Book description
Conway opens with her assessment of her life, passions, possibilities
and the making of her decision to leave Canada and return to the United
States to become Smith's first woman president. Settling into her new
environment, she is at once struck by the beauty of the Connecticut
Valley and the Olmstead-designed Smith campus - but also by the
College's financial problems and a quarrelsome and complaining faculty
engaged in disputes and trivial lawsuits. The jolt of energy she gets
from being in the presence of several thousand young women enables her
to take on the various Smith constituencies: the self-appointed
custodians of the great western male tradition of humanistic learning,
the puzzled liberals, the younger male feminists, the 'lady scholars
doing intellectual petitpoint', and the young committed feminists of all
stripes. We see her harnessing the negative energies in more positive
directions, redefining and redesigning parts of the institution,
strategising, positioning herself and building a political base,
introducing feminist scholarship into the curriculum, creating a
programme for older students and a funded research centre, adding fields
of study and athletic programmes, developing strong career counselling,
changing investment strategy, increasing the endowment - and, in
general, mobilising the institution to share the urgency she felt for
shaping the kind of women's institution that would attract the students
of the '90s and beyond. Through it all we see her continuing to cope
with her husband John's ill health and learning to protect and sustain
her inner self in the quiet solitude of gardening at their country home
- a North American variant of the solitude of her native Australian
plains. As the end of the Smith decade approaches she reviews what she
has learned and decides that she has had her education and that it is
time to 'graduate'. Jill Ker Conway was born in Hillston, NSW,
Australia, graduated from the University of Sydney in 1958, and received
her PhD from Harvard University in 1969. From 1964 to 1975 she taught at
the University of Toronto and was Vice President there before serving
for ten years as President of Smith College. Since 1985 she has been a
visiting scholar and professor in MIT's Program in Science, Technology
and Society, and she currently serves on the boards of several
companies. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
