Even though she graduated at the top of her class from the University of Sydney. The sexist hiring committee presumed that the attractive woman would marry and no longer want the job. Her failure to get that job was one of the best things that never happened to her.
Jill Ker Conway didn't acquire the mistaken belief that in life some people are winners while others are losers. Instead, she understood that life is an infinite game from which you can learn and improve. Only when the foreign service passed her over, did she look for an alternative solution for career and country.
With a bias to action, she briefly capitalized on her looks by studying modeling at a fashion school in London. Her next pivot took her to graduate studies in history at Harvard University. Her education at Harvard University led to her career as a trailblazing educator and her marriage to a fellow historian, John Conway.
Find a true partner for marriage.
I didn't marry until I met a man who was willing from the get-go to support my desire for a separate professional life. People always said to me, 'How lucky you are to have a husband who supports your separate career,' and I always say, 'It wasn't luck.' Young women are trained to think they should marry someone who is a great romantic love. You should really marry someone who respects your working self and creative ability and wants to enter into a relationship where each supports the other. And that's not the romantic story.
Jill Ker Conway in an excerpt from a 2002 Globe and Mail article
She and her husband took turns choosing where they should live, influenced by career opportunities. After their marriage, they moved to Toronto. Later, they moved to Northampton, Massachusetts for Dr. Ker Conway to assume the post of president of Smith College.
I am fortunate that I too found a true partner for marriage. Together, we fulfilled my longheld dream of living and working in Japan.
Modeled living life with different chapters
Scholar. Author. Advocate. Corporate board member.
Jill Ker Conway’s life proved that women don’t need to be limited by one career or mode of work. During each new chapter in her life, she leveraged existing skills and experiences. While, at the same time, developing new ones. She brought the same long-range view of feminist history to designing her life.
Scholar and educator
Jill Ker Conway earned her doctorate in history at Harvard University. Cambridge was a far cry from her early correspondence school education in the windswept Australian Outback. First, she worked as an academic with a focus on women’s history. Next, the trailblazing educator served as the first female president of Smith College from 1975 to 1985.
I am grateful for the following legacies of her tenure at Smith College:
All subsequent presidents of the college have been women.
She oversaw the construction and creation of the indoor track and tennis facilities. While playing tennis on those courts, a member of the athletic department encouraged me to join the team.
She championed the Ada Comstock Scholars Program, for untraditional aged students. These scholars inspired me with their eagerness to learn and finish their education.
Comparative Literature, which was my major, didn't exist at Smith until her tenure.
Three chapters after Smith College
Jill Ker Conway deliberately divided her life into thirds when her academic life ended.
WRITER
First, Jill Ker Conway devoted herself to writing her memoir trilogy. I immediately read her best-selling memoir, The Road from Coorain (1989) upon my acceptance at Smith College. In this book, she recounts her childhood on an isolated 32,000-acre sheep ranch in Australia. I liked knowing that a president of the college I would soon be attending had been born in Australia like me. She also brings us into her decision to leave her homeland in pursuit of a graduate degree. It's incredible that a girl from the Outback, who had not met another girl her age until she was age seven, went on to become president of a woman’s college.
I read her next two memoirs after college. True North, published in 1995, covered her academic career before Smith College. The final book in the trilogy, A Woman’s Education, published in 2002, addressed her term as president.
Jill Ker Conway also wrote fiction with Elizabeth Topham Kennan, the former president of Mount Holyoke. Under the pen name Clare Munnings, the two wrote a mystery/thriller titled Overnight Float set on a fictional college campus.
ADVOCATE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
An adult life...is a slowly emerging design, with shifting components, occasional dramatic disruptions, and fresh creative arrangements.
Jill Ker Conway
Jill Ker Conway’s next pivot was to think about and advocate for the environment. She did so as a visiting professor in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society.
GOVERNANCE
In her final chapter, Jill Ker Conway used her governance expertise, gained at Smith College. She served on boards of both corporations, nonprofits, and foundations.
Her memoirs didn’t sugar coat the life of an ambitious woman.
Jill Ker Conway’s memoirs depicted the ups and downs of her life as an ambitious and intelligent woman. She doesn’t leave out the hard facts such as being discriminated against as a woman or her husband’s struggle with manic depression. She takes risks and has adventures in her quest for knowledge and career advancement.
With her experience as a memoirist and as a scholar of woman’s history, Jill Ker Conway further explored woman’s autobiographies in:
When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography
Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women
In Her Own Words: Women’s Memoirs From Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States.
She helped pave the way for aspiring female memoirists, such as myself, to share their truth.
How many chapters will be in my obituary?
The obituaries about Jill Ker Conway inspired me to ponder my life. How many chapters will be in my obituary? How do I want to be remembered by my husband, son, relatives, friends, and community? What will my legacy be?
Still curious?
If you, like me, are considering a new chapter in your life or career, I recommend the following books:
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Jill Ker Conway
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Jill Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia, graduated from the University of Sydney in 1958, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard...
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PenguinRandomhouse.com
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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/5580/jill-ker-conway/
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Jill Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia, graduated from the University of Sydney in 1958, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1969. In 1962 she married John Conway and moved with him to his native Canada. From 1964 to 1975 she taught at the University of Toronto, where she was also Vice President, before going to Smith College. Since 1985 she has been a visiting scholar and professor in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. She serves on the boards of Nike, Merrill Lynch, and Colgate-Palmolive, and as Chairman of Lend Lease Corporation. She lived in Boston.
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Memorial service set for Jill Ker Conway, Smith College's first woman president
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2018-10-05T19:45:00+00:00
|
The service, open to the public, is Oct. 18 for Conway who died in Boston in June.
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/pf/resources/images/masslive/favicon.ico?d=1380
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masslive
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https://www.masslive.com/living/2018/10/memorial_service_set_for_jill_ker_conway_smith_colleges_first_woman_president.html
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NORTHAMPTON - A public memorial service is being held Oct. 18 for former Smith College President Jill Ker Conway who died in Boston in June. She would have turned 84 on Oct. 9.
The service for the Australian-born Conway, who became the college's first woman president at the age of 40 in 1975, begins at 4 p.m. in Helen Hills Hills Chapel, 123 Elm St.
Conway, who held a doctorate in history from Harvard University, was regarded as an innovator and successful fund-raiser during her years at Smith, and in retirement became a best-selling author, member of Nike's board of trustees where she chaired the committee on corporate responsibility that she suggested, and worked to address homelessness, particularly among veterans.
Her husband, John J. Conway, whom she had met at Harvard, served in the Canadian infantry in World War II, and had his right hand blown off by a grenade. He died in 1995.
In her 1989 memoir, "The Road From Coorain," the first of a trio, Conway wrote about growing up on a 32,000 sheep farm in Australia, going onto university where she study American women reformers from the Progressive Era like Jane Addams, and then entering a world where women were not really expected to stay long-term in the workforce.
The PBS program "Masterpiece Theater" used "The Road From Coorain" as the basis for a film in 2002.
Conway, who was named one of Time Magazine's Women of the Year in 1975, dedicated much of her career to creating programs and courses to help women advance and to help women - and society - expand perceptions of women's capabilities.
She came to Smith from the University of Toronto, where she served as that university's first female vice-president and successfully lobbied for equality in terms of pay and tenure.
Susan C. Bourque, a former provost and dean of the faculty at Smith, told an interviewer that Conway's appointment at the women's college at the time "absolutely electrified the campus."
"Here was this vibrant young woman, enormously attractive, who had just been appointed as the first woman in Smith's history. You could just feel the new history that had come," Bourque said.
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In a memoir that pierces and delights us, Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthood--a journey that would ultimately span immense distances and encompass worlds, ideas, and ways of life that seem a century apart.
She was seven before she ever saw another girl child. At eight, still too small to mount her horse unaided, she was galloping miles, alone, across Coorain, her parents' thirty thousand windswept, drought-haunted acres in the Australian outback, doing a "man's job" of helping herd the sheep because World War II had taken away the able-bodied men. She loved (and makes us see and feel) the vast unpeopled landscape, beautiful and hostile, whose uncertain weathers tormented the sheep ranchers with conflicting promises of riches and inescapable disaster. She adored (and makes us know) her large-visioned father and her strong, radiant mother, who had gone willingly with him into a pioneering life of loneliness and bone-breaking toil, who seemed miraculously to succeed in creating a warmly sheltering home in the harsh outback, and who, upon her husband's sudden death when Jill was ten, began to slide--bereft of the partnership of work and love that had so utterly fulfilled her--into depression and dependency. We see Jill, staggered by the loss of her father, catapulted to what seemed another planet--the suburban Sydney of the 1950s and its crowded, noisy, cliquish school life. Then the heady excitement of the University, but with it a yet more demanding course of lessons--Jill embracing new ideas, new possibilities, while at the same time trying to be mother to her mother and resenting it, escaping into drink, pulling herself back, striking a balance. We see her slowly gaining strength, coming into her own emotionally and intellectually and beginning the joyous love affair that gave wings to her newfound self. Worlds away from Coorain, in America, Jill Conway became a historian and the first woman president of Smith College. Her story of Coorain and the road from Coorain startles by its passion and evocative power, by its understanding of the ways in which a total, deep-rooted commitment to place--or to a dream--can at once liberate and imprison. It is a story of childhood as both Eden and anguish, and of growing up as a journey toward the difficult life of the free.
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Jill Ker Conway | Women’s History, Autobiography, Education
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Jill Ker Conway was an Australian-born American scholar, the first woman president of Smith College (1975–85), whose research as a historian focused on the role of feminism in American history. Jill Ker grew up in Coorain, a remote grasslands locale where her parents ran a sheep ranch. After her
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Encyclopedia Britannica
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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jill-Ker-Conway
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Jill Ker Conway (born October 9, 1934, Hillston, New South Wales, Australia—died June 1, 2018, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.) was an Australian-born American scholar, the first woman president of Smith College (1975–85), whose research as a historian focused on the role of feminism in American history.
Jill Ker grew up in Coorain, a remote grasslands locale where her parents ran a sheep ranch. After her father’s unexpected death, her mother moved the family to Sydney. Ker was educated at Abbotsleigh, a private girls’ school, and at the University of Sydney, where she took an honours degree in history in 1958. Two years later, after her rejection by the Australian foreign service on the basis of her sex, she immigrated to the United States for graduate work.
While earning her doctorate at Harvard University (Ph.D., 1969), she met and married John Conway. The Conways then moved to Toronto. There she taught 19th- and 20th-century American history at the University of Toronto, where she also became one of five vice presidents of the university. In 1975 Conway became the first woman president of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, a position she held for a decade. In 1985 she became a visiting scholar and professor in the Science, Technology, and Society program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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https://www.bmorrison.com/the-road-from-coorain-by-jill-ker-conway/
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The Road from Coorain, by Jill Ker Conway – B. Morrison
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2019-07-29T01:00:36-04:00
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https://www.bmorrison.com/the-road-from-coorain-by-jill-ker-conway/
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Rereading this bestselling 1989 memoir reminds me of why I enjoyed it so much back then. Conway gives us the opportunity to experience a childhood on a ranch in the Australian outback. She describes the austere beauty of the landscape, the desperate need for rain, the solitude for herself and her parents.
With no children besides her two older brothers within a hundred miles, she relies on her imagination and books for company. Helping out with the ranch work, she learns self-sufficiency and a practical grasp of what’s needed in the world. It is this combination of imagination and practicality that sends her into the world in search of education and greater understanding, a journey that will make her president of Smith College one day.
On this reading, I found myself fascinated with her parents in a way I hadn’t been before. She describes them as risk-takers, purchasing the land in 1929, not knowing that the drought was not seasonal but would become “legendary”, not knowing that the Depression was about to start in a few months. The ranch was her father’s dream, but the places he’d worked after returning from the horrors of the Great War were in a part of the country with a more forgiving landscape.
Her mother had grown up in a lush country town and enjoyed her career as a nurse, actually running her own country hospital. Yet she gave all this up to go with her new husband to the new home they named Coorain, an aboriginal word meaning “windy place”.
My father, being a westerner, born into that profound peace and silence, felt the need for it like an addiction to a powerful drug. Here, pressed into the earth by the weight of that enormous sky, there is real peace. To those who know it, the annihilation of the self, subsumed into the vast emptiness of nature, is akin to a religious experience. We children grew up to know it and seek it as our father before us. What was social and sensory deprivation for the stranger was the earth and sky that made us what we were. For my mother, the emptiness was disorienting, and the loneliness and silence a daily torment of existential dread.
Had she known how to tell directions she would have walked her way to human voices.
Despite all that, her mother is a figure of strength in Conway’s childhood, facing each new setback with courage and action. Her mother encourages Conway to read by asking her to read aloud while her mother works at daily chores, made more onerous by the lack of electricity and running water. Cooking is done on a wood stove even in the brutal heat of summer. Her mother has to be ready to treat snakebite or help fight bushfires.
But three years after the death of Conway’s father, she and her mother move to Sydney, leaving a good manager to run the ranch. There, her mother’s drive has no outlet and she becomes more and more controlling. Weighed down by grief and anger—she sometimes rages at strange men for daring to be alive when her beloved husband is dead—she begins drinking and her moods become unpredictable. Conway takes refuge in her schooling.
No matter where she travels, Conway never loses her love of her native landscape, though as she learns more, she becomes more critical about the treatment of aboriginal peoples and the ambiguous morality of land ownership.
It’s a fascinating story of an earlier time, a place and a culture foreign to me, and yet Conway’s experience was like mine in so many ways. My book club all raved about the book, finding Conway’s prose beautiful to read and her life inspirational. We want more of this, they said.
Have you been inspired by a memoir about a woman overcoming obstacles, both internal and external, and going on to accomplish great things in the world?
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Reviews - The Road from Coorain
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http://womenandmountains.blogspot.com/2018/07/jill-ker-conway.html
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en
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Women and Mountains: Jill Ker Conway
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Jill Ker Conway was born on a 32,000-acre sheep station in New South Wales, in 1934. Her parents were resourceful Australians with two son...
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http://womenandmountains.blogspot.com/2018/07/jill-ker-conway.html
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Jill Ker Conway was born on a 32,000-acre sheep station in New South Wales, in 1934. Her parents were resourceful Australians with two sons before Jill arrived. When her father came in from the fields, “my mother’s conversation would be intense and serious, but before long my father’s way with words, puns, and storytelling would have her laughing. They would look out on their world with high good humor. They seemed content,” she writes in The Road From Coorain [1989].
For a brief time, the ranch prospered, entirely dependent on the amount of rain that fell. The family experienced World War II by listening to radio reports. Jill’s mother organized women into a Red Cross group. When Jill’s brothers were sent to school in town, Jill was taught from correspondence courses. Soon she was reading everything in sight, and her father needed her more as a station hand. Jill rode out with him every day, checking fences, mustering sheep, doing cleaning and maintenance. She became an expert in the year’s round of crutching and shearing of the sheep, hanging out in the sheds with the men as they processed and graded the wool.
Years of drought began to pile up, however. Jill’s father died in an accident in 1944 and it soon became clear that the family could not stay on the station. Jill and her mother moved to Sydney, where the boys were in school, leaving the sheep station to a manager. Slowly the years of privation were tempered by a comfortable life. Jill too went to a formal girls boarding school where the students bathed and changed before dinner into green velvet dresses. “I was as intellectually precocious as I was socially inept,” she writes.
Jill’s mother made good decisions about the sheep station, but she was turning in on herself. When Bob, Jill’s beloved eldest brother, died in a car accident, her other brother was sent out to the sheep station and Jill was left alone with her mother again. “My mother’s devotion to me, the self-denial which had sent her to work to educate me properly, her frequent references to the fact that I was her consolation for her past tragedies, weighed on me like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross.”
Jill attended the University of Sydney, in love with history. Here too, she was at the top of her classes, though it surprised her how much history was taught as coming exclusively from Europe. Jill made friends, but in her head she heard her father: “Do something, Jill. Don’t just put in time on this earth.” She hoped, like her friends, to be accepted into the Australian Ministry of External Affairs. When her male friends were accepted and she was not, she was outraged. She abandoned Australia and applied for graduate study at Harvard. Leaving for America also solved the problem of her mother’s dependence on her.
In two subsequent memoirs, True North [1994] and A Woman’s Education [2001], Conway describes the success of her writing on American women reformers of the nineteenth century, particularly Jane Addams; her marriage to John Conway, a Canadian veteran and educator; and her growing interest in administration, culminating in her becoming the first woman president of Smith, a woman’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts, from 1975 to 1985.
Conway’s work was always groundbreaking and she describes how she felt about things very directly. At a time when many colleges were becoming co-educational, she writes: “It seems to me that the cozily domestic, introduced too early in youthful development had the effect of obliterating or muting civic and social responsibility. My nineteenth century feminist theorists about social evolution had all worried about where and how commercial society could instill social values that went beyond personal satisfaction and self-interest. I agreed with them that the development of the civic virtues tended to be slighted in exclusively commercial societies, and that leadership and the talent for action came from an education which did not take the paired couple as its social norm.”
Conway’s success is an engaging tale. She never forgot her mother, either. “She was the reason I’d never stopped trying to expand women’s opportunities.” But after ten years at Smith, she decided to begin writing these fine memoirs. She also taught classes at MIT and sat on many boards, one of which built the John and Jill Ker Conway residence for veterans in Washington, DC. The building opened in 2017, just before her death in June, 2018.
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] |
[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[] | null |
Discover Jill Ker Conway's life from her Australian roots to her pioneering role as Smith College's first female president.
|
/favicon.ico
|
https://cards.algoreducation.com/en/content/SYLBVPDI/jill-ker-conway-biography
|
Jill Ker Conway's upbringing on her family's sheep station in Australia shaped her resilience and independence
Despite initial struggles, Conway excelled at Abbotsleigh, an all-girls school in Sydney
Conway graduated with honors from the University of Sydney with a degree in History
Conway not only taught at the University of Toronto, but also helped develop one of the first women's history courses
Conway's tenure as president of Smith College was marked by her dedication to enhancing women's education and promoting programs in traditionally male-dominated fields
Conway's acclaimed memoirs and scholarly works on women's history have solidified her as a respected figure in the literary world and an influential voice in feminist discourse
|
||||
2692
|
dbpedia
|
0
| 10
|
https://issuu.com/australianamericanfulbright/docs/mindshearts_aug18/s/10754
|
en
|
In Memoriam: Dr Jill Ker Conway AC
|
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"Minds & Hearts"
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Dr Jill Ker Conway’s raw intelligence, robust character, and deft, analytical mind propelled her through a remarkable career in education, academia, and business.
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Dr Jill Ker Conway’s raw intelligence, robust character, and deft, analytical mind propelled her through a remarkable career in education, academia, and business.
Formative years spent working the harsh land of a sheep station in outback New South Wales fostered a fierce determination to shrug the shackles of endemic gender discrimination, and lead her to become a trailblazing women’s rights advocate.
Yet it was her thoughtful, poignant reflections on life amid this dusty, arid vastness, vividly chronicled in her best-selling autobiography, The Road from Coorain, that truly cemented Jill’s place as an Australian literary icon.
Time manages the most painful partings for us. One has only to set the date, buy the ticket, and let the earth, sun, and moon make their passages through the sky, until inexorable time carries us with it to the moment of parting.”
Jill’s early life was, in fact, punctuated by painful partings. She lost her father in a tragic accident on the family farm when she was just 10, and was sent from her cherished Coorain home to boarding school at 12. Her brother died in a car accident when she was 16, then at 24 she parted with her first true love, an American venture capitalist, with a tearful farewell at the Pan Am terminal in Sydney. Jill’s indomitable spirit, and the inexorable passage of time saw her safely through.
But it was a departure of a different kind that would forever alter the course of Jill’s life, and culminate in her appointment as the first woman president of Massachusetts’ prestigious Smith College, and her being named Time’s ‘Woman of the Year’ at just 40 years of age.
I’d arrived at the choice by exhausting all the possibilities of interesting careers in Australia, discovering, one by one, that they were not open to women…so my setting out was not exactly the departure of a conquering hero, but more the ambiguous result of deciding that I needed to get away from Australia, to view life from a different perspective.”
Frustrated and suffocated by the lack of opportunity for an ambitious young Australian woman, Jill decided to pursue graduate study abroad. Glimpses of American culture had opened her eyes to a more fluid and progressive interpretation of her own place in society, and to the potential of what could be achieved through hard work and talent. In 1960, Jill applied for a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the U.S, and less than a year later, found herself wandering the halls of Harvard’s Radcliffe College.
The unconventional teaching methods instantly appealed. Students were invited to critically engage with the material, rather than simply read and accept the conclusions of others. For the first time, Jill was forced to step back and ask herself exactly why she wanted to study history.
Why was I an historian? One wasn’t just born curious about history. The reason was I’d grown up having to know why things were the way they were.
The droughts and sudden swings of fortune of my childhood in the Australian outback meant that I was preoccupied by questions of free will and determinism. Coming to consciousness during the war made me interested in the conflict of ideas and ideologies, and curious about where they came from.”
The educators were passionate and eccentric; one particular favourite of Jill’s would deliver his lectures with the dramatic flair of a Shakespearian soliloquy. This intellectual nourishment was intoxicating, and Jill found herself re-examining everything she had learned about history through an entirely new lens.
Since I craved understanding more than any other intellectual delight, each flash of insight was a heady new fix for a boundless appetite… I could scarcely attend a lecture without some new insight about the history of the Australian colonies exploding in my mind like a firecracker.
This was what I’d wanted from the study of history – the flash of understanding, the new insight, the notion that one was living with reality, not some dusty myth from the past.”
Jill went on to earn a PhD in History in 1969. While at Harvard, she had fallen in love with Canadian professor and WWII veteran John Conway, whom she described as "totally and spontaneously liberated". They married, and moved to Canada, where Jill took a teaching post at the University of Toronto.
As a shrewd and innovative administrator, Jill rose swiftly through the ranks there to become a dean in 1971, then vice president in 1973. Privately, she helped John battle through severe bouts of manic depression, and in the midst of one particularly bad episode, reaffirmed the importance of her independence.
His moral integrity, courage, and devotion to humanistic learning were certainly my compass point, the true north one needed to set directions on this continent. But I now knew there were going to be times when I’d have to navigate alone.”
In 1974, Jill was visited by the committee charged with finding a new president for Smith College, one of the most illustrious women’s liberal arts institutions in the world. Busy with a life "learning to swim in the choppy seas of administrative life", she gave little thought to the idea of a move back to the U.S., but, at John’s insistence, accepted an invitation to visit the campus.
I left a grey city to see a campus ablaze with crocus, daffodils, scilla, and rich strawberry and cream magnolias. Brighter than the spring flowers were the faces of the young women I saw everywhere.
I could spend months at a time at the University of Toronto without ever hearing a female voice raised. Here the women were rowdy, physically freewheeling, joshing one-another loudly, their laughter deep-belly laughter, not propitiatory giggles. I was entranced.”
Her progressive values extended to directorship; for example, before agreeing to join Nike, Jill insisted on a campaign to stimulate interest in sport for girls, chaired a corporate social responsibility committee, and regularly visited Nike factories in Asia to check the working conditions of the primarily-female workforce.
Jill’s innovative leadership and pioneering views on corporate social responsibility brought international recognition and accolades.
In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal, and her country of birth appointed her an honorary Companion of the Order of Australia for "eminent service to the community, particularly women, as an author, academic and through leadership roles with corporations, foundations, universities and philanthropic groups".
In an article for the Sydney Morning Herald at the time, her words on contemporary Australia were characteristically thoughtful:
Today Australia is rich in resources and part of the dynamic Asia Pacific market and its financial institutions are global players. But today my rural world is in decline even though we know that there will be a serious problem of feeding the world's population within several generations.
So my hope is for a political climate a little more focused on the future, and a little less comfortable with the wealth that comes from feeding the carbon economy.”
Jill passed away at her home on the first of June, 2018, on a warm, cloudy day in Boston.
In accordance with her wishes, half of her ashes rest in a small private cemetery beside John’s, near their beloved house and garden in Massachusetts; the other half were scattered by the big tree, beside the driveway into the house at Coorain.
As I walked out to the plane in the balmy air of a Sydney September night, my mind flew back to a dusty cemetery where my father was buried. Where, I wondered, would my bones come to rest? It pained me to think of them not fertilizing Australian soil.
Then I comforted myself with the notion that wherever on the earth was my final resting place, my body would return to the restless red dust of the western plains. I could see how it would blow about and get in people’s eyes, and I was content with that.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/obituaries/jill-ker-conway-83-feminist-author-and-smith-president-dies.html
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Jill Ker Conway, 83, Feminist Author and Smith President, Dies
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2018-06-04T00:00:00
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Dr. Conway wrote three acclaimed memoirs, starting with her childhood on a sheep ranch in Australia and ending in American academia.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/obituaries/jill-ker-conway-83-feminist-author-and-smith-president-dies.html
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Growing up on a giant sheep ranch in the remote grasslands of Australia can shape a young girl’s whole life.
“In a labor-scarce society with a shortage of human energy, there is no room for social conventions about women’s work,” Jill Ker Conway, who grew up in just such a place, once noted. “The work had to be done. It never crossed anyone’s mind that you didn’t work up to your competence.”
By the time she made that observation, in 1975 and thousands of miles from her birthplace, Dr. Conway had proved the point. She had just become the first woman to be named president of Smith College, the prestigious women’s institution in Northampton, Mass.
And she was still early in a career filled with accomplishments. After a decade leading Smith, she wrote three acclaimed memoirs, among other books, and championed feminist causes and ideas. In 2013 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.
Dr. Conway died on Friday at her home in Boston, Smith College announced. She was 83. No cause was given.
Kathleen McCartney, Smith’s current president, said in a telephone interview that she was struck not only by what Dr. Conway did for the college, but also by her multiple roles as feminist, author, scholar and woman of influence on the boards of companies like Nike and nonprofits like the Kellogg Foundation.
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Tributes paid to pioneering historian who served as first female president of Smith College
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An acclaimed scholar and author who served as the first female president of Smith College has died.
Jill Ker Conway was born in New South Wales, Australia, in October 1934 and grew up on an isolated sheep ranch. She studied history and English at the University of Sydney (1958) and moved to the United States in 1960, securing a PhD from Harvard University in 1969. An expert on female reformers in the US, she was appointed professor of US social and intellectual history at the University of Toronto in 1971 and went on to serve as vice-president for internal affairs. She moved back to the US to become president of Smith – the women’s liberal arts college, based in Northampton, Massachusetts – from 1975 to 1985.
In her inaugural address at Smith, Professor Conway spoke of fostering “research and the creation of new knowledge around matters of central importance in women’s lives”. Her own scholarly work included Modern Feminism: An Intellectual History (1977), Utopian Dream or Dystopian Nightmare?: Nineteenth-Century Feminist Ideas about Equality (1987) and a series of anthologies of autobiographical writing by women.
A highly effective fundraiser, Professor Conway used her time at Smith to develop bold new programmes in management, women’s studies, comparative literature and engineering as well as the Ada Comstock Scholars Program for “women of non-traditional college age”. She also oversaw a number of major infrastructural projects, transforming the Neilson library and creating far more extensive sports facilities.
Kathleen McCartney, Smith’s current president, described Professor Conway as “groundbreaking and gracious”, a woman who “came to Smith when gender roles were being transformed – and there were people here who tried to stand in her way. But at a time when the academy didn’t see women as college presidents – or as leaders at all – she demonstrated a leadership that was innovative and effective.”
After leaving Smith in 1985, Professor Conway became a visiting professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Program in Science, Technology and Society. She devoted much of her time to environmental causes and to addressing the problems of homelessness. She also wrote a series of acclaimed memoirs, The Road From Coorain (1989), True North (1995) and A Woman’s Education (2001), the last devoted to her time at Smith. All were notable, she once said, for exploring “what women were not supposed to acknowledge – ambition, love of adventure, the quest for intellectual power, physical courage and endurance, risk-taking, [and] the negative aspects of mother-daughter relations”.
Professor Conway was honoured with a National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2013. She died on 1 June and was predeceased by her husband.
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When Jill Ker Conway departed Sydney for Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1960, she knew she “was a woman who wanted to do serious work and have it make a difference.” She has, indeed, in the years since, made a difference as a scholar, a university administrator—in 1975, she became the first woman president of Smith College—and a corporate board member. But her deepest legacy may be in her autobiographical writings. Studies in achieving the examined life, Conway’s books have taught countless women and men to practice self-awareness, to acknowledge their own ambition, and to relish leadership.
So moved have they been, particularly by The Road from Coorain, readers have written to Conway to tell her that the book gave them the courage to change, a sentiment she says is enormously gratifying. Conway hopes her writings will “prompt people to ask themselves questions about their lives and how they are living them.”
In Coorain, Conway’s poignant first memoir of growing up in the outback, she describes leaving Australia “because I didn’t fit in, never had, and wasn’t likely to.” Arriving from a culture where opportunities for aspiring women were rare, Conway found at Harvard a cohort of friends for whom there was no shame in “admitting one wanted to be a great scholar.” Within a “community where everyone was awake,” Conway became a historian, coming of intellectual age just before the study of women’s history became a legitimate area of scholarship. No matter that her discipline was not popular yet, Conway explored the contradictory ways women reformers, such as Jane Addams, presented themselves in public memoirs and private writings. Addams, for instance, had a clear plan to develop Hull-House well before it was established, yet offered up a more emotional and spontaneous view of the process, a romantic style of self-presentation that diminished her own agency in founding the settlement house.
Although there is now no doubt that women can lead, ascribing success to luck rather than effort is something incredibly accomplished women still do, says Conway, who believes “success may have an element that is fortuitous, but the ability to exploit that element of fortune is not, that’s the person.”
Conway’s works—among them The Female Experience in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century America: A Guide to the History of American Women (1982), Learning About Women: Gender, Politics, and Power (1989), with Susan C. Bourque and Joan W. Scott, and When Memory Speaks (1998)—offer insight into the ways women have narrated their lives. She has written that “what makes reading autobiography so appealing is the chance it offers to see how this man or that woman whose public self interests us has negotiated the problem of self-awareness and has broken the internalized code a culture supplies about how life should be experienced.”
The Road from Coorain, True North, and A Woman’s Education, Conway’s own memoirs, are stunningly forthright about loss and tragedy, the life of the mind and love and marriage, ambition and academia. As she uncovers her talents and, more importantly, develops their potential, Conway addresses what it means to be ever evolving. She even takes herself by surprise when she finds, while serving as the first female vice president at the University of Toronto, that she “hadn’t known I liked running things, or that I was a powerful personality.”
In True North she wrote, “it seemed ludicrous that I could be approaching forty and unaware of something so basic about myself and my motivations, especially since I’d made myself a scholarly reputation analyzing a similar lack of awareness in women leaders of an earlier generation.”
With this knowledge, Conway went on to lead Smith. A feminist who saw no reason to ditch the western canon, Conway says she was in the heretical wing of the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s because she does not subscribe to biologically deterministic definitions of femaleness and maleness, and has always advised women that they could learn from male colleagues.
For ten years at Smith, Conway exercised a practical feminism that brought in funding to research women’s experiences in the humanities, created a scholars program for older women, launched a training program for women executives, and supported mothers on welfare whose Smith educations helped them become lawyers, teachers, and clergy. She pushed for an expansion in the sciences and better athletic facilities because she believed—and still does—that leadership skills can develop by participating in competitive team sports “where you can be beaten over and over again,” then get up and “win the next time.”
In her life’s fourth act, Conway has served as a board member or trustee of a number of organizations, including Nike, Merill Lynch, Colgate-Palmolive, the Kresge Foundation, and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. Her latest ventures involve supporting the Franklin Land Trust’s efforts in Massachusetts because “we all have an obligation to the Earth,” and leading the board of directors of Community Solutions. It was launched in 2011 by MacArthur grantee Rosanne Haggerty with a “modest goal—to end homelessness,” says Conway. Although her job is to ensure that the organization is well governed during its startup years, Conway is approaching some aspects of her latest work as a scholar. “We don’t have a language to talk about poor people that dignifies them.” Conway wants to come up with a rhetoric that does. Yet another way to make a difference.
— by Anna Maria Gillis
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Biography
Jill Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia in 1934. She resided in the Australian outback until the death of her father in 1945. At that time, Conway, her mother, and two brothers moved to Sydney, an industrious seaport city. Conway received most of her education in the neighboring private schools and university. She graduated from the University of Sydney in 1958, after having dropped out for some time due to financial and emotional reasons. In 1960 she moved to the United States and received her PhD from Harvard University in 1969. Conway taught at the University of Toronto from 1964 to 1975, serving as Vice President from 1973 to 1975. She became the first woman president of Smith College in Massachusetts in 1975. Following Conway’s ten-year administration, she has received sixteen honorary doctorates from numerous other colleges and universities. Her success and personal definition are shaped by her childhood experiences and are detailed in her autobiography, The Road from Coorain. She is currently a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 she was designated a Women’s History Month honoree by the National Women’s History Project.
The Road from Coorain
The Road from Coorain is an account of Conway’s journey from the rural Australian outback to the urban metropolis in Australia and then to the United States. Conway describes growing up in a house, named “Coorain”(which is an aboriginal word for “windy place”), with her mother, father, and two older brothers. The family endures several hardships, including the death of her father and one of her brothers. A devastating five-year drought causes the family’s business to fail and forces the remaining members of her family to relocate to Sydney. This misfortune shapes Conway’s character and development because she learns to overcome that adversity.
Conway’s autobiography describes her intellectual development and her realization of the ways in which society suppresses women (see Gender and Nation). For instance, Conway describes her experience in applying for a prestigious trainee-ship with the Department of External Affairs (the equivalent of foreign service) while she is at the University of Sydney; she is denied a position because of her gender. She states, “I could scarcely believe that my refusal was because I was a woman” (191). In addition to gender bias, Conway addresses the irrelevance of the education the British provided during their postcolonial rule of Australia. After she visits Britain, she realizes the true beauty of the Australian landscape and credits it with being a crucial factor in defining who she is. However, she admits that the British-imposed educational system in Australia ultimately fails her when she states, “I had come to an intellectual dead end in Australia”(233). For this reason, and to escape her mother’s attempt to thwart her ambition, Conway decides to pursue her graduate studies at Harvard University in the United States.
Jill Ker Conway stated in an interview for The New York Times, that her purpose in writing is “to communicate to people very directly about the authenticity of women’s motivation for work, about how a person strives to find some creative expression. The moral of my mother’s life was that while she had challenging work, she was indomitable and when she didn’t, she fell apart. It’s very much the vogue to talk about women as developing their moral consciousness through a connectedness to mother, but I think that’s misleading. My book is deliberately a story of separation- of independence and breaking away.”
British Influence in Australia
One of the issues that elicits strong emotions in Conway is the British influence in Australia. She is considered a postcolonial writer, which raises other issues concerning the term “postcolonial.” Richard Lever and James Wieland discuss the role of post-colonialism in Australian literature in their bibliography, Postcolonial Literatures in English: “The term ‘post-colonial’–in practice often used synonymously with ‘New Literatures in English’ and ‘Third World Literatures’–emerged in the late seventies as a counter to the hegemonic and universalizing implications of the traditional categories ‘Dominion’ and ‘Commonwealth’ literature, which implicitly privilege the British imperial ‘Center’ and grant authority status to its literary and cultural traditions. Post-colonialism acknowledges, indeed insists upon, the fact that literatures of the nations and territories affected by British imperialism remain engaged with British traditions” (ix).
In Her Own Words
Jill Conway chose the autobiographical format because autobiographies provide the ability to hear “the voice” of the author. In her anthology Written by Herself, Conway states: “Autobiographies by women excite particular interest today, because three important trends in late-twentieth-century culture intersect to heighten the resonance of this form of narrative. The rise of democracy has enlarged the focus of interest in the lives of other people-from monarch, great general, and political leader to the ordinary person -someone like ourselves. And, as feminists have insisted that battles for power, authenticity, moral stature, and survival occur as fiercely within the domestic as in the public arena of life, what was once seen as placidly domestic now offers the reader a world charged with great issues.”
Selected Additional Works by Jill Ker Conway
— A Woman’s Education. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2001.
—“Forward.” Women on Power: Leadership Redefined. Ed. Sue J.M. Freeman, Susan C. Bourque and Christine M. Shelton. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001.
––Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment. Ed. Jill Ker Conway, Kenneth Keniston and Leo Marx. Boston: University of Massachusetts, 1999.
–– Conway, Jill Ker, Clare Munnings and Elizabeth Topham Kennan. Overnight Float. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.
––In Her Own Words: Women’s Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. New York: Vintage, 1999.
–– When Memory Speaks. New York: Vintage, 1998.
–– Modern Feminism: An Intellectual History. New York: Knopf, 1997.
—. Written by Herself, Volumes I and II. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. An anthology of the ever-changing statuses of women throughout history. It provides a firsthand account by women from different cultures and time periods (1800-present).
—. True North: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1994. A continuation of The Road from Coorain, this sequel traces Conway’s journey from Harvard, to her marriage, to her assumption of the presidency of Smith College in 1975.
—. The Politics of Women’s Education. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993. An international collection of works by women, addressing the changes that have occurred in women’s education in many countries throughout the world. The collection deals with issues women face and how they react to them.
—. Learning About Women. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1989. A collection of works by several different writers that provide an analysis of the shifting status of women in various parts of the world.
—. The First Generation of American Women Graduates. New York: Garland Publishing, 1987. Conway’s published thesis that she presented to the Harvard Department of History to receive her doctorate in American History.
—. Utopian Dream or Dystopian Nightmare? Nineteenth Century Feminist Ideas About Equality. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1987.
—. The Female Experience in 18th and 19th Century America: A Guide to the History of American Women. New York: Garland Publishing, 1982.
—. Women Reformers and American Culture: 1870-1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971-2.
—. ”Merchants and Merinos.” Journal and Proceedings (Royal Australian Historical Society), vol 46, part 4, 1960, pp 206-223.
—. Modern Feminism: An Intellectual History. New York: Knopf , 1977.
Selected Bibliography
Conway, Jill. The Road from Coorain. New York: Knopf. 1989.
—. Learning About Women. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. 1989.
Heron, Kim. “Importance of Work for Women.” The New York Times Book Review. May 7, 1989. 3.
Klinkenborg, Verlyn. “The Call of the Wind and the Kookaburra.” The New York Times Book Review. May 7, 1989. 3.
Lever, Richard, James Wieland, and Scott Findlay. Post Colonial Literatures in English. New York: G.K. Hall & Co. 1996.
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Jill Kathryn Ker ConwayJill Kathryn Ker Conway (born 1934) was a historian interested in the role of women in American history. She became the first woman president of Smith College in 1975. Source for information on Jill Kathryn Ker Conway: Encyclopedia of World Biography dictionary.
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Jill Kathryn Ker Conway (born 1934) was a historian interested in the role of women in American history. She became the first woman president of Smith College in 1975.
Jill Kathryn Ker was born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia, a small town 75 miles from her parents' sheep station, on October 9, 1934. She earned her B.A. and a university medal at the University of Sydney in 1958 and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1969. Her unpublished but widely-cited dissertation, "The First Generation of American Women Graduates," an intellectual history of Jane Addams and other progressive women reformers, almost single-handedly rekindled scholarly interest in women's contributions to Progressive Era America.
While attending Harvard University Jill Ker met and married John Conway, a history professor in whose course she was a teaching assistant. She followed him to Toronto, where he became one of the founders of York University and she joined the faculty of the University of Toronto. There she lectured on American history while completing her dissertation. Jill Conway rose to the rank of associate professor in 1972. From 1973 to 1975 she served as the first woman vice president for internal affairs at the University of Toronto.
In the mid-1970s, Toronto, like other major universities, was struck with student rebellions, giving Conway an opportunity to demonstrate her cool and unflappable administrative style. In 1975 she was appointed the first woman president of Smith College, the largest privately-endowed college for women in the United States. For this achievement, Time magazine named her one of its 12 "Women of the Year." Conway's appointment heralded a change in leadership of the so-called Seven Sisters Colleges, and as a result of this breakthrough all of them became headed by women by the early 1980s.
Initially, Conway found herself at the helm of a prestigious but flagging educational institution. In the early 1970s, Smith, like the other Seven Sisters, suffered a decline in status as bright women flocked to the newly coeducational Ivy League universities. Conway helped to restore Smith's luster as the premier women's college in the United States. A superb fund-raiser, she increased the endowment from $82 million to $220 million. To accomplish this, Conway became a peripatetic president, criss-crossing the country to solicit alumnae, foundation, and corporate support. Her executive abilities were well recognized, as she served as director of IBM World Trade Americas/Far East Corporation, Merrill Lynch, and on the board of overseers of Harvard University. Despite a hectic administrative schedule Conway maintained her commitment to teaching and scholarship. She taught a course on the "Social and Intellectual Context of Feminist Ideologies in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century America." In 1982 she published The Female Experience in 18th and 19th Century America.
In the first portion of her presidency, Conway changed the college from a genteel institution which eschewed feminist ideals into a women's college that respected and reflected feminist values. Through a strong financial aid program, Smith for the first time admitted older, working women and welfare recipients as Ada Comstock scholars. Conway expanded the career development office and took pride in promoting the "old girl" network among alumnae. She endorsed the expansion of athletic facilities, enabling Smith to become the first women's college to join the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Conway articulated a concern that Smith tenure more women faculty, and she frequently publicized the plight of women scholars and the value of women's institutions in educational journals. While not in favor of a women's studies program at Smith per se, Conway did encourage the development of the Smith College Project on Women and Social Change funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Out of her presidential budget she helped launch The Society of Scholars Studying Women's Higher Educational History, a group of researchers studying women's intellectual history.
Some highly publicized conflicts erupted in the closing years of Conway's presidency. In 1983, following student and faculty protests, Conway had to inform the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, that she could not guarantee that Kirkpatrick would receive her honorary degree and be heard as the commencement speaker without incident. The ambassador declined the offer to speak and was given her degree by the Smith trustees in a private ceremony. When newly unionized food-service workers tried to organize Smith's Davis Student Center acrimony developed between the workers and the administration. The unionized workers claimed they were being unfairly treated by a "paternalistic and male dominated" management. The dispute was quietly settled.
While funding for privately endowed, small, liberal arts colleges diminished throughout the early 1980s, Conway's capable leadership allowed Smith College to survive and grow. In an era that some term "post-feminist," Conway's contributions to women's higher education and her sponsorship of separate women's institutions made her an important spokeswoman for contemporary feminism. By the end of her presidency Conway was perturbed by a new generation of women students, less overtly feminist but strongly career-oriented. According to her, this change in the attitudes of the Smith student body was "the only disappointment in a decade." She called for women students to retain an interest in service to society and not to embrace unthinkingly high-earning professions. In this she remained faithful to the ideals of the social feminists of the Progressive generation whose careers she so well illuminated in her pioneering research. Conway also served as a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In March of 1996, she succeeded to vice-chairman of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and in February of 1997, Conway was made a member on the Board of Trustees at Adelphi University in New York.
Further Reading
Jill Conway is listed in Canadian Who's Who (1984) and in Who's Who of American Women, 14th edition (1985-1986). Conway is discussed in "Women of the Year: Great Changes, New Chances, Touch Choices," Time (January 5, 1976); Elizabeth Stone, "What Can an All Women's College Do for Women," Ms (1979); and Hal Langur, "Jill Conway," Daily Hampshire Gazette (June 27, 1985).
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The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
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In a memoir that pierces and delights us, Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthood—a journey that would ultimately...
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READERS GUIDE
The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain. We hope they will aid your understanding of the many rich themes that make up Conway’s story of her youth in mid-century Australia.
Introduction
Conway recounts the successive phases of her early life: her childhood on a remote sheep station, her teenage years in suburban Sydney, her education at the University of Sydney, and her decision to become a historian and to leave Australia for the United States. Her own coming of age is set against that of her country: the British Empire is disintegrating, and as England retreats to a local rather than an international role in world affairs, Australia must set out to rediscover its own identity, not as an extension of England, but as a Pacific nation with a distinctive culture and history. Conway’s search for her own identity, as a woman and as an Australian, is a complex story written in a deceptively simple narrative style.
Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. In the first chapter, Conway writes of the “bush ethos which grew up from making a virtue out of loneliness and hardship” (p. 8). Stoicism and self- sufficiency are the ideals adopted by the outback settlers. How have those ideals shaped the Kers’ lives? In what way have they been destructive to the family? Though Conway finally rejected these values, is it possible that they helped her to break away from her potentially
unproductive life and start again?
2. Conway stresses the fact that Australians of her parents’ generation defined themselves as Britons and saw their own country only in British terms. They equated their national interests with England’s; even their map of the world was seen from a British perspective, with nearby Japan located in the “Far East.” How did this attitude shape the educational system into which Jill and her brothers were placed? How did it color their attitudes toward their native country? How did it shape the young Australians’ class consciousness, in a country whose social and racial make-up was so different from contemporary England’s?
3. How does Conway present her mother as a prototypical twentieth-century woman? In what way are the attitudes of Australian society to blame for the mother’s deterioration from being an independent professional, a “great healer” (p. 195), to a neurotic hypochondriac? How has her simple system of values proved inadequate to the complex world of the twentieth century? To what degree do you feel that she has caused her own problems?
4. Conway compares the barriers against women that she herself encountered as she grew up with those that shaped her mother’s life. Some were openly acknowledged (i.e., the inequitable wages for men and women offered in the Help Wanted ads). Some were more insidious: unspoken prejudices buried deep within the culture. How do the two women differ in the way they confront these barriers? How do their different educational backgrounds affect their points of view?
5. Conway speculates that had her parents encountered failure earlier in their lives, they might “have learned to bend a little before the harshness of fate” (p. 23). How does the disastrous drought at Coorain affect the character of Conway’s father? Conway suggests that his death was a suicide. Does she acknowledge and confront his implied abandonment of her and the rest of the family?
6. “It was a comprehensible world” (p. 50), Conway writes of her early childhood on Coorain. “One saw visible results from one’s labors” (p. 50). In what way does the young girl’s comprehensible world turn into an incomprehensible one? What efforts does she make to confer meaning upon it? How do religious, spiritual, and intellectual systems of thought help or hinder her?
7. Conway writes that in Australia, “people distrusted intellectuals. Australians mocked anyone with ‘big ideas’ and found them specially laughable in women” (p. 146). But the same Australians who mocked “ideas” also had a high regard for success, inclusive of academic success. What shape do these contradictory attitudes give Australian society? How does the isolated position of Australian intellectuals, as depicted by Conway, reflect this dichotomy? The United States, like Australia, is a culture with a significant history of anti-intellectualism. How is this reflected in our own society?
8. How did Conway’s experiences with professional discrimination against women bring her to a more personal realization of the fate of Australia’s aboriginal people? What do her parents’ use of the nardoo stones found on Coorain signify to her?
9. Mid-century Australia had an overwhelmingly white population, but this was not true of England’s colonies and dominions in Asia and Africa. How does Conway’s visit to newly independent Ceylon change her view of the British Empire and of the imperialist credo of white superiority? The credo is not merely racial, but cultural as well. What perspective is Conway given on her own society’s culture and history by her first encounter with the wider world?
10. While the Australians willingly went to war for England, England’s treatment of Australia as expendable during the Second World War dramatized the actual state of affairs. Conway knew that “it was time to give up pretenses of the old British Empire, recognize that we were a Southern Pacific nation, and begin to study and understand the peoples and countries of our part of the globe” (p. 182). How does Conway relate her own choice of vocation as a historian to her country’s quest for identity? By extension, in what symbolic ways does she identify her own life with that of Australia?
11. Conway’s story, like James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ends with her acceptance of a life of exile. But unlike Joyce, she sees her exile as resulting from a series of “thorough and all-encompassing defeats” (p. 236). Is the narrative of Conway’s early life really a story of defeat? Or is it perhaps a story of success? Conway felt that she had failed in several areas–in making her mother happy, in running Coorain–but were these quixotic battles, impossible to win? Do you feel, as she did, that she turned her back on her duty?
12. Jill Ker Conway has written: “The rise of democracy has enlarged the focus of interest in the lives of other people–from monarch, great general, and political leader to the ordinary person–someone like ourselves” (Written by Herself, p. vii). How does Conway shape her own story–that of an obscure, isolated young girl–into a narrative with wide social and historical implications?
13. How does Conway shape the plot of The Road from Coorain? Is it a romance, a story of material success, an odyssey, a spiritual or intellectual quest or the story of a conflict between mother and daughter?
14. Conway has written elsewhere about her environmental concerns. What is the role of nature in this narrative, and how does her own understanding of the natural world influence her intellectual development?
15. The Road from Coorain is a narrative about separation and the formation of a strongly bonded female personality. It is thus a story which runs counter to a current sentimental view of women’s lives as networks of relationships. Is Conway’s view persuasive?
About this Author
Jill Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia, in 1934. Her father was a sheep rancher, her mother a nurse, and Conway and her brothers were brought up in almost total isolation on Coorain, their 18,000-acre tract of land, which was eventually enlarged to 32,000 acres. With the unexpected death of her husband, on top of a devastating drought, Mrs. Ker was compelled to leave Coorain with her family for Sydney, where they led a relatively conventional middle-class life. Jill
was educated at the all-female Abbotsleigh School and the University of Sydney, where she took an honors degree in history.
Conway emigrated to the United States in 1960, and completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1969. As a historian she specialized in American social and intellectual history, and in her own private intellectual concern, the history of American women. She taught at the University of Toronto from 1964 to 1975, where she eventually became vice-president; she then spent ten years as the president of Smith College, the first woman to hold that position.
Since 1985 she has been a visiting professor at M.I.T. in its Science, Technology and Society program.
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Australian-American scholar and author (1934-2018)
Jill Ker Conway (9 October 1934 – 1 June 2018) was an Australian-American scholar and author. Well known for her autobiographies, in particular her first memoir, The Road from Coorain, she also was Smith College's first woman president (1975–1985) and most recently served as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project.[1] She was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.
Biography
[edit]
Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, in the outback of Australia. Together with her two brothers, Ker Conway was raised in near-total isolation on a family-owned 73 square kilometres (18,000 acres) tract of land called Coorain (the Aboriginal word for "windy place"), which eventually grew to encompass 129 square kilometres (32,000 acres). On Coorain, she lived a lonely life, and grew up without playmates except for her brothers. In her early years, she was schooled entirely by her mother, with the aid of correspondence class material for her primary school and early grade school education.[2]
Ker Conway spent her youth working the sheep station; by age seven, she was an important member of the workforce, helping with such activities as herding and tending the sheep, checking the perimeter fences and transporting heavy farm supplies. The farm prospered until it was crippled by a drought that lasted seven years. This and her father's worsening health put an increasing burden on her shoulders. When she was eleven, her father drowned in a diving accident while trying to extend the farm's water piping.
Initially Jill Ker Conway's mother, a nurse by profession, refused to leave Coorain. But after three more years of drought, she was compelled to move Jill and her brothers to Sydney, where the children attended school.
Ker Conway found the local state school a rough environment. The British manners and accent ingrained by her parents clashed with her peers' Australian habits, provoking taunts and jeers. This resulted in her mother enrolling her at Abbotsleigh, a private girls school, where Ker Conway found intellectual challenge and social acceptance. After finishing her education at Abbotsleigh, she enrolled at the University of Sydney, where she studied History and English and graduated with honours in 1958. Upon graduation, Ker Conway sought a trainee post in the Department of External Affairs, but the all-male committee turned down her application.
After this setback, she travelled through Europe with her now emotionally volatile mother. In 1960, she decided to strike out on her own and move to the United States. At age 25, she was accepted into the history program of Harvard University's Radcliffe College,[3] where she devoted her studies to women's history, not yet an established historical discipline, and wrote her dissertation on Jane Addams and the establishment of Hull House.[4] Her interest in Addams and Hull House was sparked by her neighbor and friend, former Librarian of Congress, Archibald Macleish.[5] At Harvard, she also assisted a Canadian professor, John Conway, who was her husband from 1962 until his death in 1995. Ker Conway received her Ph.D. at Harvard in 1969 and taught at the University of Toronto from 1964 to 1975. Her book True North details her life in Toronto.
From 1975 to 1985, Ker Conway was the president of Smith College. After 1985, she was a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received thirty-eight honorary degrees and awards from North American and Australian colleges, universities and women's organizations.[3]
Throughout her career, Ker Conway served as director on a variety of corporate boards. These include stints of more than a decade on the boards of Nike, Colgate-Palmolive, and Merrill Lynch.[6] Ker Conway was also the first female Chairman of Lendlease.[7]
After 2011, Ker Conway served as the Board Chair of Community Solutions.[8] It is a non-profit organization with a focus on homelessness and related issues, based in New York City.
Conway died on 1 June 2018 at her home in Boston at the age of 83.[9]
President of Smith College
[edit]
In 1975, Ker Conway became the first female president of Smith College, the largest women's college in the United States. Located in Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith, a private liberal arts college, is the only women's college in the U.S. to grant its own degrees in engineering.
Ker Conway launched the Ada Comstock Scholars program, initially proposed by her predecessor Thomas Mendenhall. This program allows non-traditional students, many with work and family obligations, to study full or part-time, depending on their family and work schedules. These women can take classes for a bachelor's degree over a longer period of time. Conway House, dedicated in 2006, a residence for Ada Comstock Scholars was named in honor of Ker Conway.
One of Ker Conway's more notable accomplishments is a program she initiated to help Ada Comstock Scholars on welfare. At the time, many students who were also welfare mothers were not pursuing higher education, as accepting a scholarship would cause them to lose their welfare benefits. The mothers were forced to choose between supporting their children or furthering their education. By not giving them scholarships but paying their rent instead, Ker Conway circumvented the state's system. She also gave the students access to an account at local stores, access to physicians and so on. ABC's Good Morning America profiled graduates of the program, giving it national exposure. Eventually the state of Massachusetts, convinced about the importance of the program, changed its welfare system so that scholarship students wouldn't lose their benefits.[10]
She also led the creation of the Smith Management Program (now called Smith Executive Education) and the Project on Women and Social Change. She worked to expand the curriculum leading to the development of programs in women's studies, comparative literature, and engineering. Conway took a keen interest in fundraising and under her presidency the endowment nearly tripled from $82 million to $222 million. These efforts enabled several large-scale projects including the construction of the Ainsworth Gymnasium, and expansion of the Neilson Library. The Career Development Office was also expanded under her tenure to better educate alumnae about career opportunities and graduate training.
In 1975, Jill Ker Conway was named by Time as a Woman of the Year.[11]
The Road from Coorain
[edit]
Ker Conway started writing her first memoir after leaving Smith College, during her period at MIT. The Road from Coorain was published in 1989 (ISBN 0-394-57456-7) and details her early life, from Coorain in Australia to Harvard in the United States.
The book begins with her early childhood at the remote sheep station Coorain near Mossgiel, New South Wales. Ker Conway writes about her teenage years in Sydney and especially her education at the University of Sydney, where university studies were open to women but the culture was focused heavily on the men. She describes her intellectual development and later her feelings when she realizes that there is a bias against women; based upon her sex, she is denied a traineeship at the Australian foreign service.
In 2001, Chapman Pictures produced a television film, The Road from Coorain, featuring Katherine Slattery as the grown-up Jill and Juliet Stevenson as her mother.
Awards and honors
[edit]
1960 Jill Ker Conway was a 1960 Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar in History from the University of Sydney to Harvard University.
1975 In the first year of her presidency at Smith College, Conway was named a "woman of the year", one of a small group of notable women selected for that award by Time magazine.[12]
1989 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, The Road from Coorain
Ker Conway was appointed a Companion (AC) in the General Division of the Order of Australia on 10 June 2013 for her eminent service to the community, particularly women, as an author, academic and through leadership roles with corporations, foundations, universities and philanthropic groups.[13] On 12 June, she was removed as a 'Companion' and invested as an 'Honorary Companion' of the Order of Australia, because she no longer held Australian citizenship.[14]
On July 10, 2013, she received a 2012 National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.[15]
Legacy
[edit]
In 2017 the John and Jill Ker Conway residence for veterans was opened in Washington DC.[16]
Selected bibliography
[edit]
Books
[edit]
Conway, Jill (1977). Modern Feminism: An Intellectual History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Conway, Jill; Kealey, Linda; Schulte, Janet E. (1982). The Female Experience in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America: A Guide to the History of American Women. New York: Garland Pub. ISBN 9780691005997.
Conway, Jill (1987). Utopian Dream or Dystopian Nightmare?: Nineteenth-Century Feminist Ideas about Equality. Worcester, Massachusetts: American Antiquarian Society. ISBN 9780912296890.
Conway, Jill; Scott, Joan W.; Bourque, Susan C. (1989). Learning about Women: Gender, Politics and Power. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 9780472063987.
Conway, Jill (1989). The Road from Coorain (1st ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf Distributed by Random House. ISBN 9780749303600.
Reprinted as: Conway, Jill (1992). The Road from Coorain (2nd ed.). London: Minerva. ISBN 9780749398941.
Conway, Jill (1992). Written by Herself: An Anthology. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679736332.
Conway, Jill; Bourque, Susan C. (1995). The Politics of Women's Education: Perspectives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 9780472083282.
Conway, Jill (1995). True North: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679744610.
Conway, Jill (1992). Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women. An Anthology. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679736332.
Conway, Jill (1992). Written by Herself: Women's Memoirs From Britain, Africa, Asia and the United States, volume 2: an anthology. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679751090.
Conway, Jill (1998). When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 9780679766452.
Conway, Jill (1999). In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679781530.
Conway, Jill; Kennan, Elizabeth; Munnings, Clare (2001). Overnight Float. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 9780142000113.
Conway, Jill; Marx, Leo; Keniston, Kenneth (1999). Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 9781558492219.
Conway, Jill (2001). A Woman's Education. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 9780679744627.
Conway, Jill (Author); Millis, Lokken (Illustrator) (2006). Felipe the Flamingo. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing. ISBN 9781555915476.
Chapters in books
[edit]
Conway, Jill (1998), "Points of departure", in Zinsser, William (ed.), Inventing the truth: the art and craft of memoir, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 41–60, ISBN 9780395901502
Conway, Jill (2001), "Foreword", in Freeman, Sue J.M.; Bourque, Susan C.; Shelton, Christine M. (eds.), Women on power: leadership redefined, Boston: Northeastern University Press, ISBN 9781555534783
Journal articles
[edit]
Ker, Jill (1960). "Merchants and merinos". Royal Australian Historical Society Journal. 46 (4). Royal Australian Historical Society: 206–233.
Conway, Jill (Winter 1971–1972). "Women reformers and American culture, 1870-1930". Journal of Social History. 5 (2): 164–177. doi:10.1353/jsh/5.2.164. Pdf.[dead link]
References
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Crossing Borders: Women Writing Their Lives, lectures March-April
|
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URI writers-in-residence to give classroom, public talks
KINGSTON, R.I. –February 9, 2011—In honor of Women’s History Month, the University of Rhode Island will host four prominent memoirists during March and April. They will discuss their lives and work with students in classrooms across the University campus and the public. All public presentations are free […]
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en
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https://www.uri.edu/news/2011/02/crossing-borders-women-writing-their-lives-lectures-march-april/
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URI writers-in-residence to give classroom, public talks
KINGSTON, R.I. –February 9, 2011—In honor of Women’s History Month, the University of Rhode Island will host four prominent memoirists during March and April. They will discuss their lives and work with students in classrooms across the University campus and the public. All public presentations are free and will be held from 4:45 to 6:30 p.m. in Lippitt Hall, Room 402, 5 Lippitt Road, Kingston Campus.
The authors’ visits complement an honors class called “Crossing Borders: Women Writing Their Lives” being taught this semester by Jody Lisberger, director of Women’s Studies at URI and faculty member in the brief residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University.
“These writer-scholars have each written several prize-winning works that speak to the importance of bridging histories and peoples of the world,” said Lisberger who arranged the series. “Shared language and story telling are major entry points into the knowledge, empathy, and sympathy that generate world peace. Each of these writers will inspire the audience to read, write, talk, and communicate about issues vital to human life and history.”
The writers bring a global prospective. Jill Ker Conway, the first women president of Smith College, author of The Road from Coorain, will discuss growing up in Australia and facing cultural expectations there; Elaine Orr, author of Gods of Noonday, is a white Nigerian. She will talk about growing up during the Biafran War and also dealing with a kidney transplant; Nancy McCabe, author of Meeting Sophie and Crossing the Blue Willow Bridge: A Journey to My Daughter’s Birthplace in China will speak about adopting a daughter from China and returning to that country with her daughter; Beth Taylor, author of The Plain Language of Love and Loss, will discuss the effects of the Vietnam War on her family, the suicide of her 14-year-old brother in the midst of the war culture, and the influence of growing up Quaker.
The Rhode Island Council of the Humanities, the URI Women’s Studies Program, the College of Arts & Sciences, the College of Human Science and Services, the Honors Program, and the Departments of Anthropology/Sociology, Communication Studies, History, and Psychology sponsor the series. Here’s the schedule with more details:
March 8 International Women’s Day
4:45 to 6:30 p.m.
Lippitt Hall, Room 402
5 Lippitt Road, Kingston Campus.
Jill Ker Conway, best known for her autobiography The Road From Coorain, is a prolific, world-renown historian and writer. Born in Australia, educated at University of Sidney and Harvard, she was the first woman president of Smith College. She has taught in many places, and has received 38 honorary degrees and awards from North American and Australian colleges, universities and women’s organizations. Time magazine named her “Woman of the Year” in 1975.
March 15
4:45 to 6:30 p.m.
Lippitt Hall, Room 402,
5 Lippitt Road, Kingston Campus.
Elaine Orr, author of Gods of Noonday, is a white Nigerian, raised by a medical missionary family during the Biafran War. Her memoir explores issues of race, class, religion, war, and what it means to see (or not see) war through the eyes of a child. A professor of English at North Carolina State University, Orr weaves her story in an unusual way with the experience of a kidney transplant and the kinds of life and death issues that arose. Her recent essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared in prominent journals. Her memoir was a BookSense selection and chosen by MaximsNews as the 2003 best book of creative nonfiction.
March 29
4:45 to 6:30 p.m.
Lippitt Hall, Room 402
5 Lippitt Road, Kingston Campus.
Nancy McCabe, author of Meeting Sophie and Crossing the Blue Willow Bridge: A Journey to My Daughter’s Birthplace in China, has a forthcoming memoir. She has won a Pushcart Prize for memoir and received several Pushcart nominations. Her work been listed twice in the notable section of Best American Essays and won two awards from Prairie Schooner. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek and prominent journals. She directed the Arkansas Writers in the Schools program for two years and worked as a writer in the schools in South Carolina and Missouri. She directs the writing program for the Bradford campus of the University of Pittsburgh.
April 12
4:45 to 6:30 p.m.
Lippitt Hall, Room 402
5 Lippitt Road, Kingston Campus.
Beth Taylor is author of the memoir, The Plain Language of Love and Loss, about a Quaker family in 1960s Pennsylvania, an idyllic childhood in rural Bucks County, the suicide of a teenage brother, and the effects of the Vietnam War on three generations of the Taylor family and her own lifetime of searching, love, loss, and faith. Taylor co-directs the nonfiction writing program in the Department of English at Brown University where she teaches creative nonfiction—literary journalism, historical narrative, memoir, and radio nonfiction.
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https://www.reviewatlas.com/story/news/education/2010/09/09/best-selling-author-conway-to/44973482007/
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Best-selling author Conway to deliver MC’s Thompson Lecture
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2010-09-09T00:00:00
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MONMOUTH — Best-selling author Jill Ker Conway will deliver the 2010 Samuel M. Thompson Lecture on Sept. 15 at Monmouth College.
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en
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Daily Review Atlas
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https://www.reviewatlas.com/story/news/education/2010/09/09/best-selling-author-conway-to/44973482007/
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MONMOUTH — Best-selling author Jill Ker Conway will deliver the 2010 Samuel M. Thompson Lecture on Sept. 15 at Monmouth College.
Titled “Thinking About Women,” the free lecture will be presented at 7 p.m. in the Kasch Performance Hall of the college’s Dahl Chapel and Auditorium.
A familiar name on the Monmouth campus, Conway’s highly-acclaimed 1989 memoir, “The Road from Coorain,” has been the common reading assignment for the past four years in “Introduction to Liberal Arts,” a required course for Monmouth’s first-year students. The autobiography tells of her early life growing up in Australia in the remote township of Hillston, New South Wales.
In an interview with The New York Times, Conway said that she writes “to communicate to people very directly about the authenticity of women’s motivation for work, about how a person strives to find some creative expression. The moral of my mother’s life was that while she had challenging work, she was indomitable and when she didn’t, she fell apart. It’s very much the vogue to talk about women as developing their moral consciousness through a connectedness to mother, but I think that’s misleading. ‘The Road from Coorain’ is deliberately a story of separation – of independence and breaking away.”
The second installment of her memoirs, “True North,” chronicled her life from 1960, when she left Australia, to 1975, when she became the first woman president of Smith College, where she served for 10 years. “A Woman’s Education,” the third installment, followed in 2001.
In addition to writing autobiographies, Conway has also edited three anthologies of women’s autobiography from around the world, the most recent being “In Her Own Words.”
Conway, who holds 38 honorary degrees from North American and Australian colleges and universities, has served the past 25 years as a visiting scholar and professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s program in Science, Technology and Society. A graduate of the University of Sydney, she earned her Ph.D. in history at Harvard in 1969. There, she met her husband, the late John J. Conway, a Canadian war hero and professor of British history.
Her research as a historian has focused on the role of feminism in American history, resulting in such books as “The Female Experience in 18th- and 19th-Century America (1982)” and “Women Reformers and American Culture (1987).”
Samuel M. Thompson, for whom the lecture series is named, served in the philosophy department at Monmouth College for 46 years. After graduating from MC with a degree in English in 1924, he earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy from Princeton University. Most notable among his publications were two popular textbooks: “A Modern Philosophy of Religion” and “The Nature of Philosophy.” Thompson died in 1983.
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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/jill-ker-conway-dead-feminist-historian-first-president-smith-college-a8384466.html
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en
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Jill Ker Conway: trailblazing feminist historian and Smith College president
|
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2018-06-19T11:55:02+00:00
|
In her decade-long tenure, she presided over a transformation that brought the women’s movement to a school dominated for more than a century by a conservative male faculty
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/img/shortcut-icons/favicon.ico
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The Independent
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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/jill-ker-conway-dead-feminist-historian-first-president-smith-college-a8384466.html
|
Jill Ker Conway, who has died aged 83, chronicled the role of women in American society and then made history of her own, serving as the first female president of Smith College, the all-female Ivy League school in Northampton, Massachusetts. She was also one of the first female board members of several major corporations.
Australian-born Conway was just 40 when, in 1975, she became the first woman to lead Smith, America’s largest liberal arts institution for women. In her decade-long tenure, she presided over a transformation that brought the women’s movement to a school dominated for more than a century by conservative male faculty and administrators.
“Jill Ker Conway came to Smith at a time when gender roles were being transformed – and there were people here who tried to stand in her way,” Kathleen McCartney, Smith’s current president, said. “But at a time when the academy didn’t see women as college presidents – or as leaders at all – she demonstrated a leadership that was innovative and effective.”
While Conway paved the way for women such as Judith Rodin, who in 1993 was named the first female president of an Ivy League school (the University of Pennsylvania), women remain underrepresented at the highest levels of academia. A 2017 study by the American Council on Education found they hold just 30 per cent of the top jobs at colleges and universities.
In a wide-ranging career, Conway was an accomplished scholar who focused on early 20th century women’s reformers but later wrote a trio of critically acclaimed memoirs, beginning with The Road From Coorain (1989). New York Times reviewer Verlyn Klinkenborg described it as “the work of a writer who relentlessly tugs at the cultural fences around her until they collapse, leaving her solitary under an immense Australian sky, enlarged to herself at last”.
The book chronicled her upbringing on a 32,000-acre sheep station and, after finishing in the top of her class at the University of Sydney, the sexism she faced while trying to land a job with the Australian foreign service.
In reports on her application, diplomatic officials noted that she was “too good looking” and “too intellectually aggressive”, would “be married within a year” and “never do for diplomacy”.
She spent much of her career fighting to ensure that other women faced better treatment, whether in diplomacy, law, science or the arts.
Inspired by reformers such as Jane Addams, the famed Chicago social worker and suffrage advocate, Conway campaigned for equal pay as a professor at the University of Toronto, an effort that caught the attention of the Ontario legislature and resulted in reforms to the school’s tenure and pay policies.
After being appointed the university’s first female vice president, she drew the attention of progressive trustees at Smith, where men made up three-quarters of the faculty.
While a state anti-discrimination commission had recently found the school guilty of sex discrimination against two women who were denied tenure, its graduates included path-breaking feminists Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, whose push for gender equality helped unleash a social revolution.
“When Jill was appointed it absolutely electrified the campus,” Susan C Bourque, a former provost and dean of the faculty at Smith, said. “Here was this vibrant young woman, enormously attractive, who had just been appointed as the first woman in Smith’s history. You could just feel the new history that had come.”
Soon after her appointment, Conway was recognised by Time magazine as one of its “women of the year”, alongside figures such as first lady Betty Ford, housing and urban development secretary Carla Hills and tennis player Billie Jean King.
“America has not entirely repealed the Code of Hammurabi (woman as male property),” the magazine wrote in an accompanying cover story, “but enough US women have so deliberately taken possession of their lives that the event is spiritually equivalent to the discovery of a new continent.”
Conway, for her part, called for a focus on “research and the creation of new knowledge around matters of central importance in women’s lives”.
She spearheaded the creation of programmes in women’s studies, engineering and business, pressing for coursework that would prepare women for professional careers long considered the exclusive province of men.
She also developed policies aimed at promoting women to senior positions in the faculty, expanded athletic facilities and oversaw the creation of a scholarship programme for women pursuing a college education at non-traditional ages, often after having children.
Her efforts were driven by an explosive growth in the school’s endowment, which according to Smith nearly tripled to $222m (£167m) from $82m, but accompanied by fraught relations with the school’s old guard, a group that called itself “the Dinosaurs”, according to Bourque.
“The whole structure of higher education for women was built without any attempt to relate the educated person to the occupational structure of society outside,” Conway told the New York Times in 1975, effectively summarising her opposition. “That’s why the whole first generation of educated women,” the subject of her PhD dissertation, “had nervous collapses.”
“We have to change the perception of employers that women have certain kinds of skill,” she added, “and something must be done to make women realise what skills they have.”
Jill Kathryn Ker was born in Hillston, in the Australian state of New South Wales. She was 10 when her father drowned, working on the sheep farm’s water system amid a years-long drought, and she was soon brought to Sydney by her mother.
The duo maintained a difficult relationship, which became further strained after Conway’s eldest brother died in a car accident. “My mother’s devotion to me,” she wrote in The Road From Coorain, “the self-denial which had sent her to work to educate me properly, her frequent references to the fact that I was her consolation for her past tragedies, weighed on me like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross.”
In part, Conway said, she was driven to study history as a means of understanding her mother and the social forces that shaped her life. Initially, however, she responded to her rejection from the foreign service by doing “the most frivolous thing” – coming to London to study modelling.
She soon dropped out and moved to the US, where she received a doctorate in history from Harvard University in 1969.
It was there that she met John J Conway, a history professor for whom she worked as a teaching assistant. They married in 1962, and each decade took turns deciding where to live. The agreement enabled both their careers to thrive: it was his turn when they moved to Toronto, and was hers when they came to Smith College.
He died in 1995, and Conway leaves no immediate survivors.
After retiring from Smith in 1985, seeking to make a career change, Conway served on the boards of businesses including Merrill Lynch, Nike, Colgate-Palmolive and Lendlease, a Sydney-based company where she served as chairman. She was also a former chairman of the American Antiquarian Society.
At the same time, Conway began publishing her memoirs, which continued with True North (1994) and A Woman’s Education (2001); edited a two-volume anthology of autobiographical excerpts by women, Written By Herself; and wrote a history and analysis of the autobiographical form, When Memory Speaks (1998).
She also worked as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focusing on environmental issues, and was outspoken on the need for affordable housing for homeless veterans – an issue that came to her attention partly through her husband, who served in the Canadian infantry in the Second World War and whose right hand was blown off by a grenade. The John and Jill Ker Conway Residence, a Washington apartment building designed for homeless veterans, opened last year and is named in her honour.
In 2013, she was named a Companion of the Order of Australia, one of that country’s highest honours, and received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.
“Dr Conway has inspired generations of scholars,” the citation noted, “and her studies of exceptional and empowered women have revealed a common drive that unites women across the globe – to create, to lead and to excel.”
Jill Ker Conway, Australian-American author and scholar, born 9 October 1934, died 1 June 2018
© Washington Post
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Jill Ker Conway
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https://www.wikidata.org/static/favicon/wikidata.ico
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https://www.wikidata.org/static/favicon/wikidata.ico
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Australian-American author and academic
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/static/apple-touch/wikidata.png
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https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1395966
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For eminent service to the community, particularly women, as an author, academic and through leadership roles with corporations, foundations, universities and philanthropic groups. (English)
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https://www.smh.com.au/national/jill-ker-conway-author-historian-and-smith-college-president-20180612-p4zkwf.html
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Jill Ker Conway: author, historian and Smith College president
|
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2018-06-15T02:50:10+00:00
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Her love for her two worlds was reflected in her final wishes.
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en
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/favicons/smh.ico
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The Sydney Morning Herald
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https://www.smh.com.au/national/jill-ker-conway-author-historian-and-smith-college-president-20180612-p4zkwf.html
|
Jill Ker Conway 1934-2018
The opening pages of Road From Coorain paint some of the most lyrical, vivid and haunting descriptions of the Australian bush, portraying a visceral link to the land decades after the author had left it.
When it was published in 1989, Jill Ker Conway was already celebrated in North America for her ground-breaking achievements – a Vice President at the University of Toronto and then for a decade the first woman President of prestigious Smith College in Massachusetts, the alma mater of Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, even Nancy Reagan. After Smith, she had joined the boards of number of multi-nationals. But it was the best-selling Road From Coorain that reminded us that this remarkable woman was Australian and that she had an extraordinary story to tell.
Jill Ker was the only daughter and the third and youngest child of William Innes Ker and Evelyn A’darmes. Her father, survived gassing at Ypres and, in 1929, after a stint managing a prosperous property, drew a soldier’s settlement – Coorain (“windy place”), 30,000-hectares at Hillston, between Ivanhoe and Hay on the western plains of New South Wales. A vast plain – windy, desolate, vast and sparse - “under the weight of that enormous sky”.
Jill’s mother, the complex, tortured heroine of Coorain, had grown up comfortably in a Queensland country town and become the matron of a provincial hospital before her marriage. Jill shares her memories of long night drives home from distant parties “my father’s beautiful tenor voice singing the popular songs of the moment until the lights of our car shone on the windows of Coorain”. As her brothers went off to boarding school, Jill was taught by Blackfriars’ Correspondence School and rode about Coorain with her father, playing a part in mustering, dipping, crutching, and lambing.
1940 marked the beginning of a long drought and then, when she was 10, while trying to fix a broken pipe in one of the dams, William Ker drowned. His steely widow was undaunted – there were to be no tears. Evelyn was determined not to leave or lose Coorain and fought the elements, and all expectations. Eventually, she appointed a manager and moved to Sydney. Jill’s account of that journey by train to the city is memorably movingly magnificent.
After the cultural shock of State schools, Jill was enrolled at Abbotsleigh on Sydney’s North Shore. Modelled on the British system, students were hatted and gloved (and not just stockinged but blue-stockinged), taught the importance of deportment and enunciation – and, happily, much else. Abbotsleigh’s redoubtable headmistress, Miss Gordon Everett, inspired her “gels”, Jill among them.
She thrived, emerging not just a beauty but brilliant, and gained entry to Sydney University. She won the University Medal in History but the cathartic event was to be rejected by the Department of Foreign Affairs, while her fellow, male medallist and male runner-up were accepted. Stung by comments like “too aggressively intellectual”, “too good-looking”, and “will be married within a year”, she was taken to Britain by Evelyn and even enrolled at a fashion a modelling school.
On her return, she joined the staff of Sydney University, and found herself teaching American history. This turned her gaze across the Pacific and she was accepted as a PhD student at Harvard. But the catalyst was really her relationship with Evelyn, whose heroic resolve had been fractured by another tragedy – the death of Jill’s brother, Robert, in a car accident.
She had grown bitter and combative and her possessiveness of Jill grew oppressive – “her consolation for her past tragedies, weighed on me like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross”. And so in 1960, Jill set off for Harvard – and Australia lost a star. On this note of uncertainty, and promise, Road from Coorain ended.
Almost immediately, Conway found the world she was meant to find. And, as a teaching assistant, she met and fell in love with Canadian John Conway, a wildly popular professor of history, a bachelor and veteran of the Second World War who had lost his right hand in a charge against a German pillbox in the Italian campaign.
Conway described him as “a totally and spontaneously liberated man”. They also shared a Catholic faith (Jill having converted soon after arriving in the US). They married in 1962. After a sabbatical, they moved to Canada where John joined the staff of York University while Jill became a lecturer at the University of Toronto.
She rose, ineffably, to become Vice President of Internal Affairs, proving to be a deft and innovative administrator. As she recounts in True North (1994), the second volume of her memoirs, she combined being a campus wife with a campaigner for reform. “I would find myself making up shopping lists with one part of my mind (rib roast, new potatoes, Boston lettuce), while the other functioned apparently smoothly to deliver the lecture of the moment on the causes of the Civil War.” She also battled privately with John’s bouts of manic depression and the profound sadness of not being able to have children.
Jill and John had promised to accommodate each other’s careers, taking turns decade by decade. In 1975, Conway was appointed President of Smith, one of perhaps the most illustrious – certainly the largest – liberal arts institution for women; one of the Seven Sisters. She was famous. Time magazine named her one of its Women of the Year. Of course, she had to deal with Smith’s largely male Old Guard. They even dubbed themselves “the Dinosaurs”. But how thrilling her first convocation must have been – as 2200 young women chanted “Jill, Jill, Jill” drumming the floor as they cheered.
As the last of her memoirs, A Woman’s Education (2011) relates, she did not disappoint. She built a new sports centre and introduced rugby. Smith’s endowment nearly tripled in her time and she extended an existing programme for older women whose education had been interrupted or stalled.
The year 1985 heralded another change. Jill and John settled in Conway, Massachusetts, and while John retired, Jill joined the boards of Merrill Lynch, Nike, Colgate-Palmolive and Lendlease. Nike was a good example of her approach. Before agreeing to join, she insisted on a campaign to stimulate interest in sport for girls; she chaired a corporate social responsibility committee and regularly visited Nike plants and suppliers in Asia to check the working conditions of the mainly female workforce.
It was her fury at the fabricated portrayal of rural Australia, in the blockbusting Crocodile Dundee and Thorn Birds, especially its men (whom, unlike some other feminists, she never loathed) that led her to pen Road From Coorain. She also saw it, and its sequels, as a life lesson for other young women. Coorain was on the New York Times’ bestseller list for 54 weeks and entered the canon of Australian biography.
Conway returned home at least every two or three years and, with her slight soft East Coast burr, she was never reluctant to express – shrewdly but never shrilly; bluntly but never bitterly – her views on Australia. Expats were not allowed to be critical – chippy commentators called her “Mother Superior”. But she persevered.
John died in 1995. She remained in Massachusetts and kept extraordinarily active. Housing for homeless veterans became a passionate cause. Well into her 70s, she was still swimming, kayaking, a visiting professor at MIT, and on the Board of Nike.
She garnered some three dozen honorary degrees and received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. In 2013, she was named an honorary AC (honorary because she became a US citizen in 1982, determined to vote against Ronald Reagan). She saw her AC as “a source of joy, pride, and gratitude, a glorious coda to a long life with deep roots in this country” and rejoiced in the country of her childhood “the vast horizon, symbol of the smallness of mankind, is still there. So is the dazzling night sky, the scent of eucalyptus, the sound of galahs at sunset, and the ubiquitous dust, always a reminder of mortality.”
Her love for her two worlds was reflected in her final wishes. Half her ashes will rest in a small private cemetery with John’s, near their beloved house and garden in Massachusetts. The other half are to be scattered by the big tree beside the roadway into the house at Coorain.
Mark McGinness
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https://carolwallace.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/jill-ker-conway-the-road-from-coorain/
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Jill Ker Conway, “The Road from Coorain”
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2012-04-18T00:00:00
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Why do we read memoir anyway? Whose life is interesting enough to, well, deserve that I should spend several hours on it, instead of alphabetizing my spice cupboard or for that matter, writing my own memoir? Who is going to provide me with a vicarious experience that will be informative or stimulating or packed with emotional…
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en
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https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico
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Book Group of One
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https://carolwallace.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/jill-ker-conway-the-road-from-coorain/
|
Why do we read memoir anyway? Whose life is interesting enough to, well, deserve that I should spend several hours on it, instead of alphabetizing my spice cupboard or for that matter, writing my own memoir? Who is going to provide me with a vicarious experience that will be informative or stimulating or packed with emotional insight?
Actually, most of the memoirs I’ve read recently fall into that category, which suggests that either I’ve been very lucky in my selection or that I’m selling the entire genre too short. Because Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain is another worth-while read. First, and most notably, because Conway grew up in the Australian bush, and her description of that childhood is a loving and vivid portrait of a kind of life that probably doesn’t exist any more. (It bears comparison to the brilliant Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, a memoir of an African childhood.) I suspect that Conway’s descriptions of life on Coorain, a sheep station, will stick with me longer than the rest of the book simply for their exotic quality, and possibly because Conway describes them with the special clarity of childhood memories.
The rest of her story colors an intellectual coming-of-age tale (not dissimilar to Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase) with a specifically Australian palette. Conway gradually discovers that she is a true intellectual, but in the 1950s this makes her a very unusual woman. Further complication is supplied by Australia’s own identity crisis during the period. Conway is troubled by the colonial spirit of her country, and by its persistence in measuring itself against Great Britain. Having spent her early childhood in an environment that was specifically, uniquely Australian, she deplores an intellectual culture that takes its values and principles from that island nation on the other side of the globe. She compares the Australian origin myth to the American:
Why was my mind full of images of exhausted, marginal people, or outlaws like Ned Kelly, rather than triumphant frontier figures like Daniel Boone or Buffalo Bill? I knew that somehow it had to do with our relationship to nature, and with the way in which the first settlers’ encounter with this environment had formed the inner landscape of the mind, the unspoken, unanalyzed relationship to the order of creation which governs our psyches at the deepest level. Australians saw that relationship as cruel and harsh…”
This is just not material — not a past, not provocative writing about a past — that I could find anywhere besides the memoir of a thoughtful observer and writer who had an unusual experience to relate. Possibly a good definition of what makes the genre worth reading?
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https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/10/conway-jill-ker/
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Conway, Jill Ker – Postcolonial Studies
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2014-06-10T00:00:00
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https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/10/conway-jill-ker/
|
Biography
Jill Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia in 1934. She resided in the Australian outback until the death of her father in 1945. At that time, Conway, her mother, and two brothers moved to Sydney, an industrious seaport city. Conway received most of her education in the neighboring private schools and university. She graduated from the University of Sydney in 1958, after having dropped out for some time due to financial and emotional reasons. In 1960 she moved to the United States and received her PhD from Harvard University in 1969. Conway taught at the University of Toronto from 1964 to 1975, serving as Vice President from 1973 to 1975. She became the first woman president of Smith College in Massachusetts in 1975. Following Conway’s ten-year administration, she has received sixteen honorary doctorates from numerous other colleges and universities. Her success and personal definition are shaped by her childhood experiences and are detailed in her autobiography, The Road from Coorain. She is currently a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 she was designated a Women’s History Month honoree by the National Women’s History Project.
The Road from Coorain
The Road from Coorain is an account of Conway’s journey from the rural Australian outback to the urban metropolis in Australia and then to the United States. Conway describes growing up in a house, named “Coorain”(which is an aboriginal word for “windy place”), with her mother, father, and two older brothers. The family endures several hardships, including the death of her father and one of her brothers. A devastating five-year drought causes the family’s business to fail and forces the remaining members of her family to relocate to Sydney. This misfortune shapes Conway’s character and development because she learns to overcome that adversity.
Conway’s autobiography describes her intellectual development and her realization of the ways in which society suppresses women (see Gender and Nation). For instance, Conway describes her experience in applying for a prestigious trainee-ship with the Department of External Affairs (the equivalent of foreign service) while she is at the University of Sydney; she is denied a position because of her gender. She states, “I could scarcely believe that my refusal was because I was a woman” (191). In addition to gender bias, Conway addresses the irrelevance of the education the British provided during their postcolonial rule of Australia. After she visits Britain, she realizes the true beauty of the Australian landscape and credits it with being a crucial factor in defining who she is. However, she admits that the British-imposed educational system in Australia ultimately fails her when she states, “I had come to an intellectual dead end in Australia”(233). For this reason, and to escape her mother’s attempt to thwart her ambition, Conway decides to pursue her graduate studies at Harvard University in the United States.
Jill Ker Conway stated in an interview for The New York Times, that her purpose in writing is “to communicate to people very directly about the authenticity of women’s motivation for work, about how a person strives to find some creative expression. The moral of my mother’s life was that while she had challenging work, she was indomitable and when she didn’t, she fell apart. It’s very much the vogue to talk about women as developing their moral consciousness through a connectedness to mother, but I think that’s misleading. My book is deliberately a story of separation- of independence and breaking away.”
British Influence in Australia
One of the issues that elicits strong emotions in Conway is the British influence in Australia. She is considered a postcolonial writer, which raises other issues concerning the term “postcolonial.” Richard Lever and James Wieland discuss the role of post-colonialism in Australian literature in their bibliography, Postcolonial Literatures in English: “The term ‘post-colonial’–in practice often used synonymously with ‘New Literatures in English’ and ‘Third World Literatures’–emerged in the late seventies as a counter to the hegemonic and universalizing implications of the traditional categories ‘Dominion’ and ‘Commonwealth’ literature, which implicitly privilege the British imperial ‘Center’ and grant authority status to its literary and cultural traditions. Post-colonialism acknowledges, indeed insists upon, the fact that literatures of the nations and territories affected by British imperialism remain engaged with British traditions” (ix).
In Her Own Words
Jill Conway chose the autobiographical format because autobiographies provide the ability to hear “the voice” of the author. In her anthology Written by Herself, Conway states: “Autobiographies by women excite particular interest today, because three important trends in late-twentieth-century culture intersect to heighten the resonance of this form of narrative. The rise of democracy has enlarged the focus of interest in the lives of other people-from monarch, great general, and political leader to the ordinary person -someone like ourselves. And, as feminists have insisted that battles for power, authenticity, moral stature, and survival occur as fiercely within the domestic as in the public arena of life, what was once seen as placidly domestic now offers the reader a world charged with great issues.”
Selected Additional Works by Jill Ker Conway
— A Woman’s Education. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2001.
—“Forward.” Women on Power: Leadership Redefined. Ed. Sue J.M. Freeman, Susan C. Bourque and Christine M. Shelton. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001.
––Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment. Ed. Jill Ker Conway, Kenneth Keniston and Leo Marx. Boston: University of Massachusetts, 1999.
–– Conway, Jill Ker, Clare Munnings and Elizabeth Topham Kennan. Overnight Float. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.
––In Her Own Words: Women’s Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. New York: Vintage, 1999.
–– When Memory Speaks. New York: Vintage, 1998.
–– Modern Feminism: An Intellectual History. New York: Knopf, 1997.
—. Written by Herself, Volumes I and II. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. An anthology of the ever-changing statuses of women throughout history. It provides a firsthand account by women from different cultures and time periods (1800-present).
—. True North: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1994. A continuation of The Road from Coorain, this sequel traces Conway’s journey from Harvard, to her marriage, to her assumption of the presidency of Smith College in 1975.
—. The Politics of Women’s Education. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993. An international collection of works by women, addressing the changes that have occurred in women’s education in many countries throughout the world. The collection deals with issues women face and how they react to them.
—. Learning About Women. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1989. A collection of works by several different writers that provide an analysis of the shifting status of women in various parts of the world.
—. The First Generation of American Women Graduates. New York: Garland Publishing, 1987. Conway’s published thesis that she presented to the Harvard Department of History to receive her doctorate in American History.
—. Utopian Dream or Dystopian Nightmare? Nineteenth Century Feminist Ideas About Equality. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1987.
—. The Female Experience in 18th and 19th Century America: A Guide to the History of American Women. New York: Garland Publishing, 1982.
—. Women Reformers and American Culture: 1870-1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971-2.
—. ”Merchants and Merinos.” Journal and Proceedings (Royal Australian Historical Society), vol 46, part 4, 1960, pp 206-223.
—. Modern Feminism: An Intellectual History. New York: Knopf , 1977.
Selected Bibliography
Conway, Jill. The Road from Coorain. New York: Knopf. 1989.
—. Learning About Women. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. 1989.
Heron, Kim. “Importance of Work for Women.” The New York Times Book Review. May 7, 1989. 3.
Klinkenborg, Verlyn. “The Call of the Wind and the Kookaburra.” The New York Times Book Review. May 7, 1989. 3.
Lever, Richard, James Wieland, and Scott Findlay. Post Colonial Literatures in English. New York: G.K. Hall & Co. 1996.
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https://app.thestorygraph.com/book_reviews/d703ea6d-fe7a-466c-8a0e-f691ae2796b1
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Reviews - The Road from Coorain
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http://www.thedangergarden.com/2016/05/the-road-from-coorain-book-recomendation.html
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danger garden: The Road from Coorain, a book recomendation
|
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Unfortunately I don't manage to read many books these days, but when I do they're usually garden related. When we left for Los Angeles last ...
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https://www.vaia.com/en-us/explanations/english-literature/american-literature/jill-ker-conway/
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Jill Ker Conway: Books, Biography & Death
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Jill Ker Conway: ✓ Biography ✓ Books ✓ Quotes ✓ Family ✓ Memoirs ✓ Cause of Death ✓ Literature ✓ Vaia Original
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https://www.vaia.com/en-us/explanations/english-literature/american-literature/jill-ker-conway/
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Jill Ker Conway: Biography
Jill Ker Conway was born Jill Ker on October 9, 1934, in New South Wales, Australia. She grew up in the Australian Outback with her family—her parents and two brothers. The family owned a large expanse of land they called Coorain.
Coorain is an Aboriginal (Native Australian) word that means "windy place." Ker Conway used this name in the title of the book The Road from Coorain (1989).
Because of their remote location, the Ker family was isolated from other families. Jill Ker Conway was educated at home using educational materials sent to them by mail. In her childhood, Ker helped tend sheep in Coorain.
Sadly, the farm was hit hard by drought. In an attempt to improve the farm's water system, Ker's father tragically drowned. Though her mother initially wanted to stay on the farm, she eventually took the children to Sydney. There, Jill Ker Conway attended public school for the first time. She had difficulty fitting in and was bullied by her peers. Thankfully, she soon switched to a private school called Abbotsleigh, where she flourished.
After graduating from Abbotsleigh, Ker Conway attended the University of Sydney. She studied both English and History, receiving her bachelor's in 1958.
Jill Ker Conway: Family and Career
After receiving her bachelor's degree, Ker Conway spent two years traveling. In 1960, she moved to the US, where she attended Harvard University. While studying history there, Ker Conway met professor John Conway; they fell in love and then married in 1962. In 1969 Jill Ker Conway earned her Ph.D. from Harvard.
Before even finishing her Ph.D., Jill Ker Conway had taken a teaching position at the University of Toronto. She worked there in the history department from 1964-1975. During this time, she helped develop a course of study focused on women's history, which would spread across North America.
From 1975-1985, Jill Ker Conway served as the president of the all-women's Smith College—the first woman ever to hold that position. During her time as the college's president, Ker Conway wrote nonfiction books and articles about feminism and women's history. Modern Feminism: An Intellectual History (1977) was the first of these works. She also started programs to support non-traditional students and those on welfare- and expanded the college's curriculum to include engineering, women's studies, and comparative literature.
In 1975, the first year that Ker Conway served as the president of Smith College, Time magazine named her woman of the year. This honored her work to further the accessibility of higher education to more women and the effort she put in to help develop a curriculum for Women's Studies.
After leaving her position at Smith College, Jill Ker Conway held a variety of other jobs, including serving on several corporate boards as well as teaching as visiting professor at MIT. It was during her time at MIT that Jill Ker Conway wrote and published her first memoir, The Road from Coorain (1989). It covers her life from her time living on her family's Australian sheep farm all the way through her studies at Harvard, and it remains her most famous book. Ker Conway later continued her memoirs with True North (1995) and A Woman's Education (2001).
The National Women's History Project made Jill Ker Conway a Women's History Month Honoree in 2004.
Jill Ker Conway: Cause of Death
Nearing the end of her life, Jill Ker Conway was the board chair of a nonprofit organization. The nonprofit was based in New York City and worked to address homelessness. On June 1, 2018, Jill Ker Conway died at home in Boston, Massachusetts. She was 83 years old. Ker Conway is remembered as a beloved feminist writer and Smith College president.
Jill Ker Conway: Books
Jill Ker Conway's most well-known books are her memoirs, The Road from Coorain (1989), True North (1995), and A Woman's Education (2001). In addition to these books, though, Ker Conway has written many other works of nonfiction—mostly focused on feminist issues—as well as a children's book and scholarly articles.
Nonfiction Books
Jill Ker Conway's most well-known works are her nonfiction books. These include memoirs as well as women's history books.
Modern Feminism: An Intellectual History (1977)
Modern Feminism: An Intellectual History was author Jill Ker Conway's first published book. It addresses feminist topics through history—a common theme in many of her works.
The Road from Coorain
The Road from Coorain is Jill Ker Conway's first and most famous memoir. It begins during her childhood working on her family's sheep farm in a remote part of Australia. The book follows her through her early education and bachelor's degree at the University of Sydney, discussing the bias against women that she faced along the way.
True North: A Memoir
Ker Conway's second memoir, True North, picks up where The Road from Coorain left off. It covers her move to North America and her relationship with John Conway. As with The Road from Coorain, it incorporates feminist themes that were important throughout Ker Conway's life.
Other nonfiction books by Jill Ker Conway include Utopian Dream or Dystopian Nightmare?: Nineteenth-Century Feminist Ideas about Equality (1987), Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women (1992), Written by Herself: Women's Memoirs From Britain, Africa, Asia and the United States, Volume 2 (1992), When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (1998), In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States (1999), and A Woman's Education.
Other Works
In addition to her nonfiction books, Jill Ker Conway wrote a children's book called Felipe the Flamingo. She has also written a few scholarly journal articles. These include "Merchants and Merinos" (1960), which was published in the 1960 issue of Royal Australian Historical Society Journal in 1960, and "Women Reformers and American Culture, 1870-1930," which was published in the winter 1971-1972 issue of Journal of Social History.
Jill Ker Conway: Quotes
Men and women were treated very differently as Jill Ker Conway was growing up. This quote from The Road from Coorain describes an important moment of reflection in her childhood when she began to really think about women's issues.
Above all I needed to be made to think about what it meant that I was a woman, instead of acting unreflectingly as though I were a man, bound to live out the script of a man's life." (The Road from Coorain, ch 8)
The following quote from True North relays Ker Conway's thoughts on the different kinds of friendships that she had throughout her life. While some friendships exist only while certain circumstances are maintained, she found others that lasted longer because they were based on more than circumstance. Ker Conway made a few big moves in her life which informed her observations of friendship.
Some friendships in life sustain themselves only at a particular life stage, products of some mutual developmental problem to be resolved together, or of some external circumstance, like being housed in the same dormitory in boarding school. Others grow out of a deeper spiritual and philosophical affinity, which continues throughout life." (True North, ch 8)
The quote below from The Road from Coorain is about Ker Conway's mother. Jill Ker Conway explains that because of limitations on and expectations of women at the time, her mother was changed from a strong and rebellious person into a settled, sedated version of herself. This observation would further fuel Ker Conway's focus on feminism.
I would place beside her in my mind's eye the young competent woman, proud, courageous, and generous, I'd known as a child. I was living with a tragic deterioration brought about because there was now no creative expression for this woman's talents. [...] No one had directly willed her decline. It was the outcome of many impersonal forces, which had combined to emphasize her vulnerabilities. The medical fashion of the day decreed that troubled middle-aged women be given tranquilizers and sedatives. She, once a rebel, had acquiesced in settling down to live the life of an affluent woman." (The Road from Coorain, ch 8)
Jill Ker Conway - Key takeaways
Jill Ker Conway was born on October 9, 1934, in New South Wales, Australia.
Ker Conway is most famous for her memoirs The Road from Coorain (1989), True North (1995), and A Woman's Education (2001).
In addition to her memoirs, Ker Conway has written several nonfiction works focused on feminism and women's history.
Jill Ker Conway also worked as a professor, the first woman president of Smith College, and on the board of various corporations.
Ker Conway died at her home in 2018 at the age of 83.
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https://robbyrobinsjourney.wordpress.com/2016/02/14/landscape-and-identity/
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Landscape and identity
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2016-02-14T00:00:00
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It’s been late in coming, but 2016 is finally giving us a real, honest-to-goodness cold snap, even if it’s already the middle of February and it’s only going to last for three days. I look out the window at the sunshine glistening off the pristine snow and marvel at its beauty. When I go outside…
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Robby Robin's Journey
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https://robbyrobinsjourney.wordpress.com/2016/02/14/landscape-and-identity/
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It’s been late in coming, but 2016 is finally giving us a real, honest-to-goodness cold snap, even if it’s already the middle of February and it’s only going to last for three days. I look out the window at the sunshine glistening off the pristine snow and marvel at its beauty. When I go outside and breathe in the cold and seriously crisp air, I feel invigorated. There is drama in living in the cold. I love it.
Of course, I also love spring, summer, and fall. I couldn’t imagine living where I couldn’t experience all 4 seasons. Needless to say, that’s largely because that’s what I’m used to. That’s my world.
I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to travel all over the world. I know from personal experience that there are landscapes of remarkable beauty, grandeur, and indeed awe to be found everywhere, and also of enormous diversity. I love visiting, admiring, and absorbing what is compelling about different landscapes. But these other landscapes are not my world.
Without thinking about it too much – or at all – the landscape in which we grow up plays a role in defining who we are, just as do language and culture, your friends and family, and your personal experiences. Landscape is part of what gives us our identity. It helps define our sense of place.
I happen to have always lived in places of similar landscapes: New England, Eastern Canada, and England. New England comes by its name honestly (as does Nova Scotia, or New Scotland). Four seasons. When it’s not winter it’s green, not brown. Its mountains for the most part would be considered hills by people who live in truly mountainous parts of the world; they’re very old and more worn down, hence lower and more rounded than the majestic Rockies, Alps, and Andes (not to mention the Himalayas). These are gentle landscapes. Verdant landscapes. Dotted with lakes, rivers, and coastlines. And unless you are on a hilltop or at the edge of a large body of water, your vista is likely to be impeded by hills, stands of trees, and meandering roads.
It hit me when we were driving across the Prairies of Canada some years ago how different it would have been to have grown up in open spaces. Driving across the Prairies, or the corn fields and wheat fields – and deserts – of the U.S., the roads run straight and they run forever. One drives along under huge skies, through endless fields of grain. Flat fields of grain. The scale of the farming is an order of magnitude greater than farming in the east, maybe several orders of magnitude! Individual farm houses are separated from each other by miles and miles. The first time I drove through the Prairies, I remember thinking that I now knew where the expression “The Big Sky” came from. You just can’t see that much sky in the east; it’s impossible. And then I thought about the sense of disconnect I’d always read about between western Canada and the east – meaning Ottawa (aka the federal government) and Toronto (aka the center of big business). It dawned on me for the first time that, regardless of whether the interests of westerners really were well represented or not, the disconnect just by the influence of landscape would be huge. How could people who were raised and live under the huge Prairie sky, worrying about issues that are in large measure landscape related, believe that easterners (i.e., the federal government) understand their needs.
The role of landscape in defining who we are particularly hit me after visiting Pond Inlet in northern Baffin Island this past summer. I have been trying to put my thoughts down on paper about Inuit issues since that visit, but the complexity of their issues continue to challenge me. However, there is no doubt in my mind that, as brutally challenging as their traditional life as hunters on the ice and tundra was, their landscape has played a defining role in every aspect of their culture and spirituality over the millennia. It would be impossible to imagine someone who was raised in the Canadian Arctic, regardless of privation, not missing the cold, the frozen sea, and the mesmerizing open vistas. It is their world and it is a large part of who they are.
The first time I was ever given pause to consider landscape as part of identity was when I read a book my cousin Ellie insisted I had to read. In fact, she took me to the bookstore when I was visiting and bought it for me. It was The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway. Jill Ker Conway is a remarkable woman who was brought up on a sheep farming station in the outback of Australia (the epitome of remoteness) and, after many twists and turns that are well worth reading, ended up as Smith College’s first woman president.
When Jill Ker Conway made her way from Australia to England for the first time, her reaction to the English countryside made me sit up and take notice. As someone whose first landscape was one of vastness and dryness, and also as someone whose British-based education in Australia extolled British literature and the English countryside as the standard against which all else is measured, her reaction was not positive. She found the English countryside, contrary to what she had been taught, to be small and confining; she realized that the vastness of the Australian had its own beauty that was every bit as worthy. And it had played an important part in forming who she was. The reason this epiphany of Jill Ker Conway took me by surprise was because, of course, the English countryside is not very different from what I’ve always known. It took a drive across the Prairies for me to have my own eureka moment.
Morale of the story: For those of you who are currently experiencing this rare 2016 cold snap, embrace it. It’s part of your identity!
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When I review these relationships they seem so odd. I have always been here on this side and the other…
Biography A Guyanese of Amerindian, African, European, and possibly Asian descent (Harris 1999: 237), Wilson Harris was born in New…
Biography Novelist, poet, and critic Yasmine Gooneratne, a graduate of Bishop’s College, went on to graduate from the University of…
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Jill Ker Conway
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2015-12-03T15:51:07-08:00
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Posts about Jill Ker Conway written by GretchenJoanna
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Gladsome Lights
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https://gretchenjoanna.com/tag/jill-ker-conway/
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When in 1930 Jill Ker Conway’s father began homesteading a “block” of 18,000 acres in New South Wales, Australia, the change in lifestyle was jarring for his wife.
When my father left in the morning to work on the fences, or on one of the three bores [wells] that watered the sheep and cattle, my mother heard no human voice save the two children. There was no contact with another human being and the silence was so profound it pressed upon the eardrums. My father, being a westerner, born into that profound peace and silence, felt the need for it like an addiction to a powerful drug. Here, pressed into the earth by the weight of that enormous sky, there is real peace. To those who know it, the annihilation of the self, subsumed into the vast emptiness of nature, is akin to a religious experience. We children grew up to know it and seek it as our father before us. What was social and sensory deprivation for the stranger was the earth and sky that made us what we were. For my mother, the emptiness was disorienting, and the loneliness and silence a daily torment of existential dread.
from The Road to Coorain
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I have just begun reading a book of memoirs that Pearl gave me last week. I share this snippet not because of any metaphorical application but just for its worthiness.
On the plains, the horizon is always with us and there is no retreating from it. Its blankness travels with our every step and waits for us at every point of the compass. Because we have very few reference points on the spare earth, we seem to creep over it, one tiny point of consciousness between the empty earth and the overarching sky.
–Jill Ker Conway in The Road from Coorain
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Points of Departure
from Inventing the TruthThe motivations for writing The Road from Coorain were very complex. I'll start with the most frivolous and proceed to the most profound.
The most frivolous one was that after about the five-hundredth time some American or Canadian told me how much they loved the movie Crocodile Dundee I couldn't stand it any more, because that film is the most vulgar projection of an Australian male myth, packaged deliberately to appeal to American stereotypes. It has almost nothing to do with what life in the Australian outback is like. I grew up as a child with all those rootless, itinerant males, whose lives were mostly tragic and whose inability to connect to other people made them not the type of heroic natural man that Crocodile Dundee is presented as, but very pathetic figures. I was also tired to death of the obsessive re-creation of the male myth that we see traditionally in Australian movies, whether it's Breaker Morant or Gallipoli or The Man from Snowy River--all of them about unattached males. Women are presented as a good lay on the way to the war, or something like that; they have no real existence. So I wanted to write a story about the Australian outback that has a female heroine--my mother--and a female narrative voice.
The second motivation is more complex. I used to write a great deal when I was young, before I got a Ph.D. As an undergraduate in Australia I loved to write. I published a number of books and articles, including a book for children. Later, at Harvard, working on my doctorate made me have difficulty writing. As an academic you internalize the critical voice of your supervisor and your fellow students and you lose access to spontaneous narrative. You begin to write for other historians and less and less from your own experience. Then I became a university administrator, first as vice president of the University of Toronto and then as president of Smith College. In that kind of position you write endless reams of memoranda to the board of trustees and goodness knows what other official-dom, and in all your communications there's always the legal department looking over your shoulder and fussing about language. You begin to write like a bureaucrat.
When I took the job at Smith I promised myself that I would only be a college president for ten years, because then I would be fifty and it would be time to get back to the writing I wanted to do. In the course of being a college president I started talking to other audiences--to alumni, or corporation executives, or testifying before congres-sional committees--so the range of people I was talking to and the audience I thought about became much broader. Still, when I sat down to write again after I left Smith, I just couldn't get away from that wretched bureaucratic prose. Once you've got the voice of authority and caution, it's very hard to get away from it. So I thought, "I'm going to have to write something that's really close to the bone and see if I can rediscover my own style."
The other motivations were much larger and ongoing in my life. I was interested in seeing if I could come up with a life plot that wasn't a romance, because the archetypal life plot for women in Western society is the bourgeois romance. It's about family and erotic life, and it doesn't concern itself at all with motivations that I think are very important for women, like work and intellectual life and political commitrnents. But I didn't want to write an odyssey--to just take over the archetypal male plot and create a conquering heroine. I was looking for a way to narrate a life story of a woman that would pay due respect to her attachments to men and to family but would be about something else entirely. I wanted to convey my sense of my education, of my liberation through access to education, and of the variety of steps by which I arrived at taking charge of my own life. Philosophically, you only have to perform one free act to be a free person. Granting all the ways in which we're shaped by society, nevertheless one free choice changes the outcome.
So I deliberately ended the The Road from Coorain with my departure from Australia, because that leaves the end totally open. Afterward people kept writing to me and saying, "I want to know what happened next." I could have ended the book two years later in the United States, when I married the man to whom I've been married for thirty-three years, and then everybody would have said, "Oh, so that's how it ended!" But it's very deliberately not a romance, and it's not an odyssey. I think of it as a quest narrative. That's appropriate for any life stage, because the modern consciousness, which separates some private es-sence that we think we have from the roles we play, leaves a thoughtful person with a quest to put all those lives together and see what they have added up to.
I also wanted--another motivation--to tell the story of my separation from my family, because when I became president of Smith and had of fice hours every Monday, at which anybody could come in and see me--the grounds-keeper or someone complaining that the basketball coach only played her two minutes last week--I found that the most recurring visits were from juniors and seniors who were overwhelmed by a sense of obligation to their families. They didn't feel entitled to a private destiny, and they were terribly conflicted about their sense of their true vocation and their duty to their family. Of course young men also have those feelings, but they have access to far more narratives about how one overcomes those crippling obligations. So I thought: Since this seems to be a univer-sal problem and is unchanged for all ten generations of students I talked to at Smith, it's probably a very important theme.
Traditionally there has only been one female autobiography for every eight written by a male. And the romantic plot has so dominated the way women write their narra-tives that, to the extent that these women's books exist at all, they obscure how the woman chose to make her life. Jane Addams, my great heroine, who spent nine years founding Hull House, the great serclement house in Chicago, says in her autobiography that it would be hard to say when the idea of founding Hull House came into her mind, but it was probably when she was taken--just as a passive passenger--by a philanthropic worker to see the poor scrambling for food in the East End of London. I know from reading her diaries and letters that she bugged that woman to take her to the East End of London; she made it happen. But she never assumes responsibility.
Once I picked up that theme in her language I began to pay attention to it in other life narratives of women. By contrast, among males the sense of being the agent of one's destiny is much stronger, often to a comical level. Somebody like Lee Iacocca seems to believe that he per-sonally rescued the Chrysler Corporation. The government's bailout had nothing to do with it; the rescue came about through his agency. In writing The Road from Coorain I thought it was important to relate the story of a young woman taking charge of her life in an unromantic way, in which it's perfectly clear that she arrives at a moment of choice. Telling that story seems to have fulfilled a big need for readers of the book.
Still another motivation that's very complex, but very important to me, is that we need a more inclusive rhetoric for feminism today. The different wings of the movement have become so politicized over issues like abortion and pornography, or over competing versions of feminist the ory or literary criticism or social analysis, that feminists have become almost like the historians of my era as an academic. They're writing for a very small audience about very fine points. That rhetoric doesn't speak emotionally to a larger audience. Feminism can never succeed as a majority movement unless it can persuade a lot of men to become feminists. It can never succeed if it continues to proclaim the separate female utopia that's part of so much female-written science fiction today. We have to live in the world with men, and we have to convince them that it's morally right and just to treat women as equals. We need a rhetoric that also speaks to men. In retrospect, I suppose it was good training for me to talk to all those congressional committees when I was a college president.
Finally, I'm very much opposed to the current senti-mental school of female psychology, which argues that women never separate from their families of birth because they bond with their same-sex parent and never develop boundaries that separate them from the primal mother. Proponents of this school of thought argue that women are always lodged in networks of female relationships and are therefore morally better than men, who possess an isolated, individualized psyche. I think that's wrong for a great variety of reasons. Our culture encourages men to talk about separating and encourages women to suppress the experience. I see men lodged in networks of support-ing relationships everywhere I go. They don't come home and say, "I never could have gotten through the day at the office without Tom or Bill," but in fact they have many ways in which they display affection or support for each other--a hug or a pat on the shoulder. Women don't get to watch them doing that, so they're not aware of it.
So I wanted to write a story about separation--as honest an account as I could give of that process. My new memoir, True North, pursues that motif of separation. It's my personal testament in opposition to the sentimental school of thought about women. The view of women as always lodged in family networks is very attractive to the political right because it provides a good reason for keep-ing women from establishing a strong independent identity of their own. It also suggests that they won't form political bonds or aspire to life in the so-called "public sphere."
Both my brother and I have extraordinarily vivid visual memories. When we try to remember an event or an oc-casion, we start with where the chairs were in the room and what time of day it was and what the background noises were, and we re-create it. As a grader of papers I'm death on plagiarists because I can see the page where I once read that text. I have the artist's ability to see some-thing, but I have no ability to translate it into a repre-sentation except through words. I've also been helped in determining the shape of my narrative by the larger social concerns that I've just described. And as a college admin-istrator I have been studied at different stages of my career by psychologists who want to understand women leaders who are unusual in their generation--what experiences made me an activist and a leader. I can't tell you how many questionnaires I've filled out. Doing that naturally makes you reflect about what were important experiences in your life.
That in turn raises the question, when you actually write your memoir, of what to put in and what to leave out. As I said, I knew I had to get back to the personal style I had as a girl--that only exploring deeply-felt inner experience was going to do it for me. The danger is that in telling your life story you'll hurt some people's feelings. I couldn't have written The Road from Coorain while my mother was living. She would have struck me dead--not literally, but.... As far as others were concerned, except where I concealed someone's identity I showed my manuscript to the people I was writing about and let them say whether it was appropriate or not, or whether they minded. I've done the same thing with True North; I sent the pertinent pages to everybody in the book. I think it's an invasion of privacy not to. If you're going to see yourself in print you deserve a chance to correct anything that may be wrong.
Obviously the person who would be most concerned in The Road from Coorain was my brother. I sent him the first four chapters and said, "I won't publish this if you find it too painful." He called me up at four o'clock in the morn-ing, because he had just finished reading it in Australia, and he said, "It's wonderful. Keep going. I had forgotten so much." The places of childhood are always etched on the memory with great power and clarity. I had been thinking about The Road from Coorain for a long time; it was already written in my head. (Expatriates always think about their life up to the point of departure.) It also helped that as an undergraduate in Australia I had been interested sad, that I wanted not to shortchange her in any way. Today people ask me how I learned to manage my time so efficiently. I learned it by observing my mother when I was young. Although she had three children, she taught us school, eventually did all the cooking and cleaning at the sheep station, had a huge garden that fed us and many other people, and still had four hours a day free to read. She just never wasted a second. So as a child I had as a mother this wonderful, competent, loving, nurturing woman who was a tower of strength and creativity. Nothing fazed her; she was courageous to an extreme degree.
But first she lost my father and then she lost her eldest son, both in tragic accidents--in my father's case, a possible suicide. The loss of those paired male figures took root in her psyche, and as an older woman she became terribly dependent on her two remaining children and also on alcohol and tranquilizers, which, over an extended period, begin to affect the brain. She became subject to all kinds of paranoid delusions and turned into a punishing, angry, negative, and destructive person. The dramatic tension for me as a writer involved portraying this strong woman as seen through the eyes of the child who finally has to separate from her or lose her own life.
An outsider might put much of the blame for her tragic life on the hostile environment of the sheep station. But I didn't want to write that story, which is the Australian archetype. It comes out of the British colonial experience, which represents life in Australia as a battle with harsh elements. Of course that's a British imperial perspective; aboriginals don't experience Australia that way. It's a very bountiful land if you know how to live in it, and very beau-tiful. So I tried hard to evoke its beauty and the sense of the plenitude of nature when the seasons smile. True, the continent has these recurring periods of intense drought, but the natural vegetation is perfectly adapted to that. What created the disaster in my family history was not the land and the environment, but the introduction by white settlers of sharp-hoofed animals, which destroy and de-grade the environment.
So the land is meant to be a character in The Road from Coorain, and it continues to be a character in Trlle North, which is about my coming to North America. Today I work at M.I.T. in the Program on Science, Technology and Society, where a group of us are studying ways in which the humanities can contribute to an awareness and a thoughtful understanding of environmental issues. Much environmental thought nowadays is semifascist and authoritarian, going back to the fascist idea of people being rooted in blood in the soil and needing to relate in a very possessive way to a specific natural environment. A great deal of environmental writing has this cast, particularly in Russia; the myth of Mother Russia has always been a source of authoritarian political ideas. Ecofeminism is also raising a supposed female myth involving female-ruled prehistorical societies in which nature was the object of worship and which also--from what records we have--were highly authoritarian.
I'm interested in how one can look at the narrative treatment of nature to analyze and understand the politi-cal assumptions behind it. E. M. Forster's A Passage to I'ndia, for instance, has a totally imperialist view of the Indian landscape--the Malabar caves. From reading the book you'd never know what the Indian history of those caves was, or what the Indian culture was. You can read American narratives about wildfires, which take those fires to be some terrible wickedness or catastrophe in nature, whereas burning is how many natural woods replenish themselves. So in my writing I try to make the natural environment a character--an instructive one, but not a sentimental one. In our work at M.I.T. I think it's important for us to understand how these arid, very delicate environments like Australia are misrepresented in European-style art and literature; almost every European as-sumption about climate and nature is wrong. But I'm not someone who wants to preserve unspoiled nature. It doesn't exist. Nature is a cultural construct, and we have to understand that it's a category that we must be critical of, just as we would be critical in analyzing any other category of thought. I'm not eager to return us to the wooden plow or Stone Age culture. Technology is a creation of the hu-man intellect that we need to manage and understand.
When I first set out to write my memoir about growing up in Australia, I found that my memory was of all the painful things. But in the process of telling that story I rediscovered so much that was beautiful about my childhood. My brother had the same experience; he said my book reminded him of happy experiences that had been overwhelmed by later tragedy. Often there is a human tendency to obliterate happiness--to live in one's painful memories. But for me, going through my life gave me back the good things I had forgotten, and I've captured them for good. It gave me back my happy mother.
The book has also been helpful to other people. I can tell from my mail that it strikes a universal theme for women readers of all ages. It resonates for them because it's the story of a woman who takes charge of her life. I've also had an extensive correspondence with male readers of all ages. Many of them are the sons of single mothers, and they felt the same overwhelming sense of obligation to an all-provident female figure that I felt in relation to my mother. That correspondence has alerted me to a developmental concern for males that I hadn't been aware of. The mother-daughter relationship is traditionally sentimentalized but it's a trap, for sons as well as daughters--a trap because few people think honestly about the dimen-sions of misused maternal power. But the older men who write to me say that dealing honestly with exploitation by mothers is not an exclusively female problem. I've also had a great many letters from expatriates--the book made them feel at peace with having left--and many letters from Latin American readers, especially in the Argentine and Brazil. The way of life in the Australian out-back is comparable to life on the pampas.
All of us live with a life history in our mind, and very few of us subject it to critical analysis. But we are storytelling creatures. So it's very important to examine your own story and make sure that the plot is the one you really want. When I give talks as a historian about the domi-nance of the romantic plot in women's telling of their life histories, I'm amused to see women investment bankers and corporate lawyers giving a wry smile, as if to say, "It's true--that's how I do see my life." As a young person it's important to scrutinize the plot you've internalized and find out whether it accurately represents what you want to be, because ue tend to act out those life plots unless we think about them. I'm impatient with the postmodern effort to obfuscate the validity of narrative. We are time-bound creatures. We experience life along a time continuum; things happen sequentially in our lives, and we need to understand the causation. But we never really do un-derstand it until we sit down and try to tell the story.
So I would say to young people: First, if you approach writing about your life honestly, you'll find a style of writing that you will never otherwise discover. And second, that process can take parents or other figures who seem larger than life and reduce them to people in your story. I recently visited an experimental inner-city elementary school in a slum area of Miami that had been devastated by the hurricane. I was struck by the fact that children eight or nine or ten years old, who had been having difficulty with English, were being asked to tell their story as though it was a television series. Some of their stories were so lively and so funny that the children were laughing, although the events themselves were quite grim. And I thought, what a genius that teacher was, because television is a genre they all know about, and they were telling stories about their families in a way that must have been wonderfully helpful to them.
Until you put people in your narrative you haven't quite got them under control. The standard postmodern critique of narrative says that the narrator imposes by his or her own authority a certain meaning on the ebb and flow of events: that you change the story by where you begin it and end it, and that you impose your own meaning on events that's different from the meaning everybody else in the story puts on those events. In fact, Westerners have created a whole concept of the Asian or the African by the way we have told the history of their continents.
So there are many good things about the postmodern insistence that there is no meta-narrative. There is no fixed history, no history that is true. There are stories that we tell from our history, and we tell them well or we tell them ill. If you want to tell the history of the world in I492, we Westerners talk about Columbus, but if you're from the Arab world a very different series of events is important. In the West we have written our history as if the West were the center of the world and the events that happened elsewhere are peripheral. Still, there's no reason not to try to be more inclusive. In the case of The Road from Coorain, it's my story, and anybody who reads it may deconstruct it any way they like. It's also quite conceivable that if I were to write about my childhood as an old woman in my eighties I would tell it differently. What matters is how I thought about it at the time I wrote it.
The young women I got to know when I was at Smith were energetically interested in writing and understand-ing themselves and their current life experiences. Their problem was that most of the narratives they saw, which were on television, were structured around very brief twor three-minute incidents. These women had never become accustomed to writing reflective expository prose--looking at an event and reflecting on what it means--because events on television are so neatly packaged that you don't think about the alternatives. One of my motives for writing True North now, rather than ten years from now, say, is that many memoirs have recently been written by women of my generation in the feminist movement who talk about how exhausting their experience of the movement was. That wasn't my experience at all. My life has been enlarged and enriched and strengthened by the feminist struggle, and I have been the gainer in every respect. Much of the current writing in women's studies stresses the problems of bias that women experience. If I were a girl in college today, reading all this stuff would be a real downer. For me, fighting bias has been energizing, and on the whole I've enjoyed it. Getting in a good honest rage about injustice isn't bad for you.
I was also prompted to write True North, which is about my life in North America, by the reaction of Australians to The Road from Coorain. They think much more about expatriation than other readers do. But I've come to believe that the notion of expatriation is a nineteenth-century creation. It comes out of the obsession of the male citizens with the national soil and territory. Historically, nobody ever bothered about women being required to change countries; they were meant to be able to shift allegiance overnight through marriage. It's been interesting for me as a set of political reflections to think about what it means to move to another country and another culture and another climate and another continent. The theme of True North is my experience of intellectual life in North America and finding a life partner who is my emotional and moral compass point. It's about exploring the Northern Hemisphere. The book ends in I975, when I'm driving out of Toronto and around Lake Ontario to cross the border and go to Smith. Some readers have asked why I also didn't include my experiences as president of Smith in the book. I think you have to be at least twenty years away from what you write about to have the necessary detachment. Many mem-oirs or autobiographies get very cluttered in their later chapters because people don't know what was really involved. It takes more time to know what the shape of your life has been like.
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From the Outback to the Grail : THE ROAD FROM COORAIN <i> by Jill Ker Conway (Alfred A. Knopf: $18.95; 233 pp.; 0-394-57456-7) </i>
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[
"Janette Turner Hospital"
] |
1989-06-11T00:00:00
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In 1975, when Jill Ker Conway became the first female president of Smith College, I thought how amazing that an American women's college should take so long to do the obvious thing, and that it should then confer this "first" on an Australian.
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en
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/apple-touch-icon.png
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Los Angeles Times
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-06-11-bk-3336-story.html
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In 1975, when Jill Ker Conway became the first female president of Smith College, I thought how amazing that an American women’s college should take so long to do the obvious thing, and that it should then confer this “first” on an Australian.
At sundry dinner parties, I expatiated on the disproportionate presence of Australian women on the world stage: Germaine Greer, Joan Sutherland, Dr. Helen Caldicott (the outspoken organizer of anti-nuclear protest), Alison Cheek (the first “American” woman to be ordained in the Episcopal Church), and others. Why all this high flying? Because, I offered from personal experience, in Australia a high-achieving intellectual woman is automatically out on a limb. She has no place to go but out and up. She has to leave the country just to find a space for herself, and then she’s scrambling so hard to disprove her insignificance that suddenly, there she is at the top.
Conway’s fascinating autobiography fleshes out this life pattern. Vivid, poignant, witty, rich with anecdote and detail, compulsively readable, it delineates a life that is part adventure story, part trial by ordeal, part the academic version of “My Brilliant Career,” and part triumphant revision of the quest myth--with a female hero. Jill, youngest child of three, was told by her father who died when she was 11 years old: “Make something of yourself, Jill,” and she set out to find her own Grail.
It is an extraordinary story. Reared on Coorain, her parents’ 30,000-acre sheep station in western New South Wales, she was 7 before she saw another girl child. At 8, she was riding the boundaries and herding sheep and discussing Churchill and MacArthur and the international politics of the war with her parents. With all able-bodied men at the front, and her brothers at boarding school in Sydney, she was doing a man’s work at her father’s side. By 10, she was intimately aware of the harsh consequences of a four-year drought: dust storms, stock dying by the hundreds, the family plunging into debt, her adored and energetic father sliding into despair. The end of the war did not mean the end of the drought. In December, 1944, on a day of dust storms and 108-degree heat, her father’s body was found in an outlying water hole on the property.
Her mother was devastated but chose to battle on alone against the drought for months before delegating the struggle to a manager and leaving for Sydney. For 11-year-old Jill, reared in the profound emptiness and silence of the outback, Sydney might have been another planet.
School was culture shock, but the fledgling intellectual was finding her wings. She won a scholarship to Sydney University where she majored in Australian history and covered herself with academic glory and prizes. But there were to be more ordeals, among them the death of her beloved oldest brother in a car accident--a loss that triggered severe depression, dependency, and erratic behavior in the once-strong mother. Then there was the debacle of the planned career as a diplomat. Incredibly (though to this Australian reviewer, predictably), while accepting the male student with whom she shared top honors, the Department of External Affairs rejected Conway, Sydney University’s star history student. Too good looking, too feminine, too intellectually aggressive, the reports said.
Angry and depressed, Jill fled the country, but drifted: mothering her deteriorating mother, wandering around Europe, living in London, even modeling in Mayfair for several months (the body’s consolation to the rejected mind). But that mind could not be repressed for long. “Make something of yourself, Jill.”
She applied to Harvard Graduate School and was accepted. There followed a teaching position at the University of Toronto, where she eventually became vice president; the presidency at Smith for a 10-year term; and since 1985, a professorship at MIT.
In recounting this journey, Conway is lyrically passionate in her description of outback and drought, and intellectually acute in her analysis of Sydney intellectuals and their social and political mores. At times, however, her prose takes on the breathy gush of Society Pages of Sydney’s north shore private schools, of which she is a product. A fellow student was noted “for the melodiousness of her voice and her silvery peel of laughter”; students “wandered off for coffee to prolong the excitement created by the skillful lecture and its wonderful subject.” But this is a slight flaw in a wonderful book. The road from a sheep station in outback Australia could hardly have had more surprising twists and turns, nor led to a more illustrious Grail.
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https://indagare.com/destinations/oceania-pacific/australia/sydney/library
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en
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Archives
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Nonfiction
The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes, 1987 — The definitive chronicle of the country’s convict beginnings by one of the world’s most esteemed art critics, who grew up in Sydney.
In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson, 2000 — An irreverent overview of the country that is jam-packed with factual information and hilarious anecdotes.
The Road from Coorain: Recollections of a Harsh and Beautiful into Adulthood, Jill Ker Conway, 1992 — An incredible memoir about growing up in the outback, coming of age in Sydney of the 1950s and coming into her own as a historian and educator. Ker Conway ultimately became Smith College’s first female president.
The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin, 1987 — This brilliant meditation on why men wander and tell stories by one of the best travel writers of the 20th century illuminates much more than just the aboriginal culture.
Unreliable Memoirs, Clive James, 1981 — The prolific, award-winning Australian author’s acerbic memories of growing up in suburban Sydney.
Sydney, Jan Morris, 1992 — The author of numerous travel books, Morris gives a historical and social look at Australia’s largest city, founded in 1788 as a run-off for British convicts.
Thirty Days in Sydney, Peter Carey, 2001 — A slim and amusing volume by a native who muses on the modern metropolis.
Fiction
Bliss, Peter Carey, 1981 — A satiric and highly entertaining novel delves into a Sydney ad-exec’s spiritual crisis.
The Unknown Terrorist: A Novel, Richard Flanagan, 2007 — A page-turner about a Sydney pole-dancer whose one-night-stand puts her under suspicion for abetting a terrorist in the attempted bombing of Sydney’s Olympic stadium.
Lillian’s Story, Kate Grenville, 1986 — A poetic first novel that creates a fictional autobiography for Lil Sanger, a trouble Sydney homeless woman; the emotional survival story won the Austalian/Vogel award.
Carpentaria, Alexis Wright, 2006 — This critically acclaimed novel takes place in the fictional town of Desperance and sheds light on Aboriginal culture and the difficulties the indigenous tribes face, including interacting with local white officials.
Films
Muriel’s Wedding, P. J. Hogan, 1994 — Toni Collette stars as a homely, Abba-obsessed local girl in Porpoise Spit, Australia who finds love with the help of friend Rachel Griffiths in a feel-good comedy.
Strictly Ballroom, Baz Luhrman, 1992 — The writer/director’s breakthrough is a likeable musical comedy set in the world of ballroom dancing competitions.
Crocodile Dundee, 1986 — Classic 1980s outback adventure set in the Northern Territory.
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, 1994 —Quirky tale about three drag queens traveling from Sydney to Alice Springs in a bus.
Rabbit-Proof Fence, 2002 — Based on the true story of the so-called “Stolen Generation” of young Australian Aboriginal children who were taken from their families by the government and forcibly “integrated” into white culture.
Ned Kelly, Gregor Jordan, 2003 — Starring Heath Ledger, this film recounts the true story of Ned Kelly, a notorious Australian outlaw, and sheds a light on 19th century Australia.
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https://sureshotbooks.com/products/in-her-own-words-9780679781530
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en
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In Her Own Words
|
http://sureshotbooks.com/cdn/shop/products/img_b6384e7b-712d-40c7-a4a9-d8e3881a6bca.jpg?v=1649021778
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http://sureshotbooks.com/cdn/shop/products/img_b6384e7b-712d-40c7-a4a9-d8e3881a6bca.jpg?v=1649021778
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Jill Ker Conway, author of one of the most celebrated memoirs of recent decades, is also the premier anthologist of women's autobiographical writing. In Her Own Words is Conway's distillation of women's experience from the British Commonwealth world she came from, compared with major themes in women's lives in the Unit
|
en
|
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SureShot Books Publishing LLC
|
https://sureshotbooks.com/products/in-her-own-words-9780679781530
|
Jill Ker Conway, author of one of the most celebrated memoirs of recent decades, is also the premier anthologist of women's autobiographical writing. In Her Own Words is Conway's distillation of women's experience from the British Commonwealth world she came from, compared with major themes in women's lives in the United States, which is now her home. In this dazzling collection, we meet twelve remarkable women--from Shirley Chisholm, the West Indian-raised girl who became the first black woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress, to Janet Frame, the brilliant New Zealand writer who overcame involuntary treatment in a mental institution to write one of the archetypal analyses of the postcolonial experience. We learn how the world of politics and the private self intersect in the four offshoots of the old British world, and see how these women have made a difference--by their honesty, by the scale of their struggle for self-knowledge and autonomy, and by the power of their writing. Includes writing from: Patricia Adam-Smith Lillian Hellman
Rosemary Brown Dorothy Hewett
Kim Chernin Robin Hyde
Shirley Chisholm Dorothy Livesay
Lauris Edmond Sally Morgan
Janet Frame Gabrielle Roy
Author: Jill Ker Conway
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 09/02/1998
Pages: 624
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.78lbs
Size: 8.72h x 5.60w x 1.55d
ISBN13: 9780679781530
ISBN10: 0679781536
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Women
- Social Science | Women's Studies
|
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| 7
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https://www.utoronto.ca/news/jill-ker-conway-trail-blazing-historian-and-feminist-was-u-t-s-first-female-vice-president
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en
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Jill Ker Conway, trail-blazing historian and feminist, was U of T's first female vice-president
|
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Jill Ker Conway was a groundbreaking historian, feminist, and author who accomplished many of her “firsts” while at the University of Toronto in the 1960s and '70s. She helped establish U of T’s first history course focused on women, she was instrumental in the first major battle for pay equity for the university’s female faculty, and she was U of T’s first female vice-president.
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en
|
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|
University of Toronto
|
https://www.utoronto.ca/news/jill-ker-conway-trail-blazing-historian-and-feminist-was-u-t-s-first-female-vice-president
|
Jill Ker Conway was a groundbreaking historian, feminist, and author who accomplished many of her “firsts” while at the University of Toronto in the 1960s and '70s.
She helped establish U of T’s first history course focused on women, she was instrumental in the first major battle for pay equity for the university’s female faculty, and she was U of T’s first female vice-president.
Conway went on to become the first female president of Smith College in Massachusetts, and she wrote – in addition to her academic publications – a successful three-part autobiography. The first volume about her early life in Australia, The Road from Coorain, was a bestseller and was made into a movie.
Conway died on June 1 at her home in Boston, at the age of 83.
“She was a trailblazer,” says Nicholas Terpstra, a professor of history at U of T who is a past chair of the history department. When Conway arrived in the mid-1960s, “this was a very, very traditional kind of institution, and it needed people who could show a different way of doing things,” he says.
Her creation, along with colleague Natalie Zemon Davis, of the first U of T course on the history of women, was “absolutely a watershed moment” for the department, Terpstra says. Up to then, the women’s viewpoint had been essentially “written out of the [historical] canon.”
Conway and Davis planned an undergraduate course covering several hundred years of history to the present, and scoured rare book libraries for historical accounts written by women. “Every document had to show a woman speaking about her time,” Conway wrote in the second volume of her autobiography, True North. The idea was to present an alternative to the traditional historical perspective where women’s lives were “a simple addition to the male narrative,” she wrote.
The first session of the course, in the fall of 1971, was a major event on campus. It had to be moved to a larger lecture hall because 200 students showed up, double what was expected. The reading list took on a life of its own, and was widely circulated and used by many other academics as source material for courses across North America.
Linda Kealey, a former student of Conway’s who is now a professor emerita of history at the University of New Brunswick, says “everybody was pretty hyped up and excited” about the new course, which proved there was a treasure trove of material written by women. Kealey, who took the course in 1972, still has a copy of the syllabus.
As a mentor, Conway (pictured right in 1977) was “very warm and encouraging of young women in particular, but she also encouraged young men,” Kealey says. She prodded female students to take risks and step out of their comfort zones, an especially important role when there were so few women faculty.
Conway also became an advocate for pay equity at the university, after a successful confrontation with the history department over a delay in her own promotion to associate professor – long after male faculty with the same qualifications had received promotions and pay increases. She later convened a meeting of female faculty, and the group analyzed salary data to present clear evidence of discrimination to the university.
When she became U of T’s vice-president of internal affairs in 1973, Conway was able to put in place the changes she had worked toward as a faculty member. She implemented a pay equity program, and to make sure the issue was dealt with fairly she used a rigorous system that compared the pay of female faculty to male counterparts who had similar academic and publishing experience. Conway was also instrumental in the creation of the first official on-campus daycare.
In her autobiography, Conway describes the pressures she faced as the first female senior administrator, and the unrealistic expectations some groups had for her. She noted that she was a disappointment to some feminists because she didn’t support the creation of a separate Women’s Studies program – she felt it was better to encourage academic work focusing on women within each department.
In addition to the heavy workload in her daily job, Conway was in great demand as a speaker. “Each time I talked to a wildly enthusiastic group of women…I came to see that the mere symbol of an office in a formerly male hierarchy assumed a meaning which went way beyond my personal identity,” she wrote.
Her colleague and long-time friend Zemon Davis says Conway was driven by altruism. “Jill was always interested in making things better for other people.” She had an impact because she had “an authority that came from her poise and her sense of confident worth,” Zemon Davis says. “She was firmly spoken but soft spoken [and] made her voice heard in an effective way.”
In addition, Conway was a “tall, beautiful, gracious woman,” with a great sense of humour, Davis says. “I thought of her as a lady, in the best sense of the word.”
Jill Kathryn Ker was born on Oct. 9, 1934 in Hillston, New South Wales, in southeastern Australia and grew up on a remote sheep station run by her parents. She was home-schooled by her mother and worked on the ranch with her father, but he died when she was 10. She and her two brothers and mother then moved to Sydney. She earned a degree from the University of Sydney, then decided to go to graduate school in the United States after being turned down for a job in the Australian foreign service.
Conway worked towards a PhD at Harvard, where she lived with a group of ambitious and brilliant women. Her graduate adviser was a key influence, she said in a 1989 radio interview, when he told his students that the contribution of women to intellectual life was as important as men’s. “[He] handed out lists of women whose lives needed to be studied and whose intellectual histories need to be written.…That was just a new world for me.”
It was at Harvard that she met her future husband, Canadian historian John Conway, who was 18 years older. When he took at job at the nascent York University in Toronto in 1964, she moved with him and got a position at U of T, initially teaching American history.
After a decade at U of T, ending with her stint as vice-president, Conway accepted the post of president of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., one of the most renowned women’s liberal arts colleges in the United States. She had been recommended for the position by her old friend Zemon Davis, who was a Smith alumna. Conway was intrigued with the job, because much of her academic work had focused on the history of women’s education in the United States.
As the first female president of Smith, Conway (pictured left in 1992) initially had to battle the patriarchal views of older male faculty. She worked tirelessly to raise money and build new facilities, and defended the role of an all-women college at a time when many were merging with male or co-ed institutions. “Women needed their own intellectual turf….on which to stand as they observed the world,” she wrote in the final volume of her autobiography, A Woman’s Education.
Conway streamlined the admission of older female students, and encouraged programs to help poor working mothers to attend. At the same time, she was supporting her husband, who fought mental illness and was hospitalized several times for the treatment of severe depression.
Conway’s public profile was so strong that she was named one of Time magazine’s dozen “Women of the Year” in 1975. In 2013 she was presented with a National Humanities Medal by U.S. president Barack Obama.
After leaving Smith in 1985, Conway became a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focusing on environmental issues, and concentrated on writing books. She also served on a number of boards, some non-profit and some corporate, including Nike, Merrill Lynch and Colgate Palmolive. She was intent on ensuring these companies improved their corporate social responsibility, says Jim Williams, one of John Conway’s nephews who now lives in Halifax.
Conway was very supportive of members of the extended family and gave “wise counsel” when they needed personal advice, Williams says. “She was a person who was really oriented to problem-solving and helping wherever she could, to family members and the broader community,” he said. “She was masterful at making things happen.”
One issue that meant a lot to Conway and her husband – he had fought and been wounded in the Second World War – was the plight of homeless veterans. They supported the development of an apartment building in Washington, D.C., specifically for veterans. It opened in 2016 as the John and Jill Ker Conway Residence.
In writing her own autobiography, Conway strived to describe a complex woman’s experience, without sentimentality.
“I definitely wanted to create a counter-record to the soppy, sentimental notion of females,” she told the Globe and Mail in a 2002 interview. “I’m very much opposed to the school of psychology of women which argues that women don’t like taking risks, are not ambitious, are not interested in power, except for relational power.” She knew from her research, she said, that women are “huge risk takers, filled with ambition, [and] excited by danger.”
Conway’s husband John died in 1995. The couple did not have any children.
This fall an event to honour Jill Ker Conway will be held at U of T, and a memorial service will be held at Smith College.
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Jill Ker Conway. Writer: The Road from Coorain. Jill Ker Conway was born on 9 October 1934 in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia. She was a writer, known for The Road from Coorain (2002). She was married to John J. Conway and John Conway. She died on 1 June 2018 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
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Jill Ker Conway was born on 9 October 1934 in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia. She was a writer, known for The Road from Coorain (2002). She was married to John J. Conway and John Conway. She died on 1 June 2018 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
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True North: A Memoir
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Vintage, August 1995. Trade Paperback. Used - Very Good. Item #255047 ISBN: 0679744614 With all the openness to life, all the largeness of spirit, that made her girlhood memoir, The Road from Coorain, an acclaimed - and beloved - bestseller, Jill Ker Conway continues her story. She was twenty-five when we left her, driven by a hunger to know and to understand, boarding a plane that would
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Vintage, August 1995. Trade Paperback. Used - Very Good. Item #255047
ISBN: 0679744614
With all the openness to life, all the largeness of spirit, that made her girlhood memoir, The Road from Coorain, an acclaimed - and beloved - bestseller, Jill Ker Conway continues her story. She was twenty-five when we left her, driven by a hunger to know and to understand, boarding a plane that would carry her far from her Australian homeland. As True North begins she lands, appropriately enough, in a hurricane, in New York. And is soon at Harvard, a graduate student in history experiencing both exhilaration and culture shock; discovering among friends of many backgrounds an easier sociability than she has ever known; delighting in classes that seem charged with energy, and in the perception that ideas were being taken seriously - yet still feeling like an extraterrestrial on the American planet. We see her joining with five other women to form a household that becomes an "almost magical, " hilarious, and harmonious community - the community that functions as her family when she meets the Harvard professor and housemaster who will become her husband, John Conway, himself a historian, Canadian born and bred, decorated for heroism in World War II - the complex man whose mind and spirit complement her own. We see them marrying and learning to live together - during a year at Oxford, in Rome, and as they settle into the new world of Canadian university life - happy with each other, while coping, not always well, with her classically obsessive thesis writing, her as-yet-unresolved conflict with her mother, his periodic bouts of depression, and her realization that even though John's integrity, courage, and devotion to humanistic learning have become the compass point - the true north - bywhich she steers, there will be times when she has to navigate alone. We witness the moment of her spiritual arrival on this continent and her discovery of her warrior self - fighting for equity in her own career and for other women. This is how a most private woman found for hers.
Conway's The Road from Coorain presents a vivid memoir of coming of age in Australia. In 1960, however, she had reached the limits of that provincial--and irredeemably sexist--society and set off for America. True North--the testament of an extraordinary woman living in an extraordinary time--te lls the profound story of the challenges that confronted Conway, as she sought to establish her public self.
Used Book
Price: $6.00
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The acclaimed author of the best-selling The Road from Coorain and True North now gives us the third book in her remarkable continuing memoir—describing the pleasures, the challenges, and the constant surprises (good and bad) of her years as the first woman president of Smith College.
The story opens in 1973 as Conway, unbeknownst to her, is first “looked over” as a prospective candidate by members of the Smith community, and continues as she assesses her passions and possibilities and agrees to the new challenge of heading the college in 1975. The jolt of energy she gets from being surrounded by several thousand young women enables her to take on the difficulties that arise in dealing with the diverse Smith constituencies—from the self-appointed protectors of the great male tradition of humanistic learning to the equally determined young feminists insisting on change. We see Conway juggling the needs and concerns of faculty, students, parents, trustees, and alumnae, and re-defining and redesigning aspects of the college to create programs in line with the new realities of women’s lives. We sense the urgency of her efforts to shape an institution that will attract students of the 1990s and beyond.
Through it all we see Jill Ker Conway coping with her husband’s illness, and learning to protect and sustain her inner self. As the end of a decade at Smith approaches, we see her realizing that she has both had her education and made her contributions, and that it is time now for her to graduate.
"One of the leading educators of our time - Jill Ker Conway - had described the challenges and the benefits of a first rate university for women in contemporary society. Her path as President of Smith College gives us an insider's view not only of the institutional side but the personal demands and their burdens. It is a fascinating and important story."
--Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, U.S. Supreme Court
"Jill Ker Conway offers an elegant and highly readable narrative of both women's education and her own amidst the feminist revolution of the late twentieth century. This is a personal as well as a social and cultural history -- and a compelling story besides."
-- Drew Gilpin Faust, Dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and author of Mothers of Invention
"A WOMAN'S EDUCATION is another inspiring chapter in Jill Ker Conway's life. This time she recounts the struggle and triumphs as the first woman president of Smith College. It is a story of strengths and hope and success in a woman's education. Nothing came easy to this gallant woman."
-- Thomas Winship, former Editor of The Boston Globe
"In A WOMAN'S EDUCATION Jill Ker Conway continues her fiercely introspective and fearless study of her own life, public role and intellectual development. It is a compelling story of an active, ambitious and intellectually forceful woman who has shaped her own life. And along the way, she provides an invaluable and frank history of how a women's college met the challenges of the second wave of feminism under the direction of a thoroughly independent thinker who was determined to build a modern, feminist institution. As her successor, I was constantly aware of my debt to her, and found her own story of her years at Smith entirely fascinating and instructive."
-- Mary Maples Dunn, President Emerita, Smith College
"Jill Ker Conway continues the absorbing and beautifully crafted account of her life's journey with her experiences as president of Smith. As always, her autobiography is an excellent read for anyone who cares about interesting lives, thoughtfully described. This particular volume should appeal to anyone who has ever wondered what college and university presidents actually do, and why anyone would want such a job. Jill gives her own answers to these questions with candor, humor, and acute attentiveness to the multifaceted nature of the sometimes bizarre and apparently impenetrable office of the president."
-- Nannerl O. Keohane, President, Duke University
"Jill Conway gives the reader that rare glimpse of a whole person tacking historic events. Her language is clear and crisp, her observations astute, her understanding of history remarkable, even as she is making it, yet all this from a woman's point of view -- not only about success or failure, but the larger issues of living.... Ultimately, Jill Conway, like any great author, leaves us better off for our journey through A Woman's Education. Her deep respect for life, her careful, honest, open exploration of how we live our lives and her unrelenting belief in a set of values that have the power to take root in people and institutions makes us take stock of our own lives. She does this graciously, joyfully, and enjoyably."
-- F Baron Harvey III, CEO, The Enterprise Foundation
"A Woman's Education provides a rare insider's view of what it means and what it takes to be a college president, as well as a unique perspective on an institution many of us have come to know and love. It was the first thing I handed to Carol Christ, the moment after she was elected the new President of Smith College."
-- Shelly Lazarus, CEO, Oglesby & Mather, and Chair of the Smith College Trustees
Jill Ker Conway is the the first to have written of years as a college or university president. In this book, nonetheless, she has set a standard to which all in the future will have to conform. In diversly interesting English, with penetrating insight and memory, she has told of the problems and prospects of leading a much admired college. And of doing it very well. No one can think that they have a full understanding of women's rights, scholarly conflict, required personal commitment and true accomplishment who hasn't read these pages. And further, no one can know what enjoyment was missed. On education, not to say also personal biography, it is truly the book of the year.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"To be president of Smith from 1975 to 1985 required guts and resilience; Conway met the challenge. Her compelling account of that roller-coaster ride prompts amazement. There is much to marvel at here; my favorite gem is her portrayal of the aging male conservative faculty defending their cozy turf."
-- Carolyn Heilbrun, author of Writing a Woman's Life
"This masterful story interweaves lives with institutional history and modern times. The backdrop is a renowned woman's college that was fated to be hidebound by tradition until it captured a president whose past dictated her future and that of the college. Challenged by the opportunity, she led courageous innovations and, amazingly agile in neutralizing foes, and intellectually honest, she chose to act on what mattered most to the long-term viability of the college. In the process, she captured the imagination and support of a disparate gang -- students, trustees, faculties, and administrators. It is a poignant tale of personal and professional courage that should be read because it is all so human and so profound. Lessons are there for the young and the old because she dares to tell the truth."
-- Margaret F. Mahoney, MEM Associates, Inc.
"As a Smith alumna and a fellow laborer in the groves of women's colleges, I found Jill Ker Conway's book both absorbing and touching....Her educational vision and personal courage stood her, and eventually the institution she served so well, in very good stead. A Woman's Education is an engaging personal study of a complicated period in the women's movement and in the development of selective women's colleges."
-- Mary Patterson McPherson, The Andrew Mellon Foundation and President Emeritus, Bryn Mawr College
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Jill Kathryn Ker ConwayJill Kathryn Ker Conway (born 1934) was a historian interested in the role of women in American history. She became the first woman president of Smith College in 1975. Source for information on Jill Kathryn Ker Conway: Encyclopedia of World Biography dictionary.
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Jill Kathryn Ker Conway (born 1934) was a historian interested in the role of women in American history. She became the first woman president of Smith College in 1975.
Jill Kathryn Ker was born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia, a small town 75 miles from her parents' sheep station, on October 9, 1934. She earned her B.A. and a university medal at the University of Sydney in 1958 and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1969. Her unpublished but widely-cited dissertation, "The First Generation of American Women Graduates," an intellectual history of Jane Addams and other progressive women reformers, almost single-handedly rekindled scholarly interest in women's contributions to Progressive Era America.
While attending Harvard University Jill Ker met and married John Conway, a history professor in whose course she was a teaching assistant. She followed him to Toronto, where he became one of the founders of York University and she joined the faculty of the University of Toronto. There she lectured on American history while completing her dissertation. Jill Conway rose to the rank of associate professor in 1972. From 1973 to 1975 she served as the first woman vice president for internal affairs at the University of Toronto.
In the mid-1970s, Toronto, like other major universities, was struck with student rebellions, giving Conway an opportunity to demonstrate her cool and unflappable administrative style. In 1975 she was appointed the first woman president of Smith College, the largest privately-endowed college for women in the United States. For this achievement, Time magazine named her one of its 12 "Women of the Year." Conway's appointment heralded a change in leadership of the so-called Seven Sisters Colleges, and as a result of this breakthrough all of them became headed by women by the early 1980s.
Initially, Conway found herself at the helm of a prestigious but flagging educational institution. In the early 1970s, Smith, like the other Seven Sisters, suffered a decline in status as bright women flocked to the newly coeducational Ivy League universities. Conway helped to restore Smith's luster as the premier women's college in the United States. A superb fund-raiser, she increased the endowment from $82 million to $220 million. To accomplish this, Conway became a peripatetic president, criss-crossing the country to solicit alumnae, foundation, and corporate support. Her executive abilities were well recognized, as she served as director of IBM World Trade Americas/Far East Corporation, Merrill Lynch, and on the board of overseers of Harvard University. Despite a hectic administrative schedule Conway maintained her commitment to teaching and scholarship. She taught a course on the "Social and Intellectual Context of Feminist Ideologies in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century America." In 1982 she published The Female Experience in 18th and 19th Century America.
In the first portion of her presidency, Conway changed the college from a genteel institution which eschewed feminist ideals into a women's college that respected and reflected feminist values. Through a strong financial aid program, Smith for the first time admitted older, working women and welfare recipients as Ada Comstock scholars. Conway expanded the career development office and took pride in promoting the "old girl" network among alumnae. She endorsed the expansion of athletic facilities, enabling Smith to become the first women's college to join the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Conway articulated a concern that Smith tenure more women faculty, and she frequently publicized the plight of women scholars and the value of women's institutions in educational journals. While not in favor of a women's studies program at Smith per se, Conway did encourage the development of the Smith College Project on Women and Social Change funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Out of her presidential budget she helped launch The Society of Scholars Studying Women's Higher Educational History, a group of researchers studying women's intellectual history.
Some highly publicized conflicts erupted in the closing years of Conway's presidency. In 1983, following student and faculty protests, Conway had to inform the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, that she could not guarantee that Kirkpatrick would receive her honorary degree and be heard as the commencement speaker without incident. The ambassador declined the offer to speak and was given her degree by the Smith trustees in a private ceremony. When newly unionized food-service workers tried to organize Smith's Davis Student Center acrimony developed between the workers and the administration. The unionized workers claimed they were being unfairly treated by a "paternalistic and male dominated" management. The dispute was quietly settled.
While funding for privately endowed, small, liberal arts colleges diminished throughout the early 1980s, Conway's capable leadership allowed Smith College to survive and grow. In an era that some term "post-feminist," Conway's contributions to women's higher education and her sponsorship of separate women's institutions made her an important spokeswoman for contemporary feminism. By the end of her presidency Conway was perturbed by a new generation of women students, less overtly feminist but strongly career-oriented. According to her, this change in the attitudes of the Smith student body was "the only disappointment in a decade." She called for women students to retain an interest in service to society and not to embrace unthinkingly high-earning professions. In this she remained faithful to the ideals of the social feminists of the Progressive generation whose careers she so well illuminated in her pioneering research. Conway also served as a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In March of 1996, she succeeded to vice-chairman of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and in February of 1997, Conway was made a member on the Board of Trustees at Adelphi University in New York.
Further Reading
Jill Conway is listed in Canadian Who's Who (1984) and in Who's Who of American Women, 14th edition (1985-1986). Conway is discussed in "Women of the Year: Great Changes, New Chances, Touch Choices," Time (January 5, 1976); Elizabeth Stone, "What Can an All Women's College Do for Women," Ms (1979); and Hal Langur, "Jill Conway," Daily Hampshire Gazette (June 27, 1985).
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CONWAY, Jill KerCONWAY, Jill Ker. American (born Australia), b. 1934. Genres: Women's studies and issues, Administration/Management, Humanities. Source for information on Conway, Jill Ker: Writers Directory 2005 dictionary.
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https://www.npr.org/2018/06/14/619953256/remembering-jill-ker-conway-the-first-female-president-of-smith-college
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Remembering Jill Ker Conway, The First Female President Of Smith College
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2018-06-14T00:00:00
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The women's history scholar, who died June 1, grew up on a remote Australian sheep farm and later went on to write three memoirs, including True North. Conway spoke to Fresh Air in 1989, '94 and '98.
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https://www.npr.org/2018/06/14/619953256/remembering-jill-ker-conway-the-first-female-president-of-smith-college
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TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Today we're going to remember Jill Ker Conway, who influenced many women as a feminist, memoirist, women's history scholar and the first woman president of Smith College, one of the largest women's colleges in the world. She served in that position from 1975 to 85. Conaway died June 1 at the age of 83. We'll hear excerpts of my three interviews with her recorded between 1989 and 1998. We talked about establishing her career at a time when many doors were closed to women, how she became a feminist, how she married historian John Conway in spite of the fact she had always thought marriage would be the wrong choice for her and how she later dealt with his depression and then his death.
Our first interview was recorded in 1989 after the publication of her first memoir, which became a best-seller and a touchstone book for many women. Titled "The Road To Coorain" (ph), it covered her childhood growing up on a remote sheep farm, which her parents ran in the Australian outback where she was physically and intellectually cut off from the world. The book ends with her decision to leave Australia in 1960 when she was 25 to attend graduate school at Harvard, hoping to find more opportunities for women in the U.S. than she'd found in Australia.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
GROSS: So you grew up in a very isolated setting.
JILL KER CONWAY: Totally - our next-door neighbors were, oh, about 50 miles away on one side...
GROSS: Oh, boy.
CONWAY: ...And about 20 miles another and 10 or 12 in another direction.
GROSS: Your first schooling was through a correspondence course.
CONWAY: Yes, it was - my mother thought I could do two years in one, and she told the correspondence school that, but they thought there were two children on the place, so they sent the first lesson of the first grade and the first lesson of the second grade and continued in installments all the way through the year. It wasn't - it wasn't clear to me that it was work of a different degree of difficulty. So we didn't know until the end of the year.
GROSS: I love what you say about studying alone in isolation, that you were introduced to study as a leisure time activity. It sounds like you never really grew to dislike education in the way that so many children who go to schools do.
CONWAY: For me, it was sheer pleasure. I was doing hard, physical labor on the sheep station. And I worked at that four days a week, and on the fifth day, on Friday, I got to sit down and do my school. And it was such a treat because I had been given my own pot of tea, and Friday was a baking day, so there would be great smells of fresh-baked scones and cookies coming from the kitchen. And I felt totally indulged, and I've never felt about learning any other way.
GROSS: Were you sure that you would go to college?
CONWAY: It was very clear in my family because my mother was such a feminist that I would. And interestingly, the stereotypes of our gender worked in my favor in my family because it was expected that my brothers would probably not go to university and would - since our father was a rancher that they would take up life on the land, too. And that meant that they would begin that right after school.
GROSS: You went to the University of Sydney first, yes?
CONWAY: Yes, I did.
GROSS: And then you thought about what to do next. You decided you didn't want to go to school in England because you'd feel like a colonial there. You applied to Harvard and started living in the United States. Did you find that there were more opportunities for women?
CONWAY: Oh, goodness, yes. Well, I arrived at the Harvard graduate school. I lived in the graduate residence where there were several hundred other women all getting Ph.D.s and all enormously bright and interesting people drawn from all over the world. And I found the director of my graduate studies who told his students that the contribution of women to American intellectual life was as important as men's and handed out lists of women whose lives needed to be studied and whose intellectual histories needed to be written and so forth. And that was just a new world for me.
GROSS: What set you in the direction of being a college administrator, first a vice president at the University of Toronto, then the first woman president at Smith?
CONWAY: Well, I was born at the right time. I was - just finished my Ph.D. and beginning life as a professional historian just at the point when there was an enormous expansion of higher education in the United States and Canada. I went to Canada with my husband who was taking part in planning and building a new university in Toronto. And myself - I joined the history department the University of Toronto in the process.
I suddenly discovered one day that although I had joined the history department at the University of Toronto with a group of young men all trained in American doctoral programs like me, I was the only one who wasn't being promoted, and I found that I was also quite severely discriminated against in my salary. And so I just got in a rage, went and confronted the department chairman and the dean with this information, and they very quickly rectified the situation. But when I was finished, I realized that there were loads of other women faculty who were in much more jeopardy protesting such things than I. So I began organizing the women faculty, and before I knew it, I was in a leadership role that I just stumbled into. And very shortly thereafter, there was a change in the university administration and I sort of had to put up or shut up, and so I accepted a position as one of the university vice presidents. And so I sort of backed into it and then found out I really loved it.
GROSS: The interview with Jill Ker Conway that we just heard was recorded in 1989 after the publication of her first memoir, "The Road To Coorain." We're going to continue our remembrance of her with the interview we recorded in 1994 after the publication of her second memoir, "True North," about setting out for Harvard alone, leaving behind her suffocating family and a culture hostile to aspiring women. For the first time, she found friends she could talk to without censoring her words or emotions. And she found her niche as a scholar of women's history. To her surprise, she fell in love with and married the historian John Conway, even though she'd always thought that marriage was not for her.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
CONWAY: I was such an anomalous person in my native Australia, and I think it would have been very difficult for me to fit into a conventional Australian marriage. John Conway was already a professional scholar. He wasn't somebody who wanted a wife to make a comfortable domestic environment for him. He wanted a partner in sort of major intellectual tasks, and that was a relationship that I thought I could handle. I wasn't absolutely certain that I could ever settle into being the helping wife who's always typing her husband's manuscripts and managing somehow or another to create the right environment for somebody else to blossom in.
GROSS: Early on into your marriage, you realized that you both had a lot of mood swings. You had always had depressions, and you realized he had very serious depressions, too. And you write about during some of those depressions he'd become almost unrecognizable, quote, "as though a stranger had replaced my sensitive and loving husband with someone obsessed by demons of rage, tormented by suspicion." It must have been very unsettling, especially early on when you saw changes like that and wondered, you know, who he was becoming.
CONWAY: Well, you know, I had grown up with a neurotic family, and the thing that I think that gave me was the capacity to live through other people's moods and keep my own balance. I wouldn't recommend that as a good training for anyone, but it turned out to stand me in very good stead. And my husband was so open and direct about facing the problems he had to deal with very deep mood swings that when he came out of them, we would always be able to analyze what had happened. And I gradually learned that at those points, I just had to wait for him to reappear as his usual, positive and constructive self. But, you know, we all manage to live with somebody with acute physical ailments, and those problems of emotional swings are no different.
GROSS: He had shock treatments during one bout of depression. What were the effects of that?
CONWAY: Well, I think that is - as I say in the book, I think of electric shock therapy as the ultimate example of the engineering mentality and the sort of idea of the technological fix. It damages people's memory. And for someone who was a professional scholar, it had a devastating effect because a lifetime of learning was lost. He couldn't recall it.
GROSS: Did he lose that memory permanently?
CONWAY: Not permanently, but for a very substantial period of time.
GROSS: Like, years? Or...
CONWAY: Yes. Yes, indeed.
GROSS: We're listening to my 1994 interview with Jill Ker Conway, feminist, memoirist and the first woman president of Smith College. She died June 1. We'll hear more of that interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEORGE SHEARING'S "THINKING OF YOU")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. We're continuing our remembrance of Jill Ker Conway, a feminist, memoirist and the first woman to serve as president of Smith College. She died June 1. Let's get back to the interview I recorded with her in 1994 after the publication of her second memoir, "True North," about leaving Australia, where she grew up on a sheep ranch in the Outback, and moving to the U.S. to attend graduate school and launch her academic career. In 1964, she took a teaching position at the University of Toronto.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
GROSS: When you were at the University of Toronto, you became something of an activist. You started organizing women on campus around women's issues such as equal pay. You went in and basically demanded to know why you weren't being given a promotion.
CONWAY: Yes. That's right. You know, my experience fits exactly with the social science textbooks. Women are supposed to experience their first serious discrimination seven years after initial employment, and mine came in six and a half years. So I was right on schedule. And when I did call a meeting of women faculty at the university, I discovered that it wasn't just a question of discrimination in pay within rank, but very differential rates of promotion and access to research, support and so forth.
GROSS: Well, you went on to be appointed the first woman vice president at the University of Toronto, but after you got that position, you figured you were probably a disappointment to the feminist proponents of women's studies on campus. Why did you oppose women's studies programs?
CONWAY: Well, it's a basic difference in strategy and what one thinks will be an effective mechanism for changing institutions. I thought that the most important thing was to transform the program of instruction of conventional departments and schools. I mean, I wanted the law school to study the legal treatment of domestic violence, or the school of architecture to study transportation and how the way it's scheduled in a city affects how women can move around. You know, just when poor mothers need to collect their children from school is just when the bus schedule is at its least helpful and so forth. Or, I wanted the medical school to spend more time researching heart disease in women.
We didn't know about the frequency of breast cancer back in those days. And I thought those things were as important for the university to become committed to as creating a separate academic program which would study women's experience in a cross-disciplinary way. I believe that working in those professional schools might have more immediate impact on the lives of a great many women.
GROSS: One of the things that a lot of professional women have had to deal with is balancing being a mother and being a professional. You weren't able to have children. You had hoped to have children, but a medical problem prevented that. And I wonder how you coped with that at different stages of your life.
CONWAY: Well, I found it a most absolutely devastating experience at the time. But, you know, another part of growing up in life is learning that not everything is always going to work out the way you hoped it would and that one has to adjust and find the creative response to whatever constraints your experience in life. That was something I had to do about not having my own biological family. We simply acquired a surrogate family of many other young people who were not our biological children.
GROSS: Seems like so many things that happened to you in your life just led you to become more and more independent.
CONWAY: (Laughter). Well, I suppose that's one way of...
GROSS: Becoming independent, right?
CONWAY: (Laughter). Yes.
GROSS: (Laughter). I want to talk some more about how you planned a relationship of equality with your husband. I'm talking, for instance, about how you decided to divide up your money. I mean, you had an arrangement planned for that, at least early on in the marriage. You want to describe that?
CONWAY: Yes. You know, it's always interested me, so many families where there were young children, and a very highly educated wife would say to me, Janie can't afford to work. By the time we replaced her work in the house and bought the clothes that she'll need to have a professional life, she won't be earning any money. And I was always fascinated that it was assumed that the woman alone was responsible for replacing her domestic labor.
My husband and I made an agreement early in our married life that we would figure out what it cost us to run our household, including the domestic help, and then we would each contribute to that household budget proportionately to what we earned. So my husband was supporting far more of the cost of replacing my domestic labor than I was, and we each had our own disposable income after that to do whatever we wanted with.
GROSS: Now, what was the logic in your relationship of keeping your income separate, as opposed to just putting it in one big joint account?
CONWAY: We both felt very strongly that we should be able to plan anything that related to our professional lives, travel, even vacations, using our own resources. The fact that we were married and shared a common dwelling and a partnership in life didn't mean that we ceased to be individuals in other ways.
GROSS: Did that continue to work for you?
CONWAY: It always has.
GROSS: So you're still doing it that way?
CONWAY: Yes, indeed.
GROSS: Now, let me ask you this. When you had a best-seller and I imagine you made a, you know, fair amount of money, did you feel guilty keeping most of that in your account, not, you know, splitting it up or anything?
CONWAY: Not at all. I mean, it's always been part of our married life that what you earn outside what's required to maintain your joint household is yours.
GROSS: You know, something else that a lot of people find very intriguing, such as myself, is that you had this, like, 10-year plan...
CONWAY: (Laughter) Yes.
GROSS: ...With your husband. Explain how that works.
CONWAY: Well, we agreed very early on that every 10 years, the other person would get to say where you lived so that one person's career would always be primary, but we would take turns. We didn't want to have a commuting marriage, which was the other solution people tried to adopt. But we both really cherished the experience of living together and didn't like being parted, and so we solved the problem that way. And we have been married for a little more than 30 years now, and we're just coming up to the beginning of another 10-year period of mine. I'm thinking about what we're going to do.
GROSS: So does this mean you have to move?
CONWAY: No.
GROSS: I mean, can you just say, let's stay where we are this time?
CONWAY: If you're like what you're doing, you can stay where you are.
GROSS: Your husband's 18 years older, and I think that 18 years is a lot bigger a gap as you get older. And I'm wondering if that's been affecting the relationship at all or if that's something that's been weighing on you at all as you watch your husband get older.
CONWAY: If you live with somebody who's almost a generation older than you, it can work in two ways. That difference can be stressed, or it can be very easily bridged. My husband is chronologically 18 years older than I am, but in a lot of ways, he's psychologically a good deal younger. He's much more naive and, in many ways, much more open to experience and much more spontaneous so that, in fact, his chronological age is a lot more advanced than his psychological age. And I'm the reverse. So he's a very youthful 78-year-old, and I'm probably quite a mature 60-year-old. I can imagine that it would be very difficult living with someone whose energies were really terribly depleted and obviously declining so that one's life experience became very different. I think it's really very interesting to live very close to somebody who's having to struggle to come to terms with the issues of their own mortality and so forth - a valuable experience, which I'm glad to have had.
GROSS: You must worry about losing him.
CONWAY: Of course I do. Everybody shouldn't be worried about that every day of their life, though. I mean, we all live poised on the brink of eternity.
GROSS: Jill Ker Conway recorded in 1994 after the publication of her second memoir, "True North." The year after that interview was recorded, her husband, who was 18 years older than she was, died suddenly after suffering a stroke. Jill Ker Conway died June 1 at the age of 83. We'll continue our remembrance after a break. Also, our rock critic Ken Tucker will review the debut album by Lindsey Jordan, who's just one year out of high school. And Justin Chang will review the new sequel to the animated film "The Incredibles." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF RALPH TOWNER'S "GLORIA'S STEP")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. We're remembering feminist, memoirist and the first woman president of Smith College, Jill Ker Conway. She died June 1 at the age of 83. Let's get back to the interview we recorded in 1994 after the publication of her second memoir, "True North," about her life after leaving Australia, where she grew up on a sheep farm in the remote Outback, physically and intellectually cut off from the world. In 1960, at age 25, she moved to America to attend graduate school at Harvard. She wrote her thesis on women's memoirs and eventually wrote three memoirs of her own. It's a literary form she had strong opinions about.
(SOUNDITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
GROSS: I want to ask you about writing memoirs. You know, there's that whole idea that the writer is ultimately a traitor, that if you're writing personally, you're betraying the people who are closest to you because you're writing about them, too.
CONWAY: Yeah.
GROSS: And I'd love to know how far you feel comfortable going in your own memoirs when it comes to the lives of other people - your mother, who - you write about all the problems you've had and...
CONWAY: Well, I don't think my mother is diminished by depicting the tragedy of her life because I start out in "The Road From Coorain" showing people this absolutely wonderfully powerful, rich joyful, creative woman. And to chronicle her deterioration as a result of a society that had no place for an older woman and taught a widow to think of her life as over doesn't seem to me to diminish her, it just really emphasizes the tragedy of her life. And other people, people who are living, I always show what I've written about them. And if they don't like it or didn't, I would either leave it out or change it or find some other way to say what I wanted to say. In fact, nobody has ever asked me to change anything.
GROSS: You must really believe in the memoir as an important form.
CONWAY: Yes, I do. I think that it is, in many ways, the form of narrative that is most gripping to contemporary readers. I think we read it the way 19th century people read Dickens or Hardy or somebody like that. And I think it's because it's in writing memoirs that we are obliged to say what the total constellation of all our roles means to us. And that's the real dilemma of the modern consciousness. We have this sense of an inner core of being which is us, which looks out and comments on life and experience - and which is part of, but not subsumed by all the roles that we play.
I think modern moral philosophers think that you really can't judge a life without looking at the total sum of all the roles that are intertwined within it and trying to interpret what they all add up to. And I think that's the aspect of the modern consciousness that really resonates when we read a memoir. We want to see somebody else telling us what it's all added up to because we want to be able to do that for ourselves.
GROSS: Have there been any liabilities for you to become a more public person, which is what you've become since writing your memoirs? Because I think a lot of women and a lot of men in positions of authority, like you were as the head of a college, would try very hard to not let the people who they work with know a lot of personal things about them. For a lot of people, that's a strategy for maintaining a certain dignity and respect and power within an organization.
CONWAY: Well, you know, if you tell the story of your life, it is no more fanciful and no more interesting to people than all the fantasies they have about you. So you might just as well have your say on the record, too.
GROSS: That interview with Jill Ker Conway was recorded in 1994, after the publication of her second memoir, "True North." We recorded our third and final interview in 1998, after the publication of her book about memoirs and autobiographies titled "When Memory Speaks." I asked her a question she asks in that book, why do so many people write their life stories?
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
CONWAY: Well, I think it is part of the development in our culture which says that there's really no central point of view from which to look at the world today so that everybody's story is relevant in some way. And so now, we have memoirs written by very young people. Once upon a time, you only wrote toward the end of your life. They're written by people of every ethnic and class background and every sexual orientation, whereas once upon a time, that terrible experience of poverty would have been fictionalized by a Dickens. Or the absolutely appalling experience of incest would have been turned into a novel. Now, we have lost most of those senses of what it's appropriate to talk about in the first person, and so much that was previously fiction is now presented as a memoir.
GROSS: I think, you know, memoirs tend to have a certain coherence and shapeliness that real life lacks.
CONWAY: Absolutely.
GROSS: Real life is usually, you know, very much a muddle...
CONWAY: Yes.
GROSS: ...Particularly, as you're going from one experience to another and, you know, it doesn't have that coherence that a narrative has in book form. And I'm wondering, you know, you've written two memoirs. Did your life take on a shapeliness in book form that it didn't seem to have in real life? What was the difference between your life in that shapely form of the book and your life as it felt like as you lived the parts that you later wrote about?
CONWAY: Well, I think the important thing to remember is that in shaping that narrative, drawing that out of the ebb and flow of very different kinds of experience, you choose the things that seem meaningful to you at the time you're writing. And naturally, what you put into the narrative is shaped by what are important issues to you at the moment of composing that life plot and describing it. So I think if I look back at "The Road From Coorain", at the point at which I wrote it, the relationship with my mother, who had recently died, and the reasons why I left Australia were absolutely compelling to me.
And so the narrative of my life takes its form around those issues. And, of course, since I'm a strong feminist, I also wanted the narrative to drive home the point that I'm writing about two generations of Australian women who couldn't contribute what they might have to their society because of their being female. Were I to write that story today, you know, I've come to a much different understanding of my mother, partly from being widowed myself. And the things that drove me out of Australia seem less important to me, and I would probably construct the narrative quite differently.
But that doesn't mean to say that it wasn't true at the time I wrote it. And if I think about the second volume of my memoirs, "True North," one of the things that I wanted to convey as clearly as I could was that it's possible for a professional woman to form a very deep and powerful marriage relationship and yet retain a bounded identity and a strong professional self and not experience those two things as in conflict. And I'm still close enough to that experience that I'd want to tell that story the same way.
GROSS: You would tell that story the same way.
CONWAY: Yes. Yes, indeed.
GROSS: Now, how...
CONWAY: You know, if I were in another life phase completely and struggling with other issues of meaning in my life, I might tell that one differently, too. But I'm not at the moment. I'm in the same life stage that I was when I was writing that.
GROSS: Your husband passed away since we last...
CONWAY: Yes.
GROSS: ...Spoke. And I was very...
CONWAY: That's right.
GROSS: ...Sorry to read about that. You just mentioned that you would tell your mother's story differently now, having experienced losing your husband, as she had lost hers. What would be different in how you told her story now based on what you've experienced?
CONWAY: Well, you know, at the time, before I'd had this experience, I attributed her excessive and overwhelming lifetime of grief as incomprehensible to me. I couldn't understand how she did not have the energy and drive, as a powerful and very strong woman, to get herself together and take up life again. Having lost my own husband, I can see what a temptation that is, although it's not one I've succumbed to. I understand how it might happen.
GROSS: Do you plan on writing another memoir?
CONWAY: One day, I will. But you have to be in another stage of life from the one you're writing about in order to know what's significant. You know, we fuss a lot about experiences, which, at the time, seem important, and with hindsight, seem not so important. And we often overlook, at the time, something that's very significant and shaping, so you have to be in another stage of life to know what the shape of your previous one was.
GROSS: I think, also, when we're in a certain - when we're in the stage of life that we're talking or writing about, we're much more defensive about the actions that we took.
CONWAY: (Laughter) That's right.
GROSS: ...Much more involved in justifying what we've done.
CONWAY: That's right. I mean, that's why the memoirs of statesmen written right after they lose office are so terrible because...
GROSS: Yes, right?
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: Well, Jill Ker Conway, thank you very much for talking with us.
CONWAY: It's a great pleasure, Terry. Thank you.
GROSS: Jill Ker Conway, recorded in 1998 after the publication of her book about memoirs, called "When Memory Speaks." In 2002, she wrote her third memoir, titled "A Woman's Education," about serving as the first woman president of Smith College. She died June 1 at the age of 83. I'm grateful for the opportunities I had to speak with her.
(SOUNDBITE OF MICHEL REIS' "REPERCUSSIONS")
GROSS: After a break, our rock critic Ken Tucker will review the debut album by Lindsey Jordan, who's just one year out of high school. She records under the name Snail Mail. This is FRESH AIR.
[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: This story incorrectly states the title of Jill Ker Conway's 1989 memoir as The Road to Coorain. It is The Road from Coorain.]
Copyright © 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Ker_Conway
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Australian-American scholar and author (1934-2018)
Jill Ker Conway (9 October 1934 – 1 June 2018) was an Australian-American scholar and author. Well known for her autobiographies, in particular her first memoir, The Road from Coorain, she also was Smith College's first woman president (1975–1985) and most recently served as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project.[1] She was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.
Biography
[edit]
Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, in the outback of Australia. Together with her two brothers, Ker Conway was raised in near-total isolation on a family-owned 73 square kilometres (18,000 acres) tract of land called Coorain (the Aboriginal word for "windy place"), which eventually grew to encompass 129 square kilometres (32,000 acres). On Coorain, she lived a lonely life, and grew up without playmates except for her brothers. In her early years, she was schooled entirely by her mother, with the aid of correspondence class material for her primary school and early grade school education.[2]
Ker Conway spent her youth working the sheep station; by age seven, she was an important member of the workforce, helping with such activities as herding and tending the sheep, checking the perimeter fences and transporting heavy farm supplies. The farm prospered until it was crippled by a drought that lasted seven years. This and her father's worsening health put an increasing burden on her shoulders. When she was eleven, her father drowned in a diving accident while trying to extend the farm's water piping.
Initially Jill Ker Conway's mother, a nurse by profession, refused to leave Coorain. But after three more years of drought, she was compelled to move Jill and her brothers to Sydney, where the children attended school.
Ker Conway found the local state school a rough environment. The British manners and accent ingrained by her parents clashed with her peers' Australian habits, provoking taunts and jeers. This resulted in her mother enrolling her at Abbotsleigh, a private girls school, where Ker Conway found intellectual challenge and social acceptance. After finishing her education at Abbotsleigh, she enrolled at the University of Sydney, where she studied History and English and graduated with honours in 1958. Upon graduation, Ker Conway sought a trainee post in the Department of External Affairs, but the all-male committee turned down her application.
After this setback, she travelled through Europe with her now emotionally volatile mother. In 1960, she decided to strike out on her own and move to the United States. At age 25, she was accepted into the history program of Harvard University's Radcliffe College,[3] where she devoted her studies to women's history, not yet an established historical discipline, and wrote her dissertation on Jane Addams and the establishment of Hull House.[4] Her interest in Addams and Hull House was sparked by her neighbor and friend, former Librarian of Congress, Archibald Macleish.[5] At Harvard, she also assisted a Canadian professor, John Conway, who was her husband from 1962 until his death in 1995. Ker Conway received her Ph.D. at Harvard in 1969 and taught at the University of Toronto from 1964 to 1975. Her book True North details her life in Toronto.
From 1975 to 1985, Ker Conway was the president of Smith College. After 1985, she was a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received thirty-eight honorary degrees and awards from North American and Australian colleges, universities and women's organizations.[3]
Throughout her career, Ker Conway served as director on a variety of corporate boards. These include stints of more than a decade on the boards of Nike, Colgate-Palmolive, and Merrill Lynch.[6] Ker Conway was also the first female Chairman of Lendlease.[7]
After 2011, Ker Conway served as the Board Chair of Community Solutions.[8] It is a non-profit organization with a focus on homelessness and related issues, based in New York City.
Conway died on 1 June 2018 at her home in Boston at the age of 83.[9]
President of Smith College
[edit]
In 1975, Ker Conway became the first female president of Smith College, the largest women's college in the United States. Located in Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith, a private liberal arts college, is the only women's college in the U.S. to grant its own degrees in engineering.
Ker Conway launched the Ada Comstock Scholars program, initially proposed by her predecessor Thomas Mendenhall. This program allows non-traditional students, many with work and family obligations, to study full or part-time, depending on their family and work schedules. These women can take classes for a bachelor's degree over a longer period of time. Conway House, dedicated in 2006, a residence for Ada Comstock Scholars was named in honor of Ker Conway.
One of Ker Conway's more notable accomplishments is a program she initiated to help Ada Comstock Scholars on welfare. At the time, many students who were also welfare mothers were not pursuing higher education, as accepting a scholarship would cause them to lose their welfare benefits. The mothers were forced to choose between supporting their children or furthering their education. By not giving them scholarships but paying their rent instead, Ker Conway circumvented the state's system. She also gave the students access to an account at local stores, access to physicians and so on. ABC's Good Morning America profiled graduates of the program, giving it national exposure. Eventually the state of Massachusetts, convinced about the importance of the program, changed its welfare system so that scholarship students wouldn't lose their benefits.[10]
She also led the creation of the Smith Management Program (now called Smith Executive Education) and the Project on Women and Social Change. She worked to expand the curriculum leading to the development of programs in women's studies, comparative literature, and engineering. Conway took a keen interest in fundraising and under her presidency the endowment nearly tripled from $82 million to $222 million. These efforts enabled several large-scale projects including the construction of the Ainsworth Gymnasium, and expansion of the Neilson Library. The Career Development Office was also expanded under her tenure to better educate alumnae about career opportunities and graduate training.
In 1975, Jill Ker Conway was named by Time as a Woman of the Year.[11]
The Road from Coorain
[edit]
Ker Conway started writing her first memoir after leaving Smith College, during her period at MIT. The Road from Coorain was published in 1989 (ISBN 0-394-57456-7) and details her early life, from Coorain in Australia to Harvard in the United States.
The book begins with her early childhood at the remote sheep station Coorain near Mossgiel, New South Wales. Ker Conway writes about her teenage years in Sydney and especially her education at the University of Sydney, where university studies were open to women but the culture was focused heavily on the men. She describes her intellectual development and later her feelings when she realizes that there is a bias against women; based upon her sex, she is denied a traineeship at the Australian foreign service.
In 2001, Chapman Pictures produced a television film, The Road from Coorain, featuring Katherine Slattery as the grown-up Jill and Juliet Stevenson as her mother.
Awards and honors
[edit]
1960 Jill Ker Conway was a 1960 Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar in History from the University of Sydney to Harvard University.
1975 In the first year of her presidency at Smith College, Conway was named a "woman of the year", one of a small group of notable women selected for that award by Time magazine.[12]
1989 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, The Road from Coorain
Ker Conway was appointed a Companion (AC) in the General Division of the Order of Australia on 10 June 2013 for her eminent service to the community, particularly women, as an author, academic and through leadership roles with corporations, foundations, universities and philanthropic groups.[13] On 12 June, she was removed as a 'Companion' and invested as an 'Honorary Companion' of the Order of Australia, because she no longer held Australian citizenship.[14]
On July 10, 2013, she received a 2012 National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.[15]
Legacy
[edit]
In 2017 the John and Jill Ker Conway residence for veterans was opened in Washington DC.[16]
Selected bibliography
[edit]
Books
[edit]
Conway, Jill (1977). Modern Feminism: An Intellectual History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Conway, Jill; Kealey, Linda; Schulte, Janet E. (1982). The Female Experience in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America: A Guide to the History of American Women. New York: Garland Pub. ISBN 9780691005997.
Conway, Jill (1987). Utopian Dream or Dystopian Nightmare?: Nineteenth-Century Feminist Ideas about Equality. Worcester, Massachusetts: American Antiquarian Society. ISBN 9780912296890.
Conway, Jill; Scott, Joan W.; Bourque, Susan C. (1989). Learning about Women: Gender, Politics and Power. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 9780472063987.
Conway, Jill (1989). The Road from Coorain (1st ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf Distributed by Random House. ISBN 9780749303600.
Reprinted as: Conway, Jill (1992). The Road from Coorain (2nd ed.). London: Minerva. ISBN 9780749398941.
Conway, Jill (1992). Written by Herself: An Anthology. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679736332.
Conway, Jill; Bourque, Susan C. (1995). The Politics of Women's Education: Perspectives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 9780472083282.
Conway, Jill (1995). True North: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679744610.
Conway, Jill (1992). Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women. An Anthology. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679736332.
Conway, Jill (1992). Written by Herself: Women's Memoirs From Britain, Africa, Asia and the United States, volume 2: an anthology. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679751090.
Conway, Jill (1998). When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 9780679766452.
Conway, Jill (1999). In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679781530.
Conway, Jill; Kennan, Elizabeth; Munnings, Clare (2001). Overnight Float. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 9780142000113.
Conway, Jill; Marx, Leo; Keniston, Kenneth (1999). Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 9781558492219.
Conway, Jill (2001). A Woman's Education. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 9780679744627.
Conway, Jill (Author); Millis, Lokken (Illustrator) (2006). Felipe the Flamingo. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing. ISBN 9781555915476.
Chapters in books
[edit]
Conway, Jill (1998), "Points of departure", in Zinsser, William (ed.), Inventing the truth: the art and craft of memoir, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 41–60, ISBN 9780395901502
Conway, Jill (2001), "Foreword", in Freeman, Sue J.M.; Bourque, Susan C.; Shelton, Christine M. (eds.), Women on power: leadership redefined, Boston: Northeastern University Press, ISBN 9781555534783
Journal articles
[edit]
Ker, Jill (1960). "Merchants and merinos". Royal Australian Historical Society Journal. 46 (4). Royal Australian Historical Society: 206–233.
Conway, Jill (Winter 1971–1972). "Women reformers and American culture, 1870-1930". Journal of Social History. 5 (2): 164–177. doi:10.1353/jsh/5.2.164. Pdf.[dead link]
References
[edit]
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Jill Ker Conway
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Jill Ker Conway was an Australian-American author. Well known for her autobiographies, in particular her first memoir, The Road from Coorain. She was als...
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https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21163.Jill_Ker_Conway
|
The Road from Coorain
4.02 avg rating — 13,303 ratings — published 1989 — 49 editions
A Woman's Education: The Road from Coorain Leads to Smith College
3.86 avg rating — 397 ratings — published 2001 — 10 editions
Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women: An Anthology
4.11 avg rating — 223 ratings — published 1992 — 7 editions
When Memory Speaks
3.70 avg rating — 103 ratings — published 1998 — 8 editions
Written by Herself: Volume 2: Women's Memoirs From Britain, Africa, Asia and the United States
4.18 avg rating — 40 ratings — published 1996 — 8 editions
In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States
4.03 avg rating — 31 ratings — published 1999 — 2 editions
Felipe the Flamingo
by
Lokken Millis (Illustrations)
4.15 avg rating — 13 ratings — published 2006 — 5 editions
Female Experience in Twentieth Century America
3.80 avg rating — 5 ratings — published 1982 — 3 editions
The Politics of Women's Education: Perspectives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Women And Culture Series)
by
really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 4 ratings — published 1993 — 2 editions
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Jill Ker Conway, chairman and trailblazer, dies at 83
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2018-06-04T07:19:57+00:00
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Jill Ker Conway was a business woman, college professor and the first female chairman of global property group, Lendlease
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https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/jill-ker-conway-chairman-and-trailblazer-dies-at-83-20180604-p4zjdy.html
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Jill Ker Conway, business woman, college professor and the first female chairman of global property group, Lendlease has passed away in the US on June 1 at 83.
Dr. Conway chronicled the role of women in American society. She was born at Hillston, as Jill Ker, on the Western Plains of NSW, and was seen as a trailblazer, being appointed as the first woman to serve as the US-based prestigious Smith College president in 1975.
Having married a Canadian, John J Conway, she was a graduate student at Harvard and was 39 when she was named president of Smith. That earned her Time magazine’s “woman of the year” title during the first year of her tenure alongside figures such as first lady Betty Ford, housing and urban development secretary Carla Hills and tennis player Billie Jean King.
Dr Conway served on the boards of businesses including Merrill Lynch, Nike, Colgate-Palmolive and Lendlease. She was also a former chairman of the American Antiquarian Society.
In 2000 she was appointed as chair of Lendlease at a time when the company needed a firm hand. It had David Higgins as the boss and was venturing overseas, but also expanding rapidly in Australia.
But in 2003 the group's new CEO Greg Clarke took Lendlease back to its roots as a single-focused construction group.
Ms Ker Conway resigned on May 29, 2003 and went back to the US to rejoin the academic world.
Then-President Barack Obama awarded Dr Conway the National Humanities Medal in 2013. She was also a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 2011.
In 2013, she was named a Companion of the Order of Australia.
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Jill Ker Conway pioneered opportunities for women's education
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Jill Ker Conway, historian and memoirist who served as Smith College's first woman president, created an environment in academia in which women could flourish and find their own vocations.
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https://www.ncronline.org/news/guest-voices/jill-ker-conway-pioneered-opportunities-womens-education
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Conway lived on a family ranch of 32,000 acres, far removed from any town, school or church. Her life was solitary, the nearest neighbor being 50 miles away. Other than her two brothers, she had no playmates. She claimed not to have met another girl until she was 7 years old. Her work was herding and tending sheep, helping to maintain her family's hard-scrabble life.
Tragedy struck when the ranch failed. Her father, a devout Catholic, died, as did one of her brothers, forcing her mother to move what remained of the family to Sydney. There Conway began her formal education and attended the Catholic Church. But the outback had already formed her. The vastness of nature, the comfort of solitude, and hard physical labor all molded her.
Intellectually self-confident and chastened by difficult experiences, she completed her education at the University of Sydney, graduating first in her class. However, she quickly realized she would not find employment commensurate with her ambition in Australia. This limitation, plus her desire to free herself from the grip of a psychologically dependent mother, led her to apply to Harvard University, where she would earn a doctoral degree in history. She claimed she studied history in order to understand the social forces which diminished her mother's life. It was these early years in Australia and her decision to leave that she chronicled in The Road from Coorain, one of the best loved memoirs of the 20th century.
True North, her second memoir, tells of her years at Harvard and her marriage to one of her professors, the historian John Conway. Although he was 18 years her senior, during their 33 years of marriage, which ended with his death in 1995, John Conway proved to be an immensely supportive partner, irrespective of his debilitating depression. In 1964, the Conways left Harvard for Toronto where she began teaching at the University of Toronto and subsequently was appointed its first woman vice president.
The last of her trio of memoirs, A Woman's Education: The Road from Coorain Leads to Smith College, is the story of her presidency of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, which began in 1975 when she was 40. She stayed 10 years. Academia's full intransigence to change was the background against which Conway attempted to institute a curriculum which would serve the contemporary needs of women students.
During her tenure, courses in women's studies, business and engineering were added; athletics was supported; non-traditional age students were enrolled; and financial aid was extended. What A Woman's Education makes clear is that Conway harnessed her personal ambition, intellectual acuity, and ability to take risks in order to advance the ambitions of other women. Her innate shyness allowed her to do all she did with humility.
After she left Smith, Conway was named a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute for Technology, served on the boards of Nike and Merrill Lynch, and continued to write about male and female autobiographies and how and why they differed. She expanded the field of life-writing by editing Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women and In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, and authoring When Memory Speaks.
If grit characterized Jill Ker Conway's personality, so too did graciousness toward others. Intellectual, tenacious and fearless, she nonetheless cared about individuals and treated all she met with respect. Over the course of her life she drew on various sources of inspiration. Her early life in the Australian outback gave her an appreciation of solitude and of the natural world. Her father's Catholicism impressed her, as did her reading of the Bible. The remoteness of her life with its absence of ecclesial authority allowed her to freely ask questions of meaning and to form an independent conscience.
Her advanced study of history, especially her doctoral dissertation on American female reformers like Jane Addams, was also a formative element in her life. She credited Catholic influences in giving her a sense of vocation. In her case this was to uncover the history of women as revealed in their autobiographical writings and to create an intellectual environment in which women could flourish and find their own vocations.
She took seriously the importance of women mystics, especially St. Julian of Norwich and St. Teresa of Avila. Believing as she did in the value of community, she derived encouragement from the achievements of women's religious communities; she rejoiced when her parish, St. Mark's in Conway, Massachusetts, a small, diverse mission church, was able to create a vibrant spiritual community largely independent of ecclesial direction. Her commitment to social issues expressed itself in her long-standing concern for homeless veterans, which resulted in the opening of the John and Jill Ker Conway Residence in Washington, D.C., in 2017.
Conway died June 1 at age 83. Her funeral service was held at her much-loved St. Mark's. Unable to have children, her progeny were the multitude of women whom she inspired, pioneered opportunities for their education, and left a trove of writing to motivate them. An avowed feminist, her life was whole and integrated, liberated and realized; it was grounded both in grit and grace.
Fully alive, Jill Ker Conway in her living fulfilled her father's admonition, to "do something," and Irenaeus' claim that the one fully alive gives glory to God.
[Dana Greene's latest biography, Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War, is to be released in November from Oxford University Press.]
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Jill Ker Conway
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"Just as soon as I had time," Jill Ker Conway pledged years ago, "I'd try to write a lively picture of the way a woman's mind developed and how her intellectual vocation is formed." Readers fir
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https://www.powells.com/post/interviews/jill-ker-conway
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"Just as soon as I had time," Jill Ker Conway pledged years ago, "I'd try to write a lively picture of the way a woman's mind developed and how her intellectual vocation is formed."
Readers first caught a glimpse of that lively picture in The Road from Coorain, the story of a bright, strong girl's childhood on a remote Australian sheep farm (Jill was seven before she first saw another girl child); then subsequently her adolescence, navigating family tragedy and educational challenges with her brothers and their widowed mother in Sydney. True North rejoined Jill's life as she embarked on graduate studies at Harvard, then followed her Canadian husband to an academic career in Toronto - until 1975, when Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, recruited Conway to redefine and redesign the distinguished 100-year-old institution.
A Woman's Education recounts Conway's ten-year term as Smith's first woman president, boldly applying her lifetime's scholarship and passion to juggle the concerns of students, parents, faculty, and alumnae. As one Ivy League school after another went coeducational, Smith resolutely maintained its independence, reinventing itself under Conway's leadership to create academic programs in line with the new realities of women's lives. On campus, the irrepressible enthusiasm of Smith's student body energized her efforts; at home, her husband's manic depression grew worse by the year.
"Her path as President of Smith College gives us an insider's view not only of the institutional side," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor noted, "but the personal demands and their burdens. It is a fascinating and important story."
Dave: Always the first question people ask when I tell them about your new book is, "How could Smith not have had a female president until 1975? Hasn't it always been a women's school?"
Jill Ker Conway: It's always been a women's college. It's hard for people to believe today, but having a male president was thought of as being the guarantee you would have the most academically rigorous institute imaginable. It wasn't until the 1970s and the upsurge in the feminist movement that the trustees decided they must have a woman president. And there I was.
Dave: It seems like such a no-brainer now.
Conway: Places like Wellesley and Vassar had women presidents, but they always had a male chairman of the board and a male treasurer who ran the finances. At Smith, from about 1900 on, there was always a woman chairman of the board; the male president worked for a female board of trustees, pretty much. But the thing to realize is that there were always males in authority in these women's institutions.
At Wellesley, which had had women presidents for a long time, there was a much greater representation of women on the faculty than there was at Smith. But since the 1880s or 90s, Smith had had educators from Harvard or Yale, and when they thought about building a faculty, they recruited their friends.
Dave: That was another surprise for me - 70% of the faculty at Smith was male when you took over - though it makes sense when you read the book and see how those people got their jobs.
In True North, you write about graduating from Harvard with the highest honors and not being offered academic positions that the men you had just beat out were getting. One would think, from a distance, that a place like Harvard would have been more enlightened.
Conway: They certainly were not. By the time I finished up at Harvard I was married to a Canadian and going to Canada, but some of my friends who were graduate students in History or Literature were just told, "It's going to be very difficult to get you a job, and of course it won't be possible here."
There would be days in the various scholarly departments when recruiters from outside would visit, and students would post their curriculum vitae if they wanted to be interviewed. One of my woman friends put hers up, and it was taken down. She was told, "I'm sorry. You can't post that here."
But I have to tell you - and I think I describe it in True North - when I was at The University of Toronto and became the chairman of a search committee for a position in History, I got letters back nominating women, and they would always say at the end, "I would never have suggested Ms. X or Ms. Y had it not been for the fact that there was a woman chairman of the search committee." So it was a very closed system for a very long time.
Dave: You do an excellent job of showing how personal experience dictated so much of your politics and your activism. For example, all the work you did at Smith to attract older students, not just eighteen-year-old incoming freshman. Again, it seems very basic when you think about it today, but at the time you had to convince people that adult education was a worthwhile endeavor for a college to take on.
Conway: My mother, whom I'm very much like, never got to finish high school, so I grew up with a woman who was starved for formal education and who educated herself quite marvelously through a very serious program of reading. But she was always conscious of the fact that she'd never had a formal education. She was widowed very young, at forty-four, and it would have been a dream if she could have gone to college and had that experience. She would have thrived.
She did try to study part-time at an Australian university, but people didn't take older women, sort of suburban housewives, seriously, so she never really settled down to do it.
When I got to The University of Toronto I chose to teach in the evenings. There would be a whole day schedule, then another in the evening for part-time students. I'd look at these women and I'd think of my mother; they would have worked all day as a secretary or a filing clerk or in retail sales or something like that, then they'd arrive on campus already tired. They just wouldn't have the energy to really do their best work.
Thinking about my mother, trying to counsel these women, convincing them to give themselves a bit more time...even if it was economically difficult they could develop so much of their own intellectual power that they'd benefit later. It all made me think, When I get to Smith, I'm going to see that we lead the way in showing people that women over twenty-five can be serious scholars and that the whole experience of an undergraduate education can be just as transforming for them as it is for an 18-22 year-old. And it's so clear that that's the case.
Dave: I found it particularly interesting how much trouble you had convincing people that marketing was important. To many people, marketing is a dirty word, a form of selling-out. And it can be. But marketing something you believe in is alternately a way to produce positive change. It's why I'm here at Powell's, because I like the place.
Conway: It all depends on what you're marketing. If what you're marketing is a first-rate education that people wouldn't otherwise know is available to them, that's a very important thing to do. If you are marketing wonderful books and making them available to people who might only have a junky bookstore close by them, that's a wonderful thing to do, too. Growing up in the outback of Australia, I can't tell you what it was like to get our parcel from the lending library - just such joy. It brought another world into our environment.
The thing about marketing a first-rate, eastern, liberal arts college in the day I was doing it was that they drew their student population entirely from prep schools, places where everybody knew what Smith and Harvard and Williams and Dartmouth were. You didn't need to market to them because they already knew about it. But as the possibility of applying opened to people in little rural villages in the south or remote farming communities somewhere, you had to have some way of letting sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds and their families know this was available, and you had to do it in terms they would understand. If you sent off the standard old catalogue of the Smith curriculum with very dry titles for the courses and no description of what they were about, how were they supposed to know that they might like this education?
Marketing is always equated with commercialism, and that's thought of as a dirty word. But commerce does good things, too, as well as bad.
Dave: In A Woman's Education you recall thinking, "Just as soon as I had time, I'd try to write a lively picture of the way a woman's mind developed and how her intellectual vocation is formed." That objective so accurately sums up these three books.
Conway: That was my dream, and in part it's because we do have a lengthy tradition of male writing about education, going back to classical times. We don't have anything similar from women.
There are great women writers, medieval nuns, who describe a spiritual formation, but no descriptions of the excitement of learning and discovering what one's own intellectual style and interests are, finding the right mentors, growing and understanding a discipline. That isn't written in a female voice, and I really wanted to do that.
I can remember when I was an undergraduate at The University of Sydney I would read all these male memoirs and descriptions of educations - there's a whole genre of "life at Oxford or Cambridge books" - and I'd think, I wonder what it's going to be like for me. If you don't have a cultural tradition in which to fit, I suppose you're free in the sense that you have a blank page to work with, but in another sense you're at sea in interpreting what's of real significance.
I particularly wanted to create this narrative because I know from teaching young men that they draw on that tradition, and young women don't have it. It makes understanding their education a lot more difficult. And of course because of my own strong convictions about how much one learns and grows after age twenty-two, I wanted to chart that through a professional career.
Dave: In When Memory Speaks, you write about Moments of Being, the Virginia Woolf book, which sounds fascinating. I noticed we have it here, but I haven't had a chance to read it.
Conway: It's absolutely marvelous. She's writing with beautiful, elegant irony about the oppression of her family, the exploitation of the women in her family, and her life with a basically gay male community with whom she and her brother set up house after her father died.
As I wrote in When Memory Speaks, I always wish she'd once been able to get in an absolute flaming rage about what had happened to her - sexual exploitation by her step-brother and so on. Perhaps she wouldn't have had those terrible depressions that eventually carried her off.
But you must read it because she's a very great writer; she has this phrase about "moments of being," when the current of life seems clear. Those are so well woven into fiction in To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway and so on. You can really see where they come from.
Dave: I've only read her fiction, and it's breathtaking. Of a class that you half-believe it's not a person writing this...
Conway: ...a force of nature.
Dave: I appreciated your analogy in A Woman's Education between the idea of "a room of one's own" to a college of one's own. Fifteen years after you left Smith, what's the role of women's colleges today?
Conway: It's still very much to provide an environment where women who are so-minded can be taught by a first-rate faculty in their own institution, which they and the alumnae own and have created. That's a very energizing experience, as I tried to explain in this book.
Secondly, it's very powerful to hold those institutions up as benchmarks for the rest of society. When people like to say for instance that women don't do well in physics or mathematics, it's helpful to point to the number of women PhDs produced in those fields by women's colleges and how well the women have performed in their careers.
Also, it's very important to have women's colleges as an organized lobbying force in higher education. So much educational policy, especially about public support, federal and state loan programs, and so on, is set entirely with male careers in mind unless there's a powerful organization there lobbying.
And I have another concern, which to me is very important and is highlighted by the tragedy of September 11th: American women's colleges have been greatly concerned with women's education around the world. They have founded institutions for women in India, China, Burma, and elsewhere. Their founders and leaders for many years believed that a women's position in the Western world was not safe while women were so terribly discriminated against in other cultures.
Those great women's institutions and their networks around the world still offer a way of mobilizing energy and resources to deal with education elsewhere. I know that's been very important to me. All those great women's schools - Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Barnard - they all have a solid contingent of women's students from around the world. Those students are leaders when they go back.
All those roles are still as important as the day I got to Smith.
Dave: Beyond issues of equality and freedom, the most straightforward argument you put forth is that to waste the potential of half a population, any population, is horribly lacking in foresight.
Conway: Everybody acknowledges that the abolition of slavery was a huge source of increased productivity for industrializing societies. When you develop free markets and labor and give people freedom to develop their talents, they're more productive.
The same goes for having totally segregated labor markets when women don't get the education and the skills to rise in responsibility and power and earnings. It's exactly the same argument, but people always think that an increase in access to the labor market or to political power for women will damage men. They think of it as a zero-sum game instead of increasing results for everyone. It's very hard to shake that.
Dave: In When Memory Speaks, you write about the traditional female role in biography as one that has been acted-upon; the women are rarely the actors. You became quite involved in business and economics when you were at Smith, and of course it's clear from the book why those skills were integral to the job. You've always created opportunities for yourself. How did you get on your first board?
Conway: When I came to Smith, it had only seventy-four million dollars in endowment. We were experiencing very high inflation; during the Carter years, we had 18-20% inflation. The cost of heating and lighting the campus had quadrupled in the previous six months. And there'd been a big shift in the capital markets; Smith's endowment was not invested to produce optimum returns. So, high inflation, shrinking value to the endowment, and very low returns from it...Quickly, I had to figure out how to get more operating support.
I knew from being part of running The University of Toronto that the average research university - a Harvard or a Yale - got about 15-20% of its operating money from corporate contributions. I thought, There's a new source, so I got together with Smith's networks and called the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies that were big donors to education, and I asked them why they didn't support women's colleges, and whether they would. Almost always, they would say, "Nobody's ever asked us. And yes, certainly we will."
But the net result was that I had been talking to all these CEOs just at the time that they were under a lot of pressure to recruit women to their boards. So there was an unintended consequence of my fundraising: they didn't know many women CEOs, and I'm sure when it came up they said, "I know someone who was around just a few weeks ago asking for money."
I actually received quite a few invitations to join corporate boards, but I chose the ones where I knew I would learn something that I needed for the job I was doing.
I went on the board of Merrill Lynch because I needed to understand how to manage an endowment, and I wanted to understand the investment world. I'm fascinated with economic history and wanted to understand capital markets in their modern form.
I went on one of IBM's boards at the World Trade Corporation, which is outside the United States, because I wanted to understand information processing and how it was going to affect the lives of my students.
I went on the board of a consulting company, Arthur D. Little, because it's basically a bunch of PhDs who have to make a profit for their owners at research and development and management consulting, and I was interested to see how they did it.
Those were all assignments I took on because they taught me things I needed to know.
Dave: You saw T.S. Eliot read!
Conway: Yes, I did! The most marvelous experience. His poetry is one of the shaping intellectual forces of my life. Still is.
I never dreamed that I would see him in the flesh and hear him read, but I did. He came to Cambridge quite regularly in the late fifties and early sixties. I heard Robert Frost read at Harvard, too. And other people: W.H. Auden...
Dave: At the time, was Eliot as influential as he is considered now? Did you assume that forty years later his reputation would remain as lofty?
Conway: He was. For the postwar generation, Eliot, Pound, and Yeats had been the most influential poets. There was a period in the late seventies and early eighties when they were out of popularity, when there was much more interest in the Victorians, but they've come back into favor again.
Dave: At McGill, in Montreal, where I went to college, they offered full semester courses on Eliot, Pound, and Yeats. One of the things I appreciate now about the education I received there is that we read nothing but classics. Yeats and Eliot were contemporary, as far as that formal, British educational outlook was concerned. They'd written during this century! I resented such a stodgy perspective at the time, but I'm so glad now for having read all those texts.
Conway: You probably had an education much like I had as an undergraduate in Australia. In that British mode, it's not important to study the immediate present. People feel there's no critical assessment. You read that for pleasure, but it's not Literature.
Dave: Do you read for pleasure much these days?
Conway: All the time. I tend to read autobiography and biography.
I think the art of biography is flourishing at the moment. If you think about the recent biographies of Jefferson, of John Adams, of Harry Truman (which is absolutely fabulous)...wonderful recent one of Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee...a wonderful one of Edna St. Vincent Millay...
And of course it's been an extraordinary period of memoir. That's what I read, plus poetry. I read for pleasure, also, things I loved at an earlier stage in my life. I might spend time reading James Joyce or George Eliot. If I haven't looked at that work in thirty or forty years, I'm a totally different reader coming to the text.
Dave: So what now? You're at M.I.T.?
Conway: I teach very part time at M.I.T., one course with a couple colleagues in the spring semester. I split my life up into time for writing, which is very early in the morning, a little bit of teaching, then a lot of work on philanthropic boards, foundations of one kind or another, and corporate boards. And I devote a good deal of time to small, not-for-profit organizations that don't have much fundraising capacity or don't have strong governance, trying to help them get started.
Dave: Are you working on a book now?
Conway: I've been writing murder mysteries with a friend. We publish them under a pseudonym [Clare Munnings]. So I'm trying my hand at fiction, and that's a lot of fun. I don't know what I'll write next. This Volume Three is the end; that's what the memoir was meant to be.
My late husband was working on a memoir when he died, so at the moment I'm at work on editing that, and I'll probably write the last few chapters. Other than that, I can't tell you. Maybe something about my avocation, which is gardening and landscape design, or it might be about education, maybe religious reflections. You never know what you'll want to write until it starts writing itself in your head.
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https://www.npr.org/2018/06/14/619953256/remembering-jill-ker-conway-the-first-female-president-of-smith-college
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Remembering Jill Ker Conway, The First Female President Of Smith College
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2018-06-14T00:00:00
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The women's history scholar, who died June 1, grew up on a remote Australian sheep farm and later went on to write three memoirs, including True North. Conway spoke to Fresh Air in 1989, '94 and '98.
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https://www.npr.org/2018/06/14/619953256/remembering-jill-ker-conway-the-first-female-president-of-smith-college
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TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Today we're going to remember Jill Ker Conway, who influenced many women as a feminist, memoirist, women's history scholar and the first woman president of Smith College, one of the largest women's colleges in the world. She served in that position from 1975 to 85. Conaway died June 1 at the age of 83. We'll hear excerpts of my three interviews with her recorded between 1989 and 1998. We talked about establishing her career at a time when many doors were closed to women, how she became a feminist, how she married historian John Conway in spite of the fact she had always thought marriage would be the wrong choice for her and how she later dealt with his depression and then his death.
Our first interview was recorded in 1989 after the publication of her first memoir, which became a best-seller and a touchstone book for many women. Titled "The Road To Coorain" (ph), it covered her childhood growing up on a remote sheep farm, which her parents ran in the Australian outback where she was physically and intellectually cut off from the world. The book ends with her decision to leave Australia in 1960 when she was 25 to attend graduate school at Harvard, hoping to find more opportunities for women in the U.S. than she'd found in Australia.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
GROSS: So you grew up in a very isolated setting.
JILL KER CONWAY: Totally - our next-door neighbors were, oh, about 50 miles away on one side...
GROSS: Oh, boy.
CONWAY: ...And about 20 miles another and 10 or 12 in another direction.
GROSS: Your first schooling was through a correspondence course.
CONWAY: Yes, it was - my mother thought I could do two years in one, and she told the correspondence school that, but they thought there were two children on the place, so they sent the first lesson of the first grade and the first lesson of the second grade and continued in installments all the way through the year. It wasn't - it wasn't clear to me that it was work of a different degree of difficulty. So we didn't know until the end of the year.
GROSS: I love what you say about studying alone in isolation, that you were introduced to study as a leisure time activity. It sounds like you never really grew to dislike education in the way that so many children who go to schools do.
CONWAY: For me, it was sheer pleasure. I was doing hard, physical labor on the sheep station. And I worked at that four days a week, and on the fifth day, on Friday, I got to sit down and do my school. And it was such a treat because I had been given my own pot of tea, and Friday was a baking day, so there would be great smells of fresh-baked scones and cookies coming from the kitchen. And I felt totally indulged, and I've never felt about learning any other way.
GROSS: Were you sure that you would go to college?
CONWAY: It was very clear in my family because my mother was such a feminist that I would. And interestingly, the stereotypes of our gender worked in my favor in my family because it was expected that my brothers would probably not go to university and would - since our father was a rancher that they would take up life on the land, too. And that meant that they would begin that right after school.
GROSS: You went to the University of Sydney first, yes?
CONWAY: Yes, I did.
GROSS: And then you thought about what to do next. You decided you didn't want to go to school in England because you'd feel like a colonial there. You applied to Harvard and started living in the United States. Did you find that there were more opportunities for women?
CONWAY: Oh, goodness, yes. Well, I arrived at the Harvard graduate school. I lived in the graduate residence where there were several hundred other women all getting Ph.D.s and all enormously bright and interesting people drawn from all over the world. And I found the director of my graduate studies who told his students that the contribution of women to American intellectual life was as important as men's and handed out lists of women whose lives needed to be studied and whose intellectual histories needed to be written and so forth. And that was just a new world for me.
GROSS: What set you in the direction of being a college administrator, first a vice president at the University of Toronto, then the first woman president at Smith?
CONWAY: Well, I was born at the right time. I was - just finished my Ph.D. and beginning life as a professional historian just at the point when there was an enormous expansion of higher education in the United States and Canada. I went to Canada with my husband who was taking part in planning and building a new university in Toronto. And myself - I joined the history department the University of Toronto in the process.
I suddenly discovered one day that although I had joined the history department at the University of Toronto with a group of young men all trained in American doctoral programs like me, I was the only one who wasn't being promoted, and I found that I was also quite severely discriminated against in my salary. And so I just got in a rage, went and confronted the department chairman and the dean with this information, and they very quickly rectified the situation. But when I was finished, I realized that there were loads of other women faculty who were in much more jeopardy protesting such things than I. So I began organizing the women faculty, and before I knew it, I was in a leadership role that I just stumbled into. And very shortly thereafter, there was a change in the university administration and I sort of had to put up or shut up, and so I accepted a position as one of the university vice presidents. And so I sort of backed into it and then found out I really loved it.
GROSS: The interview with Jill Ker Conway that we just heard was recorded in 1989 after the publication of her first memoir, "The Road To Coorain." We're going to continue our remembrance of her with the interview we recorded in 1994 after the publication of her second memoir, "True North," about setting out for Harvard alone, leaving behind her suffocating family and a culture hostile to aspiring women. For the first time, she found friends she could talk to without censoring her words or emotions. And she found her niche as a scholar of women's history. To her surprise, she fell in love with and married the historian John Conway, even though she'd always thought that marriage was not for her.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
CONWAY: I was such an anomalous person in my native Australia, and I think it would have been very difficult for me to fit into a conventional Australian marriage. John Conway was already a professional scholar. He wasn't somebody who wanted a wife to make a comfortable domestic environment for him. He wanted a partner in sort of major intellectual tasks, and that was a relationship that I thought I could handle. I wasn't absolutely certain that I could ever settle into being the helping wife who's always typing her husband's manuscripts and managing somehow or another to create the right environment for somebody else to blossom in.
GROSS: Early on into your marriage, you realized that you both had a lot of mood swings. You had always had depressions, and you realized he had very serious depressions, too. And you write about during some of those depressions he'd become almost unrecognizable, quote, "as though a stranger had replaced my sensitive and loving husband with someone obsessed by demons of rage, tormented by suspicion." It must have been very unsettling, especially early on when you saw changes like that and wondered, you know, who he was becoming.
CONWAY: Well, you know, I had grown up with a neurotic family, and the thing that I think that gave me was the capacity to live through other people's moods and keep my own balance. I wouldn't recommend that as a good training for anyone, but it turned out to stand me in very good stead. And my husband was so open and direct about facing the problems he had to deal with very deep mood swings that when he came out of them, we would always be able to analyze what had happened. And I gradually learned that at those points, I just had to wait for him to reappear as his usual, positive and constructive self. But, you know, we all manage to live with somebody with acute physical ailments, and those problems of emotional swings are no different.
GROSS: He had shock treatments during one bout of depression. What were the effects of that?
CONWAY: Well, I think that is - as I say in the book, I think of electric shock therapy as the ultimate example of the engineering mentality and the sort of idea of the technological fix. It damages people's memory. And for someone who was a professional scholar, it had a devastating effect because a lifetime of learning was lost. He couldn't recall it.
GROSS: Did he lose that memory permanently?
CONWAY: Not permanently, but for a very substantial period of time.
GROSS: Like, years? Or...
CONWAY: Yes. Yes, indeed.
GROSS: We're listening to my 1994 interview with Jill Ker Conway, feminist, memoirist and the first woman president of Smith College. She died June 1. We'll hear more of that interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEORGE SHEARING'S "THINKING OF YOU")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. We're continuing our remembrance of Jill Ker Conway, a feminist, memoirist and the first woman to serve as president of Smith College. She died June 1. Let's get back to the interview I recorded with her in 1994 after the publication of her second memoir, "True North," about leaving Australia, where she grew up on a sheep ranch in the Outback, and moving to the U.S. to attend graduate school and launch her academic career. In 1964, she took a teaching position at the University of Toronto.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
GROSS: When you were at the University of Toronto, you became something of an activist. You started organizing women on campus around women's issues such as equal pay. You went in and basically demanded to know why you weren't being given a promotion.
CONWAY: Yes. That's right. You know, my experience fits exactly with the social science textbooks. Women are supposed to experience their first serious discrimination seven years after initial employment, and mine came in six and a half years. So I was right on schedule. And when I did call a meeting of women faculty at the university, I discovered that it wasn't just a question of discrimination in pay within rank, but very differential rates of promotion and access to research, support and so forth.
GROSS: Well, you went on to be appointed the first woman vice president at the University of Toronto, but after you got that position, you figured you were probably a disappointment to the feminist proponents of women's studies on campus. Why did you oppose women's studies programs?
CONWAY: Well, it's a basic difference in strategy and what one thinks will be an effective mechanism for changing institutions. I thought that the most important thing was to transform the program of instruction of conventional departments and schools. I mean, I wanted the law school to study the legal treatment of domestic violence, or the school of architecture to study transportation and how the way it's scheduled in a city affects how women can move around. You know, just when poor mothers need to collect their children from school is just when the bus schedule is at its least helpful and so forth. Or, I wanted the medical school to spend more time researching heart disease in women.
We didn't know about the frequency of breast cancer back in those days. And I thought those things were as important for the university to become committed to as creating a separate academic program which would study women's experience in a cross-disciplinary way. I believe that working in those professional schools might have more immediate impact on the lives of a great many women.
GROSS: One of the things that a lot of professional women have had to deal with is balancing being a mother and being a professional. You weren't able to have children. You had hoped to have children, but a medical problem prevented that. And I wonder how you coped with that at different stages of your life.
CONWAY: Well, I found it a most absolutely devastating experience at the time. But, you know, another part of growing up in life is learning that not everything is always going to work out the way you hoped it would and that one has to adjust and find the creative response to whatever constraints your experience in life. That was something I had to do about not having my own biological family. We simply acquired a surrogate family of many other young people who were not our biological children.
GROSS: Seems like so many things that happened to you in your life just led you to become more and more independent.
CONWAY: (Laughter). Well, I suppose that's one way of...
GROSS: Becoming independent, right?
CONWAY: (Laughter). Yes.
GROSS: (Laughter). I want to talk some more about how you planned a relationship of equality with your husband. I'm talking, for instance, about how you decided to divide up your money. I mean, you had an arrangement planned for that, at least early on in the marriage. You want to describe that?
CONWAY: Yes. You know, it's always interested me, so many families where there were young children, and a very highly educated wife would say to me, Janie can't afford to work. By the time we replaced her work in the house and bought the clothes that she'll need to have a professional life, she won't be earning any money. And I was always fascinated that it was assumed that the woman alone was responsible for replacing her domestic labor.
My husband and I made an agreement early in our married life that we would figure out what it cost us to run our household, including the domestic help, and then we would each contribute to that household budget proportionately to what we earned. So my husband was supporting far more of the cost of replacing my domestic labor than I was, and we each had our own disposable income after that to do whatever we wanted with.
GROSS: Now, what was the logic in your relationship of keeping your income separate, as opposed to just putting it in one big joint account?
CONWAY: We both felt very strongly that we should be able to plan anything that related to our professional lives, travel, even vacations, using our own resources. The fact that we were married and shared a common dwelling and a partnership in life didn't mean that we ceased to be individuals in other ways.
GROSS: Did that continue to work for you?
CONWAY: It always has.
GROSS: So you're still doing it that way?
CONWAY: Yes, indeed.
GROSS: Now, let me ask you this. When you had a best-seller and I imagine you made a, you know, fair amount of money, did you feel guilty keeping most of that in your account, not, you know, splitting it up or anything?
CONWAY: Not at all. I mean, it's always been part of our married life that what you earn outside what's required to maintain your joint household is yours.
GROSS: You know, something else that a lot of people find very intriguing, such as myself, is that you had this, like, 10-year plan...
CONWAY: (Laughter) Yes.
GROSS: ...With your husband. Explain how that works.
CONWAY: Well, we agreed very early on that every 10 years, the other person would get to say where you lived so that one person's career would always be primary, but we would take turns. We didn't want to have a commuting marriage, which was the other solution people tried to adopt. But we both really cherished the experience of living together and didn't like being parted, and so we solved the problem that way. And we have been married for a little more than 30 years now, and we're just coming up to the beginning of another 10-year period of mine. I'm thinking about what we're going to do.
GROSS: So does this mean you have to move?
CONWAY: No.
GROSS: I mean, can you just say, let's stay where we are this time?
CONWAY: If you're like what you're doing, you can stay where you are.
GROSS: Your husband's 18 years older, and I think that 18 years is a lot bigger a gap as you get older. And I'm wondering if that's been affecting the relationship at all or if that's something that's been weighing on you at all as you watch your husband get older.
CONWAY: If you live with somebody who's almost a generation older than you, it can work in two ways. That difference can be stressed, or it can be very easily bridged. My husband is chronologically 18 years older than I am, but in a lot of ways, he's psychologically a good deal younger. He's much more naive and, in many ways, much more open to experience and much more spontaneous so that, in fact, his chronological age is a lot more advanced than his psychological age. And I'm the reverse. So he's a very youthful 78-year-old, and I'm probably quite a mature 60-year-old. I can imagine that it would be very difficult living with someone whose energies were really terribly depleted and obviously declining so that one's life experience became very different. I think it's really very interesting to live very close to somebody who's having to struggle to come to terms with the issues of their own mortality and so forth - a valuable experience, which I'm glad to have had.
GROSS: You must worry about losing him.
CONWAY: Of course I do. Everybody shouldn't be worried about that every day of their life, though. I mean, we all live poised on the brink of eternity.
GROSS: Jill Ker Conway recorded in 1994 after the publication of her second memoir, "True North." The year after that interview was recorded, her husband, who was 18 years older than she was, died suddenly after suffering a stroke. Jill Ker Conway died June 1 at the age of 83. We'll continue our remembrance after a break. Also, our rock critic Ken Tucker will review the debut album by Lindsey Jordan, who's just one year out of high school. And Justin Chang will review the new sequel to the animated film "The Incredibles." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF RALPH TOWNER'S "GLORIA'S STEP")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. We're remembering feminist, memoirist and the first woman president of Smith College, Jill Ker Conway. She died June 1 at the age of 83. Let's get back to the interview we recorded in 1994 after the publication of her second memoir, "True North," about her life after leaving Australia, where she grew up on a sheep farm in the remote Outback, physically and intellectually cut off from the world. In 1960, at age 25, she moved to America to attend graduate school at Harvard. She wrote her thesis on women's memoirs and eventually wrote three memoirs of her own. It's a literary form she had strong opinions about.
(SOUNDITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
GROSS: I want to ask you about writing memoirs. You know, there's that whole idea that the writer is ultimately a traitor, that if you're writing personally, you're betraying the people who are closest to you because you're writing about them, too.
CONWAY: Yeah.
GROSS: And I'd love to know how far you feel comfortable going in your own memoirs when it comes to the lives of other people - your mother, who - you write about all the problems you've had and...
CONWAY: Well, I don't think my mother is diminished by depicting the tragedy of her life because I start out in "The Road From Coorain" showing people this absolutely wonderfully powerful, rich joyful, creative woman. And to chronicle her deterioration as a result of a society that had no place for an older woman and taught a widow to think of her life as over doesn't seem to me to diminish her, it just really emphasizes the tragedy of her life. And other people, people who are living, I always show what I've written about them. And if they don't like it or didn't, I would either leave it out or change it or find some other way to say what I wanted to say. In fact, nobody has ever asked me to change anything.
GROSS: You must really believe in the memoir as an important form.
CONWAY: Yes, I do. I think that it is, in many ways, the form of narrative that is most gripping to contemporary readers. I think we read it the way 19th century people read Dickens or Hardy or somebody like that. And I think it's because it's in writing memoirs that we are obliged to say what the total constellation of all our roles means to us. And that's the real dilemma of the modern consciousness. We have this sense of an inner core of being which is us, which looks out and comments on life and experience - and which is part of, but not subsumed by all the roles that we play.
I think modern moral philosophers think that you really can't judge a life without looking at the total sum of all the roles that are intertwined within it and trying to interpret what they all add up to. And I think that's the aspect of the modern consciousness that really resonates when we read a memoir. We want to see somebody else telling us what it's all added up to because we want to be able to do that for ourselves.
GROSS: Have there been any liabilities for you to become a more public person, which is what you've become since writing your memoirs? Because I think a lot of women and a lot of men in positions of authority, like you were as the head of a college, would try very hard to not let the people who they work with know a lot of personal things about them. For a lot of people, that's a strategy for maintaining a certain dignity and respect and power within an organization.
CONWAY: Well, you know, if you tell the story of your life, it is no more fanciful and no more interesting to people than all the fantasies they have about you. So you might just as well have your say on the record, too.
GROSS: That interview with Jill Ker Conway was recorded in 1994, after the publication of her second memoir, "True North." We recorded our third and final interview in 1998, after the publication of her book about memoirs and autobiographies titled "When Memory Speaks." I asked her a question she asks in that book, why do so many people write their life stories?
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
CONWAY: Well, I think it is part of the development in our culture which says that there's really no central point of view from which to look at the world today so that everybody's story is relevant in some way. And so now, we have memoirs written by very young people. Once upon a time, you only wrote toward the end of your life. They're written by people of every ethnic and class background and every sexual orientation, whereas once upon a time, that terrible experience of poverty would have been fictionalized by a Dickens. Or the absolutely appalling experience of incest would have been turned into a novel. Now, we have lost most of those senses of what it's appropriate to talk about in the first person, and so much that was previously fiction is now presented as a memoir.
GROSS: I think, you know, memoirs tend to have a certain coherence and shapeliness that real life lacks.
CONWAY: Absolutely.
GROSS: Real life is usually, you know, very much a muddle...
CONWAY: Yes.
GROSS: ...Particularly, as you're going from one experience to another and, you know, it doesn't have that coherence that a narrative has in book form. And I'm wondering, you know, you've written two memoirs. Did your life take on a shapeliness in book form that it didn't seem to have in real life? What was the difference between your life in that shapely form of the book and your life as it felt like as you lived the parts that you later wrote about?
CONWAY: Well, I think the important thing to remember is that in shaping that narrative, drawing that out of the ebb and flow of very different kinds of experience, you choose the things that seem meaningful to you at the time you're writing. And naturally, what you put into the narrative is shaped by what are important issues to you at the moment of composing that life plot and describing it. So I think if I look back at "The Road From Coorain", at the point at which I wrote it, the relationship with my mother, who had recently died, and the reasons why I left Australia were absolutely compelling to me.
And so the narrative of my life takes its form around those issues. And, of course, since I'm a strong feminist, I also wanted the narrative to drive home the point that I'm writing about two generations of Australian women who couldn't contribute what they might have to their society because of their being female. Were I to write that story today, you know, I've come to a much different understanding of my mother, partly from being widowed myself. And the things that drove me out of Australia seem less important to me, and I would probably construct the narrative quite differently.
But that doesn't mean to say that it wasn't true at the time I wrote it. And if I think about the second volume of my memoirs, "True North," one of the things that I wanted to convey as clearly as I could was that it's possible for a professional woman to form a very deep and powerful marriage relationship and yet retain a bounded identity and a strong professional self and not experience those two things as in conflict. And I'm still close enough to that experience that I'd want to tell that story the same way.
GROSS: You would tell that story the same way.
CONWAY: Yes. Yes, indeed.
GROSS: Now, how...
CONWAY: You know, if I were in another life phase completely and struggling with other issues of meaning in my life, I might tell that one differently, too. But I'm not at the moment. I'm in the same life stage that I was when I was writing that.
GROSS: Your husband passed away since we last...
CONWAY: Yes.
GROSS: ...Spoke. And I was very...
CONWAY: That's right.
GROSS: ...Sorry to read about that. You just mentioned that you would tell your mother's story differently now, having experienced losing your husband, as she had lost hers. What would be different in how you told her story now based on what you've experienced?
CONWAY: Well, you know, at the time, before I'd had this experience, I attributed her excessive and overwhelming lifetime of grief as incomprehensible to me. I couldn't understand how she did not have the energy and drive, as a powerful and very strong woman, to get herself together and take up life again. Having lost my own husband, I can see what a temptation that is, although it's not one I've succumbed to. I understand how it might happen.
GROSS: Do you plan on writing another memoir?
CONWAY: One day, I will. But you have to be in another stage of life from the one you're writing about in order to know what's significant. You know, we fuss a lot about experiences, which, at the time, seem important, and with hindsight, seem not so important. And we often overlook, at the time, something that's very significant and shaping, so you have to be in another stage of life to know what the shape of your previous one was.
GROSS: I think, also, when we're in a certain - when we're in the stage of life that we're talking or writing about, we're much more defensive about the actions that we took.
CONWAY: (Laughter) That's right.
GROSS: ...Much more involved in justifying what we've done.
CONWAY: That's right. I mean, that's why the memoirs of statesmen written right after they lose office are so terrible because...
GROSS: Yes, right?
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: Well, Jill Ker Conway, thank you very much for talking with us.
CONWAY: It's a great pleasure, Terry. Thank you.
GROSS: Jill Ker Conway, recorded in 1998 after the publication of her book about memoirs, called "When Memory Speaks." In 2002, she wrote her third memoir, titled "A Woman's Education," about serving as the first woman president of Smith College. She died June 1 at the age of 83. I'm grateful for the opportunities I had to speak with her.
(SOUNDBITE OF MICHEL REIS' "REPERCUSSIONS")
GROSS: After a break, our rock critic Ken Tucker will review the debut album by Lindsey Jordan, who's just one year out of high school. She records under the name Snail Mail. This is FRESH AIR.
[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: This story incorrectly states the title of Jill Ker Conway's 1989 memoir as The Road to Coorain. It is The Road from Coorain.]
Copyright © 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/obituaries/jill-ker-conway-83-feminist-author-and-smith-president-dies.html
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Jill Ker Conway, 83, Feminist Author and Smith President, Dies
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2018-06-04T00:00:00
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Dr. Conway wrote three acclaimed memoirs, starting with her childhood on a sheep ranch in Australia and ending in American academia.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/obituaries/jill-ker-conway-83-feminist-author-and-smith-president-dies.html
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Growing up on a giant sheep ranch in the remote grasslands of Australia can shape a young girl’s whole life.
“In a labor-scarce society with a shortage of human energy, there is no room for social conventions about women’s work,” Jill Ker Conway, who grew up in just such a place, once noted. “The work had to be done. It never crossed anyone’s mind that you didn’t work up to your competence.”
By the time she made that observation, in 1975 and thousands of miles from her birthplace, Dr. Conway had proved the point. She had just become the first woman to be named president of Smith College, the prestigious women’s institution in Northampton, Mass.
And she was still early in a career filled with accomplishments. After a decade leading Smith, she wrote three acclaimed memoirs, among other books, and championed feminist causes and ideas. In 2013 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.
Dr. Conway died on Friday at her home in Boston, Smith College announced. She was 83. No cause was given.
Kathleen McCartney, Smith’s current president, said in a telephone interview that she was struck not only by what Dr. Conway did for the college, but also by her multiple roles as feminist, author, scholar and woman of influence on the boards of companies like Nike and nonprofits like the Kellogg Foundation.
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Review: When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography by Jill Ker Conway
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Journalist, critic, and memoirist, Thomas Larson is the author of three books: The Sanctuary of Illness, January 2014 from Hudson Whitman, The Saddest Music Ever Written and The Memoir and the Memoirist. He is a staff writer for the San Diego Reader, and he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Nonfiction at Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio. His essay-series, “The Social Author,” is running at Guernica. His website is www.thomaslarson.com.
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(San Diego Union-Tribune March 22, 1998)
A Mostly Male Form
Jill Ker Conway, feminist historian of memoir, knows the form firsthand. Her best-selling The Road From Coorain (1989) captured her indomitable family and hard-knocks girlhood in the Australian outback as well as her self-sufficiency when that family was plagued by loss.
True North (1994) showed her immigrating to the United States to study history at Harvard and later to teach at the University of Toronto, where she specialized in women's issues. Now, with When Memory Speaks, Conway charts the slow, at times ossified, growth of memoir over the last 200 years.
She contends that patriarchy has fixed the genre: Only men are allowed the "agency" of self-awareness when presenting the story of their lives. Agency arises from the belief that life "is an odyssey, a journey through many trials and tests, which the hero must surmount alone through courage, endurance, cunning and moral strength."
Among the archetypal male epics Conway inspects are those by Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass and Henry Ford, each of whom claims to have manufactured his own destiny. Living it "my way" is muted in female memoir: The woman's autobiographical script opposes agency because the heroine must portray herself unselfishly, which also means, romantically.
Forced to complement men, she "has no . . . power to act on her own behalf.
Things happen to her—adventures, lovers, reversals of fortune."
As a life-writer, she conceals her desires and devotes herself most often to others. The classic self-censoring woman's autobiography comes from lesser-known 19th-century authors like Harriet Martineau, Jane Addams and Margaret Sanger.
These women, Conway learns from their biographers, lived lives of forceful individuality—but their memoirs resemble Jane Austen-like romantic fiction, written to ply Victorian propriety (selfless and sexless) rather than to claim authority. It's true that past male and female life-writers have slavishly emphasized what they believed were their separate and immutable biological dispositions.
Yet Conway argues such pinks and blues are misguided because the presentation of self is far more culturally determined than gender-based. This concept, her most provocative, is convincing only when she applies it to the current trend in memoir writing.
Today, thanks to feminism, male and female authors freely mix agency and passivity, ego and romance, in portraits of traumatic experience with family.
To illustrate, Conway guides us through Mary Karr's The Liar's Club to show the writer as epic heroine, taking control of her destiny.
She plumbs Rick Bragg's All Over But the Shoutin' to gauge a young author who is profoundly influenced by his self-sacrificing mother, giving her, and not himself, credit for his journalistic success. The agency of family seems ripe for exploration but, alas, Conway ends too soon.
Maybe in her next study.
For now, her insights on the new agency of women who have, at last, begun to tell their stories selfishly are worth savoring. "Western culture has elevated the romantic heroine to pre-eminent place in its governing myths," she writes, "and, at least until very recently, has regarded women as less morally developed than men, or less able to exercise abstract moral reasoning.
But it's hard for someone who doesn't acknowledge agency, even to herself, to reason very cogently about the morality of her actions.
Once we've acquiesced in concealing our agency from ourselves and others, we've lost our moral moorings."
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https://community.solutions/a-note-on-the-naming-of-the-john-and-jill-ker-conway-residence/
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A note on the naming of the John and Jill Ker Conway Residence
|
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"Anna Kim"
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2018-01-09T02:40:44+00:00
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At the groundbreaking for the John and Jill Ker Conway Residence, Jill Ker Conway shared the following stories about how military service impacted her life and the lives of both her father, William Ker, who fought in World War I, and her husband, John Conway, who fought in World War II. Today this plaque hangs […]
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/favicon.ico
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Community Solutions
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https://community.solutions/a-note-on-the-naming-of-the-john-and-jill-ker-conway-residence/
|
At the groundbreaking for the John and Jill Ker Conway Residence, Jill Ker Conway shared the following stories about how military service impacted her life and the lives of both her father, William Ker, who fought in World War I, and her husband, John Conway, who fought in World War II. Today this plaque hangs in the John and Jill Ker Conway Residence, a supportive housing residence for formerly homeless veterans in Washington, D.C.
Jill Ker Conway
Jill Ker Conway, the founding Board Chair of Community Solutions, was the catalyst for the development of this building. At every step in the long development process, through many challenges, she reminded our team of the veterans who needed this housing and charged us to find a way forward.
Jill Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales and grew up on a sheep station in the Australian outback. She moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies in history at Harvard, and her research and writing on the lives of women helped to establish the field of Women’s Studies. Her gifts as an administrator and organizational leader were also soon recognized, and she became the first woman to hold the presidency of Smith College.
Following 10 noteworthy years at Smith, she began other careers as a best-selling author and as a builder and leader of strong institutions. Her board service spanned 37 foundations, multinational corporations and nonprofit organizations.
Fearless, elegant, and a builder up of people, she went on to receive the Order of Australia, the National Humanities Medal and 40 honorary degrees from colleges and universities.
William Ker
My father, William Innes Ker, was born in South Australia in 1884. His parents died early and he was raised by an uncle and aunt who lived on a very large sheep and cattle station close to Broken Hill, a mining town, in western New South Wales. Like many backcountry children, he left school early and trained as an engineer working in the Broken Hill Mines. But the great pleasure of his life during this period was his training in music and singing in the choir in the local Roman Catholic cathedral.
In 1914, he, along with his brother, went to the nearest recruiting center to join the army. He was refused for “poor eyesight,” but his younger brother made his way into the infantry and joined the troops who would undertake the disastrous landing in Gallipoli. Undaunted, my father tried again a year later and soon entered the fighting on the Menin Road leading up to the bloody Battle of Passchendaele. There he was severely wounded when he was buried alive by the explosion of a German bomb in the dugout his company occupied. Despite being rescued quickly, he lost sight in one eye and collected much shrapnel in his body.
After the war, my father returned to Australia to become the manager of a large sheep and cattle property in the countryside. There, he met my mother, Evelyn Adames, the beautiful matron of the local hospital. They married after two months and took up a land grant made available to returned soldiers.
In my childhood, I saw the many ways in which my father carried the marks of trench warfare. He had frequent, terrifying nightmares, almost always reenacting his burial in the dugout. Sudden, loud noises made him jittery, and he needed someone with him when we worked outside because flying dust could blind his one eye.
A deeply moral person, my father also grappled with his wartime experience of the horrors human beings could inflict on one another. He never allowed me to denigrate soldiers on the losing side of the First World War, and when the Second World War began, he would not tolerate denigration of the opposing side. When I asked him as a child if he had killed Germans, his reply was unforgettable. “They looked exactly like your brothers. Same blond hair and blue eyes. Same lovely skin. Never rejoice at another life taken. We must do better than that.”
My father died at the age of 54 in an accident partly caused by the heart problem he developed in the army.
John Conway
My husband, John Conway, studied literature at the University of British Columbia before entering the legal profession in 1940. In June of that year, after the fall of France, he joined the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada and participated in the defense of England. When an Allied counteroffensive began with an attempt to seize the Aegean port of Ortona, a major supply source for the German army in Italy, the Seaforths were elated to contribute. The landing was sobering because it produced the first loss of life for the regiment, and the route along the coast to Ortona proved a grinding struggle.
By the time the epic battle for Ortona was launched, John’s role had changed. He read maps quickly and accurately, and by reason of education and interest, he had some knowledge of Italian history and culture. He was selected to serve as A.D.C. for the commanding general of the Seaforths. Thus, he was at headquarters when the battle for Ortona was launched two days before Christmas Eve of 1942, watching and interpreting news as the fighting raged for eight days. When the battle had been won, the Canadian troops involved had lost 1375 dead.
This was the first Allied land victory in the European arena, and the Canadian general who had led it was immediately called back to England to participate in plans for the invasion of France. Before leaving, he ordered John to gather up the dead, buy some land for a cemetery, and organize a burial service. It was a tough task for a very young man, especially because among the dead were his close friends from school and college.
On May 23, 1944, one of John’s men was shot by a German gunner on the Hitler Line outside Rome and dropped a live hand grenade. John quickly grabbed the grenade and flung it far from his unit, losing a portion of his arm to the blast. Amazingly, he continued to lead his men forward with only a pistol until they had captured the German position. For this, he was awarded the Military Cross for heroism.
Following the war, John began a distinguished academic career at Harvard and York University in Ontario, but he never forgot his experience in battle, especially at Ortona. For the rest of his life, it was impossible for him to participate in Christmas celebrations, and the memories haunted him. We made visits to the Moro River Canadian Cemetery, and at his request, I took some of his ashes there after he died to join old friends.
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https://www.harvardmagazine.com/node/1120
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Review of Jill Ker Conway’s "True North"
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2002-05-01T08:00:00-04:00
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Since 1989, Jill Ker Conway has been fascinating readers, especially women, with the compelling story of her journey from sheep ranchers'...
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/themes/custom/harvard_magazine/images/favicons/apple-touch-icon.png
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Harvard Magazine
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https://www.harvardmagazine.com/node/1120
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Since 1989, Jill Ker Conway has been fascinating readers, especially women, with the compelling story of her journey from sheep ranchers' daughter in the wilds of Australia to president of one of this country's foremost liberal-arts institutions, Smith College. The Road from Coorain (1989) was a lyrical, at times magical, presentation of how this "born risk-taker" tore herself from a beloved but enervating family to pursue a dream of adventure through scholarship. True North (1994) brought the story to American shores, as Conway earned a Harvard Ph.D. in history, found her "true north" in marriage and intellectual fulfillment, and then, during 11 years at the University of Toronto, expanded her career beyond the growing pleasures of teaching and research into the newly satisfying arena of academic management.
A Woman's Education (2001) completes this captivating trilogy of memoir, taking Conway from her 1974 decision to accept the Smith presidency to her equally firm determination to leave after 10 years and follow an individualized plan for fulfilling other interests. The end of A Woman's Education is almost startling in its bold and unsentimental explanation of how she has conceived these three books of autobiography.
In the last chapter, "Sostenuto," she outlines the tripartite agenda she drew up for her postpresidential years that could be the envy of other powerful people retiring from public life. A clear theme runs through that agenda: she will use what she has learned as a woman leader, and she will capitalize on the visibility she has gained. After Smith, Conway spent one-third of her time in helping to manage organizations (corporations, now, as well as familiar nonprofits like hospitals and schools). Her growing appreciation of technology led her to spend another third as a scholar at MIT, exploring the connections among science, technology, and society. There, she challenged the "ecofeminism" she has grown to distrust for its view of women as "earth mothers" who must protect the planet from the disruptions of male-directed industry and environmental disregard. The third part of the agenda nourished her artistic side. She decided to explore and record her own story--perhaps, she intimates here, less for self-understanding than as a "counter-record" to certain feminist approaches that worry her.
As this volume makes clear, Conway questions feminism that emphasizes women's difference from men, especially their presumed softer side that might lead institutions in new ways. Using her own autobiography as evidence, Conway resolves to "write about what women were not supposed to acknowledge--ambition, love of adventure, the quest for intellectual power, physical courage and endurance, risk taking, the negative aspects of mother/daughter relations always so relentlessly sentimentalized." Hers, then, will be a record of women's pains and pleasures, with no hiding of ambition for public leadership.
On reading this determined declaration, I initially felt some of the warmth recede from my previous assessments of Conway's books. Never romantic, these volumes nonetheless inspire as Conway explores the difficulties of life, love, work, and career. However, on reflection, I began to understand that she wants readers--both those who share her stage of life and younger ones looking for a model--to see feminism and leadership with clarity and independent thinking. Conway's particular approach to feminism values freedom of choice for women on personal, professional, and intellectual fronts. She will offer readers one carefully examined story of how a talented woman pursued life's challenges.
Above all, A Woman's Education is a story of leadership, framed by Conway's decade at Smith College. She draws us in immediately with the engaging story of how she unwittingly auditioned for the job. Invited with her husband, John, to spend a weekend at the always vibrant Berkshire home of their friends Archibald and Ada MacLeish, Conway wondered why every question in their normally eclectic conversation turned to women's education. She also noticed that every guest at the MacLeish table stopped speaking and focused on her answers. Only at the end of the weekend did Conway realize that all the other guests were Smith-connected--members of an informal team quietly recruiting a replacement for the college's retiring president.
When an invitation for an actual interview arrived six months later, Conway was prepared, yet she notes that she accepted the overture mostly to please her husband. But citing only that part of her decision makes Conway seem disingenuous. How could a woman so committed to feminism and her own managerial strengths pretend that only her husband's encouragement prompted this exciting move? To think this, however, would miss a vital strand in Conway's story: her deeply fulfilling marriage. In her second volume, Conway explored her growing love with John, how he nurtured her intellectually and personally. Thus, saying that she accepted Smith's invitation "to please him" never diminishes her own agency. Rather, it reveals and honors their tradition of joint consideration of how this opportunity--like various others--might satisfy her needs, ambitions, and skills. The decision was mutual, with her best interests at the fore.
Arriving at Smith in the summer of 1975, Conway found the presidency predictable in its professional challenges, but unexpectedly provocative in its personal challenge to her sense of herself as a woman. This academic historian, who has spent a career analyzing the history of progressive women, describes the unexpected "jolt of energy" she felt, discovering in Smith "a literal manifestation of a century of work on women." The first female Smith College president depicts in striking detail her first convocation, "when 2,200 Smith women began chanting, 'Jill! Jill!' and drumming on the floor to accentuate the shout." Although she had begun by assuming her accustomed asexual public demeanor, she "realized there could be no hiding behind a formal role. They and I were entering a little-known and rarely experienced relationship of woman leader and idealistic young followers." When a male colleague expressed astonishment at feeling left out of this connection, recognizing his distance from these students for the first time, Conway began to realize the potential of her work not only for inspiring young women students, but for learning new truths about herself at midlife.
The book offers unabashedly positive views of students. Conway is both tolerant and supportive of young adult self-exploration. Further, she refuses to blame that generation of women for being rowdy, confused, impatient with authority, and sexually experimental. Her sense of history, honed through studying women fighting for a place in a resistant world, teaches her that issues go in cycles, and that 1970s women were challenging a particular set of barriers around curriculum and student life.
Concerning the latter, Conway unblinkingly discusses the frequent challenges she faced over homosexuality on the Smith campus. In fact, she credits the incessant demands that she "fix" Smith's sexual experimentation for developing her commitment to lesbian and gay rights. Blaming the Puritan legacy for people's discomfort with homoeroticism, and further noting the long existence of homosexuality, Conway essentially told complainants "that this is a fact of life." Although this seldom satisfied homophobes, Conway asserted her presidential conviction that adult women can make their own decisions about sexuality, about education, and about their futures.
Outside challengers were not the only ones who questioned Conway's methods. Her effort to infuse the curriculum with new attention to women's studies, non-Western content, technology, and professional training met with horror from a faculty group that she calls "the dinosaurs." People who taught at Smith during the Conway years must open this book with a slight frisson, hoping not to find themselves categorized too meanly. The former president is harsh in describing these hopeless males trying to wait out the tides of feminism, as well as a younger group of men who patronized female intellectuality and valued themselves as patriarchal sources of knowledge. Nor do female faculty escape presidential skewering. Conway laments the "honorary male scholars" who copied a traditionally "male" approach to teaching and thinking. She also dismisses those "lady scholars" with a penchant for detailed and fine-grained work that strikes her as "intellectual petit point." Although Conway's long journey toward an academic persona might suggest why she is so impatient with these styles, former Columbia University literature professor Carolyn Heilbrun has recently explored this issue more sympathetically in When Men Were the Only Models We Had (University of Pennsylvania Press). Both authors, now among the country's senior female scholars, recall the uncomfortable, tense environment encountered by women trying to extend feminist gains into academe.
Happily, Conway also found a group of activist female scholars who helped her bring a new feeling to Smith. Providing a historical case study of curriculum transformation, Conway describes how they strategically instituted a sort of shadow curriculum, offering new approaches in noncredit or nonrequired courses that drew large numbers of students. Conway then generated funding to help faculty update their knowledge, create a research center, and find ways to make their teaching more innovative. Before long, students excited about the new curriculum upped the ante for all courses, pushing the edge of curricular change.
Besides the students and this smallish group of like-minded women faculty, Conway found welcome support from Smith alumnae--both the leaders and the general group of many devoted graduates. She describes the unexpected boosts she felt during otherwise-exhausting cross-country fundraising: as committed alumnae offered testimonies to Smith's success, followed by promises of help, Conway was humbled by the cumulative power of a strong woman's institution. She also came to realize her prejudice--perhaps fed by her own professional decisions--against women's volunteer work. Although she does not seem to connect the legacy of powerful volunteerism to the Progressive era she studied historically, Conway now appreciates how this alternate track produces female influence.
Throughout A Woman's Education, Conway's perspective as a historian informs both her approach to living a professional life and her understanding of Smith's issues--including the omnipresent question of whether Smith should join the 1970s march to coeducation. (Her answer: No, the tide will turn.) Like her earlier books, which explored her unshakable connection to the land, Conway here takes a chapter to describe the Berkshire retreat home and garden that she and John transformed in 10 years. She sees their house within the sweep of Massachusetts history that domesticated western New England, then moved through phases of settlement, bustle, farming, and tourism. Conway is her most introspective, personal, and poetic in this chapter, as she explores her need to retreat from presidential duties. But she also reveals the extent of her "public role and private sadness" as John's longstanding and recurrent clinical depression, so movingly detailed in her second book, continues to plague their marriage. Her work successes are punctuated by the disorienting periods of John's hospitalization. Just as the book validates the blessings of companionable marriage, it also explores Conway's fears of losing the security of this partnership.
Both gardening and sculpting are powerful metaphors throughout the book that gain strength in the chapter on the retreat, but resonate throughout her descriptions of presidential life. They balance and soften Conway's discussion of tasks, sections that tend toward the prosaic as she lets her obligation to describe overcome her pleasure in metaphor and introspection. With her Smith garden successfully blooming, Conway began preparations to leave. Again offering a case study of managerial competence and leadership bravado, she presented a challenging new campus strategic plan, and, for three years, marshaled resources to accomplish it. She left Smith with its all-female traditions intact, yet transformed by growth fostered by that heady decade of American feminism.
The great pleasure of this book, as it completes Conway's trilogy, is the clear centering in its time period. Although autobiography is necessarily retrospective, Conway avoids the temptation to let her present accomplishments and understandings color her presentation of the past. Even while explaining her intentions for her postpresidential life, she keeps herself and her readers rooted in the bustling feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. Because of her training, Conway values the historical record enough to record that era's effort to define a woman's education. She values the importance of memoir enough to infuse that presentation with the personal story of one woman's education.
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https://issuu.com/australianamericanfulbright/docs/mindshearts_aug18/s/10754
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In Memoriam: Dr Jill Ker Conway AC
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"Minds & Hearts"
] |
2018-09-04T04:50:43+00:00
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Dr Jill Ker Conway’s raw intelligence, robust character, and deft, analytical mind propelled her through a remarkable career in education, academia, and business.
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/favicon.ico
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Issuu
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https://issuu.com/australianamericanfulbright/docs/mindshearts_aug18/s/10754
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Dr Jill Ker Conway’s raw intelligence, robust character, and deft, analytical mind propelled her through a remarkable career in education, academia, and business.
Formative years spent working the harsh land of a sheep station in outback New South Wales fostered a fierce determination to shrug the shackles of endemic gender discrimination, and lead her to become a trailblazing women’s rights advocate.
Yet it was her thoughtful, poignant reflections on life amid this dusty, arid vastness, vividly chronicled in her best-selling autobiography, The Road from Coorain, that truly cemented Jill’s place as an Australian literary icon.
Time manages the most painful partings for us. One has only to set the date, buy the ticket, and let the earth, sun, and moon make their passages through the sky, until inexorable time carries us with it to the moment of parting.”
Jill’s early life was, in fact, punctuated by painful partings. She lost her father in a tragic accident on the family farm when she was just 10, and was sent from her cherished Coorain home to boarding school at 12. Her brother died in a car accident when she was 16, then at 24 she parted with her first true love, an American venture capitalist, with a tearful farewell at the Pan Am terminal in Sydney. Jill’s indomitable spirit, and the inexorable passage of time saw her safely through.
But it was a departure of a different kind that would forever alter the course of Jill’s life, and culminate in her appointment as the first woman president of Massachusetts’ prestigious Smith College, and her being named Time’s ‘Woman of the Year’ at just 40 years of age.
I’d arrived at the choice by exhausting all the possibilities of interesting careers in Australia, discovering, one by one, that they were not open to women…so my setting out was not exactly the departure of a conquering hero, but more the ambiguous result of deciding that I needed to get away from Australia, to view life from a different perspective.”
Frustrated and suffocated by the lack of opportunity for an ambitious young Australian woman, Jill decided to pursue graduate study abroad. Glimpses of American culture had opened her eyes to a more fluid and progressive interpretation of her own place in society, and to the potential of what could be achieved through hard work and talent. In 1960, Jill applied for a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the U.S, and less than a year later, found herself wandering the halls of Harvard’s Radcliffe College.
The unconventional teaching methods instantly appealed. Students were invited to critically engage with the material, rather than simply read and accept the conclusions of others. For the first time, Jill was forced to step back and ask herself exactly why she wanted to study history.
Why was I an historian? One wasn’t just born curious about history. The reason was I’d grown up having to know why things were the way they were.
The droughts and sudden swings of fortune of my childhood in the Australian outback meant that I was preoccupied by questions of free will and determinism. Coming to consciousness during the war made me interested in the conflict of ideas and ideologies, and curious about where they came from.”
The educators were passionate and eccentric; one particular favourite of Jill’s would deliver his lectures with the dramatic flair of a Shakespearian soliloquy. This intellectual nourishment was intoxicating, and Jill found herself re-examining everything she had learned about history through an entirely new lens.
Since I craved understanding more than any other intellectual delight, each flash of insight was a heady new fix for a boundless appetite… I could scarcely attend a lecture without some new insight about the history of the Australian colonies exploding in my mind like a firecracker.
This was what I’d wanted from the study of history – the flash of understanding, the new insight, the notion that one was living with reality, not some dusty myth from the past.”
Jill went on to earn a PhD in History in 1969. While at Harvard, she had fallen in love with Canadian professor and WWII veteran John Conway, whom she described as "totally and spontaneously liberated". They married, and moved to Canada, where Jill took a teaching post at the University of Toronto.
As a shrewd and innovative administrator, Jill rose swiftly through the ranks there to become a dean in 1971, then vice president in 1973. Privately, she helped John battle through severe bouts of manic depression, and in the midst of one particularly bad episode, reaffirmed the importance of her independence.
His moral integrity, courage, and devotion to humanistic learning were certainly my compass point, the true north one needed to set directions on this continent. But I now knew there were going to be times when I’d have to navigate alone.”
In 1974, Jill was visited by the committee charged with finding a new president for Smith College, one of the most illustrious women’s liberal arts institutions in the world. Busy with a life "learning to swim in the choppy seas of administrative life", she gave little thought to the idea of a move back to the U.S., but, at John’s insistence, accepted an invitation to visit the campus.
I left a grey city to see a campus ablaze with crocus, daffodils, scilla, and rich strawberry and cream magnolias. Brighter than the spring flowers were the faces of the young women I saw everywhere.
I could spend months at a time at the University of Toronto without ever hearing a female voice raised. Here the women were rowdy, physically freewheeling, joshing one-another loudly, their laughter deep-belly laughter, not propitiatory giggles. I was entranced.”
Her progressive values extended to directorship; for example, before agreeing to join Nike, Jill insisted on a campaign to stimulate interest in sport for girls, chaired a corporate social responsibility committee, and regularly visited Nike factories in Asia to check the working conditions of the primarily-female workforce.
Jill’s innovative leadership and pioneering views on corporate social responsibility brought international recognition and accolades.
In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal, and her country of birth appointed her an honorary Companion of the Order of Australia for "eminent service to the community, particularly women, as an author, academic and through leadership roles with corporations, foundations, universities and philanthropic groups".
In an article for the Sydney Morning Herald at the time, her words on contemporary Australia were characteristically thoughtful:
Today Australia is rich in resources and part of the dynamic Asia Pacific market and its financial institutions are global players. But today my rural world is in decline even though we know that there will be a serious problem of feeding the world's population within several generations.
So my hope is for a political climate a little more focused on the future, and a little less comfortable with the wealth that comes from feeding the carbon economy.”
Jill passed away at her home on the first of June, 2018, on a warm, cloudy day in Boston.
In accordance with her wishes, half of her ashes rest in a small private cemetery beside John’s, near their beloved house and garden in Massachusetts; the other half were scattered by the big tree, beside the driveway into the house at Coorain.
As I walked out to the plane in the balmy air of a Sydney September night, my mind flew back to a dusty cemetery where my father was buried. Where, I wondered, would my bones come to rest? It pained me to think of them not fertilizing Australian soil.
Then I comforted myself with the notion that wherever on the earth was my final resting place, my body would return to the restless red dust of the western plains. I could see how it would blow about and get in people’s eyes, and I was content with that.”
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https://www.pinestreetinn.org/innsider/Donor-Spotlight-Jill-Ker-Conway
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en
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Donor Spotlight: Jill Ker Conway
|
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[
"Pine Street Inn",
"homelessness",
"Boston",
"ending homelessness",
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Pine Street Inn's mission is to end homelessness. Pine Street is New England's leading provider of housing, shelter, street outreach and job training to homeless men and women in Greater Boston. We envision a permanent home and community for everyone.
|
en
|
https://www.pinestreetinn.org/innsider/Donor-Spotlight-Jill-Ker-Conway
|
Jill Ker Conway was a writer, a scholar, president of Smith College in Northampton, MA – and a philanthropist. An Australian native, Conway left her mark on the Boston community, including Pine Street, not only as a loyal donor during her lifetime, but also in helping to sustain Pine Street after her death last year.
As an annual fund donor, Conway went above and beyond in her support of Pine Street through planned giving efforts. She made a meaningful gift through her retirement and estate planning. We are grateful for her generosity, which will secure the continuation of our work for years to come.
Planned giving helps ensure a consistent, long-term source of funding. Please consider including Pine Street in your planning for the future.
To learn more about our planned giving program, contact Alicia Ianiere at alicia.ianiere@pinestreetinn.org or 617.892.9177.
|
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https://issuu.com/australianamericanfulbright/docs/mindshearts_aug18/s/10754
|
en
|
In Memoriam: Dr Jill Ker Conway AC
|
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2018-09-04T04:50:43+00:00
|
Dr Jill Ker Conway’s raw intelligence, robust character, and deft, analytical mind propelled her through a remarkable career in education, academia, and business.
|
en
|
/favicon.ico
|
Issuu
|
https://issuu.com/australianamericanfulbright/docs/mindshearts_aug18/s/10754
|
Dr Jill Ker Conway’s raw intelligence, robust character, and deft, analytical mind propelled her through a remarkable career in education, academia, and business.
Formative years spent working the harsh land of a sheep station in outback New South Wales fostered a fierce determination to shrug the shackles of endemic gender discrimination, and lead her to become a trailblazing women’s rights advocate.
Yet it was her thoughtful, poignant reflections on life amid this dusty, arid vastness, vividly chronicled in her best-selling autobiography, The Road from Coorain, that truly cemented Jill’s place as an Australian literary icon.
Time manages the most painful partings for us. One has only to set the date, buy the ticket, and let the earth, sun, and moon make their passages through the sky, until inexorable time carries us with it to the moment of parting.”
Jill’s early life was, in fact, punctuated by painful partings. She lost her father in a tragic accident on the family farm when she was just 10, and was sent from her cherished Coorain home to boarding school at 12. Her brother died in a car accident when she was 16, then at 24 she parted with her first true love, an American venture capitalist, with a tearful farewell at the Pan Am terminal in Sydney. Jill’s indomitable spirit, and the inexorable passage of time saw her safely through.
But it was a departure of a different kind that would forever alter the course of Jill’s life, and culminate in her appointment as the first woman president of Massachusetts’ prestigious Smith College, and her being named Time’s ‘Woman of the Year’ at just 40 years of age.
I’d arrived at the choice by exhausting all the possibilities of interesting careers in Australia, discovering, one by one, that they were not open to women…so my setting out was not exactly the departure of a conquering hero, but more the ambiguous result of deciding that I needed to get away from Australia, to view life from a different perspective.”
Frustrated and suffocated by the lack of opportunity for an ambitious young Australian woman, Jill decided to pursue graduate study abroad. Glimpses of American culture had opened her eyes to a more fluid and progressive interpretation of her own place in society, and to the potential of what could be achieved through hard work and talent. In 1960, Jill applied for a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the U.S, and less than a year later, found herself wandering the halls of Harvard’s Radcliffe College.
The unconventional teaching methods instantly appealed. Students were invited to critically engage with the material, rather than simply read and accept the conclusions of others. For the first time, Jill was forced to step back and ask herself exactly why she wanted to study history.
Why was I an historian? One wasn’t just born curious about history. The reason was I’d grown up having to know why things were the way they were.
The droughts and sudden swings of fortune of my childhood in the Australian outback meant that I was preoccupied by questions of free will and determinism. Coming to consciousness during the war made me interested in the conflict of ideas and ideologies, and curious about where they came from.”
The educators were passionate and eccentric; one particular favourite of Jill’s would deliver his lectures with the dramatic flair of a Shakespearian soliloquy. This intellectual nourishment was intoxicating, and Jill found herself re-examining everything she had learned about history through an entirely new lens.
Since I craved understanding more than any other intellectual delight, each flash of insight was a heady new fix for a boundless appetite… I could scarcely attend a lecture without some new insight about the history of the Australian colonies exploding in my mind like a firecracker.
This was what I’d wanted from the study of history – the flash of understanding, the new insight, the notion that one was living with reality, not some dusty myth from the past.”
Jill went on to earn a PhD in History in 1969. While at Harvard, she had fallen in love with Canadian professor and WWII veteran John Conway, whom she described as "totally and spontaneously liberated". They married, and moved to Canada, where Jill took a teaching post at the University of Toronto.
As a shrewd and innovative administrator, Jill rose swiftly through the ranks there to become a dean in 1971, then vice president in 1973. Privately, she helped John battle through severe bouts of manic depression, and in the midst of one particularly bad episode, reaffirmed the importance of her independence.
His moral integrity, courage, and devotion to humanistic learning were certainly my compass point, the true north one needed to set directions on this continent. But I now knew there were going to be times when I’d have to navigate alone.”
In 1974, Jill was visited by the committee charged with finding a new president for Smith College, one of the most illustrious women’s liberal arts institutions in the world. Busy with a life "learning to swim in the choppy seas of administrative life", she gave little thought to the idea of a move back to the U.S., but, at John’s insistence, accepted an invitation to visit the campus.
I left a grey city to see a campus ablaze with crocus, daffodils, scilla, and rich strawberry and cream magnolias. Brighter than the spring flowers were the faces of the young women I saw everywhere.
I could spend months at a time at the University of Toronto without ever hearing a female voice raised. Here the women were rowdy, physically freewheeling, joshing one-another loudly, their laughter deep-belly laughter, not propitiatory giggles. I was entranced.”
Her progressive values extended to directorship; for example, before agreeing to join Nike, Jill insisted on a campaign to stimulate interest in sport for girls, chaired a corporate social responsibility committee, and regularly visited Nike factories in Asia to check the working conditions of the primarily-female workforce.
Jill’s innovative leadership and pioneering views on corporate social responsibility brought international recognition and accolades.
In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal, and her country of birth appointed her an honorary Companion of the Order of Australia for "eminent service to the community, particularly women, as an author, academic and through leadership roles with corporations, foundations, universities and philanthropic groups".
In an article for the Sydney Morning Herald at the time, her words on contemporary Australia were characteristically thoughtful:
Today Australia is rich in resources and part of the dynamic Asia Pacific market and its financial institutions are global players. But today my rural world is in decline even though we know that there will be a serious problem of feeding the world's population within several generations.
So my hope is for a political climate a little more focused on the future, and a little less comfortable with the wealth that comes from feeding the carbon economy.”
Jill passed away at her home on the first of June, 2018, on a warm, cloudy day in Boston.
In accordance with her wishes, half of her ashes rest in a small private cemetery beside John’s, near their beloved house and garden in Massachusetts; the other half were scattered by the big tree, beside the driveway into the house at Coorain.
As I walked out to the plane in the balmy air of a Sydney September night, my mind flew back to a dusty cemetery where my father was buried. Where, I wondered, would my bones come to rest? It pained me to think of them not fertilizing Australian soil.
Then I comforted myself with the notion that wherever on the earth was my final resting place, my body would return to the restless red dust of the western plains. I could see how it would blow about and get in people’s eyes, and I was content with that.”
|
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https://www.amazon.com/Road-Coorain-Jill-Ker-Conway/dp/0679724362
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Amazon.com
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https://kelseycleveland.com/jill-ker-conway/
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en
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Jill Ker Conway: Reflections on the chapters of her life
|
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2018-06-21T16:20:59+00:00
|
Dr. Jill Ker Conway modeled for women a life divided into distinct chapters during her 83 years. All woman can learn from her example.
|
en
|
Kelsey Cleveland LLC
|
https://kelseycleveland.com/jill-ker-conway/
|
Photo courtesy of Smith College
Your body of work is everything you create, contribute, affect, and impact. For individuals, it is the personal legacy you leave at the end of your life, including all tangible and intangible things you have created. Individuals who structure their careers around autonomy, mastery, and purpose will have a powerful body of work.
Pamela Slim, Body of Work: Finding the Thread That Ties Your Story Together (p. 7)
A girl from the Outback, who grew up to become one of my role models, died this month. Dr. Jill Ker Conway served as the first female president of my alma mater, Smith College, from 1975 until 1985. Even though our paths only intersected the one time I heard her speak on campus, I followed her career. I felt a kinship with her due to our shared connection to both Australia and Smith College. Although not a student during her tenure, I benefitted from her legacy. Her death gave me the opportunity to reflect on the lessons I take from her life and career.
As both a scholar of woman’s history and in designing her own life, Dr. Ker Conway took the long-range view on women’s lives. She modeled for women a life divided into distinct chapters during her 83 years. All woman can learn from her body of work and the chapters of her life.
Fail fast and learn from it.
The Australian government passed Jill Ker Conway over for a job in the foreign service. Even though she graduated at the top of her class from the University of Sydney. The sexist hiring committee presumed that the attractive woman would marry and no longer want the job. Her failure to get that job was one of the best things that never happened to her.
Jill Ker Conway didn't acquire the mistaken belief that in life some people are winners while others are losers. Instead, she understood that life is an infinite game from which you can learn and improve. Only when the foreign service passed her over, did she look for an alternative solution for career and country.
With a bias to action, she briefly capitalized on her looks by studying modeling at a fashion school in London. Her next pivot took her to graduate studies in history at Harvard University. Her education at Harvard University led to her career as a trailblazing educator and her marriage to a fellow historian, John Conway.
Find a true partner for marriage.
I didn't marry until I met a man who was willing from the get-go to support my desire for a separate professional life. People always said to me, 'How lucky you are to have a husband who supports your separate career,' and I always say, 'It wasn't luck.' Young women are trained to think they should marry someone who is a great romantic love. You should really marry someone who respects your working self and creative ability and wants to enter into a relationship where each supports the other. And that's not the romantic story.
Jill Ker Conway in an excerpt from a 2002 Globe and Mail article
She and her husband took turns choosing where they should live, influenced by career opportunities. After their marriage, they moved to Toronto. Later, they moved to Northampton, Massachusetts for Dr. Ker Conway to assume the post of president of Smith College.
I am fortunate that I too found a true partner for marriage. Together, we fulfilled my longheld dream of living and working in Japan.
Modeled living life with different chapters
Scholar. Author. Advocate. Corporate board member.
Jill Ker Conway’s life proved that women don’t need to be limited by one career or mode of work. During each new chapter in her life, she leveraged existing skills and experiences. While, at the same time, developing new ones. She brought the same long-range view of feminist history to designing her life.
Scholar and educator
Jill Ker Conway earned her doctorate in history at Harvard University. Cambridge was a far cry from her early correspondence school education in the windswept Australian Outback. First, she worked as an academic with a focus on women’s history. Next, the trailblazing educator served as the first female president of Smith College from 1975 to 1985.
I am grateful for the following legacies of her tenure at Smith College:
All subsequent presidents of the college have been women.
She oversaw the construction and creation of the indoor track and tennis facilities. While playing tennis on those courts, a member of the athletic department encouraged me to join the team.
She championed the Ada Comstock Scholars Program, for untraditional aged students. These scholars inspired me with their eagerness to learn and finish their education.
Comparative Literature, which was my major, didn't exist at Smith until her tenure.
Three chapters after Smith College
Jill Ker Conway deliberately divided her life into thirds when her academic life ended.
WRITER
First, Jill Ker Conway devoted herself to writing her memoir trilogy. I immediately read her best-selling memoir, The Road from Coorain (1989) upon my acceptance at Smith College. In this book, she recounts her childhood on an isolated 32,000-acre sheep ranch in Australia. I liked knowing that a president of the college I would soon be attending had been born in Australia like me. She also brings us into her decision to leave her homeland in pursuit of a graduate degree. It's incredible that a girl from the Outback, who had not met another girl her age until she was age seven, went on to become president of a woman’s college.
I read her next two memoirs after college. True North, published in 1995, covered her academic career before Smith College. The final book in the trilogy, A Woman’s Education, published in 2002, addressed her term as president.
Jill Ker Conway also wrote fiction with Elizabeth Topham Kennan, the former president of Mount Holyoke. Under the pen name Clare Munnings, the two wrote a mystery/thriller titled Overnight Float set on a fictional college campus.
ADVOCATE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
An adult life...is a slowly emerging design, with shifting components, occasional dramatic disruptions, and fresh creative arrangements.
Jill Ker Conway
Jill Ker Conway’s next pivot was to think about and advocate for the environment. She did so as a visiting professor in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society.
GOVERNANCE
In her final chapter, Jill Ker Conway used her governance expertise, gained at Smith College. She served on boards of both corporations, nonprofits, and foundations.
Her memoirs didn’t sugar coat the life of an ambitious woman.
Jill Ker Conway’s memoirs depicted the ups and downs of her life as an ambitious and intelligent woman. She doesn’t leave out the hard facts such as being discriminated against as a woman or her husband’s struggle with manic depression. She takes risks and has adventures in her quest for knowledge and career advancement.
With her experience as a memoirist and as a scholar of woman’s history, Jill Ker Conway further explored woman’s autobiographies in:
When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography
Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women
In Her Own Words: Women’s Memoirs From Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States.
She helped pave the way for aspiring female memoirists, such as myself, to share their truth.
How many chapters will be in my obituary?
The obituaries about Jill Ker Conway inspired me to ponder my life. How many chapters will be in my obituary? How do I want to be remembered by my husband, son, relatives, friends, and community? What will my legacy be?
Still curious?
If you, like me, are considering a new chapter in your life or career, I recommend the following books:
|
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https://www.supersummary.com/the-road-from-coorain/summary/
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The Road from Coorain Summary
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Get ready to explore The Road from Coorain and its meaning. Our full analysis and study guide provides an even deeper dive with character analysis and quotes explained to help you discover the complexity and beauty of this book.
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en
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SuperSummary
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https://www.supersummary.com/the-road-from-coorain/summary/
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A SuperSummary Plot Summary provides a quick, full synopsis of a text.
A SuperSummary Study Guide — a modern alternative to Sparknotes & CliffsNotes — provides so much more, including chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and important quotes.
|
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https://www.kennys.ie/biography/road-from-coorain
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Road From Coorain
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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jill-Ker-Conway
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Jill Ker Conway | Women’s History, Autobiography, Education
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1999-04-26T00:00:00+00:00
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Jill Ker Conway was an Australian-born American scholar, the first woman president of Smith College (1975–85), whose research as a historian focused on the role of feminism in American history. Jill Ker grew up in Coorain, a remote grasslands locale where her parents ran a sheep ranch. After her
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/favicon.png
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Encyclopedia Britannica
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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jill-Ker-Conway
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Jill Ker Conway (born October 9, 1934, Hillston, New South Wales, Australia—died June 1, 2018, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.) was an Australian-born American scholar, the first woman president of Smith College (1975–85), whose research as a historian focused on the role of feminism in American history.
Jill Ker grew up in Coorain, a remote grasslands locale where her parents ran a sheep ranch. After her father’s unexpected death, her mother moved the family to Sydney. Ker was educated at Abbotsleigh, a private girls’ school, and at the University of Sydney, where she took an honours degree in history in 1958. Two years later, after her rejection by the Australian foreign service on the basis of her sex, she immigrated to the United States for graduate work.
While earning her doctorate at Harvard University (Ph.D., 1969), she met and married John Conway. The Conways then moved to Toronto. There she taught 19th- and 20th-century American history at the University of Toronto, where she also became one of five vice presidents of the university. In 1975 Conway became the first woman president of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, a position she held for a decade. In 1985 she became a visiting scholar and professor in the Science, Technology, and Society program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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https://www.target.com/p/written-by-herself-by-jill-ker-conway-paperback/-/A-91161740
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By Jill Ker Conway (paperback) : Target
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Shop Written by Herself - by Jill Ker Conway (Paperback) at Target. Choose from Same Day Delivery, Drive Up or Order Pickup. Free standard shipping with $35 orders.
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Jill Ker Conway
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Jill Ker Conway. Writer: The Road from Coorain. Jill Ker Conway was born on 9 October 1934 in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia. She was a writer, known for The Road from Coorain (2002). She was married to John J. Conway and John Conway. She died on 1 June 2018 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
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IMDb
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https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4440989/
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Jill Ker Conway was born on 9 October 1934 in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia. She was a writer, known for The Road from Coorain (2002). She was married to John J. Conway and John Conway. She died on 1 June 2018 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
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https://www.masslive.com/living/2018/10/memorial_service_set_for_jill_ker_conway_smith_colleges_first_woman_president.html
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en
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Memorial service set for Jill Ker Conway, Smith College's first woman president
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2018-10-05T19:45:00+00:00
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The service, open to the public, is Oct. 18 for Conway who died in Boston in June.
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masslive
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https://www.masslive.com/living/2018/10/memorial_service_set_for_jill_ker_conway_smith_colleges_first_woman_president.html
|
NORTHAMPTON - A public memorial service is being held Oct. 18 for former Smith College President Jill Ker Conway who died in Boston in June. She would have turned 84 on Oct. 9.
The service for the Australian-born Conway, who became the college's first woman president at the age of 40 in 1975, begins at 4 p.m. in Helen Hills Hills Chapel, 123 Elm St.
Conway, who held a doctorate in history from Harvard University, was regarded as an innovator and successful fund-raiser during her years at Smith, and in retirement became a best-selling author, member of Nike's board of trustees where she chaired the committee on corporate responsibility that she suggested, and worked to address homelessness, particularly among veterans.
Her husband, John J. Conway, whom she had met at Harvard, served in the Canadian infantry in World War II, and had his right hand blown off by a grenade. He died in 1995.
In her 1989 memoir, "The Road From Coorain," the first of a trio, Conway wrote about growing up on a 32,000 sheep farm in Australia, going onto university where she study American women reformers from the Progressive Era like Jane Addams, and then entering a world where women were not really expected to stay long-term in the workforce.
The PBS program "Masterpiece Theater" used "The Road From Coorain" as the basis for a film in 2002.
Conway, who was named one of Time Magazine's Women of the Year in 1975, dedicated much of her career to creating programs and courses to help women advance and to help women - and society - expand perceptions of women's capabilities.
She came to Smith from the University of Toronto, where she served as that university's first female vice-president and successfully lobbied for equality in terms of pay and tenure.
Susan C. Bourque, a former provost and dean of the faculty at Smith, told an interviewer that Conway's appointment at the women's college at the time "absolutely electrified the campus."
"Here was this vibrant young woman, enormously attractive, who had just been appointed as the first woman in Smith's history. You could just feel the new history that had come," Bourque said.
|
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https://issuu.com/australianamericanfulbright/docs/mindshearts_aug18/s/10754
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en
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In Memoriam: Dr Jill Ker Conway AC
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Dr Jill Ker Conway’s raw intelligence, robust character, and deft, analytical mind propelled her through a remarkable career in education, academia, and business.
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Dr Jill Ker Conway’s raw intelligence, robust character, and deft, analytical mind propelled her through a remarkable career in education, academia, and business.
Formative years spent working the harsh land of a sheep station in outback New South Wales fostered a fierce determination to shrug the shackles of endemic gender discrimination, and lead her to become a trailblazing women’s rights advocate.
Yet it was her thoughtful, poignant reflections on life amid this dusty, arid vastness, vividly chronicled in her best-selling autobiography, The Road from Coorain, that truly cemented Jill’s place as an Australian literary icon.
Time manages the most painful partings for us. One has only to set the date, buy the ticket, and let the earth, sun, and moon make their passages through the sky, until inexorable time carries us with it to the moment of parting.”
Jill’s early life was, in fact, punctuated by painful partings. She lost her father in a tragic accident on the family farm when she was just 10, and was sent from her cherished Coorain home to boarding school at 12. Her brother died in a car accident when she was 16, then at 24 she parted with her first true love, an American venture capitalist, with a tearful farewell at the Pan Am terminal in Sydney. Jill’s indomitable spirit, and the inexorable passage of time saw her safely through.
But it was a departure of a different kind that would forever alter the course of Jill’s life, and culminate in her appointment as the first woman president of Massachusetts’ prestigious Smith College, and her being named Time’s ‘Woman of the Year’ at just 40 years of age.
I’d arrived at the choice by exhausting all the possibilities of interesting careers in Australia, discovering, one by one, that they were not open to women…so my setting out was not exactly the departure of a conquering hero, but more the ambiguous result of deciding that I needed to get away from Australia, to view life from a different perspective.”
Frustrated and suffocated by the lack of opportunity for an ambitious young Australian woman, Jill decided to pursue graduate study abroad. Glimpses of American culture had opened her eyes to a more fluid and progressive interpretation of her own place in society, and to the potential of what could be achieved through hard work and talent. In 1960, Jill applied for a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the U.S, and less than a year later, found herself wandering the halls of Harvard’s Radcliffe College.
The unconventional teaching methods instantly appealed. Students were invited to critically engage with the material, rather than simply read and accept the conclusions of others. For the first time, Jill was forced to step back and ask herself exactly why she wanted to study history.
Why was I an historian? One wasn’t just born curious about history. The reason was I’d grown up having to know why things were the way they were.
The droughts and sudden swings of fortune of my childhood in the Australian outback meant that I was preoccupied by questions of free will and determinism. Coming to consciousness during the war made me interested in the conflict of ideas and ideologies, and curious about where they came from.”
The educators were passionate and eccentric; one particular favourite of Jill’s would deliver his lectures with the dramatic flair of a Shakespearian soliloquy. This intellectual nourishment was intoxicating, and Jill found herself re-examining everything she had learned about history through an entirely new lens.
Since I craved understanding more than any other intellectual delight, each flash of insight was a heady new fix for a boundless appetite… I could scarcely attend a lecture without some new insight about the history of the Australian colonies exploding in my mind like a firecracker.
This was what I’d wanted from the study of history – the flash of understanding, the new insight, the notion that one was living with reality, not some dusty myth from the past.”
Jill went on to earn a PhD in History in 1969. While at Harvard, she had fallen in love with Canadian professor and WWII veteran John Conway, whom she described as "totally and spontaneously liberated". They married, and moved to Canada, where Jill took a teaching post at the University of Toronto.
As a shrewd and innovative administrator, Jill rose swiftly through the ranks there to become a dean in 1971, then vice president in 1973. Privately, she helped John battle through severe bouts of manic depression, and in the midst of one particularly bad episode, reaffirmed the importance of her independence.
His moral integrity, courage, and devotion to humanistic learning were certainly my compass point, the true north one needed to set directions on this continent. But I now knew there were going to be times when I’d have to navigate alone.”
In 1974, Jill was visited by the committee charged with finding a new president for Smith College, one of the most illustrious women’s liberal arts institutions in the world. Busy with a life "learning to swim in the choppy seas of administrative life", she gave little thought to the idea of a move back to the U.S., but, at John’s insistence, accepted an invitation to visit the campus.
I left a grey city to see a campus ablaze with crocus, daffodils, scilla, and rich strawberry and cream magnolias. Brighter than the spring flowers were the faces of the young women I saw everywhere.
I could spend months at a time at the University of Toronto without ever hearing a female voice raised. Here the women were rowdy, physically freewheeling, joshing one-another loudly, their laughter deep-belly laughter, not propitiatory giggles. I was entranced.”
Her progressive values extended to directorship; for example, before agreeing to join Nike, Jill insisted on a campaign to stimulate interest in sport for girls, chaired a corporate social responsibility committee, and regularly visited Nike factories in Asia to check the working conditions of the primarily-female workforce.
Jill’s innovative leadership and pioneering views on corporate social responsibility brought international recognition and accolades.
In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal, and her country of birth appointed her an honorary Companion of the Order of Australia for "eminent service to the community, particularly women, as an author, academic and through leadership roles with corporations, foundations, universities and philanthropic groups".
In an article for the Sydney Morning Herald at the time, her words on contemporary Australia were characteristically thoughtful:
Today Australia is rich in resources and part of the dynamic Asia Pacific market and its financial institutions are global players. But today my rural world is in decline even though we know that there will be a serious problem of feeding the world's population within several generations.
So my hope is for a political climate a little more focused on the future, and a little less comfortable with the wealth that comes from feeding the carbon economy.”
Jill passed away at her home on the first of June, 2018, on a warm, cloudy day in Boston.
In accordance with her wishes, half of her ashes rest in a small private cemetery beside John’s, near their beloved house and garden in Massachusetts; the other half were scattered by the big tree, beside the driveway into the house at Coorain.
As I walked out to the plane in the balmy air of a Sydney September night, my mind flew back to a dusty cemetery where my father was buried. Where, I wondered, would my bones come to rest? It pained me to think of them not fertilizing Australian soil.
Then I comforted myself with the notion that wherever on the earth was my final resting place, my body would return to the restless red dust of the western plains. I could see how it would blow about and get in people’s eyes, and I was content with that.”
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Rediscover: The Road from Coorain
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2018-06-15T00:00:00
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Jill Ker Conway, an Australian-American author who was also the first woman president of Smith College, died on June 1 at age 83. She was born
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https://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers/2018-06-15/rediscover:_the_road_from_coorain.html
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Jill Ker Conway, an Australian-American author who was also the first woman president of Smith College, died on June 1 at age 83. She was born on a 32,000-acre sheep ranch deep in the Australian outback, with little company growing up except her parents, brothers and a teacher. The ranch, called Coorain (an Aboriginal word for windy place), prospered until a seven-year drought. When Conway was 11, her father drowned while attempting to expand Coorain's irrigation system. After a further three years of drought, Conway's mother moved the family to Sydney, where Jill struggled to integrate with her new peers. She went on to graduate from the University of Sydney and moved to the United States in 1960. She received a Ph.D. from Harvard, met a Canadian professor who later became her husband, and taught at the University of Toronto from 1964 to 1975. Conway was the president of Smith College from 1975 to 1985, and thereafter a visiting professor at MIT.
Conway's writing career began with the publication of her first memoir, The Road from Coorain, in 1989. It tracks her early life in the outback and her moves to Sydney and the U.S. Her second memoir, True North (1994), follows Conway's time teaching in Toronto. She also wrote A Woman's Education (2001) and When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (1998), and was the editor of several books, including Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women (1992) and In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States (1999). She received a National Humanities Medal in 2013. The Road from Coorain was last published in 1990 by Vintage Departures ($15.95, 9780679724360). --Tobias Mutter
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A Day in the Life on the Farm: The Road to Coorain; A Book Review
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A blog about two retired cops who went in search of peace and quiet and got more chaos than they could ever imagine.
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Jill Ker Conway
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"Jill Ker",
"Jill Ker Conway",
"Clare Munnings",
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"Sell - Powell's Books"
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"Just as soon as I had time," Jill Ker Conway pledged years ago, "I'd try to write a lively picture of the way a woman's mind developed and how her intellectual vocation is formed." Readers fir
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"Just as soon as I had time," Jill Ker Conway pledged years ago, "I'd try to write a lively picture of the way a woman's mind developed and how her intellectual vocation is formed."
Readers first caught a glimpse of that lively picture in The Road from Coorain, the story of a bright, strong girl's childhood on a remote Australian sheep farm (Jill was seven before she first saw another girl child); then subsequently her adolescence, navigating family tragedy and educational challenges with her brothers and their widowed mother in Sydney. True North rejoined Jill's life as she embarked on graduate studies at Harvard, then followed her Canadian husband to an academic career in Toronto - until 1975, when Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, recruited Conway to redefine and redesign the distinguished 100-year-old institution.
A Woman's Education recounts Conway's ten-year term as Smith's first woman president, boldly applying her lifetime's scholarship and passion to juggle the concerns of students, parents, faculty, and alumnae. As one Ivy League school after another went coeducational, Smith resolutely maintained its independence, reinventing itself under Conway's leadership to create academic programs in line with the new realities of women's lives. On campus, the irrepressible enthusiasm of Smith's student body energized her efforts; at home, her husband's manic depression grew worse by the year.
"Her path as President of Smith College gives us an insider's view not only of the institutional side," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor noted, "but the personal demands and their burdens. It is a fascinating and important story."
Dave: Always the first question people ask when I tell them about your new book is, "How could Smith not have had a female president until 1975? Hasn't it always been a women's school?"
Jill Ker Conway: It's always been a women's college. It's hard for people to believe today, but having a male president was thought of as being the guarantee you would have the most academically rigorous institute imaginable. It wasn't until the 1970s and the upsurge in the feminist movement that the trustees decided they must have a woman president. And there I was.
Dave: It seems like such a no-brainer now.
Conway: Places like Wellesley and Vassar had women presidents, but they always had a male chairman of the board and a male treasurer who ran the finances. At Smith, from about 1900 on, there was always a woman chairman of the board; the male president worked for a female board of trustees, pretty much. But the thing to realize is that there were always males in authority in these women's institutions.
At Wellesley, which had had women presidents for a long time, there was a much greater representation of women on the faculty than there was at Smith. But since the 1880s or 90s, Smith had had educators from Harvard or Yale, and when they thought about building a faculty, they recruited their friends.
Dave: That was another surprise for me - 70% of the faculty at Smith was male when you took over - though it makes sense when you read the book and see how those people got their jobs.
In True North, you write about graduating from Harvard with the highest honors and not being offered academic positions that the men you had just beat out were getting. One would think, from a distance, that a place like Harvard would have been more enlightened.
Conway: They certainly were not. By the time I finished up at Harvard I was married to a Canadian and going to Canada, but some of my friends who were graduate students in History or Literature were just told, "It's going to be very difficult to get you a job, and of course it won't be possible here."
There would be days in the various scholarly departments when recruiters from outside would visit, and students would post their curriculum vitae if they wanted to be interviewed. One of my woman friends put hers up, and it was taken down. She was told, "I'm sorry. You can't post that here."
But I have to tell you - and I think I describe it in True North - when I was at The University of Toronto and became the chairman of a search committee for a position in History, I got letters back nominating women, and they would always say at the end, "I would never have suggested Ms. X or Ms. Y had it not been for the fact that there was a woman chairman of the search committee." So it was a very closed system for a very long time.
Dave: You do an excellent job of showing how personal experience dictated so much of your politics and your activism. For example, all the work you did at Smith to attract older students, not just eighteen-year-old incoming freshman. Again, it seems very basic when you think about it today, but at the time you had to convince people that adult education was a worthwhile endeavor for a college to take on.
Conway: My mother, whom I'm very much like, never got to finish high school, so I grew up with a woman who was starved for formal education and who educated herself quite marvelously through a very serious program of reading. But she was always conscious of the fact that she'd never had a formal education. She was widowed very young, at forty-four, and it would have been a dream if she could have gone to college and had that experience. She would have thrived.
She did try to study part-time at an Australian university, but people didn't take older women, sort of suburban housewives, seriously, so she never really settled down to do it.
When I got to The University of Toronto I chose to teach in the evenings. There would be a whole day schedule, then another in the evening for part-time students. I'd look at these women and I'd think of my mother; they would have worked all day as a secretary or a filing clerk or in retail sales or something like that, then they'd arrive on campus already tired. They just wouldn't have the energy to really do their best work.
Thinking about my mother, trying to counsel these women, convincing them to give themselves a bit more time...even if it was economically difficult they could develop so much of their own intellectual power that they'd benefit later. It all made me think, When I get to Smith, I'm going to see that we lead the way in showing people that women over twenty-five can be serious scholars and that the whole experience of an undergraduate education can be just as transforming for them as it is for an 18-22 year-old. And it's so clear that that's the case.
Dave: I found it particularly interesting how much trouble you had convincing people that marketing was important. To many people, marketing is a dirty word, a form of selling-out. And it can be. But marketing something you believe in is alternately a way to produce positive change. It's why I'm here at Powell's, because I like the place.
Conway: It all depends on what you're marketing. If what you're marketing is a first-rate education that people wouldn't otherwise know is available to them, that's a very important thing to do. If you are marketing wonderful books and making them available to people who might only have a junky bookstore close by them, that's a wonderful thing to do, too. Growing up in the outback of Australia, I can't tell you what it was like to get our parcel from the lending library - just such joy. It brought another world into our environment.
The thing about marketing a first-rate, eastern, liberal arts college in the day I was doing it was that they drew their student population entirely from prep schools, places where everybody knew what Smith and Harvard and Williams and Dartmouth were. You didn't need to market to them because they already knew about it. But as the possibility of applying opened to people in little rural villages in the south or remote farming communities somewhere, you had to have some way of letting sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds and their families know this was available, and you had to do it in terms they would understand. If you sent off the standard old catalogue of the Smith curriculum with very dry titles for the courses and no description of what they were about, how were they supposed to know that they might like this education?
Marketing is always equated with commercialism, and that's thought of as a dirty word. But commerce does good things, too, as well as bad.
Dave: In A Woman's Education you recall thinking, "Just as soon as I had time, I'd try to write a lively picture of the way a woman's mind developed and how her intellectual vocation is formed." That objective so accurately sums up these three books.
Conway: That was my dream, and in part it's because we do have a lengthy tradition of male writing about education, going back to classical times. We don't have anything similar from women.
There are great women writers, medieval nuns, who describe a spiritual formation, but no descriptions of the excitement of learning and discovering what one's own intellectual style and interests are, finding the right mentors, growing and understanding a discipline. That isn't written in a female voice, and I really wanted to do that.
I can remember when I was an undergraduate at The University of Sydney I would read all these male memoirs and descriptions of educations - there's a whole genre of "life at Oxford or Cambridge books" - and I'd think, I wonder what it's going to be like for me. If you don't have a cultural tradition in which to fit, I suppose you're free in the sense that you have a blank page to work with, but in another sense you're at sea in interpreting what's of real significance.
I particularly wanted to create this narrative because I know from teaching young men that they draw on that tradition, and young women don't have it. It makes understanding their education a lot more difficult. And of course because of my own strong convictions about how much one learns and grows after age twenty-two, I wanted to chart that through a professional career.
Dave: In When Memory Speaks, you write about Moments of Being, the Virginia Woolf book, which sounds fascinating. I noticed we have it here, but I haven't had a chance to read it.
Conway: It's absolutely marvelous. She's writing with beautiful, elegant irony about the oppression of her family, the exploitation of the women in her family, and her life with a basically gay male community with whom she and her brother set up house after her father died.
As I wrote in When Memory Speaks, I always wish she'd once been able to get in an absolute flaming rage about what had happened to her - sexual exploitation by her step-brother and so on. Perhaps she wouldn't have had those terrible depressions that eventually carried her off.
But you must read it because she's a very great writer; she has this phrase about "moments of being," when the current of life seems clear. Those are so well woven into fiction in To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway and so on. You can really see where they come from.
Dave: I've only read her fiction, and it's breathtaking. Of a class that you half-believe it's not a person writing this...
Conway: ...a force of nature.
Dave: I appreciated your analogy in A Woman's Education between the idea of "a room of one's own" to a college of one's own. Fifteen years after you left Smith, what's the role of women's colleges today?
Conway: It's still very much to provide an environment where women who are so-minded can be taught by a first-rate faculty in their own institution, which they and the alumnae own and have created. That's a very energizing experience, as I tried to explain in this book.
Secondly, it's very powerful to hold those institutions up as benchmarks for the rest of society. When people like to say for instance that women don't do well in physics or mathematics, it's helpful to point to the number of women PhDs produced in those fields by women's colleges and how well the women have performed in their careers.
Also, it's very important to have women's colleges as an organized lobbying force in higher education. So much educational policy, especially about public support, federal and state loan programs, and so on, is set entirely with male careers in mind unless there's a powerful organization there lobbying.
And I have another concern, which to me is very important and is highlighted by the tragedy of September 11th: American women's colleges have been greatly concerned with women's education around the world. They have founded institutions for women in India, China, Burma, and elsewhere. Their founders and leaders for many years believed that a women's position in the Western world was not safe while women were so terribly discriminated against in other cultures.
Those great women's institutions and their networks around the world still offer a way of mobilizing energy and resources to deal with education elsewhere. I know that's been very important to me. All those great women's schools - Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Barnard - they all have a solid contingent of women's students from around the world. Those students are leaders when they go back.
All those roles are still as important as the day I got to Smith.
Dave: Beyond issues of equality and freedom, the most straightforward argument you put forth is that to waste the potential of half a population, any population, is horribly lacking in foresight.
Conway: Everybody acknowledges that the abolition of slavery was a huge source of increased productivity for industrializing societies. When you develop free markets and labor and give people freedom to develop their talents, they're more productive.
The same goes for having totally segregated labor markets when women don't get the education and the skills to rise in responsibility and power and earnings. It's exactly the same argument, but people always think that an increase in access to the labor market or to political power for women will damage men. They think of it as a zero-sum game instead of increasing results for everyone. It's very hard to shake that.
Dave: In When Memory Speaks, you write about the traditional female role in biography as one that has been acted-upon; the women are rarely the actors. You became quite involved in business and economics when you were at Smith, and of course it's clear from the book why those skills were integral to the job. You've always created opportunities for yourself. How did you get on your first board?
Conway: When I came to Smith, it had only seventy-four million dollars in endowment. We were experiencing very high inflation; during the Carter years, we had 18-20% inflation. The cost of heating and lighting the campus had quadrupled in the previous six months. And there'd been a big shift in the capital markets; Smith's endowment was not invested to produce optimum returns. So, high inflation, shrinking value to the endowment, and very low returns from it...Quickly, I had to figure out how to get more operating support.
I knew from being part of running The University of Toronto that the average research university - a Harvard or a Yale - got about 15-20% of its operating money from corporate contributions. I thought, There's a new source, so I got together with Smith's networks and called the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies that were big donors to education, and I asked them why they didn't support women's colleges, and whether they would. Almost always, they would say, "Nobody's ever asked us. And yes, certainly we will."
But the net result was that I had been talking to all these CEOs just at the time that they were under a lot of pressure to recruit women to their boards. So there was an unintended consequence of my fundraising: they didn't know many women CEOs, and I'm sure when it came up they said, "I know someone who was around just a few weeks ago asking for money."
I actually received quite a few invitations to join corporate boards, but I chose the ones where I knew I would learn something that I needed for the job I was doing.
I went on the board of Merrill Lynch because I needed to understand how to manage an endowment, and I wanted to understand the investment world. I'm fascinated with economic history and wanted to understand capital markets in their modern form.
I went on one of IBM's boards at the World Trade Corporation, which is outside the United States, because I wanted to understand information processing and how it was going to affect the lives of my students.
I went on the board of a consulting company, Arthur D. Little, because it's basically a bunch of PhDs who have to make a profit for their owners at research and development and management consulting, and I was interested to see how they did it.
Those were all assignments I took on because they taught me things I needed to know.
Dave: You saw T.S. Eliot read!
Conway: Yes, I did! The most marvelous experience. His poetry is one of the shaping intellectual forces of my life. Still is.
I never dreamed that I would see him in the flesh and hear him read, but I did. He came to Cambridge quite regularly in the late fifties and early sixties. I heard Robert Frost read at Harvard, too. And other people: W.H. Auden...
Dave: At the time, was Eliot as influential as he is considered now? Did you assume that forty years later his reputation would remain as lofty?
Conway: He was. For the postwar generation, Eliot, Pound, and Yeats had been the most influential poets. There was a period in the late seventies and early eighties when they were out of popularity, when there was much more interest in the Victorians, but they've come back into favor again.
Dave: At McGill, in Montreal, where I went to college, they offered full semester courses on Eliot, Pound, and Yeats. One of the things I appreciate now about the education I received there is that we read nothing but classics. Yeats and Eliot were contemporary, as far as that formal, British educational outlook was concerned. They'd written during this century! I resented such a stodgy perspective at the time, but I'm so glad now for having read all those texts.
Conway: You probably had an education much like I had as an undergraduate in Australia. In that British mode, it's not important to study the immediate present. People feel there's no critical assessment. You read that for pleasure, but it's not Literature.
Dave: Do you read for pleasure much these days?
Conway: All the time. I tend to read autobiography and biography.
I think the art of biography is flourishing at the moment. If you think about the recent biographies of Jefferson, of John Adams, of Harry Truman (which is absolutely fabulous)...wonderful recent one of Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee...a wonderful one of Edna St. Vincent Millay...
And of course it's been an extraordinary period of memoir. That's what I read, plus poetry. I read for pleasure, also, things I loved at an earlier stage in my life. I might spend time reading James Joyce or George Eliot. If I haven't looked at that work in thirty or forty years, I'm a totally different reader coming to the text.
Dave: So what now? You're at M.I.T.?
Conway: I teach very part time at M.I.T., one course with a couple colleagues in the spring semester. I split my life up into time for writing, which is very early in the morning, a little bit of teaching, then a lot of work on philanthropic boards, foundations of one kind or another, and corporate boards. And I devote a good deal of time to small, not-for-profit organizations that don't have much fundraising capacity or don't have strong governance, trying to help them get started.
Dave: Are you working on a book now?
Conway: I've been writing murder mysteries with a friend. We publish them under a pseudonym [Clare Munnings]. So I'm trying my hand at fiction, and that's a lot of fun. I don't know what I'll write next. This Volume Three is the end; that's what the memoir was meant to be.
My late husband was working on a memoir when he died, so at the moment I'm at work on editing that, and I'll probably write the last few chapters. Other than that, I can't tell you. Maybe something about my avocation, which is gardening and landscape design, or it might be about education, maybe religious reflections. You never know what you'll want to write until it starts writing itself in your head.
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https://sts-program.mit.edu/news/former-visiting-professor-mit-sts-program-jill-ker-conway/
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Former Visiting Professor at MIT STS Program: Jill Ker Conway
|
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[
"Stephanie Brandão Carvalho",
"Bryan Marquard"
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2018-06-04T18:04:54+00:00
|
Jill Ker Conway, 83, author and first woman to serve as Smith College’s president SMITH COLLEGE Initiatives Dr. Conway pioneered as Smith’s president from 1975 to 1985 continue to open doors…
|
en
|
MIT STS
|
https://sts-program.mit.edu/news/former-visiting-professor-mit-sts-program-jill-ker-conway/
|
On the road from a childhood herding sheep in the lonely Australian Outback to becoming the first woman to serve as president of Smith College, Jill Ker Conway found that her intellectual gifts matched her personal ambition.
“I had a talent for history,” she told the Globe in 1989, when she published “The Road From Coorain,” the first of her trio of best-selling memoirs, “and the fates were prodding me toward putting it into use.”
Dr. Conway, who was 83 when she died Friday in her Boston home, made use of that academic talent while making history herself.
Continue reading the Boston Globe article: Jill Ker Conway, 83, author and first woman to serve as Smith College’s president
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https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Road-from-Coorain-Audiobook/B002V8KXLU
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The Road from Coorain
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2009-03-10T00:00:00
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The Road from Coorain as it's meant to be heard, narrated by Barbara Caruso. Discover the English Audiobook at Audible. Free trial available!
|
en
|
Audible.com
|
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Road-from-Coorain-Audiobook/B002V8KXLU
|
Very Interesting
I received an education about Australia, whose history I've neglected until now. Conway's upbringing, education, and eventual departure from her homeland is most unique, while generously managing to convey for most readers connections into Conway's experiences and views. "Independent and brave" certainly sums this character's life. The writing is beautifully detailed and poetic, making the listening a delight.
Fantastic book
A professor friend of mine, who is also from Australia, recommended this book to me. She is a friend of the author. My friend was raised in Australia but had a different back ground. Her father was a university history professor and her mother was Australia most famous composer. They shared the same boarding school experience. They became friends here in the U.S. when both were professors. I am sure glad I took my friend's advice. This is a great book. Conway paints a picture in rich detail of life in the outback. I could feel myself there with the wind on my face. What a hard life the ranchers had and probably still do. I was most interested in her description of the stoic character of the Australian people. She described my friend personality to a tee. Conway takes us on a journey of self discovery both of her personal life with the lost of her father and older brother to finding her place in academia. In passing, she furnished, a great insight into the difference between high school learning and university learning. She provides a great deal of information of the daily life of a girl growing up in the late1930s to 1960 Australia. She describes the gender discrimination which I could easily relate to having grown up in the same time frame. I had read "A Town Named Alice" from Audible, also about Australia, between the two books they paint an fascinating picture of Australia's out back. Barbara Caruso did a great job narrating the book. Enjoyed the pre and post comments by Jill Ker Conway. You will enjoy this book.
So glad I (finally) listened to my aunt
When I was in my early 20s and ready to set off for 2 years as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, I asked friends and family to recommend books I might take along with me, and an aunt who knew me well recommended this one. Unfortunately I didn't bring it along, and I didn't get around to reading it until now, nearly 20 years later. So glad I finally did. What a beautifully written memoir! And what a fine example of an intelligent, thoughtful girl's journey of self-discovery. The descriptions of 1940s life in the Australian outback are vivid and fascinating, and the taste of life in Sydney during the author's adolescent years and young adulthood are equally interesting. Barbara Caruso's narration is superb, as usual.
|
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https://www.target.com/p/the-road-from-coorain-vintage-departures-by-jill-ker-conway-paperback/-/A-93117510
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en
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(vintage Departures) By Jill Ker Conway (paperback) : Target
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https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/10/conway-jill-ker/
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Conway, Jill Ker – Postcolonial Studies
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2014-06-10T00:00:00
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https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/10/conway-jill-ker/
|
Biography
Jill Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia in 1934. She resided in the Australian outback until the death of her father in 1945. At that time, Conway, her mother, and two brothers moved to Sydney, an industrious seaport city. Conway received most of her education in the neighboring private schools and university. She graduated from the University of Sydney in 1958, after having dropped out for some time due to financial and emotional reasons. In 1960 she moved to the United States and received her PhD from Harvard University in 1969. Conway taught at the University of Toronto from 1964 to 1975, serving as Vice President from 1973 to 1975. She became the first woman president of Smith College in Massachusetts in 1975. Following Conway’s ten-year administration, she has received sixteen honorary doctorates from numerous other colleges and universities. Her success and personal definition are shaped by her childhood experiences and are detailed in her autobiography, The Road from Coorain. She is currently a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 she was designated a Women’s History Month honoree by the National Women’s History Project.
The Road from Coorain
The Road from Coorain is an account of Conway’s journey from the rural Australian outback to the urban metropolis in Australia and then to the United States. Conway describes growing up in a house, named “Coorain”(which is an aboriginal word for “windy place”), with her mother, father, and two older brothers. The family endures several hardships, including the death of her father and one of her brothers. A devastating five-year drought causes the family’s business to fail and forces the remaining members of her family to relocate to Sydney. This misfortune shapes Conway’s character and development because she learns to overcome that adversity.
Conway’s autobiography describes her intellectual development and her realization of the ways in which society suppresses women (see Gender and Nation). For instance, Conway describes her experience in applying for a prestigious trainee-ship with the Department of External Affairs (the equivalent of foreign service) while she is at the University of Sydney; she is denied a position because of her gender. She states, “I could scarcely believe that my refusal was because I was a woman” (191). In addition to gender bias, Conway addresses the irrelevance of the education the British provided during their postcolonial rule of Australia. After she visits Britain, she realizes the true beauty of the Australian landscape and credits it with being a crucial factor in defining who she is. However, she admits that the British-imposed educational system in Australia ultimately fails her when she states, “I had come to an intellectual dead end in Australia”(233). For this reason, and to escape her mother’s attempt to thwart her ambition, Conway decides to pursue her graduate studies at Harvard University in the United States.
Jill Ker Conway stated in an interview for The New York Times, that her purpose in writing is “to communicate to people very directly about the authenticity of women’s motivation for work, about how a person strives to find some creative expression. The moral of my mother’s life was that while she had challenging work, she was indomitable and when she didn’t, she fell apart. It’s very much the vogue to talk about women as developing their moral consciousness through a connectedness to mother, but I think that’s misleading. My book is deliberately a story of separation- of independence and breaking away.”
British Influence in Australia
One of the issues that elicits strong emotions in Conway is the British influence in Australia. She is considered a postcolonial writer, which raises other issues concerning the term “postcolonial.” Richard Lever and James Wieland discuss the role of post-colonialism in Australian literature in their bibliography, Postcolonial Literatures in English: “The term ‘post-colonial’–in practice often used synonymously with ‘New Literatures in English’ and ‘Third World Literatures’–emerged in the late seventies as a counter to the hegemonic and universalizing implications of the traditional categories ‘Dominion’ and ‘Commonwealth’ literature, which implicitly privilege the British imperial ‘Center’ and grant authority status to its literary and cultural traditions. Post-colonialism acknowledges, indeed insists upon, the fact that literatures of the nations and territories affected by British imperialism remain engaged with British traditions” (ix).
In Her Own Words
Jill Conway chose the autobiographical format because autobiographies provide the ability to hear “the voice” of the author. In her anthology Written by Herself, Conway states: “Autobiographies by women excite particular interest today, because three important trends in late-twentieth-century culture intersect to heighten the resonance of this form of narrative. The rise of democracy has enlarged the focus of interest in the lives of other people-from monarch, great general, and political leader to the ordinary person -someone like ourselves. And, as feminists have insisted that battles for power, authenticity, moral stature, and survival occur as fiercely within the domestic as in the public arena of life, what was once seen as placidly domestic now offers the reader a world charged with great issues.”
Selected Additional Works by Jill Ker Conway
— A Woman’s Education. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2001.
—“Forward.” Women on Power: Leadership Redefined. Ed. Sue J.M. Freeman, Susan C. Bourque and Christine M. Shelton. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001.
––Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment. Ed. Jill Ker Conway, Kenneth Keniston and Leo Marx. Boston: University of Massachusetts, 1999.
–– Conway, Jill Ker, Clare Munnings and Elizabeth Topham Kennan. Overnight Float. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.
––In Her Own Words: Women’s Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. New York: Vintage, 1999.
–– When Memory Speaks. New York: Vintage, 1998.
–– Modern Feminism: An Intellectual History. New York: Knopf, 1997.
—. Written by Herself, Volumes I and II. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. An anthology of the ever-changing statuses of women throughout history. It provides a firsthand account by women from different cultures and time periods (1800-present).
—. True North: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1994. A continuation of The Road from Coorain, this sequel traces Conway’s journey from Harvard, to her marriage, to her assumption of the presidency of Smith College in 1975.
—. The Politics of Women’s Education. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993. An international collection of works by women, addressing the changes that have occurred in women’s education in many countries throughout the world. The collection deals with issues women face and how they react to them.
—. Learning About Women. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1989. A collection of works by several different writers that provide an analysis of the shifting status of women in various parts of the world.
—. The First Generation of American Women Graduates. New York: Garland Publishing, 1987. Conway’s published thesis that she presented to the Harvard Department of History to receive her doctorate in American History.
—. Utopian Dream or Dystopian Nightmare? Nineteenth Century Feminist Ideas About Equality. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1987.
—. The Female Experience in 18th and 19th Century America: A Guide to the History of American Women. New York: Garland Publishing, 1982.
—. Women Reformers and American Culture: 1870-1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971-2.
—. ”Merchants and Merinos.” Journal and Proceedings (Royal Australian Historical Society), vol 46, part 4, 1960, pp 206-223.
—. Modern Feminism: An Intellectual History. New York: Knopf , 1977.
Selected Bibliography
Conway, Jill. The Road from Coorain. New York: Knopf. 1989.
—. Learning About Women. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. 1989.
Heron, Kim. “Importance of Work for Women.” The New York Times Book Review. May 7, 1989. 3.
Klinkenborg, Verlyn. “The Call of the Wind and the Kookaburra.” The New York Times Book Review. May 7, 1989. 3.
Lever, Richard, James Wieland, and Scott Findlay. Post Colonial Literatures in English. New York: G.K. Hall & Co. 1996.
|
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https://freshairarchive.org/segments/jill-ker-conways-path-country-girl-college-president
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Jill Ker Conway's Path from Country Girl To College President
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1989-06-07T12:00:00+00:00
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Conway grew up in Australia and was home-schooled until college. Her new memoir, The Road from Coorain, looks at how her academic pursuits eventually led her to become Smith College's first woman president.
|
en
|
/themes/custom/fresh_air/favicon.ico
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Fresh Air Archive: Interviews with Terry Gross
|
https://freshairarchive.org/segments/jill-ker-conways-path-country-girl-college-president
|
Bob Elliott was half of the comedy team Bob and Ray; his son Chris appears regularly on the Late Show with David Letterman. They've written a joint memoir called Daddy's Boy, in which Chris recounts a childhood memory, and Bob offers his rebuttal.
Some people bemoan the use of computer language to describe human behavior. But linguist Geoff Nunberg says the trend works both ways: we often discuss technology in anthropomorphic terms -- but only when it malfunctions.
Historian Jill Ker Conway. She's the author of the bestselling memoir, "The Road from Coorain," about growing up in the Australian outback. Conway also edited two volumes of women's memoirs "Written By Herself" (Volumes I and II) which were, in part, about the nature of autobiography written by women. Her new book is "When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography." (Knopf) Conway was the first female vice president of The University of Toronto, and from 1975 to 1985 was the president of Smith.
Conway grew up in a remote sheep station in the Australian outback, and later became the president of Smith College. Her girlhood memoir, "The Road from Coorain," was a bestseller, In her new book, "True North," she continues her story, writing about organizing for women's rights on campus, and creating a marriage in which she and her husband are equal partners. Conway was the first female vice president of The University of Toronto, and from 1975 to 1985 was the president of Smith.
Activist Greg Mortenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Central Asia Institute. Since 1993, the organization has opened schools and provided an education for over 4000 girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The schools promote literacy, women vocational skills, public health and environmental awareness. Mortenson splits his time between Central Asia and Montana.
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History and Fun Facts about the Saint-Honoré d’Eylau Church
Rich with history and culture, the Saint-Honoré d’Eylau Church has even served as the venue for the funeral of the great French couturier Christian Dior — a service that attracted nationwide interest. Where better than this opulent architectural marvel to serve as the final resting space for an icon of fashion and design?
Discover the visual splendour and captivating history of the Saint-Honoré d’Eylau Church, nestled in the heart of Paris’s 16th arrondissement. Initially constructed to serve as a temporary chapel annex to its ancient counterpart, this church remains standing as a veritable hidden gem amongst Paris’s long list of gorgeous chapels and churches.
Indulge in the serene, spiritual atmosphere cultivated by this awe-inspiring space. Observant eyes will appreciate the myriad architectural details on offer, including the slender metal pillars that preserve the structure of this unique interior space. Setting this church apart from the crowd is its exquisite Art Deco glass roof, as created by Félix Gaudin with reference to designs by Eugène Grasset and Raphaël Freida. The spellbinding atmosphere of the hushed crypt will charm spectators, having been adapted into an events space over a decade ago. For a change of taste, explore the adjacent chapel of Sainte-Thérèse-de-l’Enfant-Jésus, imbued with all the elegance of Art Deco and adorned with remarkable murals by Alfred Sauvage illustrating the seven sacraments.
The soul of this sacred space can only be truly experienced with an in-person visit. Why not go beyond the doors of this historic venue and discover it for yourself? You may just be treated to an evening of magnificent classical music to complement the delightful architecture!
Fast facts
Capacity: 1000
Handicap Accessible: No
Air conditioning: No
Heating: No
Coat Check: No
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http://www.theatreinparis.com/theatre/eglise-saint-honore-deylau
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ABOUT
History and Fun Facts about the Saint-Honoré d’Eylau Church
Rich with history and culture, the Saint-Honoré d’Eylau Church has even served as the venue for the funeral of the great French couturier Christian Dior — a service that attracted nationwide interest. Where better than this opulent architectural marvel to serve as the final resting space for an icon of fashion and design? Discover the visual splendour and captivating history of the Saint-Honoré d’Eylau Church, nestled in the heart of Paris’s 16th arrondissement. Initially constructed to serve as a temporary chapel annex to its ancient counterpart, this church remains standing as a veritable hidden gem amongst Paris’s long list of gorgeous chapels and churches.
Indulge in the serene, spiritual atmosphere cultivated by this awe-inspiring space. Observant eyes will appreciate the myriad architectural details on offer, including the slender metal pillars that preserve the structure of this unique interior space. Setting this church apart from the crowd is its exquisite Art Deco glass roof, as created by Félix Gaudin with reference to designs by Eugène Grasset and Raphaël Freida. The spellbinding atmosphere of the hushed crypt will charm spectators, having been adapted into an events space over a decade ago. For a change of taste, explore the adjacent chapel of Sainte-Thérèse-de-l’Enfant-Jésus, imbued with all the elegance of Art Deco and adorned with remarkable murals by Alfred Sauvage illustrating the seven sacraments.
The soul of this sacred space can only be truly experienced with an in-person visit. Why not go beyond the doors of this historic venue and discover it for yourself? You may just be treated to an evening of magnificent classical music to complement the delightful architecture!
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MUSÉE RAYMOND POINCARÉ
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The 'musée départemental' is on the ground floor of the former summer residence of President Raymond Poincaré. It was built between 1906 and 1913 in a neo-Louis XIII style by an architect from Nancy, Charles-Désiré Bourgon.
Raymond Poincaré was
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Ressentez le frisson du Far West avec Lucky Luke Casino Avis! Jouez à nos passionnants jeux de Poker et de Roulette, et bénéficiez de bonus de bienvenue généreux! L'aventure commence ici! Rejoignez-nous aujourd'hui!
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37 Rue Raymond Poincaré, Troyes, Grand Est Coworking Space
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Like the amenities & availability at 37 Rue Raymond Poincaré? Book coworking space now at 37 Rue Raymond Poincaré, Troyes, GRAND EST 10000.
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Yes, you can certainly take a tour of the space before signing up for a membership. In fact, it’s encouraged, to help you get a feel for what your workday will look like. to set up a time to come and see the space.
37 Rue Raymond Poincaré operates during regular business hours, as indicated above. For access outside of these hours, please contact the operator directly to inquire about any available options.
For spontaneous collaboration and interaction, open desks provide an open and flexible environment. If you prefer a dedicated space with shared community elements, dedicated desks offer a great balance between personal space and interaction.
On the other hand, private offices are best suited for focused work and private interactions. They're ideal for solo workers as well as teams seeking a dedicated space, shielded from distractions.
Choosing the ideal coworking arrangement for you is about aligning your workspace with your work style, team dynamics, and project requirements.
Coworking spaces typically have limited storage options, most of which are reserved for members with dedicated desks or private offices. With that said, it’s best to contact the coworking operator directly via the form on the right side of the page to learn about available storage options.
Whether you're a day pass holder or a monthly member, you can access most amenities. Meeting rooms do require prior scheduling, and private offices are reserved for those with subscriptions. However, the lounge, kitchen, and breakout spaces are open to all. Complimentary services are also available regardless of membership tier, while ancillary services can be purchased separately or negotiated with myWO.
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