When I was approached about the Smith College presidency, in 1975, I could see that the board’s interest was logical. I’d made my reputation as a historian writing on the history of women’s education in the United States. I’d studied the historical circumstances and motives that produced the characteristic American pattern of coeducational higher-education institutions and elite colleges for a male or a female student body. So I’d had many years to reflect on how educational institutions could foster or impede equal treatment for women.
And more recently, I’d become involved in academic administration. At 37, I’d surprised myself by setting aside the book I was enjoying writing to become a vice president of the University of Toronto. While in that role, I could still pretend that I’d soon be back in my office in the history department, getting ready to teach again. But to decide to become a college president would be to permit such fudging no longer.
When I cast up the accounts on the matter of staying in Canada or moving into a new institution and a more public role, I thought the negatives clearly predominated. I was by nature solitary. Born on an isolated sheep station in Australia, virtually an only child while my brothers were in boarding school, I needed the quiet of libraries and the comfort of losing myself in some research project. The sounds I liked best were the subdued rustle of manuscripts and papers in an archive, and the hushed background voices of a library staff careful not to interrupt. I could manage being with people constantly, but I found it exhausting, an inheritance of a childhood where we could go months without seeing another human being come by the homestead.
Part of me didn’t want to move permanently beyond the scholar’s role -- deliberately detached, speaking always in the third person, looking at the past from a distant present. I’d accentuated that distance by choosing to study not the history of my own country and past, where I might have met the ghosts of myself and my forebears, but 19thand 20th-century American history. That choice kept the boundary between studied and studier comfortably impermeable. Like the medievalist or the classical scholar, I wanted my knowledge to be about a world so distant one could engage it in imagination and spirit without digging around in the roots of a fragile identity in the present.
But then again, I’d chosen to study a generation of pioneering American woman leaders in the Progressive era, women who made things happen to improve the lot of their sisters, women who were passionate writers and speakers on women’s issues. I admired them deeply, and studying them had taught me what a woman could do with her life. But if I had a public voice, it was as a scholar, and I shied away from putting too much of myself on the line.
What I feared most concretely, with a real lurch of the stomach and a chill around the heart, was the conflict of needing to care for my husband, John, a manic depressive, either in manic euphoria or desperate depression while all my time was committed to the responsibilities and the onerous schedule of a college head in a residential community. In the privacy offered by an urban commuter setting, we could manage the mood swings together. But I dreaded the fishbowl life of a rural college community -- and what was worse, being deeply committed to the fund-raising event, or the highly visible public occasion that couldn’t be rescheduled, just when he was in a manic spell and couldn’t be found.
John, however, was stoic and kept insisting that I shouldn’t let this ailment stop me from achieving important things in life. “I don’t believe in bourgeois domesticity,” he’d say. “Privacy can be selfish. If you think the cause is right, we’ll manage somehow.” When I followed his advice and thought about that, the prospect was exciting. The fashion of the moment was for the wonderful women’s colleges, which were unique to the United States and a sustaining force in keeping feminist issues alive, to merge with formerly all-male institutions, or to become coeducational. I knew how hard it was to make a male-led university allocate resources to meet the needs of woman students or to support the research of woman faculty members. And I knew that there was no cumulative effort to study issues relating to women, whether in law, medicine, social theory, or history. So the preservation of these institutions and their painstakingly acquired endowments was important. They were a base it was worth fighting to retain. Besides, I knew I’d enjoy the fight.
The Smith I came to know carried within its alumnae body two founding Utopian ideals. One school of alumnae saw the voluntarism of educated women as the saving remnant in a capitalist society little mindful of the natural environment, the needs of children and the elderly, the prerequisites for civilized urban life. Another, not necessarily younger, saw women’s education and their entry into the professions and political life as a source of progress. So Smith had established a creative program of education in social work, and graduate programs in fields as disparate as theater, music, and physical education. And it prided itself on the level of its preparation for entry into fields like law and medicine. Both groups worried about Smith’s second century. Would it be able to attract gifted students? Would it be able to raise the resources necessary to compete with more richly endowed Ivy League institutions? Would Smith attract outstanding faculty members, as it had in the past?
There were questions that quickly polarized opinion among faculty members, students, and alumnae. The sexual revolution of the ‘70s and the movement for gay rights were deeply threatening to older faculty members, both male and female. Smith, like all women’s colleges, had had a long history of devoted female faculty couples in Boston marriages. But these had been discreetly seemly, and never challenged heterosexual norms the way a new generation of gay women and men proceeded to do in the 1970s.
Students from smaller, rural high schools were dumbfounded by both heterosexual and homosexual behavior on a campus in the throes of sexual revolution. And many parents who cheerfully expected their sons to enjoy sexual adventures at college worried greatly about the new freedoms for their daughters. So the subject of sexual mores came to complicate every generation’s understanding of what a feminist educational institution should be, a question exacerbated by the society’s lack of ease with all-female institutions.
Most older faculty members found it hard to take African-American studies or women’s studies seriously. Most younger faculty members were passionately committed to both. White students and black tried warily to befriend one another in an environment overheated by strong feelings on sexual, cultural, and racial politics. These tensions intensified as Smith marked its first century by its first serious effort to make its feminism encompass women of color. There had been isolated African-American women in Smith’s classes before the mid-'60s, but by 1975 there was a sizable group with a strong and articulate Black Students’ Association. And the centennial celebrations themselves echoed with the early salvos of feminist scholars in the battle to insert a feminine point of view in humanistic studies, to redefine the norms of the social sciences so that women would not be viewed as failed men, and to enlarge women’s participation in science.
These cultural battles raged across American and Western European campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but their resonance was different within the community of a women’s college. American society had always nursed deep suspicions of single-sex institutions. A Protestant society thought single-sex groups redolent of popery, and likely to nourish what were darkly called “priestly vices.” So the determination of women’s colleges to retain their mission in the 1970s, when the fashion was coeducation, placed them far out on the wrong end of the spectrum of what was thought “progressive.”
The resonance of the struggle over feminist scholarship was also different on the campus of a women’s college, because it required senior male faculty members to see themselves no longer as paternalistic deliverers of wisdom to young women but as bearers of a scholarly tradition that these same young women might reject. Because they were already challenged in self-image by the fact of teaching women, their reactions to feminist scholarship were the more heatedly visceral.
I wanted to help build an educational system that made intellectual maturity possible for all women. The question was how to model such a system. I thought strong women’s colleges could do just that: be the benchmarks for the ways society thought about educating women, be the counter-instances in physics and mathematics, or political science and economics, where popular stereotypes decreed limited expectations for women. To insist on alternative models was unpopular, because the prevailing liberal orthodoxy stressed assimilation -- for women, or black people, or any other disadvantaged group.
But I knew from studying the abortive history of women in the professions, from the 1890s through the 1950s, that liberal notions of assimilation had not worked. They had been important in opening up access to professional education, but woman doctors and lawyers had been quickly marginalized into low-paid service areas and kept outside the research base of the professions. Just as liberalism failed its believers when faced with the economic crisis of the 1930s, I’d found in my life that the great liberal ideal of access was valuable in giving women entry into privileged educational enclaves -- but not valuable enough, because entering an institution (club, profession, school, military unit) did not necessarily mean becoming a full member.
Women needed their own intellectual turf, “a country of the mind,” an intellectual territory on which to stand as they observed the world. Great female thinkers of the Middle Ages, like Hildegard of Bingen, or Dame Julian of Norwich, had possessed that territory within the powerful religious communities in which they lived. I wanted to see the 20th-century counterparts of that territory not just preserved but given fresh vitality.
Just a few days in the office made me see how naive I’d been in expecting that the mission of a century-old educational institution for women would be established beyond question and that my objective would fit neatly into Smith’s traditions. My naiveté was matched only by the ferocity with which different Smith constituencies advanced contending points of view about how that mission should be defined in terms of 20th-century American culture.
In its first century, Smith had prided itself on having male presidents as guarantors of intellectual standards. Nothing seemed more logical to the products of the Ivy League or Oxbridge who stepped into the guarantor’s role than to recruit their old friends (naturally all male) from graduate school to the Smith faculty. So my ideal female intellectual community was taught by a faculty almost 70 percent male, and many of them saw themselves as custodians of the great Western tradition of humanistic learning, which they handed down to young women in decidedly patriarchal style. Because of their location within a women’s institution, their male identity was decidedly fragile, and they needed to fight feminist ideas of the academy much more than their most conservative colleagues in coeducational settings. Making sure that a new woman president didn’t introduce ideas subversive of the Western male tradition was a life-and-death matter for them, and they acted accordingly.
The smaller group of younger faculty members who were male feminists wanted to educate woman philosophers or mathematicians to correct the male bias in Western learned culture. At Smith, members of the first group were colloquially known as the dinosaurs, while the second was, alas, too small to warrant a collective name.
Not all older male faculty members were dinosaurs. Some were just puzzled liberals, so sure of their own good intentions toward woman students that they were genuinely hurt when accused of denigrating them. Like much of the old-style left, they’d never extended their politics to sexual relationships and didn’t see anything wrong with their sexual liaisons with much younger women. They continued to believe paternalistically that pats on the behind or a little fondling should be accepted as a compliment, willfully unaware that it is annoying at best to be defined sexually by someone you want to take you seriously as a mind.
The third of the faculty who were female were similarly divided generationally. The older women had negotiated academic life by two strategies. The first was to become an honorary male and espouse, with the passion of the convert, every last detail of the accepted male definition of intellectual rigor, as encountered in graduate school and professional life in the 1940s and ‘50s. Such women were the scourges of what they took to be sloppiness and flabby minds in the younger women, products of graduate school in the 1960s and ‘70s, who were feminist critics of the methods and assumptions of the social sciences and humanities.
A second strategy of the older generation was to adopt the style of the upper-middle-class “lady” scholar. For them, scholarship involved exquisitely fine-grained research and elegant writing about tiny details within an established field. I thought of them as doing intellectual petit point -- decorative, but working on one letter in an illuminated manuscript rather than ranging over the entire scope of a field or discipline. They were ladies first and foremost, and far too well mannered to ever challenge male authority. They were the darlings of the dinosaurs.
The younger female faculty generation had its share of honorary males and “lady” scholars, but its ranks were made up mainly of committed feminists whose intellectual energies were fed by a political vision that encompassed every aspect of their understanding of what learning was about, and that governed how they thought the institutions that transmitted it should operate.
But, as with all other political movements, 1970s feminism wasn’t monolithic. There were essentialist feminists who wanted to replace the agonistic style of the academy with maternal caring. There were doctrinaire Marxists wanting to dismantle capitalism. There were gay women intent on dismantling compulsory heterosexuality. And there were the all-too-few African-American and Hispanic women, who saw themselves as the advance guard of a juster racial society. Most members of this younger generation could be mobilized around a small segment of feminist issues, but on all others they espoused radically different strategies for change. All expected that Smith’s first woman president would see things their way.
I learned most from the face we presented to the world and the way the institution was perceived. Spending the better part of a decade as a spokeswoman on woman questions -- women and work, women and religion, women in academe, women in the third world, women in the arts, women and voluntarism -- I had found all the usual reductive tags journalists and politicians used very instructive. The “women and” questions came because the questioners couldn’t be bothered to think at a more precise level about what they wanted to know. Answering all those questions forced me to articulate positions on many issues that had never come up in my academic life. At Smith they came up almost daily, and I soon learned that my answer was delivered into a highly charged political environment.
Answering questions from politicians or corporate leaders on standard feminist goals -- equal pay, for instance -- taught me that most people thought about women’s advancement as a zero-sum game. If women gained equal pay, there would be less for men. No one considered that a better use of women’s talents would be a source of productivity. I realized that feminists hadn’t painted a very good picture of the kind of world we’d live in if women succeeded in winning every plank of the Western feminist platform. Science fiction by women was the closest we had to Utopian thinking, but it wasn’t much help on the zero-sum issue. We didn’t even have many bildungsromans by women that weren’t just about sexual adventures. I decided that when my time was free, I’d write one.
My conversation often stumbled over the puzzled question about why women would want to be educated separately, and why I, whom my questioner clearly thought competent, would want to run a women’s “school.” The subtext of the question was that women could not possibly have any intellectual reason for being together. The life of the mind was a male activity to which women were lucky to be admitted. They were great research assistants, but the conversation about knowledge was in a male voice. So if women chose to be educated separately from men, their reasons couldn’t be intellectual -- they must be sexual and involve sexual rejection of males. Invariably, the discussion then got around to homophobic subjects on which all vestiges of liberal tolerance for difference vanished. I had a hard time explaining the concept of parallel institutions for men and women at different life stages, and never managed to convey the possibility that liberty might be greater in a society of greater complexity than in one of uniformity.
What was startling was how worried people got over any grouping of women without men. It troubled people to think of women owning and running their own turf. It troubled men faced with critical wives, mothers, or daughters. It also troubled insecure women uncertain of what life would be like if they had to earn their own way in the world. It couldn’t be normal. Ergo it was deviant, and since women were defined by their bodies and not their minds and talents, it had to be sexually deviant, and the course of study had to be intellectually weak.
Internally, the politics of knowledge at Smith had revolved around the study of women and the study of non-Western fields. Conservatives claimed that the Western humanistic tradition should not be eroded by “relativistic” studies of other cultures. Why build language programs in Chinese and Japanese when students needed first to know Greek and Latin? Why spend so much effort on Buddhist studies when no one read the King James Bible anymore? Every cultural conservative could understand teaching Hebrew to understand biblical texts, but Arabic? Why that, when there were no longer many students who could write a sentence in English that parsed? At issue was the question of whether or not the world should be seen, both in time and in cultural expression, from a Western European point of view, or even whether it was possible to construe reality from a central point.
This was the political battle of ideas that inspired the new right and gave birth to the leftish postmodern view of cultural politics. Its resonance at Smith was complicated by the gender composition of the faculty, because deconstructing the narrative of European superiority also undermined the concept of the Western male hero. So a curriculum committee could become heated over a simple question such as whether a course treating women’s contribution to the French Resistance in the Second World War was biased. Proponents of the course would argue that it was odd that the widespread and well-documented participation of women in the Resistance should somehow not have made its way into histories of the period, and opponents would see the proposal as a feminist effort to devalue the Jean Moulins of the maquis.
Possibly even more inflammatory were efforts to insert works by women into the canon of Western art and literature. These battles were standoffs during the 1980s, dealt with by academic eclecticism and the approval of courses representative of both points of view. So a Smith student arriving in 1975 might have found herself reading only works by great male writers, whereas by 1985 she could either choose works by those cheerfully referred to as “dead white males” or settle for woman writers from George Eliot to Toni Morrison, or both.
The solution was a costly addition to the mounting of the curriculum, and troublesome or not depending on whether one thought the young should create their own synthetic view of culture or have one offered to them. The eclecticism didn’t bother me. It was symptomatic of a major paradigm shift in the idea of high culture, and in geopolitics. I didn’t expect it to be worked out in my lifetime. I remembered how long it had taken Oxford and Cambridge to accept the idea of teaching modern history, an intellectual shift that took more than a quarter-century. And I was confident students were bright enough to figure out the politics once they were alerted to the male bias in the canon.
The battles were different in the social sciences, because the mode of participant observation built into sociology and anthropology had created a disciplinary oeuvre that rested upon a total failure to observe the roles of women in non-Western cultures, or if they were observed, to interpret them correctly. So the early anthropologists who were the giants in the field, like Bronislaw Malinowski, had simply concluded, for example, that Australian Aboriginal women had no role in religion, because their rituals were secret and not revealed to men. Correcting that sort of misconception was not just a matter of inserting existing materials into the curriculum but required remaking the discipline. And sociologists like the eminent Talcott Parsons, who had structured gender concepts on the divide between instrumental and expressive behavior, could not be dealt with by just adding supplementary texts.
The remedy was rethinking how bias shapes participant observation, and why such dualistic concepts once seemed to have such explanatory power. Because their disciplines are based on comparative studies, which requires some relativistic assessment, it was easier for the social scientists to adapt. A Smith student who arrived in 1975 would have been given the entire orthodoxy on women’s closeness to nature and subordinate role in religious ritual in the introductory courses to social-science disciplines, but by 1985 she’d find both points of view and their historical origins explained in her introductory course, and a set of upper-level courses drawing on trailblazing feminist research.
The change wasn’t so easy in economics and political science. Since economics is based on measuring what can be counted in human productivity, and all the elegant mathematical theorems of neoclassical economics rest on monetary measures, it’s more difficult to adjust for the fact that women’s unpaid work is part of a society’s productivity. And the founding documents of political theory are, of course, based on the great texts drawn from Greek political culture, which didn’t see women as part of the polis.
Here, as in the humanities, various forms of parallel curriculums evolved, leaving the student to reach her own conclusions. But the going was harder for young feminist scholars in these fields. Their research had to be better, their conclusions more rigorous, and their professional standing more broadly recognized for them to earn a permanent place on the Smith faculty. So students in the 1980s might find all counterviews of political theory or economics taught, but more often than not by a rotating crop of young, untenured scholars.
In the natural sciences, the political issues hinged on the philosophy and sociology of Western science. The philosophical question hinged on the methods of science, the effort to break down living organisms into ever smaller units for the purpose of control and manipulation. Or in one manifestation of physics, to develop ever-more-destructive weapons for military purposes. And both, of course, offered unlimited potential for unintended consequences damaging to ecological balance.
These critiques, by no means exclusively feminist, had special resonance at a women’s college because of the sociology of Western science, based on a culture organized since the 17th century to exclude woman participants. Since Smith women wanted to be prepared for advanced study in all fields, the curricular response was to build an ever-more-preprofessional science curriculum while covering the philosophical and sociological issues through courses on the history and philosophy of science. It was a pragmatic fix that worked, since the reorientation of science as an enterprise required resources and facilities well beyond the range of an undergraduate science program. It also worked because it was on the applications of science that feminist perspectives could most easily be brought to bear. What was glaringly missing in the curriculum was a multidisciplinary environmental-studies program, where feminist perspectives were clearly relevant. But that was a project left for my successor.
Of course there was a vigorous right-wing backlash within the general academic culture of the 1990s to all these critiques of established disciplines, as there was to the effort to create undergraduate communities where different ethnic, gender, and sexual-preference groups were not demeaned by hostile or prejudiced majorities. I thought the rancor and emotional excess of the backlash a sign of the power of the efforts to redefine “official” knowledge. And since I believed with Hegel that the advancement of knowledge was a dialectical process, I thought the political passions were at least a sign of engagement rather than neglect.
But I knew I wasn’t going to be fighting those battles on university campuses in the years ahead. I wanted to move on to create texts rather than study them. The new knowledge I was looking for was about environmental change, and the question of gendered perceptions of nature, something not yet roiling the debates of Smith’s curriculum committees, or figuring prominently in Western feminist discourse.
Smith had definitely made my theoretical historical understanding of gender politics three-dimensional. But there was no question that I needed time to move on, to think more about the pluses and minuses of where we’d arrived in the gender politics of my day. I needed time out for more training, a better coach on vital issues like technology and environmental hazards, and a new arena for the fight.
I hadn’t expected the next round for me to be literary, but that was where all my inner voices were leading me. And watching generations of young women grow intellectually, discover intellectual vocations, and begin to take charge of their lives had been a powerful experience. I couldn’t find that women’s story written about much except in pop-culture terms by movie stars and rock singers. We clearly needed more writers who could make the serious woman intellectual’s life experience come alive for both women and men. So that would be an early assignment for my new life.
Jill Ker Conway, a visiting scholar and professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s program in science, technology, and society, was president of Smith College from 1975 to 1985. This essay is excerpted from A Woman’s Education, just published by Alfred A. Knopf. Copyright ©2001 by Jill Ker Conway.
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