I&M Staff Writer
Jill Ker Conway’s early life in the Australian outback, where she was raised in isolation on a 32,000-acre sheep farm, taught by her mother, with only her two brothers for playmates, mirrored the hard lives of the mid-19th century Nantucket girls, whose fathers went off to sea, sometimes for years at a time.
Conway’s father died when she was 11, leaving her mother, a nurse, to run the farm.
Conway later attended private school and graduated from college, eventually earning her Ph.D. from Harvard. She was the first woman president of Smith College, a position she held from 1975 to 1985, and now is a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and will be speaking tonight at the Egan Maritime Foundation on “Stories of Scientists Who are Women.”
Quaker Nantucket was not the only community during the 18th and 19th centuries which explored equality between the sexes, said Conway.
“New Harmony, Indiana, the Shaker communities of the late 18th and 19th centuries, the Oneida Community. These might have flourished longer had they been isolated by being on a remote island,” Conway said. “But, because of the opposition of neighboring settlers, they did not last more than a few generations, except for the Shakers whose industry and deep religious vision were attractive to other settlers.”
Conway believes women become leaders when faced with one of four challenges: loss of a male life, either a father, brother or lover, where a woman has lived vicariously through a male and now that male is gone; an early intellectual interest which is so absorbing that a young woman does not hear societal messages; a tragedy in childhood, where a girl realizes that she will have to make her own way in the world; and the availability of options, for example, the 20 million dead in Russia after World War II left opportunities for women to become doctors, lawyers and engineers.
“So far as demography is concerned, we can say that for Europe, North America and Australasia, the loss of male life in 1914-18, and 1939-45, definitely did create opportunities for women in professions and in government,” Conway said.
While Nantucket native Maria Mitchell, the first woman to discover a comet with a telescope, the first woman to be admitted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1848, and the first woman college professor, was first introduced to science by her father, who instructed her, later she became self-taught.
“It is not a useful question to ask what would happen to Maria Mitchell if she were enrolled in the average high school of today, since the answer is unknowable,” Conway said.
Yet, if Maria Mitchell attended public school today, she would have to aggressively speak up to make herself known.
“The disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and science which are studied in universities today are the same no matter what the gender, race, age, or ethnic background of students,” said Conway. “The way in which these disciplines are taught differs if the classes are all male, all female, or mixed. Both men and women teachers hear the male voice more clearly than the female in mixed classes – so women are called upon less, and have less chance to interact with the instructor.”
As to feminism, Conway noted the differences between Third World feminism and feminism in the United States.
“Third World feminism is more focused on environmental hazards, and the impact of westernization than on the concerns of American women with reproductive and legal rights,” said Conway.
Jill Ker Conway will speak on “Stories of Scientists Who are Women” tonight at the Egan Maritime Foundation’s Coffin School, 4 Winter Street at 5:30 p.m. Tickets prices range from $35 for students to $250 for benefactors. For more information, call (508) 228-2505.