A Woman's Education
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REVIEW BY MAUDE MCDANIEL
It was "a real gamble" for Jill Ker Conway to accept the offer to become Smith College's first woman president. (More of a challenge for her, most of her readers would say, than for the college, which was getting a good thing.) There were "definitely goals to dream about," Conway writes in her newest memoir A Woman's Education, an examination of her years at the prestigious institution. Unfortunately, she also felt "profound anxiety" and "a sort of generalized alertness" that stemmed from earlier family-related vulnerabilities, deepened by her brilliant husband's increasing manic-depressive problems. Born in Australia, Conway had turned her life around to combat her mother's dominance, come to Harvard for her Ph.D., then moved to Canada, where she became a vice president of the University of the Toronto. Add to all that upheaval the culture wars of the 1970s, when all institutions of learning were debating questions of direction and growth , both spurred and impeded by student activism, and you have the stuff of risk and chance. Conway took the gamble. The decision was a precursor to the growth both she and Smith College -- now transformed into an unapologetic woman's school with a keen sense of its own promise, uniqueness and future -- experienced. As for Conway herself, she had moved on to another phase of her development, leaving behind her illusions about 20th century scholarship and disciplinary boundaries. She was ready to move past techniques and politics, especially as these were expressed in the rise of the "new-right" and such scholars as Allan Bloom (mentioned unfavorably more than once) to "universals of human experience." And for the second time in her life, she took a 180-degree turn in the road back to her first love, literature. This small but vital volume, third in a series including the terrific The Road from Coorain, and the mature True North, sometimes leans heavily on theories of education and feminism, and tends to "tell" more than "show" the details of conflicts in Conway's administration. All the people she mentions by name are bright stars, worthy and wonderful; the others go unnamed (except for Bloom), who is diplomatic and dull. The ghosts of many an ideological battle haunt these pages, along with the circumspectly reported sorrows and overweening joys of the author's personal life. Through it all shines Conway's own maturing understanding, and her great faith in young people. Bringing the reader up to 1985, she reflects on her tendency to think "about life in the language of music" and wonders which movement of her own personal symphony she will be playing next. I can't wait to hear it myself. Maude McDaniel writes from Cumberland, Maryland.
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