A Woman's Education
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher 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'.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Conway's goals and visions as the first female president of elite Smith College during an era in which many women's institutions were going co-ed are the focus of this plainspoken and gracefully written third volume of her memoirs (following The Road from Coorain and True North). When Conway, then age 39, took the helm of Smith College in 1975, she knew that her determination to make Smith competitive as "an avowedly modern feminist institution" would be a difficult challenge. In addition, she faced the disapproval of most of the entrenched senior male faculty, as well as academic infighting and tensions between the faculty and the board of trustees. She is candid about the problems in her decade there, revealing as well her own misgivings and vulnerabilities and the stresses of her personal life. Learning quickly that she had to be a political strategist, mediator and fundraiser, Conway took as her main mission the need to convey the liberalizing qualities of single-sex education for women seeking to develop their identities. Despite alumnae criticism of the strong lesbian presence at Smith, she was also outspoken in her passionate defense of gay rights as a fundamental feminist issue. Yet she also records her intellectual differences with much of the ideology of the feminist movement. There are poignant passages, when Conway describes her "losses" and her husband's accelerating manic depression, but the main thrust is her forceful argument about the superior ability of women's colleges to liberate students from the shibboleths and constraints of the male-dominated point of view prevalent at most other institutions. Whether or not readers agree with her analysis, they will respond to her high ideals, courageous spirit and humanistic philosophy.