ETHOS
Growing up on a giant sheep ranch in the remote grasslands of Australia can shape a young girl’s whole life.
“In a labour-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 hadtobedone.itnevercrossed 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, 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, Massachusetts.
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.
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 she was struck not only by what 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 non-profits such as the Kellogg Foundation.
“One of the things I really like about Jill’s life as a model,” Mccartney said, “is that she had different chapters in it.”
Jill Kathryn Ker was born in Hillston, New South Wales, in southeastern Australia, and grew up in nearby Coorain, where her parents, William and Evelyn A’dames Ker, had a 32,000-acre sheep ranch.
Her father died when she was ten, and at 12 Jill was sent to boarding school. She later enrolled at the University of Sydney and received a history degree in 1958. In 1960 she decided to leave Australia for graduate school in the United States.
“I’d arrived at the choice by exhausting all the possibilities of interesting careers in Australia,” Conway wrote in True North (1994), her second memoir, “discovering, one by one, that they were not open to women.”
She enrolled at Radcliffe College and shared a house for a time with other women from overseas who were doing graduate work. They came to call her Mother Superior for her skill at negotiating with the landlord and her general organisational abilities. While working towards her PH.D., whichshereceivedatharvard in 1969, she served as a teaching fellow, working for a Harvard professor named John Conway. They married in 1962.
Her feminist convictions extended to the marriage.
“Young women are trained to think they should marry someone who is a great romantic love,” Conway said in 2002. “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.”
The couple moved to Canada in 1964, and she took a teaching post at the University of Toronto. She became a dean in 1971 and a vice president in 1973. Conway took over the Smith presidency at a time when the college was facing complaints that women were being discriminated against in faculty hiring and promotions. It was also a period when the very idea of a college for women was being questioned and Smith was trying to transform itself into somethinglessantiquatedand more competitive.
Conway understood that a woman’s education can often be interrupted by marriage, childbirth or economic realities. At a time when many universities had not yet focused on non-traditional students, she began the Ada Comstock Scholars Programme (named for a Smith alumna) for students seeking to resume studies they had abandoned.
In 1985 Conway left Smith to devote time to writing. Her first memoir, The Road From Coorain (1989), which became a bestseller, told of her life in Australia up to the point of her decision to leave.
Fuelling that decision, she wrote, was an episode in which she and two male friends applied for the Australian foreign service; the men were accepted while she was not.
“It chilled me to realise that there was no way to earn my freedom through merit,” she wrote. “It was an appalling prospect.”
Verlyn Klinkenborg, reviewing the book in the New York Times, called it “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 became the basis for a film starring Juliet Stevenson in 2002.
True North picked up Conway’s story where the first book had left off and took it up to her move from Toronto to Smith. Then, in 2001, came A Woman’s Education. “She writes knowledgeably about all disciplines as a good college president should,” William R. Everdell wrote in his review in the New York Times, “but never misses what women’s scholarship has done, including reshaping entire fields like anthropology and economics.
“A philosophical empiricist and ethical universalist,” he continued, “she gracefully picks her way over the rocks of ‘essentialist’ feminism and through the eddies of cultural particularism. A knowledge of history – and a good sense of humour – help her keep her balance.”
After leaving Smith, Conway was a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Programme on Science, Technology and Society. Besides her memoirs, her books include When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (1998), which explores the ways memoirs by men and by women differ.
She was the editor of several books as well, 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).
Although much of Conway’s writing focused on women, she knew that limited definitions and opportunities affect everyone.
“Sex-role stereotyping has hurt men as much as women,” she told the Boston Globe in 1975.
“For me, liberation means the full range of human traits can be displayed by either men or women without social penalties.”
John Conway died in 1995. Jill Ker Conway leaves no immediate survivors. NEIL GENZLINGER The Scotsman welcomes obituaries and appreciations from contributors as well as suggestions of possible obituary subjects. Please contact: Gazette Editor n The Scotsman, Level 7, Orchard Brae House, 30 Queensferry Road, Edinburgh EH4 2HS; n gazette@scotsman.com