Two things that I find most amazing about Jill Ker Conway
1. Her mind: she is able to read large amounts of material and piece together a large picture of a field. She sees connections between ideas, and is able to make lateral jumps across fields too. (I read articles in the Annual Review of Sociology and am entirely sure that to compile, ingest, process, and analyze a large body of literature would be SO HARD for me. That makes her all the more amazing to me)
2. Her feminism and activism for women. As an academic, she writes a dissertation about women who pioneered social work. But, her feminist interest is also personal, in the way she has been treated in her college days from Australia, as well as the world that she and her female colleagues and roommates experience.
I love the story she recounts in True North about earnings disparities. As a youngish professor in Canada, she is not promoted when many of her cohort of male colleagues is. She finds out that they are also making more money than she is. She schedules a meeting with the department chair, then the dean of her school, and calmly discusses the issue. With an objective eye to her accomplishments, the decision is made to promote her as well and raise her salary.
But, this is not where she leaves it. She goes on to organize a committee of women at the university to look into the overall system of pay discrepancy between men and women faculty. She is also concerned about other university employees including all the women that secretarial staff. She describes the way that she gives her own assistants tasks to help them learn broader skills and encourages them to take classes, with the hopes that in 1-2 years they will have outgrown their jobs with her and moved on to something else. Her values and her committment to women and their education are probably the main reason why she was chosen to be the first female president at Smith and explain many of her initiatives and priorities there.
I was jealous of her early graduate school experience. She talks about the intense conversations she shares with her 5 roommates, all in different fields, and the world of ideas into which she is immersed with other students and faculty.
She is deliberate in her studies and manages to knock a year off of her coursework to take her exams earlier than most. She marries a faculty member 18 years her senior in the middle of her 3rd year, in every way a true partner for her, and they embark on their life together. They go from Harvard to Toronto, then on to Smith College (at her husband's urging), and finally back to Boston.
Although she longs to have children, she is unable to do so, and never becomes a mother. I wondered how her life would have been different with children. She is able to manage immense amounts of work, long hours in the library and later in university administration, and maintaing an intense schedule. It is possible that she would have managed the same amount with children, but I wanted to see her personally struggle with balancing children and a career. Her husband suffers from severe manic depression, requiring hospitaltization at times, but she does not talk much about what this requires of her personally.
A Women's Education is probably my least favorite. Here, her writing becomes more academic and less accessible. In both this and True North, she describes in too much detail the people in her life, that do not reappear after their two pages of discussion. But, all in all, I really enjoyed reading her three memoirs. She is a master of describing place and her connection to physical places and her grounding through location was apparent.
1. Her mind: she is able to read large amounts of material and piece together a large picture of a field. She sees connections between ideas, and is able to make lateral jumps across fields too. (I read articles in the Annual Review of Sociology and am entirely sure that to compile, ingest, process, and analyze a large body of literature would be SO HARD for me. That makes her all the more amazing to me)
2. Her feminism and activism for women. As an academic, she writes a dissertation about women who pioneered social work. But, her feminist interest is also personal, in the way she has been treated in her college days from Australia, as well as the world that she and her female colleagues and roommates experience.
I love the story she recounts in True North about earnings disparities. As a youngish professor in Canada, she is not promoted when many of her cohort of male colleagues is. She finds out that they are also making more money than she is. She schedules a meeting with the department chair, then the dean of her school, and calmly discusses the issue. With an objective eye to her accomplishments, the decision is made to promote her as well and raise her salary.
But, this is not where she leaves it. She goes on to organize a committee of women at the university to look into the overall system of pay discrepancy between men and women faculty. She is also concerned about other university employees including all the women that secretarial staff. She describes the way that she gives her own assistants tasks to help them learn broader skills and encourages them to take classes, with the hopes that in 1-2 years they will have outgrown their jobs with her and moved on to something else. Her values and her committment to women and their education are probably the main reason why she was chosen to be the first female president at Smith and explain many of her initiatives and priorities there.
I was jealous of her early graduate school experience. She talks about the intense conversations she shares with her 5 roommates, all in different fields, and the world of ideas into which she is immersed with other students and faculty.
She is deliberate in her studies and manages to knock a year off of her coursework to take her exams earlier than most. She marries a faculty member 18 years her senior in the middle of her 3rd year, in every way a true partner for her, and they embark on their life together. They go from Harvard to Toronto, then on to Smith College (at her husband's urging), and finally back to Boston.
Although she longs to have children, she is unable to do so, and never becomes a mother. I wondered how her life would have been different with children. She is able to manage immense amounts of work, long hours in the library and later in university administration, and maintaing an intense schedule. It is possible that she would have managed the same amount with children, but I wanted to see her personally struggle with balancing children and a career. Her husband suffers from severe manic depression, requiring hospitaltization at times, but she does not talk much about what this requires of her personally.
A Women's Education is probably my least favorite. Here, her writing becomes more academic and less accessible. In both this and True North, she describes in too much detail the people in her life, that do not reappear after their two pages of discussion. But, all in all, I really enjoyed reading her three memoirs. She is a master of describing place and her connection to physical places and her grounding through location was apparent.
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