Jill Ker Conway

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Jill Ker Conway (born 9 September 1934) is an American author, best known for her autobiographies The Road from Coorain, True North and A Woman's Education. She was Smith College's first woman president, a post she served for ten years (1975-1985).

Early life and education

Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales in the outback of Australia. Together with her two brothers, Conway was raised in total isolation on the family owned 18,000-acre tract of land, Coorain, which was eventually expanded into 32,000 acres. On Coorain she lived a lonely life, and grew up without playmates except for her brothers. She was schooled entirely by her mother and a country governess.

Conway she spent her youth working on her father's sheep farm. Already by age 7, Conway was an important workforce on the farm, she helped with such activities as herding and tending the sheep, checking the perimiter fences and lugging heavy farm supplies around. The farm prospered until a drought that would last for seven years. This drought and her father's worsening health put an increasing burden on her shoulders. But this ended abruptly when she was 11 and her father drowned in an unfortunate diving accident, while trying to extend the farm's water piping.

Initially Conway's mother, a nurse by profession, refused to sell Coorain. But after three more years of drought she was compelled to move Jill and her brothers to Sydney, to allow her daughter to lead a normal life.

Conway found the local state school a rough environment. The British manners and accent ingrained by her parents clashed with her peers' Australian habits provoking taunts and jeers. This resulted in her mother enrolling her at Abbotsleigh, a prestigious private girls school, where Conway found intellectual challenge and social acceptance. After finishing her education at Abbotsleigh, she enrolled at the University of Sydney where she studied History and English and graduated with honours in 1958. Upon graduation, Conway sought a prestigious trainee post in the Foreign Service, but the conservative all-male committee was intimidated by her she was refused for being, as she learned later, "too good looking" and "too intellectually aggressive."

After this setback she travelled through Europe with her now emotionally volatile mother. In 1960 she decided to strike out on her own and move to the United States. At age 25, she was accepted into the Harvard University history program. There she assisted a Canadian professor, John Conway, who became her husband until his death in 1995. Conway received her Ph.D. at Harvard in 1969 and taught at the University of Toronto from 1964 to 1975. Her book True North deals about her time in Toronto.

Smith College

In 1975 Conway became the first woman president of Smith College, the largest women's college in the United States. Located in Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith is a private liberal arts college and is the first and only women's college in the U.S. to grant its own degrees in engineering.

One of Conway's most notable accomplishments, is a program she instigated to help students on welfare. At the time many students who were also welfare mothers were not pursuing liberal-arts as accepting Smith's scholarship meant losing their welfare benefits. The students were forced to choose between supporting their children or furthering their education. By not giving them scholarships but paying their rent instead, Conway circumvented the state's system. She also gave the students access to an account at local stores, access to physicians and so on. ABC’s Good Morning America even profiled graduates of the program, giving it national exposure. Eventually the state of Massachusetts, convinced about the importance of the program, changed its welfare system so that scholarship students wouldn’t lose their benefits.

Conway also created the Ada Comstock Scholars program. This program allows older women, often with extensive work and family obligations, to study part-time. These women can take classes for a Bachelor's degree at Smith's at a slower pace over a longer period of time.

Writings

Conway wrote many books, mainly autobiographies.

The Road from Coorain

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The Road from Coorain, published in 1989, is Conway's first autobiography and deals with her youth. She started writing her memoirs during her period at MIT, after leaving Smith's College.

The book starts off with her early childhood at the remote sheep farm Coorain in Hillston. Conway writes about her teenage years in Sydney and especially her education at the University of Sydney, where university studies were open to women but the culture was heavily focused on males.

True North

The Politics of Women's Education

A Woman's Education

List of works

Merchants and Merinos (1960)
The Female Experience in 18th- and 19th-Century America (1982)
Women Reformers and American Culture (1987)
Learning About Women (with Susan Bourque and Joan Scott) (1989)
The Road from Coorain (1990)
Autobiographies of American Women: An Anthology (1992)
The Politics of Women's Education (with Susan Bourque) (1993)
True North (1995)
Written by Herself (editor) (1995)
Written By Herself, vol. 2, Autobiographies of Women from Britain, Africa, Asia and the U.S. (1996)
When Memory Speaks (1998)
A Woman's Education (2002)

References

External links