Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly Fall 2015

Mount Holyoke fa l l 2015

Alumnae Quarterly

I N T H I S I SSU E A C H IL D H O O D T RAN S FO R M E D SEARCHING FOR FORGIVENESS AUTISM ADVOCACY M ARY LYO N ’S R EC IP ES

Find Your People

Alumnae pursue unique connections through a powerful network of powerful women

MHQ_Fall15_CoverR1.indd 5

9/21/15 1:54 PM

President’s Pen T H E S U M M E R P R O V I D E D an extraordinary opportunity to connect with alumnae across the country, from Seattle, San Francisco, and Jackson Hole to Aspen, Santa Fe, Austin, Tampa, and Cape Cod. One of the most frequent questions I hear from alumnae on these visits is how they can encourage young women to apply to Mount Holyoke College. Mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and other alumnae who have smart women in mind are interested in ways to explain the I felt privileged, benefits of a women’s college, and Mount Holyoke in particular. grateful, and There is, of course, much we want prospective students to learn about emboldened to Mount Holyoke: the rich diversity of our student body, our incomparable be in a place faculty who become lifelong mentors, the breathtaking beauty of our campus, that took the College’s vast resources that help students link curriculum to careers. me seriously.”

And then there are our well-connected alumnae. Let’s not forget about — LYN N PA SQ U E R E LL A ’80 you. Alums are invaluable in lending students a hand with securing internships and jobs after graduation.

To be honest, we realize college-bound students are bombarded with emails and envelopes extolling the virtues of countless schools. I have encountered more than one student who confessed that in today’s information-overload world, the college search is like jumping into a surging eddy of data, digits, and lists.

We want Mount Holyoke’s story to surface, and there’s one way I have found that alumnae can make a difference. Talk with potential students about what you loved about your time at the College.

Perhaps you relished conversations with faculty members who always had time for you. Or classrooms where you never hid your intellect. Or dorm mates who became friends for life and stretched your mind in ways you never could have imagined.

Sometimes the best way to talk about Mount Holyoke is to share memories of a special spot on campus. I loved the old basement of Blanchard, where my post office box was. I liked nothing more than checking my mail and then darting into the bookstore for a bag of Milanos (sometimes

“

During her summer travels President Pasquerella met up with Elizabeth McInerny McHugh ’87 in Santa Fe

John Kuchle

”

polishing off a whole pack if the night’s studying was long). Like many other students, I also loved the library, with its leaded glass windows and view of Clapp’s soaring tower.

The spot on campus that inspired me the most, however, was the amphitheater. I distinctly remember sitting there one autumn afternoon making my way through Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death. I read and read, grappling with ideas about existentialism and despair. And I was totally uplifted. When I looked down from my green perch atop the steps, I played a game with myself: I imagined walking across the amphitheater stage at graduation. In that reverie, I never felt fear or trembling. Instead, I felt privileged, grateful, and emboldened to be in a place that took me seriously. “Here’s the future,” I told myself, “My life begins here.”

There’s one more piece of advice I’d like to pass along: Tell your daughters, granddaughters, and friends to visit the College. Encourage them to come to Mount Holyoke, roam around, and imagine a future that begins here, in their own best place. We know that if they join us, they will find their own best selves as well.

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 2

9/22/15 2:23 PM

FA L L 2 015

//

VO LU M E 9 9

//

NUMBER 4

Contents 22

D E PA R T M E N T S

2 LYONS SHARE

Support for My Voice, disappointed in reunion coverage, sharing Connections Program stories

5 UNCOMMON GROUND

Bloch sisters: Anna+Elena=Balbusso; Convocation: MHC Office of Communications; front cover: Erin Schaff; back cover: Katie Brase Photography

Alumnae Fellowships, Mountain Day reunions, welcoming new students and staff, faculty research, students attend Harvard Business School program 9 Ten Minutes With Autism advocate Shelley Hendrix ’91 10 Insider’s View Music library

F E AT U R E S

16 Find Your People

Alumnae pursue unique connections through a powerful network of powerful women

22 A College Excellent and Nice After fleeing Germany and hiding from Nazi occupation in Holland, sisters Gerda ’49 and Doris Bloch ’51 made their way to South Hadley to continue their interrupted education

28 Forgive/Can’t Forget

In her quest to understand who was responsible for the operation that removed part of her clitoris, Mariya Karimjee ’10 learned that forgiveness was the only way forward

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 3

36

12 Go Figure Alumnae clubs and groups

13 The Maven Nadene Tabari Bradburn ’94 on finding the right health care provider 14 The Female Gaze Printmaker Ariel Szabo White ’09; playwright Lisa Giordano ’82; authors Wendy Laura Belcher ’84, Phyllis Lee Schwalbe Levin ’41, and MHC English professor Valerie Martin

34 MoHOME MEMORIES

Twenty-seven years of lunar howling 35 On Display Mary Lyon’s recipes 36 Then and Now Convocation

37 CONNECTIONS

Alumnae in Ghana, Reunion 2016, alumnae insurance coverage 38 A Place of Our Own A view of 1837

40 CLASS NOTES 80 MY VOICE

Edith Kaselis ’76 on “Choosing Mount Holyoke Again and Again”

O N T H E COV E R Sarah-Ann Lynch ’82 (left) and Amy Koler ’02

9/22/15 2:23 PM

LETTERS

|

EMAIL

|

FAC E B O O K

|

TWITTER

|

I N S TAG R A M

|

LINKEDIN

Lyons Share IT IS ENOUGH Thank you for the article “What is

@aamhc it’s easier than ever to #findyourpeople in NYC. Saw a new alum in an MHC sweatshirt on the subway last night and made fast friends.

E STE LLE D R E NT ’ 12 @E STE LLE _O LIVIA

2

Enough?” (summer 2015, p. 80) by Kate Burke Laird ’95. I, too, have spent many hours wondering whether my MHC degree, which I followed with a master’s from UC Davis, was a “waste” of time and talent when “all” I’m doing now is being a stay-at-home mom to four wonderfully energetic and amazing homeschooled kids. My husband (Amherst College ’96) is a professor at the University of Maine and the sole supporter of our family.

My MHC education put me on a path that has allowed me to make the choice to stay home, and I will always be grateful for that. I know there are MHC women everywhere changing the world in far more dramatic ways, but I am changing the world my way.

It is, indeed, enough.

—Aimee MacEachran Gerbi ’96 via email I can’t thank you enough for your wonderful essay. You summed up completely many of the same feelings that I have had since my own graduation. I, too, stayed at home to raise three children. I, too, never pursued a career that was high profile or fast-paced. I, too, became a teacher, having taught Spanish in elementary school for sixteen years now. I, too, would read with amazement class notes and wonder if I was doing enough. Let me assure you, though, as I start to close in on the age of sixty, I wouldn’t trade my life for anything. I cherish my time at MHC and value the wonderful education I received. I cherish the time that I had at home with my children (all grown and married now). I so appreciate my education career that allowed me the same hours/vacations as my kids.

I cherish and value the world travel opportunities that have come my way, most of them done with my wonderful husband. And I look forward to many new future adventures! Your father was right. You have a voice in the future. We all do, no matter what road we take; we are all uncommon women!

—Carol Hicks O’Neill ’79 via email MORE, PLEASE Congratulations on the summer

issue, particularly the fine article “A Winning Formula” (p. 17) on the College’s chemistry program.

This truly is exactly the kind of writing about the academic life of Mount Holyoke that fellow members of the ’62 class board and myself have asked for.

—Beatrice Beach Szekely ’62, class president, via email DISAPPOINTED While I have been increasingly im-

pressed by the quality of the Alumnae Quarterly, I was appalled by a caption in the summer 2015 issue. Under the photo of some members of the class of 1945 (“Lyons Share: Reunion,” p. 4), it states, “They look adorable!” This plays directly into the infantilization of older women that so many of us are fighting. Puppies are adorable. Babies are adorable. These women are, at the very least, magnificent. In the spirit of the class of 1969, I would like to say, “I protest!”

—Sally Parker ’69, Newburyport, Massachusetts In May I had the most wonderful time at my thirtieth reunion, bonding with my classmates, reveling in our college’s rich history and abundant fantastic women and

spirit. We have had a fun time on social media since, sharing stories, photos and memories of that weekend. Sadly, our latest exchange has been one of utter disbelief at the horrid choice of cover of the latest Quarterly. Instead of a photo of the cheerful faces of alums or any other happy depiction of our celebration of our college, you chose to print a photo of mostly pavement, along with a desecrated laurel chain, complete with the feet that may have just trampled it.

No sign of alums showing their love and pride in their school or anything festive but instead a cover that looks like an appeal for a clean-up crew. One hopes this was just a misguided attempt at being artistic, but for me it is also the first time I’ve ever been moved to weigh in on the Quarterly.

Our class alone took many more appropriate photos, and those are the ones I’ll choose to remember.

You really dropped the ball!

—Jeremy Cutler Vassallo ’85 via email CONNECTION STORIES I was thrilled to see the article about

the connection between Sandhya Banskota ’10 and Dana Feldshuh Whyte ’60 (“Meaningful Moments,” summer 2015, p. 22). Just to let you know that the two of them did not get to know each other as a result of the Connections Program, as the article implies. Actually, Dana and Sandhya met through their participation in the McCulloch Center’s hosting program for new international firstyear students called Cross-Cultural Connections, a program founded in 2005. Dana signed up to be a host to an incoming first-year international

alumnae.mtholyoke.edu

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 4

9/22/15 2:23 PM

Someone (besides me) is excited the Quarterly arrived. @aamhc #MHC03 #dogsofMHC E M I LY RU D D OCK ’03 @E M I LY RU D D OCK

Twitter: Emily Ruddock ’03 ; Instagram: Jennifer Grow ’94

student in the summer of 2006.

Sandhya applied for a host that summer. I paired the two based on the information provided in their applications; they seemed to have a lot in common and I thought they would be a good match. They “met” each other on email during the summer and then in person when Sandhya arrived for pre-orientation in August 2006.

—Donna C. Van Handle​’74​, Mount Holyoke dean of international studies and senior lecturer in German studies, via email Thank you for highlighting the evolving tradition “Meaningful Moments” that connects MHC classes 50 years apart. The class of 1955, as it approached its fiftieth reunion in 2005, wanted more than a great party; we wished to connect with current students in a meaningful way and thus, over a two-year period, pioneered the sharing of ideas and insights with current students, aided greatly by Sociology Professor Eleanor Townsley and others. We believe this fifty-year alumnae/student connection was the first of its kind in the country.

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 5

For our part, the project has given us a much greater understanding of the mindset, concerns, and dreams of twenty-one-year-olds.

What specifically did we learn?

First, that we had shared values in the love of learning; second, that attitudes about sexuality and social interactions with men on campus were vastly different; and third, that overall the class of 2005 felt far more self-reliant and independent than we did as they looked ahead to careers. Marriage and children was the number-one goal for most of us.

Similarly, we hear that the class of 2005 increased its understanding of the older generation and the traditions that alumnae experienced, like Gracious Living dinners and rigid curfews. Most of all, they were thrilled that we were so “with it,” that many of us still lead fulfilling lives. Our goal now is to be good role models!

We are delighted that subsequent fiftieth reunion classes have adopted the idea and are benefiting from connecting with those fifty years younger.

—Joan Winkel Ripley ’55 via email I very much enjoyed the summer 2015 Alumnae Quarterly but was surprised not to see any inclusion of class of 1966 activities with regard to Connections and other activities.

Since beginning our fiftieth reunion planning in 2011 the class of 1966 has had a robust set of events to bring us closer to our grand-sister class of 2016. These have ranged from e-elving (sending ecards with pictures and text to all members of the class of 2016), participating in welcoming events hosted by local clubs for our grand-sisters, annually meeting with the class board of 2016, participating in the sophomore ring ceremony on campus, hosting Thanksgiving guests, etc.

I am not sure of the outreach process within the Quarterly, but I hope very much that the class of 1966 will be included in future editions. Indeed there is a separate Connectivity

section on the 1966 website which provides more details.

I am sure that Class President Joan Shapiro Green and Class Treasurer Martha M. Ferry, both of whom are executive members of the Fiftieth Reunion Committee and have been active since we began working toward our Fabulous Fiftieth, can provide additional information.

The class of 1966 has an extensive committee of engaged class members for our fiftieth, and as we turn toward this final year of preparation there is much that can be shared with the Alumnae Quarterly.

—Patricia Kreiner Perlman ’66 via email

Join the Conversation quarterly@mtholyoke.edu

f

facebook.com/aamhc twitter.com/aamhc instagram.com/mhcalums alumn.ae/linkedin

Where students become alumnae. #mountholyoke

Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

|||

FA L L 2 01 5

3

9/22/15 2:23 PM

alumnae.mtholyoke.edu quarterly@mtholyoke.edu The Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly is published quarterly in the spring, summer, fall, and winter by the Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College, Inc. Fall 2015, volume 99, number 4, was printed in the USA by Lane Press, Burlington, VT. Periodicals postage paid at South Hadley, MA, and additional mailing offices.

Ideas expressed in the Alumnae Quarterly do not necessarily reflect the views of Mount Holyoke College or the Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College.

To update your information, contact Alumnae Information Services at

M OU NT H O LYOK E A LU M NA E QUA RT E R LY Fall 2015 Volume 99 Number 4 EDITORIAL AND DESIGN TEAM

Taylor Scott Senior Director of Marketing & Communications Jennifer Grow ’94 Editor Millie Rossman Creative Director Anne Pinkerton Assistant Director of Digital Communications Jess Ayer Marketing & Communications Assistant CONTR IBUTORS

f

Olivia Collins ’18 Alicia Doyon Maryellen Ryan Linda Valencia Xu ’16

ais@mtholyoke.edu or 413-538-2303.

QUARTERLY COMMITTEE

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION

Beth Mulligan Dunn ’93, chair Amy L. Cavanaugh ’06 Lauren D. Klein ’03 Katharine L. Ramsden ’80 Linda Valencia Xu ’16, student rep.

This information published as required by USPS. Publication title: Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly; ISSN publication number 0027-2493; USPS 365-280; published quarterly; subscriptions are free.

Office of Publication: Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College, 50 College St., South Hadley, MA 01075-1486.

Contact person: Taylor Scott, 413-538-3159; Publisher and owner: Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College.

Circulation (based on summer 2015 issue): Net press run: 36,487; Requested subscriptions: 33,707 + nonrequested (campus) distribution: 1887.

POST M AST ER

(ISSN 0027-2493; USPS 365-280) Please send form 3579 to Alumnae Information Services Mount Holyoke Alumnae Association 50 College St. South Hadley, MA 01075-1486

‘I JUST HAVE ALL THESE ACADEMIC THOUGHTS I NEED TO DISCUSS’

WE SHARE D

Dorm pride is going up all over campus as students start moving in, and a candy theme is being revealed through these banners! What was your dorm’s persona?

and then go ‘Can I go back to @MountHolyoke??’

KE L S E Y RO G E RS ’ 13 @KRO G E RS91

President Marcia Brumit Kropf ’67 Vice President Julianne Trabucchi Puckett ’91 Treasurer and Chair, Finance Committee Tara Mia Paone ’81 Clerk Ashanta Evans-Blackwell ’95 Alumnae Trustee Catherine Burke ’78 Young Alumnae Representative Elaine C. Cheung ’09 Chair, Nominating Committee Radley Emes ’00 Chair, Classes and Reunion Committee Danielle M. Germain ’93 Chair, Communications Committee Shannon Dalton Giordano ’91 Chair, Volunteer Stewardship Committee Ellen L. Leggett ’75

Directors-at-Large Katherine S. Hunter ’75 Amanda S. Leinberger ’07 Nancy Bellows Perez ’76

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 6

else ever think

ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Chair, Clubs Committee Elizabeth Redmond VanWinkle ’82

4

“Does anyone

Executive Director Jane E. Zachary ex officio without vote

CORRECTION:

The summer 2015 Alumnae Quarterly Reunion 2015 Awardees listing (p. 28) included two errors. At Reunion Dana Feldshuh Whyte ’60 and Nancy Zone Bloom ’60 received Medal of Honor awards not Loyalty Awards. Full citations can be read at alumnae.mtholyoke. edu/awards2015.

In 1976, the dorm T-shirt had a winking face on it and said “Hot Prospect.”

—Caroline Foty ’80 I just gave my Emma Goldman Hall T-shirt from 1975 or ’76 to my niece. I didn’t live there, but friends did. It was also known as Pearsons Annex.

—Janice Broder ’77 Wilderness! I still have the T-shirt from, gulp, 1981.

—Virginia Lincoln ’82 Prospect in 2005–06 was “We’re here for the Food.” When all other dining halls closed, Prospect was still open during J-term and weekends.

—Charli Lighty ’08

Olivia Collins ’18

The Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College, Inc. 50 College St. South Hadley, MA 01075-1486 413-538-2300

9/22/15 2:23 PM

N E WS

|

TEN MINUTES WITH

|

INSIDER’S VIEW

|

GO FIGURE

|

T H E M AV E N

|

THE FEMALE GAZE

Uncommon Ground Alumnae Fellowships Support Lifelong Learning “How wacky is this? A seventy-four-yearold wanting to study Farsi in Iran?” asks Constance Dilley ’62.

Dilley has been interested in Iran for many years, having first visited in 1993. “The people I met, the discussions we had, the peculiar state of Iran with its highly educated and seemingly secular population contrasted to the devout government . . . was just fascinating,” she says. In 2009 she visited Iran again, and upon her return home decided to take her interest in the country and the culture to the next level.

“Given that I was retired and had time, I decided to try to learn Farsi, as much to make my brain work as anything else,” she says.

Dilley found a teacher near her hometown of Toronto and learned some basic Farsi, then she went back to Tehran for two months to teach English to a family of four. While the experience was rewarding, the family turned out to speak Kurdish, so unfortunately Dilley wasn’t able to expand on her own language learning. Hungry for more, when back at her home in Canada, she audited two Farsi classes at local universities and immersed herself in the Iranian community there, joining an Iranian film club and Iranian women’s literary club.

MHQ_Fall15_Depts_Final.indd 7

“I have regular dates with individuals to speak and listen, which are the hardest skills,” she says, “since spoken Farsi has little to do with the written Farsi you learn at the university.”

After applying to the University of Tehran for three years, Dilley was finally accepted last spring. Soon after that she received an email from the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Association promoting fellowships. “It seemed like a sign,” she says. She filled out the application and continued with her plans to attend the university. Over the summer Dilley learned that the Alumnae Association had awarded her a 1905 Fellowship to support an intensive six-week Farsi language course she started this fall at the International Center for Persian Studies, a part of the University of Tehran. “The fellowship covers the expenses of travel, tuition, and room and board. As a retired, fixed-income grad, it’s a great help not to have to dip into my savings in order to undertake this course,” she says.

Once Dilley has finished her program, she looks forward to being more involved in the Persian community in Toronto, possibly partnering with an Iranian friend to provide a service for elderly visitors from Iran, to “give the visitors a better sense of Toronto

and Canada and to help them fill the time until their children get home,” she says.

Alumnae fellowships provide opportunities for graduates to continue to pursue knowledge along both traditional and non-traditional paths. Endowed by generous alumnae, fellowships are available each year to fund projects, research, and advanced degrees. Past alumnae initiatives have focused on topics as far ranging as dance therapy, Buddhist nuns, Huntington’s disease, and green lacewings.

Nine fellowships are available with varying requirements and eligibility. For more information and details on applying, visit alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/fellowships.

—BY ANNE PINKERTON

9/22/15 2:34 PM

In July Amherst-based conservation group Kestrel Land Trust celebrated its work over the past two years in preserving an additional 1,000 acres of land on the Mount Holyoke Range, adding significantly to the 10,000 acres already protected from the threat of development. In a ceremony at the Summit House atop Mt. Holyoke, Kestrel Executive Director Kristin DeBoer gathered a group of state and local partners whose involvement and financial contributions made the effort possible.

As anyone who has enjoyed Mountain Day knows, the range is a precious local resource. Home to twenty-seven rare species, the area features one of the largest remaining blocks of

undeveloped forest in Massachusetts, offers extensive hiking paths along the New England National Scenic Trail, and provides the spectacular view of the Oxbow that has inspired many famous painters, including Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School.

Ensuring that these key attributes survive was central to the mission of the project and has been a primary goal of the group since its founding forty years ago.

“People live here and study here because it is a great combination of nature and culture,” DeBoer said, “and so our job is to keep the natural parts of the [Pioneer Valley] available for the public enjoyment and the public benefit.”

—BY ANNE PINKERTON

Alumnae Invited to Join Webcasts on College’s Strategic Plan This fall the Office of the President, in partnership with the Alumnae Association, kicks off a series of webcasts. The webcasts— featuring President Lynn Pasquerella ’80, staff, and faculty—will identify and answer questions about key priorities of the College’s strategic planning process for 2016–2021. In order to achieve shared objectives, the College welcomes alumnae to participate in these community conversations.

Alumnae are invited to tune in live to the webcasts—or to watch a recorded version at their convenience—to learn more about the College’s strategic planning process. Topics include the facilities master planning study, core curriculum and academic initiatives, faculty and student success, and student life.

Visit mtholyoke.edu/alumwebcasts to register for an upcoming webcast. You can also submit questions in advance to MHCStrategicPlanning @mtholyoke.edu.

6

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 8

Professor’s Research Brings New Hope to Those Who Hear Voices Professor of Psychology Gail Hornstein has been awarded a $250,000 grant from the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care for research to validate a revolutionary approach to understanding and coping with

the experience of hearing voices. She will analyze a peer-group approach in which voice hearers meet together with one another outside of clinical context to share insights about the meaning of their voices and to develop strategies to limit their destructive effects.

Psychiatrists have long believed that people who experience what they call “auditory hallucinations” suffer from schizophrenia and typically urge them to ignore the voices or suppress them with psychiatric drugs. In 2003 while in London conducting research for her book, Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness, Hornstein witnessed a patient who seemed to suddenly transform when she joined a group run by the Hearing Voices Network (HVN), an international alliance of mental health professionals and people with lived experience that uses peer groups as an alternative or adjunct to medical treatment.

“The woman ‘woke up,’ made insightful, empathetic comments to others . . . and was an active, involved member of the group,” says Hornstein. Since then she has been committed to the idea that hearing voices is not necessarily a symptom of psychosis but rather, she says, an understandable response, often to traumatic situations, that can be interpreted, understood, and coped with.

Last spring Hornstein and collaborators began training people in five regions of the US— California, Colorado, Delaware, Michigan, and Oregon—to facilitate HVN peer-support groups.

The US lags far behind other countries in the use of this approach, and once more groups are established the team will use interviews and narratives from participants to identify the key elements that contribute to the effectiveness of these groups. — B Y A N N E P I N K E R T O N

Webcasts: Ben Barnhart

Mount Holyoke Range Landscape Partnership Program Adds 1,000 Acres

9/22/15 2:23 PM

PEEK: Barbara Baumann ’77

Celebrating Five Years of Mountain Day Alumnae Reunions

Life after Mount Holyoke can be hard when the friends you’re used to seeing on a daily basis scatter across the globe. Nostalgia suddenly becomes a powerful and common emotion in your life, especially when beloved annual traditions like Mountain Day roll around. So when Meredith Nelson ’11 approached her class board—of which she was the president—about organizing Mountain Day reunions in cities and towns where alumnae were living, they jumped at the idea. They created a Facebook event and asked alums to post the locations of ice cream shops where alumnae could meet on Mountain Day. And the result was beyond their expectations.

“We always used to say that you could find an MHC alumna everywhere you went,” says Nelson, “but the response could not have proven us more correct!”

In the fall of 2011 there were get-togethers in forty-three cities. Five years later that number has grown to more than 130 around the world. “Mountain Day reminds us that our Mount Holyoke education is so much more than just academic—it is social and personal, and it has heart,” says Nelson.

Mountain Day Alumnae Reunions is now officially an Alumnae Association program, but Nelson is proud of its organic roots and continues to stay closely involved. “It takes a lot of work but is incredibly rewarding,” she says. “I have had the opportunity to correspond with MHC alumnae from all over the world—people I never would have connected with had I not been working on this initiative.”

Visit alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/mountainday to view a slideshow of the Mountain Day Alumnae Reunions from this year. — B Y TAY L O R S C O T T

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 9

Summer Program Links MHC to Harvard Business School

This summer thirteen Mount Holyoke College students and recent graduates who aspire to enter the business world participated in the PEEK program at Harvard Business School (HBS), which included a weekend-long MBA sampling of classwork, opportunities to network, and career insights.

Mount Holyoke College Trustee Kaitlyn Szydlowski ’09 and Board of Trustees Chair Barbara Baumann ’77 rallied alumnae to fund the tuition fully for each of the students and graduates who participated.

“It’s rare that any undergraduate student gets the chance to experience in person the curriculum, the learning style, and the classroom environment of a top-notch graduate program,” Baumann said.

“I didn’t have that experience prior to attending business school, so I jumped at the chance to ensure that these students did.”

When Szydlowski—who once worked at HBS— learned that MHC students wanted to attend, she called on her Mount Holyoke network. Alumnae responded in record time. Baumann hopes that the PEEK program will become another solid pathway leading Mount Holyoke College graduates toward top business schools.

Liz Lierman, director of MHC’s Career Development Center, which helped support the program, said the participants described PEEK as “a valuable and enjoyable way to learn how a business degree can support one’s career; a chance to attend case-method classes; and an opportunity to network with HBS faculty, students, and participants from other women’s colleges.”

In sending students to PEEK, Mount Holyoke is also helping to meet a need identified by the business community—recruiting more well-qualified women.

According to Lierman, recent studies show that many business executives value the communication, analytical, and problem-solving skills developed by a liberal arts education.

Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

|||

FA L L 2 01 5

7

9/22/15 2:23 PM

A Common Read for the Class of 2019 In late August more than 550 students from

College Welcomes New Vice President for Enrollment

forty-one states and thirty-two countries arrived in South Hadley to embark on

Archives and Special Collections (ASC) is continuing its project to document the campus experiences of Mount Holyoke alums.

Last spring staff from archives interviewed thirteen LGBTQ alums about their time at MHC. ASC is seeking more alums who identify as LGBTQ and are available to come to Mount Holyoke to be interviewed about their years as students. ASC staff are particularly interested in alums from classes prior to the 1980s. If you are interested in participating in this project, please email archives@mtholyoke.edu.

2019 took part in a robust orientation program that allowed students to get acclimated to their new home and get to know classmates, faculty, and staff.

As part of Orientation, members of the class of 2019 were encouraged to read Americanah, by prize-winning Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, to kick off the 2015 Common Reads program. This year for the first time, the book selection was left to the greater campus community, with more than 900 faculty, students, and staff casting votes for one of five possible choices. Americanah was the clear front-runner, said Dean of Students Marcella Runell Hall.

“Transparency in decision making is very important, and this was a good example of a time when we felt the campus community would have a greater investment if more folks could be a part of the process,” Hall said.

Students participated in a first-year Common Read dialogue with faculty members to discuss issues of race, identity, and belonging as well as various other themes found in Adichie’s work. Related events for the entire campus community centering around Americanah will continue throughout the academic year. — B Y

8

J E S S AY E R

Gail Berson, an innovative leader and consultant who led admission and marketing efforts at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, for thirty years, has been named Mount Holyoke College’s next vice president for enrollment and admission. Berson served in the interim role since April and was selected for the permanent position after a national search. She started July 1.

As a senior officer and member of President Lynn Pasquerella’s ’80 cabinet, Berson will contribute to the strategic leadership and administrative oversight of the College, oversee the Office of Admission and Student Financial Services, and coordinate all aspects of enrollment.

“Gail brings a breadth and depth of knowledge and experience to this position that is truly extraordinary,” Pasquerella said in a July letter to the community.

Prior to her work at Wheaton College, Berson was director of admission and financial aid at Mills College in Oakland, California, and was a consultant for institutions including Otis College of Art, Randolph College, and Elms College. She also served as a trustee of The College Board from 2010 to 2014. Berson received her bachelor’s degree in art history from Bowdoin College and a master’s in integrated marketing communications from Emerson College.

“I am convinced that I can bring value to the landscape of higher education with all of the challenges associated with affordability for a premier institution like Mount Holyoke,” Berson said. “I look forward to working to strengthen the position of Mount Holyoke in the marketplace and to build on the initiatives here.”

Berson: MHC Office of Communications

LGBTQ Alum Oral History Project Update

their first year on campus. The class of

alumnae.mtholyoke.edu

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 10

9/22/15 2:23 PM

ten minutes with

AUTISM ACT I V I ST

Advocating for Change S H E L L E Y H E N D R I X ’ 9 1 is the national

director of grassroots advocacy at Autism Speaks (autismspeaks.org). When her son, Liam, was diagnosed with autism at twenty-seven-months old, Hendrix had limited access to resources and information. In 1999 the political-science major cofounded the nonprofit Unlocking Autism (unlockingautism.org), which provides a support network for families living with autism. With an estimated one in sixty-eight children identified with Autism Spectrum Disorder nationwide, Hendrix advocates for the recognition and tools needed to address this growing concern.

On her work with Unlocking Autism and Autism Speaks: It has been an honor working with families through Unlocking Autism (UA) and Autism Speaks. Because the divorce rate is higher in our community, leaving many women stranded economically, UA hopes to partner with another organization to provide single mothers with sustainable employment in the autism-awareness field so they can match their passion with a paycheck. As a single mom, I realize how important this is. At Autism Speaks we continue to lead the nation in policy development to improve health care access, housing, jobs, and financial security for individuals on the spectrum.

Jeannie Frey Rhodes

On her son, Liam: When Liam was diagnosed with autism, we were told he would likely never speak and would require institutionalization—so we never went back to that doctor. Liam is now a high-school senior and has held a job for close to four years. He is almost an Eagle Scout. He has a 3.2 GPA in regular classes, and he has an active social life and is very personable. He wants to get married and have three children. Just like every other kid his age he wants the American dream—including a blue Mustang with racing stripes— and we are going to work until he achieves it!

On what’s next: I am determined to use this next political cycle to finally garner the attention of our lawmakers.

On April 2, 2016, World Autism Awareness Day, UA will host a national march in Washington, DC, from the Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. It is our hope that we will be

“ ”

It has been an honor working with families, helping them move from being scared and confused to strong, capable advocates.

able to turn out a multitude of people on that Saturday night to show the country, the world, and—most important—ourselves, The Power of One.

On Mount Holyoke: Mount Holyoke helped me grow from a very shy girl into a leader.

I received a solid education, but it was the extracurricular activities that provided me with valuable life experience. With leadership opportunities at every turn, I tested my wings in a safe environment.

Participating in those roles taught me how to motivate and inspire people into action. Every single one of the experiences I gained at MHC helped prepare me for the career I have today—from counseling other women as a student advisor or a hall president, to planning events in our dorms, to absorbing everything they could teach me about political science, to helping me realize that women can change the world in a very different way than men can.

— I NT E RVI EWE D BY L AU RE N KO D I A K

Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 11

|||

FA L L 2 01 5

9

9/22/15 2:23 PM

Music Library Within Pratt Music Hall resides the small, quiet Eleanor Pierce Stevens Library of Music. The space is named after Eleanor Pierce Stevens ’25 and was established in 2001 as part of the building’s renovation, which also resulted in improvements to the concert hall, now McCulloch Auditorium.

Stevens was a French major at Mount Holyoke and a lifelong lover of music.

Until her death in 2007 at the age of 102, she was known to practice her extraordinary ballroom dancing skills weekly.

10

alumnae.mtholyoke.edu

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 12

9/22/15 2:23 PM

Music Hall the volumes currently in the library were dispersed in eight separate rooms scattered throughout the building and in the College’s Williston-Smith Library. The redesign created a central space for these materials to be comprehensively organized and made more useful to students. Prior to this refurbishing, Pratt Hall, originally built in 1909, hadn’t changed much. The renovation revitalized and modernized the building.

a place ofview our own insider’s

n Until the 2001 renovation of Pratt

Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16.

n Stevens is home to roughly 27,700

items, including CDs, DVDs, journals, books, and 155 instruments. The oldest item in the collection is a first-edition translation of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “Traité de l’harmonie,” published in 1737.

The most popular item found in the library’s stacks is a CD of Shakespearean songs and dances performed by the Broadside Band. n The library features a bank of

computers outfitted with headphones and plenty of music-related software for student use. There is also a room intended for group work that features full audio/video capacity for use in student projects. n Although students may first come

Marion Ross (2); sheet music: James Gehrt

to the library for the numerous scores, books on music theory, recordings, and periodicals, they stay—and return—for the space itself. Students who spend time in the library tend to cluster near the windows that afford a view of Lower Lake or lounge in the comfortable chairs tucked away behind the stacks. The library is quieter and newer than Williston and conveniently located in the same building as music classrooms. Of course, non-music students are welcome as well.

—BY OLIV IA COLLINS ’ 18

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 13

WEB EXCLUSIVE

Get a glimpse of musicians in action in a video of the Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra at alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/orchestra.

Pratt Music Hall’s original exterior was preserved in the building’s renovation.

Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

|||

FA L L 2 01 5

11

9/22/15 2:23 PM

go figure

go figure

Staying Connected to Mount Holyoke

The Alumnae Association supports 104 regional clubs and groups around the world* Number of alumnae volunteers active in regional clubs/groups

33 13

Number of regional clubs/groups that held events and activities for current, prospective, or admitted students

Number of new regional clubs/ groups formed

Percentage of clubs/groups that organized Mountain Day events and activities

475 1

Number of events and activities run by regional clubs/groups

Number of clubs/groups that adopted a “Mary Lion” at a local zoo

10

21

Number of clubs/groups that have book clubs

Approximate number of alumnae served by regional clubs/groups

REGIONAL CLUBS AND GROUPS CLUBS AND GROUPS

12

AROUN D THE WORLD

26,000 16

Percentage of clubs/groups that held ten or more events during the year

9,425 Distance in miles between South Hadley and farthest group, located in Singapore

*Figures represent data from July 2014–July 2015.

To find a club or group near you visit alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/clubs. alumnae.mtholyoke.edu

MHQ_Fall15_Depts_Final.indd 14

9/25/15 1:40 PM

the maven

T HE PAT I E NT A DVO CAT E M AVEN

Finding the Right Health Care Provider AR E YO U A MAVE N?

Pitch us your area of expertise at quarterly@ mtholyoke.edu.

N A D E N E TA B A R I B R A D B U R N ’ 9 4 is president of Blackwell Healthcare

Recruiting Inc. (BHR), a consulting firm that recruits physicians for clients in medically underserved areas. In 1997 the discovery of an aneurysm near her brain stem exposed Bradburn to a continuum of care, from emergency rooms to surgery to inpatient rehabilitation. She succeeded in getting her HMO to cover 100 percent of the cost, and the ordeal defined her career path. She holds a master’s in health administration and is a fellow in the American College of Healthcare Executives. After many years working in management at physician practices and in hospitals, in 2012 she incorporated BHR, named after America’s first female doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell.

We’re finally figuring out that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and managing health is seen as a partnership between patient and provider. So it’s important to find the right medical expert to be your partner. Your health plan may give you a limited choice, but there are steps you can take to find the right high-quality physician, nurse practitioner, or advanced practice provider (APP) for you. Start with a list of providers from your health plan, then follow these steps:

1. Ask Google Take online information with a grain of salt, and know that you may find something you don’t like: affiliations, non-medical misdeeds, photos, or even the contents of a provider’s Amazon wish list.

2. Check licenses Any physician who attended an accredited medical school will have the medical doctor (MD) or doctor of osteopathy (DO) credential, but not every doctor has a valid license to practice medicine. In the US you can verify licenses online at each state’s professional regulation office. Start at docfinder.docboard.org. To verify APP licenses go to a state’s board of nursing or professional regulation website. Many countries— particularly those with socialized medicine—offer the same online resources.

3. Seek board certification Board certification is not required to practice medicine. Certification is, however, a good indication that a provider has a solid command of his or her specialty

and has kept up with advances in the field. Verify your provider at boardcertified.com.

4. Make the appointment Are you satisfied with how the office handled your phone call and how quickly you’ll get to see the provider? If office processes make it difficult for you to access care then you will likely be frustrated no matter how phenomenal the physician is.

5. Advocate for yourself Once you’re in the exam room together, it’s all about listening.

• Did your provider hear you? An accurate diagnosis depends upon communication, and no one knows your symptoms better than you.

Keep talking until you have shared everything and feel you have been understood.

• Did you hear your provider? For example, if you hear a list of unfamiliar test names, your results, and “I’m going to refer you to a specialist,” but you have no idea why, say so.

Keep asking questions until you are sure you understand the treatment plan. If the plan is, “Let’s wait and see,” be sure you understand why that’s the best approach.

If this two-way communication is not comfortable after a few visits, maybe you haven’t found a good fit. Go back and start the process again. Your health may depend on it.

— BY N A D E N E TA B A R I B R A D B U R N ’ 9 4

Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 15

|||

FA L L 2 01 5

13

9/22/15 2:23 PM

the female gaze

BOOKS

The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros Wendy Laura Belcher PRI NCETO N U N IVE RSIT Y PRESS

Drunk Cells, 2015. Silk screen print, 22 in. x 30 in.

AR E YO U AN ARTI ST?

Email your submission to quarterly@ mtholyoke.edu.

P RINT MA K I NG

Mind Maps “I can’t survive without art,” says Ariel Szabo White ’09, who uses the name Ariel Szabo professionally. Since her first printmaking class with Professor Nancy Campbell at Mount Holyoke, the Boston native has been using silk-screening techniques to create her layered, abstract pieces. Through repetition and transparency, Szabo brings the illusion of depth to two-dimensional art. Her use of cohesive shapes and colors can also be traced back to college. “My journey into creating mind maps started with drawing repetitive lines as a stress release during my first two years at Mount Holyoke,” she says. “This carried over into how I used the printmaking process.”

Szabo uses her artwork as a kind of mind-mapping exercise, allowing the ink to create a “playland” for her thoughts. The abstract images represent feelings and communicate meanings that she cannot articulate otherwise. “[Silk-screening] takes the simple art form of drawing and makes it as complicated as possible,” she says. “I really enjoy the process of going through so many steps to get to the finished product.”

14

This translation of the first biography of an African woman tells the story of an Ethiopian saint who led a successful nonviolent movement to preserve African Christian beliefs in the face of European protocolonialism.

Walatta Petros (1592– 1642) risked her life by leaving her husband and led a struggle against the Jesuits, who were trying to

Entering college with the intent of focusing on pre-med, Szabo switched her major in her second year to studio art. “I am thankful to my professors, who encouraged me to experiment,” she says. Describing the printmaking process as “rigid, yet allow[ing] for experimentation at the same time,” Szabo enjoys silk-screening because it allows her to improvise and take advantage of any “surprises” that might arise. Not that she has any trouble juggling these surprises when they come up; Szabo also trains as a boxer, is a Young Partner for the Boston Ballet, and sings.

In addition to her artwork, Szabo supports herself with another passion, real estate. She considers herself lucky to be working in a field that she enjoys and has this advice to other artists who might be trying to make ends meet: “It’s tough to make a living just making art.” Szabo says that having an “income-producing” job to take some of the stress off of being an artist helps her fulfill her drive to create the artwork so essential to her psyche.

— BY OLI V I A COLLI N S ’ 18

alumnae.mtholyoke.edu

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 16

9/22/15 2:23 PM

convert Ethiopians from their ancient form of Christianity.

After her death, her disciples wrote this book, praising her as a friend of women, a skilled preacher, and a radical leader.

WENDY LAURA BELCHER ’84 is an associate professor in

the Department of Comparative Literature and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University.

Sea Lovers Valerie Martin NAN A . TALESE PU B LISH I NG

The twelve stories in this collection— representing work published over a period

of more than thirty years—are organized around the three obsessions that drive Martin’s fiction: the power of nature; the human price of art; and the enduring appeal of mythic transformations.

VALERIE MARTIN is the author of ten

novels and three collections of short stories as well as a biography of St. Francis of Assisi.

She is a professor of English at Mount Holyoke, where she teaches creative writing, short story writing, and contemporary women’s short fiction.

The Remarkable Education of John Quincy Adams Phyllis Lee Levin PALG R AVE MACM I LL AN

A detailed and intimate biography that focuses on the unusual childhood and global education of America’s sixth president, the book draws closely on Adams’ own writing— primarily diary entries and letters—and offers a more sympathetic look at a man who has often been viewed as cold and stubbornly contentious.

P L AYWRIG HT

OK3 Photography

Writing Women Back Into History Lisa Giordano ’82 wrote her first play while confined to bed, battling a severe case of Lyme disease.

“At Mount Holyoke, I studied science,” says Giordano, “but I always had an interest in writing. It wasn’t until my life changed course due to health challenges that I finally started to write.”

Now the resident playwright of the Emerson Theatre Collaborative in Mystic, Connecticut, she takes great joy in seeing her work performed. Giordano cofounded the theatre company in 2008 with writer and actor Emma Palzere-Rae and Camilla Ross, lead actor in Giordano’s play Harriet Tubman’s Dream. The play has been paired with Palzere-Rae’s play about Harriet

Beecher Stowe, and the production is billed Harriet2. In April, to mark the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, Harriet2 was produced in Connecticut in collaboration with the Farmington Valley Chorale and received standing ovations.

It’s no surprise that Giordano tends to write about strong women; her inspirations include Mount Holyoke alumnae Wendy Wasserstein ’71 and Suzan-Lori Parks ’85.

“I spoke with Ms. Parks at an alumnae event in New York City several years ago,” she says, “and she encouraged me to keep writing.” She also recalls meeting an elderly Catholic nun who encouraged her to write about women because “we’ve been written out of history for so long. It’s

PHYLLIS LEE SCHWALBE LEVIN ’41 is the author of several

books, including Abigail Adams and Edith and Woodrow.

She has been a reporter, editor, and columnist for the New York Times and lives in Manhattan.

WEB EXCLUSIVE

See more recent alumnae books at alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/ fall2015books.

important that we write ourselves back into it.”

Giordano is currently developing a play about the life of author Zora Neale Hurston.

Inspired by her research about Hurston, Giordano founded and organizes The Annual Zora Neale Hurston Celebration and Reading of Her Works during Women’s History Month. Hurston’s surviving family members participate in the event. She also hopes for a full production of her new play about the life of this extraordinary woman and the hurdles she overcame.

“In my writing, I like to give a voice to peoples whose voices have been traditionally ignored, suppressed, or distorted throughout time,” says Giordano. “I have taught creative writing to students . . . and I like helping youth find and express their own voices. When kids and young adults feel that they have a voice, then they feel empowered. And feeling empowered, they make positive choices that impact their lives and their communities for the better.”

— BY OLI V I A COLLI N S ’ 1 8

Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 17

|||

FA L L 2 01 5

15

9/22/15 2:23 PM

Amy Koler ’02 (left) and Sarah-Ann Lynch ’82 have a long history of working together.

Photograph by Erin Schaff

28

alumnae.mtholyoke.edu

MHQ_Fall15_FYP_Final.indd 28

9/21/15 2:22 PM

Alumnae pursue unique connections through a powerful network of powerful women Written by Rachel Sturtz

Mount Holyoke alumnae have a knack for finding each other.

There’s something about the bond formed in a lively classroom or in the shared history of this place that shapes the lives of the women who have passed through Mount Holyoke’s gates.

It’s a bond that can span generations, continents, and even the length of an Olympic triathlon. Just ask the scribe who tracked down a partner-in-crime to pen the quarterly class notes.

Or members of the class of 1992, who use Facebook to turn their classmates into triathletes. Or the two foreign service officers who showed their mettle in Baghdad as ISIS closed in on them.

After shredding documents, nameplates, and anything else that could identify those who worked for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Iraq, Amy Koler ’02 and Sarah-Ann Lynch ’82 sat back in their empty office and watched CNN’s coverage of ISIS’s potential invasion of Baghdad, their current location. Eighty percent of their staff had left under mandatory evacuation. Four people remained in the USAID office, including Koler, Lynch, and an IT specialist. ISIS was within thirty miles of the embassy, and the crew knew that a Howitzer missile could hit a target twenty miles away.

They prayed that the ten-mile buffer wouldn’t shrink further.

“I once told Sarah that I would work for her anywhere in the world, under any circumstances,” says Koler. “I didn’t know that would be tested so directly.”

Koler first met Lynch in Kabul, Afghanistan, in July 2008. Koler had graduated from Mount Holyoke in 2002 and earned her graduate degree in public administration, a degree she nicknames an “MBA for democrats.”

Her interest in policy and public service led her to the Presidential Management Fellows Program, which matches graduate students with federal government positions. Part of the program required fellows to spend six months

Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

MHQ_Fall15_FYP_Final.indd 29

|||

FA L L 2 01 5

17

9/21/15 2:22 PM

18

Holyoke,” says Koler, who says the type of work they did together was comfortingly familiar. “The analysis and conversations we had in Kabul and Baghdad were similar to the way we discussed things during our years at Mount Holyoke.” The difference from college was that men often outnumbered the women. This only strengthened the pair’s bond after Kabul.

In 2014 Koler became deputy office director in Baghdad. Soon after, Lynch convinced her family to let her go to Baghdad for a year, and she was sworn in as mission director. She urged Koler to stay on as her right hand. Then, in June 2014, ISIS made its way toward Baghdad, and by June 15 the majority of the US Embassy staff was evacuated, leaving the compound with only one hundred people.

“Normally, we focus on long-term development, but with ISIS we pivoted to short-term humanitarian assistance for internally displaced people,” says Lynch. “We helped Iraqis find safe places to stay, health care, and jobs.

Meanwhile, we were also managing the home front and letting our families know that we were OK.” “ISIS was never going to invade Baghdad, but it didn’t feel that way then,” says Koler. “If our colleagues were late for work, we worried something had happened to them.”

Being a foreign service officer isn’t an easy gig, especially when you’re the mother of three children, as Lynch is, and need to explain why you’re going into a war zone for a year. Lynch says sometimes people look at you like you’re crazy, while others think it’s fascinating.

“The experience of that year in Iraq was the most formative professional time of my life,” says Koler. “Working with Sarah made my job fun and rewarding. It’s the reason I stay in this crazy career.”

1954 classmates Elaine Fischer Marshack (wearing necklace) and Ellin Rosenzweig both live in New York City and work together to write their class notes for the Quarterly.

Erin Schaff

overseas. When Lynch, program office director in Kabul at the time, saw Mount Holyoke on Koler’s resume, she emailed her sister alumna and told her to come to Afghanistan. Koler went.

USAID works closely with governments as well as local nonprofits, private businesses, faith-based organizations, and others to assess a country’s needs. Lynch devises a strategic plan, designs and implements programs, and, eventually, reports the results back to DC. “We hit it off immediately,” says Lynch, who speaks five languages and has been with the agency since 1993, serving in Bangladesh and Peru before coming to Kabul. “Amy’s the only person who came to me asking for more work. She did such a good job that we kept extending her time here.”

Koler was supposed to be in Kabul for a six-month detail but stayed on for an extra six months after earning a big promotion to the role of gender advisor for Afghanistan.

“This was 2009,” explains Koler.

“Shortly after I got the job, Barbara Boxer and other senators went on TV saying, ‘We’re in Afghanistan to help the women.’ That was my job. I was like, ‘Uh-oh, I better start studying.’”

Luckily, Koler had the best mentor available. Not only was Lynch good at nurturing talent, but she had made a name for herself in USAID: having already earned several awards, she would go on to win the 2010 Distinguished Honor Award, USAID’s highest performance award, for her service in Afghanistan and with the Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs. Thanks to Mount Holyoke, the two shared similar writing styles, which was helpful because much of Koler’s job was drafting and editing documents for Lynch.

“There was an awareness of certain things that we had because of Mount

Ellin Rosenzweig ’54 and Elaine Fischer Marshack ’54 call themselves the Bobbsey Twins, but they may be closer to identical Nancy Drews. The pair of class scribes has spent more than six years (eleven for Marshack) tracking down classmates to get the latest on their lives—careers, accolades, children, and travel.

There’s a giddy joy that the two women get from their quarterly task.

“We have more time than younger scribes now that we’re retired,” says Rosenzweig, who began volunteering as coscribe when Marshack recommended her for the position just before their fifty-fifth reunion.

Also a coscribe for her high school in Brooklyn, Rosenzweig says she “learned how to snoop” when she became an active volunteer in the school’s development department helping to find lost alumni.

“I found a mug shot online of one alumnus and discovered an alumna who was a jazz pianist and singer, and, being snoopy, found her on YouTube.”

“She’s a sleuth!” says Marshack. “My favorite part of being a scribe is collaborating with Ellin. We always have a luncheon in Washington Square and decide who we’re going to attack next.”

The two New Yorkers focus their “attack” on the elusive non-responders, the people who don’t reply to emails and postcards asking for updates. Because the same group of people tend to respond each year, Marshack decided to draw up a list of all 450 original class members (including those who did not graduate) to track down those who hadn’t already appeared in their column. Rosenzweig sniffs out contact information through the Internet, and the pair begins making phone calls. Usually, they spend the first part of every phone call explaining that they’re not asking for money.

Then they start making more personal connections with their classmates.

“Since our class has been out for more than sixty years, we tend to get a lot of sad news; news of people who are sick or handicapped,” says Rosenzweig.

“We often invite women who are widowed to write a couple of sentences about their husbands, but we try to keep the column upbeat. When we talk to people, we want a survey of their lives.”

Those lives are rich with stories. Rosenzweig and Marshack learn about classmates who have biked around Europe, others who have authored several

alumnae.mtholyoke.edu

MHQ_Fall15_FYP_Final.indd 30

9/21/15 2:22 PM

books, and one alumna who traveled to South Africa for the World Orchid Congress just this past September.

Their own lives are just as interesting.

Marshack is a retired teacher from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, where she taught for thirty years after spending eleven years as a social worker, the first five in Harlem during a period of growing drug abuse in that community. She also joined her husband as his assistant when he traveled to Europe and the Middle East for archaeological research. Rosenzweig worked for twenty-five years in the American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art as an administrative assistant and then as associate manager of one of the museum’s largest donor groups.

The scribes knew each other but weren’t close friends during their time at Mount Holyoke, but both credit the College for the reason why they—and so many of their classmates—are close today.

“I think the absence of men in classes and in the dormitory allows the kind of development of relationships and participation in academic life that’s very special,” says Marshack. “Besides a good education, I met people I deeply cared about and got leadership opportunities I might not have had with men around.”

The two women often meet for lunches around the city, consulting each other about the column.

They take turns writing first drafts, which they email back and forth for tweaking. With only 315 words for their column, the women have learned to embrace brevity, though they lengthen it when they can.

“Sometimes we carry over extra words from the growing tribute section in order to have more words for the living,” says Marshack. The class of 1954 has lost about 150 of their classmates so far. That’s why the duo works diligently to bring together the classmates they have left.

“There were a couple of women living in New York who hadn’t been heard from in a long time, so Elaine and I suggested we all get together for lunch,” says Rosenzweig. “We met at the Neue Galerie. One came right away, the other a little later. The alumna who came late had this glaze in her eyes, like, ‘Why did I say yes?’” It didn’t take long for her to be glad she had.

“The two women found they had so much in common!” says Marshack, laughing along with Rosenzweig.

“They’d both summered in Provençe. We all had a wonderful time and continued to get together.”

Rosenzweig and Marshack get together far more often, attending New York Philharmonic open rehearsals, meeting at museums, and during class mini-reunions that they started organizing a few years ago. The two, it seems, have found a wonderful complement in each other.

“It’s certainly my luck that Elaine found me,” says Rosenzweig.

Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

MHQ_Fall15_FYP_Final.indd 31

|||

FA L L 2 01 5

19

9/25/15 3:24 PM

Julie Temlak (left) and Alethea O’Donnell share training accomplishments and challenges through the MHC ’92 Iron Girls Facebook page.

32

alumnae.mtholyoke.edu

MHQ_Fall15_FYP_Final.indd 32

9/21/15 2:22 PM

Lynne Graves

In 2010, four Mount Holyoke alumnae decided to challenge each other to enter a race: the 2011 Iron Girl Lake Las Vegas Women’s Triathlon. It would consist of an 800-meter swim, 14-mile bike ride, and 3.1-mile run in the unforgiving desert heat. A week after they crossed the finish line, they created the MHC ’92 Iron Girls Facebook page, the de facto triathlon training and support group for 1992 Mount Holyoke College alumnae scattered across the country.

In the group’s first post, the four founding members—Kristen Scheyder ’92, Lorrel Birnschein Plimier ’92, Jennifer Webster ’92, and Alethea O’Donnell ’92—are pictured in their wet suits just before the Las Vegas race. This was the first of many triathlons for the group, which has grown to twenty-four members, including triathletes, wannabe triathletes, and their supporters.

“We’re all professionals with kids who are trying to balance fitness with a career and a family,” says Julie Temlak ’92, who joined the group during a 6:00 a.m. Upper Lake run just after her twentieth Mount Holyoke College reunion in 2012.

“Everyone has the same challenges and has been so supportive of each other. I would have never—not in a million years—done a triathlon if it weren’t for these women.”

The four original group members lived in Brigham Hall during their senior year at Mount Holyoke.

Webster and Plimier competed on the water polo team, and Scheyder played golf for the Lyons.

“There’s something about your college friends,” says Plimier. “You form a bond that’s different from the one you have with other people.

Through our group, I’ve met women I didn’t know in college and others who weren’t there at the same time. We still talk about Mount Holyoke as if we were there together.”

“Mount Holyoke alums are hardcore,” says O’Donnell. “I don’t know what it is about this school. People become inspired by the group and next thing you know, Jen is flying in from Alaska to race.”

On the Iron Girls Facebook group, women post training questions (“I need to be training 4-6 times a week for the next 8 weeks. Doable, right??”), training updates (“8 miles today. . .”), successes (“Beat the 74yo grandpa by :01 sec. Lol!”) and disappointments (“Torn soleus. Ugh.”).

They share photos of families and vacations and links to articles about staying in shape and preventing injuries—anything that’s a part of life and being an athlete.

That support is most important during the hard times. Just this year O’Donnell found out she needs foot surgery and both of her parents were hospitalized. Training took a backseat, but she could turn to her online friends to help her through it.

“We’re getting older, which takes a toll on your body,” says O’Donnell, who lives in rural western Massachusetts. “But the group is there for moral support, no matter what the challenges. There’s always some rallying encouragement.”

For Webster, getting older means she needs to work out more, not less.

“I had surgery on my knees years ago, and I feel pain when I don’t exercise,” says Webster, who lives in Kodiak, Alaska, and trains mostly on her own because she’s far from a triathlon training group. “If I see that someone else was up and running at 5:00 a.m., then I have no excuse to skip my workout.”

And not every benefit is related to the triathlon. Temlak’s first race with the group was an Iron Girl in Atlanta, Georgia, that was canceled thanks to a massive storm that dumped six inches of rain in two hours, washing out the course. During the downtime, Temlak told O’Donnell she was looking for a job. Six months later, Temlak got a phone call and a new job with O’Donnell’s company.

During that time, Plimier proved that anything is possible if you’re willing to train for it. In July 2013, she finished the Vineman Ironman Triathlon in northern California, racing a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and 26.2-mile run. Plimier says the training leading up to the race was the hardest part because it required six months of total commitment.

“It was a lot of sacrifice for one of the best days of my life,” says Plimier, who recently turned to the group for courage and advice on taking on the grueling Escape From Alcatraz triathlon in San Francisco.

Some of the women will be meeting in Seattle for a triathlon next summer. Others are toying with the idea of a tropical vacation triathlon.

And some wouldn’t mind having one at their twenty-fifth reunion in 2017.

“We’ve kicked around the idea of a Mount Holyoke triathlon,” says Plimier. “We just need to find someone to organize it.”

Rachel Sturtz is a freelance writer living in Denver. She writes for Outside, Marie Claire, Popular Mechanics, and more.

WEB EXCLUSIVE

Read more and watch videos of other alumnae connections—and share your own stories—at alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/ findyourpeople.

Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

MHQ_Fall15_FYP_Final.indd 33

|||

FA L L 2 01 5

21

9/21/15 2:22 PM

By Mariya Karimjee ’10

MHQ_Fall15_Holocaust_Final.indd 28

9/25/15 2:02 PM

A COLLEGE

EXC E L LENT

& NICE

After fleeing Germany and hiding from Nazi occupation in Holland, sisters Gerda ’49 and Doris Bloch ’51 made their way to South Hadley to continue their interrupted education

THE LETTER began simply. “I should like very much to apply for a scholarship at the university of South Hadley.”

The words may have elicited a smile from Mount Holyoke Academic Dean Harriett M. Allyn when she read the plain, handwritten note. Perhaps the origin of the April 1946 letter also piqued her curiosity, given that its return address was Kampen, Holland. Less than a year before, the Netherlands had been liberated from German occupation.

For certain, the story that unfolded in Gerda Bloch’s three pages won Allyn’s full attention. The narrative emerged in shards, like the broken glass Gerda and her sister, Doris, three years her junior, had witnessed on Kristallnacht. “Born in Berlin . . . emigrated to the Netherlands, against the German

persecution . . . the Germans invaded . . . all Jews had to leave ordinary schools . . . we had to leave our parents . . . we lived in hiding . . . we never saw our parents again.”

Allyn recognized that, written between the lines of the two hundred-odd words, two orphaned young women wished to restart their lives in the United States. She would help make that possible, and Gerda and Doris Bloch did indeed make their way to Mount Holyoke, graduating with the classes of 1949 and 1951, respectively.

Their days at the “university of South Hadley” would be at the fulcrum of two lives that witnessed not only the painful losses of the Holocaust but the quiet good works of the adult lives that followed.

By HUGH HOWARD Illustration by ANNA+ELENA=BALBUSSO

Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

MHQ_Fall15_Holocaust_Final.indd 29

|||

FA L L 2 01 5

23

9/21/15 2:37 PM

TO P: Gerda (left) and Doris on a farm in Germany in 1938; M I D D LE: False identification card issued to Doris in 1943; BOT TO M : August 1944 portrait of the Faber family, who hid Gerda during the German occupation in Holland.

Richard Bloch with daughters Doris (left) and Gerda in 1929.

24

In an interview conducted in 1997, Doris Bloch remembered her early years. “I was just an ordinary kid growing up in an ordinary family.”

The Bloch sisters were the children of two architects, who operated an engineering firm out of their Berlin apartment. The well-to-do Blochs owned a car they used for day trips and weekends in the country. They celebrated the Jewish holidays, but their attendance at synagogue was irregular, as they saw themselves as primarily German. Richard Bloch, the girls’ father, had served in the Kaiser’s army in the Great War. “My father was an optimist,” Doris recalled with evident sadness.

His confidence in their comfortable lives vanished with Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938. Across Germany and Austria, thousands of men in the Nazi party paramilitary (the so-called “Brown Shirts,” though on that night most wore civilian clothes), together with boys in the Hitler youth, attacked Jews and their property in a night of wanton destruction. Some thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested in a matter of hours and sent to prisons and concentration camps.

For Doris, the public launching of the Nazi pogrom was both bewildering and personal. Her school—along with hundreds of synagogues and thousands of Jewish businesses—went up in flames during the night of terror. She was anticipating the gift of a watch on her tenth birthday, as Gerda had received one three years earlier. But Doris’s birthday fell less than a week after Kristallnacht. Her father had hidden Doris’s timepiece in their home before he had gone into hiding in order to escape arrest.

For a time, the reunited family would live as before, but when the authorities forced most Jewish businesses to shut their doors, Richard Bloch prepared to leave Germany. He secured tickets for Shanghai, but as their departure date approached, in March of 1939, Richard and his wife, Ilse, seized another opportunity, moving with their two daughters to the safety of the Netherlands.

The security of neutral Holland proved illusory, and the Germans invaded in May 1940. After the Nazi occupiers ordered the Jewish population from the coast, the Blochs relocated inland. But by the end of 1942, with many Jews

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Doris Bloch (4)

A CHILDHOOD TRANSFORMED

alumnae.mtholyoke.edu

MHQ_Fall15_Holocaust_Final.indd 30

9/25/15 1:58 PM

already being deported to detention camps in Poland, a plan was made for the family to separate. Richard and Ilse took refuge together in a nearby town, while Doris and Gerda, aided by the Dutch underground and armed with new identity papers, bade their parents farewell.

“That day my sister and I got on the train just like we were going to go to school,” recalled Doris. “We . . . took off our Jewish stars, and that was that.” The sisters were separated. Gerda took the name Nancy. As Dorothea Blockland, Doris became the seventh daughter in a farming family in eastern Holland.

When Doris offered her testimony a half century later in a Shoah Foundation interview, the video camera captured a somber middle-aged woman, her hair in a salt-and-pepper page boy, her manner matter-of-fact, speaking with a just discernible trace of a German accent. But a deep vulnerability emerged when she spoke of the separation from her parents. Her voice breaking, eyes glistening, she recalled the parting: “I knew my parents could get killed. I knew I could get picked up.”

MHC Archives and Special Collections (2)

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Doris Bloch (4)

“I JUST KIND OF LIVED THROUGH IT ”

Doris and her protectors listened to British newscasts on the radio. She helped around the house and worked on her English, reading a great deal and talking with the American and Canadian visitors. Meanwhile Gerda worked quietly as a nanny, caring for the children of her protectors, Reverend Adriann Faber and his wife, Anna.

As for the fate of the Jews? “I knew,” Doris recalled. In the case of Dutch Jewry, fewer than one in four are thought to have survived, although among those hidden by the underground the survival rate is estimated closer to two-thirds.

The sisters were luckier than their famous contemporary Anne Frank, but they understood Frank’s sentiments when she wrote in 1943, “I simply can’t imagine the world will ever be normal again for us. I do talk about ‘after the war,’ but it’s as if I were talking about a castle in the air, something that can never come true.”

Before the full story of the Holocaust reached the sisters, Allied successes permitted them a taste of freedom. On May 5, 1945, the German occupiers capitulated. “I enjoyed being outdoors and walking around, talking to everybody, the liberating forces,” Doris remembered. In a letter to Mount Holyoke’s Allyn, Gerda described it as “the happiest day in my life.”

But word of their parents’ transport to concentration camps, at Westerbork and Theresienstadt, and their deaths at Auschwitz in 1944 came soon after.

The Dutch families who hid the Blochs were kind. But the specter of capture meant the girls rarely left their houses in daylight. Separated by some sixty miles and a veil of silence, they heard nothing of one another or of their parents.

AT HOME IN SOUTH HADLEY During nights Helen and Carl Johann Derksens’ farm In response to the 1946 letter of inquiry, s pent hiding offered Doris hiding places, including a void Allyn dispatched a Mount Holyoke catain the woods, in a wall behind an unobtrusive door in the logue to her new correspondent in Holland. rambling farmhouse and, high in a nearby The process of securing transcripts soon with the s ound barn, a horizontal space between quantities began, and, in the course of the year that of German of hay. The family took in men hiding from followed, applications and other paperwork s houts within the Germans, too, including a Canadian crossed and recrossed the Atlantic. flier, emaciated from time spent in a prisonThough their formal education had been ears hot, Doris er-of-war camp. When an American airman interrupted when they went into hiding, the remembered was downed nearby in a raid, Doris rememreunited sisters had resumed their schoolfeeling for the bered Carl Derksen saying, “Oh, sure, [we’ll] work in September 1945 in Holland. Gerda take him. They can only shoot me once.” took her secondary school examinations in pois on in her Though just sixteen, Doris recognized May 1946, and, with a plan to emigrate to the pocket. the weight of the knowledge she carried. “I United States taking shape, she enrolled at thought that I wouldn’t be able to keep all the Institute for Social Work in Amsterdam. the secrets if somebody tortured me,” she She took a typing class. “We have heard that said in the 1997 interview. “And so I asked your colleges are excellent and nice,” the the family, somebody in the family, could they find me some Bloch sisters wrote to Allyn again in January 1947 as they poison, which they actually did. And I carried it with me all awaited word of admission to Mount Holyoke. “It is very good the time.” During nights spent hiding in the woods, with the to have various educations.” sound of German shouts within earshot, Doris remembered At Mount Holyoke the Bloch sisters also had a sponsor feeling for the poison in her pocket. in Henry Rox. A woodcarver and sculptor, Rox, along with

Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

MHQ_Fall15_Holocaust_Final.indd 31

Llamarada photos of Doris Bloch ’51 (top) and Gerda Bloch ’49.

|||

FA L L 2 01 5

25

9/21/15 2:37 PM

WEB EXCLUSIVE

his wife, Lotte, had been part of the Bloch’s circle of artisthe decade, she traveled to Africa. “I learned some Swahili tic friends in Berlin before escaping to England in the early working in a Rwandan refugee camp,” she later said. But her nineteen-thirties. In 1938 Henry Rox became an assistant time in Tanganyika (today’s Tanzania) “was not easy. Tough professor at Mount Holyoke, teaching studio classes and going.” Still, the experience put her on a path to public health. courses in art history.

On her return to the United States, she worked as a nursing The sisters sought—and eventually received—finansupervisor while earning a second master’s in 1965 and then cial support from the Institute of International Education. a doctorate in 1970, both in public health at the University Gerda came to the United States in mid-1947, Doris two years of California, Berkeley. After working for the World Health later. Once on campus Gerda tutored students in German Organization in the Philippines, she took a job in the Division under the auspices of the College’s department of German. of Nursing of the US Department of Health, Education, and She studied psychology and philosophy but expressed a conWelfare, in Bethesda, Maryland. tinuing interest in social work.

Doris would work for the federal govDoris would major in zoology. “I had ernment for almost a quarter century; by always wanted to be a doctor or a nurse,” she the time she retired in 1994, hers was an Late in life, recalled. “When I was a little kid, I used to important and widely recognized legacy. both Doris Bloch drill little holes in my doll’s arm—that was She helped found the National Institute and Gerda Bloch the injection. I remember from Germany, of Nursing Research (NINR). With its so that’s way back. I opted for nursing. I was establishment in 1985, nurse researchers Mos s e would thinking that all along.” gained a new status and, as co-author of the return to Holland National Nursing Research Agenda, Doris to honor the MOTHER OF NURSING helped establish research as a nursing priRE SEARCH ority. Her work initiated a shift in the medfamilies that had When asked to state their nationality, ical mindset: the nurse researcher—rather kept them safe the young women entered “stateless” on than focusing on the function, disease, or from the Germans. their application forms. But their Mount treatment (as medical researchers do)— Holyoke years proved to be a prologue to would partner with medical researchers. new lives in America.

Doris made a persuasive case for looking at On leaving South Hadley, Gerda headed the patients and families as they dealt with for the Columbia University School of Social disease. Much of nursing research would be Work, where she earned a master’s degree. clinical and patient-centered; by establishLater she married, had two children, and worked for many ing nursing research and training programs, Doris argued, years as a county social worker in northern California. After advances could be made in clinical practice, disease prevenher retirement at age sixty-five she worked as a psychothertion, disability, and the management of symptoms caused by apist with children with developmental disabilities. At age illness. She foresaw improved palliative and end-of-life care eighty-three she retired a second time and today lives quias well as a growing role for nurses in critical care and other etly in the skilled nursing wing of a retirement facility in Los medical skills traditionally restricted to physicians.

Gatos.

The profession today reflects her broader vision. According Her sister’s career gained her national status in her proto Ada Sue Hinshaw, who served as the first director of the fession. Heading directly to Yale after earning her undergradNINR from 1987 to 1994, Doris was more than merely present at uate degree, Doris earned a master’s of nursing and became the NINR’s creation. “She was practically the mother of nursing a registered nurse in 1954. She worked as an emergency research,” Hinshaw said. room nurse in a New Haven, Connecticut, community hosAt the time of her death from heart failure in 2003, Doris pital before joining the Visiting Nurse Association, first in was remembered warmly by former colleagues as a quiet Connecticut, then in northern California. With the turn of presence in the profession. “There are the show people,

26

Illustration detail by ANNA+ELENA=BALBUSSO

Read a remembrance by Lynn Buckingham Meins ’70 of her grandparents, who escaped Germany in 1938 and soon became beloved members of the Mount Holyoke community at alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/bloch.

alumnae.mtholyoke.edu

MHQ_Fall15_Holocaust_Final.indd 32

9/21/15 2:37 PM

Travel permit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Doris Bloch; student group: MHC Archives and Special Collections; Doris Bloch: courtesy of the NIH

Illustration detail by ANNA+ELENA=BALBUSSO

then there are the behind-the-scenes people,” remarked Deidre Blank, another former chief of the NINR. “She just did her job.”

Doris also played a central role in shaping the formal structure for the NINR. She traveled widely as a grant administrator, reviewed journal articles, mentored many young researchers, and helped launch a variety of initiatives aimed at establishing nursing as a clinical profession.

The recipient of several honors during her lifetime, including one from Yale’s School of Nursing and the Chairperson’s Award for Meritorious Service from the Council of Nurse Researchers, her memory was honored by nursing’s honor society, Sigma Theta Tau International, which established the annual Doris Bloch Research Award. She also funded a scholarship award at Mount Holyoke in honor of her parents.

Late in life, both Doris Bloch and Gerda Bloch Mosse would return to Holland to honor the families that had kept them safe from the Germans, succeeding in getting the Derksens and the Fabers entered on the rolls of Yad Vashen, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority. Yet some of Doris’s coworkers remained unaware of her Holocaust experience, learning of it only after her death. She devoted herself to her work and never married, but her discipline and commitment to her profession are warmly remembered by surviving colleagues. As one of them, Dr. Thomas P. Phillips, recently observed, “She was perhaps the best role model anyone could have when it comes to living one’s life with honor and courage.”

Historian and writer Hugh Howard is the author of numerous books, including Houses of Civil War America (Little, Brown, 2014).

TO P: Travel permit issued in 1942 to Doris Bloch by the

Zentralstelle fur judische Auswanderung Amsterdam [Central Office for Jewish Emigration] allowing her to travel from her home in Hulshorst to Zwolle in order to attend school; BOT TO M : A 1948 photograph of a group of Mount Holyoke international students includes Gerda Bloch ’49 (standing second from left).

Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

MHQ_Fall15_Holocaust_Final.indd 33

Doris Bloch, in an undated photograph that accompanied her obituary in 2003.

|||

FA L L 2 01 5

27

9/21/15 2:37 PM

CAN’T FORGET

FORGIVE

Like all of the other seven-year-old girls in my religious sect, I had an operation that removed part of my clitoris. In my quest to identify who could be held responsible I learned that forgiveness was the only way forward.

By Mariya Karimjee ’10 Excerpted with permission from the author and The Big Roundtable.

MHQ_Fall15_FGM__Final.indd 28

9/25/15 1:53 PM

he first and only time I had sex it did not go well. I was twenty-two, a late bloomer by most standards, and for the year my boyfriend and I had been dating, we’d skirted around the issue. He was willing to wait however long it might take me to be ready. I chafed at his understanding.

I couldn’t explain the crawls that I felt every single time he touched me in the wrong place, or understand the debilitating anger that I felt when he nodded after I told him I needed a pause. He’d had girlfriends before, and I badgered him endlessly about their sexual experiences. He answered all of my questions patiently.

After these conversations, as we lay beside each other, he would tell me that he loved me, that if I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t ready. Yet while I listened to his steady, phlegmy breathing as he slept next to me, I’d be filled with an uncontrollable anger.

I’d crawl out of bed and into the bathroom, where I’d stare at my face in the mirror.

The truth was that I had no idea what it might take for me to let go of all of my fears about sex.

After a year of dating him, I decided that I needed to get the act over with. I researched the mechanics on the Internet, taking notes that I hid under the bed. I watched a few porn clips and memorized the way the women moved effortlessly below the men pounding into them. While he was at work I practiced making sounds of pleasure, the shower running so no one could hear.

I wanted to have sex before the end of summer.

“I don’t want you to stop even if I look like it’s hurting me,” I told him.

He grimaced, but I repeated the statement again and then again. His quiet acquiescence was disarming, so I gripped his wrists tightly and stared at him directly. “I need you to do this for me,” I told him.

The night it was to happen, I drank a half bottle of wine in fifteen minutes as he watched, warily. For a blissful forty-five minutes we made out on the couch, his hands staying in all of the safe spots, the ones that months of dating had taught him didn’t make me involuntarily gag.

The wine turned my limbs heavy. My body was warm.

By the time his body was positioned over mine, we’d moved from the couch to the bed. I closed my eyes, feeling my nostrils flare as I breathed in slowly, counting to control my heartbeat and the nausea welling up inside me: IN one, two three; HOLD one, two three; OUT one, two three. After a couple of minutes we were technically having sex. Pain shot up my body. I could feel it in my teeth and in the muscles of my jaw. My insides felt like they

were being scraped out by sandpaper. The pain was everywhere. I couldn’t figure out what hurt and where. After a couple of thrusts, he withdrew, unfinished, kissing my forehead gently. He reminded me he loved me, and left for the bathroom.

I sat in the bed, allowing myself to cry for the first time since we’d begun talking about sex. For the first time since I’d admitted to him that I might never be able to enjoy a sexual experience, and that when I was younger, someone had taken a knife to my clitoris and cut out a small but significant part of me.

I wanted to call my mother.

When my boyfriend finally reemerged from the bathroom, I was biting my lower lip and crying silently. He looked at me for a long moment, until I waved him away. It took me about four minutes to open up my laptop and finally call my mother in Karachi.

The last time I’d spoken in person with my mother had been almost a year earlier, in August 2009. I’d been hovering over my suitcase—trying to decide between two polka-dotted shirts—in the bedroom that belonged to me in my parents’ Karachi apartment. I was packing for my senior year at Mount Holyoke and did not know when I’d be returning to Pakistan.

Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

MHQ_Fall15_FGM__Final.indd 29

|||

FA L L 2 01 5

29

9/21/15 2:19 PM

KARACHI, PAKISTAN, 1995 When I was seven years old and living in Karachi, Pakistan, my mother took me for my yearly check-up with the pediatrician. While I sat on a stool, polishing imaginary dirt off the buckles on my Mary Janes, my mother quietly asked the pediatrician if it was time for me to get the bug removed. The conversation wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. Earlier that month, my mother had asked me if I was ever itchy or uncomfortable down there. I didn’t understand what the questions meant, and I don’t remember my responses.

What I do remember is my mother explaining that around the time I turned seven, a bug would attempt to grow out of me down there and would crawl to my brain. It would need to be removed, she had said.

After a brief examination, my pediatrician agreed.

For the next year, I’d break out into a cold sweat whenever I encountered the kind-faced woman who laid me down on a tarp on her living room floor and spoke to me softly as she took a knife and cut me.

HOUSTON, TEXAS, 2004 My mother and I did once speak about what happened to me. When I was sixteen, a woman within earshot at my Houston mosque had asked the woman next to her if her daughter had the “operation” already and if she’d gotten it done in the US or back in India. Her question niggled something deep in my brain. The kind-faced woman came back to me; I could hear her no-nonsense tone as she told me it would be over quickly.

I’m not sure what I Googled, but three hours after returning home from mosque I had words to describe what had happened to me: female genital cutting, clitoridectomy, female genital circumcision. Later that night, I sat with the illicit copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves that my American aunt had given me. My aunt realized that her Western,

30

THERE WAS SOMETHING HORRIFICALLY DIFFERENT ABOUT WHAT I HAD BETWEEN MY LEGS.

agnostic upbringing was startlingly different from mine, and she gave the book to me while visiting one Christmas, gently telling me that she was around for any questions I may have. One of the things the book suggested was to put a hand mirror between my legs. In the harsh lights of my bathroom, looking at the pictures, I realized that there was something horrifically different about what I had between my legs.

Over the next few weeks, the Internet gave me a sense of outrage that I wasn’t prepared to handle. I latched onto the most controversial name for what had happened to me: female genital mutilation, or FGM. Years later I’d find a printout from an outdated website with the words highlighted. “Because that’s what it is Mom,” I wrote underneath.

“Religion, no religion, it’s mutilation. It’s wrong.”

I read article after article about girls in African villages, their labia sewn shut, dying from the cutting.

This was not me. Though my parents were raised in East Africa, I wasn’t black African. I was Muslim, from a small sect of Shi’ites who prided themselves on their progressive actions. I Googled “FGM Islam” and found no correlation between my religion and this horrible act. FGM in South Asia, however, seemed confined singularly to my sect. Why hadn’t anyone else said anything, I wondered. I seethed internally for days, an anger bubbling inside of me. I had no one to talk to. For the next few days, I’d remember my

mother’s cool hand on my forehead after I finally peed for the first time after being cut.

I couldn’t talk to her, I realized.

She’d done this.

Yet who else could fill in the blanks? When I finally asked my mother, the two of us were cleaning my bathroom. I’d been standing in the bathtub, a roll of steel wool in my hand. I hadn’t meant to talk to her about it, but the porcelain was spotless from my fury, and I was running out of things to clean to perfection.

“What exactly was that bug thing you told me about?”

My mouth was full of marbles, of cotton, of peanut butter. After the words escaped, I couldn’t swallow.

My mother’s expression was unreadable, cloaked in an emotion I knew but could not name. I was terrified that my question made no sense, that I’d have to clarify further. Then, as a beat passed without her responding, I realized I was even more scared that it had made perfect sense. That she’d been expecting this question since I was seven years old.

My mother’s explanation came out as fumbled as my initial question, something about women not being sexual and shortening my clitoris.

“You removed the part of me that makes me feel good while having sex?” I asked. Our Bodies, Ourselves and some of the articles I’d read gave me the confidence to say this last part. At sixteen, I thought I knew exactly what had been taken away from me.

alumnae.mtholyoke.edu

MHQ_Fall15_FGM__Final.indd 30

9/21/15 2:19 PM

“I didn’t have a choice,” said my mother. “It happened to me, too.”

SOUTH HADLEY, MASSACHUSETTS, 2006–2008 At Mount Holyoke I watched as confident upper-class women walked around with hairy armpits and greasy hair. The stark contrast to the perfectly coiffed girls at my Texas high school felt jarring for the first few weeks, but soon I realized this wasn’t the only difference. My first semester in one of the student residence halls, I heard what sounded like a heartbreaking keening noise coming from the dorm room next door. As I listened to make sure she was OK, I realized that the girl was having sex.

My roommate and I would never be close, but she was the first person I spoke to honestly about what had happened. I’d told my best friends in high school, letting them in on the superficial horrors of my secret.

But until speaking with my Mount Holyoke roommate, I had never really told anyone that I had no idea what it meant to have a clitoridectomy, that I had no idea about the extent of the damage.

None of my high school girlfriends would have discussed their sex lives with me frankly. My roommate was different. She sat patiently as I garbled an explanation, of finding out about FGM, of feeling so horribly violated and alone.

Before going home for the summer, I made an appointment at student health services. I ended up in stirrups only twenty minutes after walking in, and when the doctor finally arrived, she sat down between my legs murmuring something about a pap smear.

“Let’s have a look,” she said, using the same no-nonsense tone I remembered from the lady from my childhood, the one who cut me.

I clamped my knees together and started bawling.

The doctor didn’t miss a beat. She was in her late fifties and had seen

enough during her quick glance to make a correct assumption about why I was crying. “Why don’t you sit right up and let’s talk about any questions you may have.”

She had questions of her own, too. “When did this happen? How long did it hurt? Are you able to wipe yourself with toilet paper without discomfort?” The doctor admitted up front that she didn’t know much but said that taking a closer look might help her out.

By the time I finally let the doctor take a look, she let out a long, low breath. For a few moments she looked without speaking. Then, she asked me for my cell number. She would ask around, see if anyone in the area knew more than she did.

“What I can tell you is that there is a lot of thin scar tissue, most of which looks extremely painful,” she said. “This doesn’t look like a full clitoridectomy,” she added, explaining that while she’d never seen one before, it looked like a partial cut. “Did a medical professional do this?” she asked as I shook my head. I didn’t know, I admitted. The question would linger with me, and for months I would weigh the consequences of asking my mother.

Later, after I put my clothes on, she came back in to hug me. “Come see me anytime, with any questions,” she said, and before I could stop myself, I blurted out. “Can I ever have an orgasm?”

She shrugged carefully, handing me a few printed pamphlets on healthy masturbation.

WASHINGTON, DC, JULY 2010 In the seconds before my mother answered the phone in Karachi, I chewed on the words I wanted to use carefully. By the time I heard her voice, though, my carefully planned sentences had disappeared.

“Is sex ever good for you?” I asked her, my voice still watery from my tears. There was a brief but

important pause. I heard the click of a door.

“I tried to have sex with my boyfriend.” I said. “It hurt so bad that I’m not sure I ever want to try it again.

I know you don’t think I should be having sex, but I’m so scared.”

What I didn’t say out loud was what exactly I was so afraid of. She didn’t learn about her own FGM until after she was married, when my father, raised without a formal sexual education, pointed out that she looked different from his other conquests. She filed this information away until I turned seven, realizing almost too late that this had happened to her, too. She heard in the words I never used my one greatest fear: that true love would escape me forever, simply because I carried the weight of what I considered a defective body part.

During college I’d figured out that getting to orgasm wasn’t going to be easy. Even when I attempted to pleasure myself, any wrong move, any sudden accidental movement, would shoot pain inside of me. The scar tissue was tender and grew inflamed quickly. The skin sloughed off easily sometimes, and it was quick to bleed.

I worried that my mother would hang up. Instead, she told me about how, when she was a teenager, she saved up pocket change for Harlequin romances. “All I wanted was to figure out how to feel like those women,” she told me. “When your father and I first got married, him touching me would light me on fire. But sometimes, if he moved too fast, if he tried something new, that fire just became pain.”

“I get panic attacks when that happens,” I told her.

“I did too,” she told me. “So your father and I talked through what felt good and we figured out a way,” she explained. I told her that I loved her.

I wanted her to apologize for giving me the same pain that she herself had suffered. But my mother stayed quiet.

Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

MHQ_Fall15_FGM__Final.indd 31

|||

FA L L 2 01 5

31

9/21/15 2:19 PM

The Skype clock showed that I had one-and-a-half more minutes left, and I told her that. “Talk soon, OK?” I said, our signature goodbye.

“I hate everyone else too,” she said, unprompted. “Those women on TV who love sex, who enjoy it. I hate them too.” I knew what that last part was supposed to be—the closest thing to an apology my mother would ever be able to make.

NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 2011–BOSTON, JUNE 2012 After breaking up with my boyfriend in April 2011 and completing my master’s at Columbia, I moved to Boston to work at an international news startup. There, I made out with a coworker. It was the first moment in my life that I’d allowed myself to be overtaken by my own desire.

While he kissed me, I wanted something more, pressing myself firmly against him. Yet when his hand sneaked under my shirt and I pulled away, nauseated, I was more upset than he was. Though we hung out for the next few months, we never made out again.

A week later I delved into my meager savings account. I was living without health insurance that year, and when I called the doctor’s office, explaining this, the receptionist told me to plan to spend somewhere around $2,000 for the consult. The money was worth it. This doctor, unlike so many of the gynecologists I’d seen before, didn’t wince when she peered between my legs.

She didn’t over-apologize or pat my knees. She didn’t murmur, in a hushed whisper like the medical resident at Columbia, “Oh, bless your dear heart.”

Instead, she silently examined me. She’d heard of the religious sect that I belonged to and had examined other girls like me. She explained that because the cutting is done without proper medical equipment for girls in my sect, the results varied. “Some of the girls can easily

32

go on to have great sex lives, the only part removed is part of their hood,” she explained. But for me the difference was in the scar tissue, and the fact that all of my hood and a large chunk of my clitoris had been removed.

She told me what I’d long suspected: I’d probably never have the kind of wonderful, easy, glowing sex that everyone had in the movies. I wouldn’t likely even have the real, imperfect kind. Instead, it would likely involve many conversations in bed, a sex therapist, and a willingness to trust another human being completely. I wasn’t horribly mutilated or defective in a way that made me incapable of sexual pleasure, she explained.

KARACHI, PAKISTAN, JULY 2012 My job in Boston wasn’t a good fit, and when my work permit ran out a year after I earned my master’s, I moved back to Karachi.

Readjusting to life in Karachi was difficult. My family expected me to attend religious services, but I dragged my feet every time I had to enter our neighborhood mosque.

I’d scan all of the faces to see if I could recognize the woman who had cut me. I sat next to girls I’d grown up with and knew that they had suffered this same fate.

In Karachi, family took precedence over everything. My grandfather, my father’s father, had passed away in the months before I moved home, and my grandmother sleepwalked through her grief.

I’d always viewed my grandmother as tough as nails, the kind of woman who wouldn’t disappear into the woodwork like so many of her friends. While in mourning, her vulnerability was masked by a kind of vitriol, one I’d recognized in myself. After her mourning period ended she grew intolerable, lashing out at everyone to let them know how much they’d disappointed her, just

so she could have a conversation that she felt like she was in control of.

During one of my visits to her house, as I willed myself to not check the clock on my phone, my grandmother suddenly asked me what FGM was.

We were sitting in the living room, the TV on mute. I sat alert, and asked her what she was talking about. She handed me a carefully folded piece of the local Englishlanguage daily. In it was a review of a documentary, screened during a film festival in Karachi. The documentary, A Pinch of Skin, showed several obscured women talking about their genital mutilation. My grandmother had first heard about it in her women’s group. Then she’d read about it in the paper.

I had only seven minutes before I’d be late to an appointment, one I couldn’t miss. I asked her carefully if she remembered what had been done to me when I was seven.

She nodded.

“What did you think that was?”

I asked her. She shrugged. Gujarati, the only language that my grandmother and I had in common, wasn’t my strongest suit, and speaking about female anatomy in it made my words stumble up against each other. But I told her that women were supposed to enjoy sex, that we had an organ similar to a penis, except tiny, that was supposed to make it feel good for us. That’s what they cut out. That’s what FGM was.

“Do you think that’s right?” She was asking me for my honest opinion, so I dove right in with as much restrained anger as I could.

“No. It was wrong. Being able to enjoy sex is a basic human right and you took that away from me. You took that away from every girl they cut,” I said, lumping her in with the rest of the members of the sect, all of whom I blamed for what had happened to me.

I realized that the decisions that had been made about my life came

alumnae.mtholyoke.edu

MHQ_Fall15_FGM__Final.indd 32

9/21/15 2:19 PM

THE DECISIONS THAT HAD BEEN MADE ABOUT MY LIFE CAME FROM A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO WERE WOEFULLY ILL-INFORMED.

from a group of people who were woefully ill-informed.

My grandmother had always been the matriarch; her insidious emotional blackmail was legendary in our extended family. With one sentence she could convince my father to do something he never wanted to do.

She’d easily make my mother’s life miserable if my mother did something she didn’t approve of. When I left to go to her house, my mother would carefully inspect my outfit, hoping it would meet my grandmother’s expectations. We bided our time with her, measuring each conversation against intended or unintended consequences. And now, what I’d said was the most honest and real opinion I’d ever given her. I’d meant every word, but now that they were out, in the vast space between the separate couches we sat on, I didn’t know if I wanted them there.

My grandmother gave one, slow nod. “The religious elders,” she explained, “they know what’s best, I suppose.”

It was those last two words that gave her away. For my grandmother to imply even a little bit that her faith wasn’t unwavering was gigantic. Days after our conversation, I found out that she’d asked my uncle about this and addressed it with my cousin as well. I was the third person she’d talked to. Later, when I found the courage to ask her about it again, she’d pretend she had no idea what I was referring to, using the veil of old age to shove it away. Yet before I left

for my appointment, my grandmother held my hand and looked me in the eyes.

“Your mother tried to stop it,” she told me.

KARACHI, PAKISTAN, MARCH 2014 I sat with my grandmother’s words for three weeks before talking to my mother. Somewhere inside of me, my hatred had broken away.

It moved about untethered to anything, cropping up in phone conversations with my best friend, twisting into my dreams. Dislodged, my anger was both worse and better than it had been before I accused my mother. I felt a global sense of unfairness that I didn’t know if I would ever be able to escape.

I finally told my mother about my conversation with my grandmother. She was folding her laundry on her bed. She continued folding. After a pause that seemed to stretch so thin that I felt a physical ache, I finally whispered what my grandmother had said. My mother looked back at me, her eyes filled with tears. “We tried so very, very hard,” she whispered back. “I told your father that he couldn’t let this happen. Your grandmother just watched, never once interfering.”

But the real villain, if there even was such a thing, was my grandfather. From what I pieced together from my mother’s words, he’d put his foot down firmly. The fights about it grew so out of control that

he threatened to kick my mother out of the family. “I’ll keep the kids,” he warned my mother, and she was smart enough to realize that this was true. Because of Pakistan’s overwhelmingly Muslim customs and society, she might be able to be unbound from his family, but she’d lose her children in the process.

My mother blamed herself enough that she let me hate her for years. She shouldered this blame silently.

After she told me what really happened, I didn’t ask her many questions. But I knew that our relationship had forever changed.

Forgiveness was no longer something I had to learn to give my mother, or something she needed to earn.

Faced with an impossible dichotomy, my mother chose to raise me.

She chose to give me every dream that was never possible for her. She gave me ambition and an identity that was separate from my family.

She encouraged me to think critically and question authority. I had lived with two diametrically opposed sides of my mother: the champion and the betrayer. She was only ever one of those things. My grandfather’s threat was powerful: either way I’d have ended up a victim of genital mutilation. This way, she was able to hold my hand after I was cut. I told my grandmother that FGM had ruined my life, and I wanted these women to know it. I told her that I was too young to hate so many people for what had happened. She nodded quietly, a rare détente between the two of us.

“They ruined my life too,” she said, patting my hand.

Mariya Karimjee is a freelance writer based in Karachi, Pakistan.

WEB EXCLUSIVE

Read Mariya’s original essay at alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/damage.

Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

MHQ_Fall15_FGM__Final.indd 33

|||

FA L L 2 01 5

33

9/21/15 2:19 PM

O N D I S P L AY

|

T H E N A N D N OW

MoHome Memories Beneath the Full Moon For twenty-seven years students have gathered at Gettell Amphitheater to take part in the Lunar Howling Society’s monthly ritual I N T H E E A R LY DAYS of each fall semester campus security often receives a worried call from a first-year student about the sudden howling emanating from Gettell Amphitheater. Not to worry, the dispatcher will say, reassuring a new Mount Holyoke student that she is in no danger of a wolf attack—the high-pitched cacophony is

just Mount Holyoke’s Lunar Howling Society letting off steam.

Founded by two students in 1988, the Society still meets monthly to howl and bay at the full moon for ten to fifteen minutes in honor of their lupine brethren. Open to anyone, attendance of the howlings climbs steadily as finals near, with sometimes more than one hundred

students releasing a sort of primal scream to the heavens.

Through the years, the Lunar Howling Society hasn’t just been about stress relief. The organization has also raised money for real wolves and at one point discussed “adopting” a wolf in Alaska. T-shirt sales have raised money to be donated to the Defenders of Wildlife’s Save the Wolves program.

The Society has also garnered the attention of the media, having been the subject of newspaper articles in the Daily Hampshire Gazette (1995) and even the New York Times (1989). And one windy day in December 1990 filmmakers for Tokyo-based Nippon TV documented the lunar howlers’ ritual atop Mount Tom for the popular Japanese program Show by Shobai, which reached more than sixty million viewers, far more people than even the loudest—and most academically stressed—Mount Holyoke student howlers could reach on their own.

34

alumnae.mtholyoke.edu

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 18

MHC Archives and Special Collections

—BY OLIVIA COLLINS ’ 18

9/22/15 2:24 PM

on display

A RT IFACT

Written History Mary Lyon’s recipes

A MONG T H E C OL L E C T ION of Mary Lyon’s manuscripts housed at

Mount Holyoke are several recipes written in Lyon’s own handwriting. The recipes instruct the reader how to make some of the popular desserts of the time, including molasses cake and apple “dumplins.” Mary Lyon wrote down several such recipes as well as some “housekeeping hints” and ideas for meals. In one note a list of possible vegetables for a dinner includes squash, beets, turnips, and parsnips. In another she reminds the reader to “be careful to rub rice & beans between the hands in washing.” It isn’t clear who these tips were meant for; perhaps they were intended to help her students in their compulsory domestic duties around the Seminary.

These documents, dated 1845–1847, are just a few in Mary Lyon’s extensive collection housed at the College’s archives. — B Y O L I V I A C O L L I N S ’ 1 8

WEB EXCLUSIVE

James Gehrt

Want to make your own molasses cake? View this and more of Mary Lyon’s recipes and housekeeping hints at alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/lyonrecipes.

MHQ_Fall15_Depts_Final.indd 19

35

9/25/15 1:36 PM

my voice

ESSAY

Choosing Mount Holyoke Again and Again

By ED ITH K AS EL IS ’76

Pitch your topic at quarterly@ mtholyoke.edu.

80

alumnae.mtholyoke.edu

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 24

“ ”

resigned. When it was time to collect news, she called her classmates personally, submitting her column to the Quarterly in her careful handwriting. For the last column my mother wrote—for the summer 2015 issue—her home health aide and I put her classmates on speaker phone and took notes while she talked to people. For the first time, she accepted help with her notes—I wrote up the column.

From her fiftieth reunion through her seventy-fifth, I was fortunate to attend reunions and mini-reunions with my mother. I always enjoyed them as much or more than mine. I went to my first alumnae club meeting after I moved to Cape Cod in 1992. I kept coming back to the meetings because I met a number of my mother’s classmates there. Before I knew it I was president. I felt like I owed them that.

I promised—and fully expected—to take my mother to her eightieth reunion. But after a quick decline in health, she passed away at the age of ninety-seven on June 11, 2015, seventy-seven years after graduating from Mount Holyoke.

A few days before she died, my mother looked me in the eye and said, “What can I do to make this easier for you?”

There was no way for me to respond. She’d already done everything for me, including sharing her alma mater.

Katherine Streeter

HAVE AN O PI N I O N TO S HAR E?

I AT TENDED my first Mount Holyoke reunion in 1968. I was thirteen and slept on the floor of the Mandelles. It poured rain the whole weekend—as I would later accept was the usual for class of 1938 reunions. I fell in love with my mother’s wonderful class and fell in love with the College. After that weekend I decided where I would go to college: Mount Holyoke.

We all recognize ourselves in Wendy Wasserstein’s ’71 play Uncommon Women and Others, but my mother, Ruth Abbott Kaselis ’38, was truly an uncommon woman. She started in a master’s program in chemistry at Harvard/Radcliffe, but the man who was her advisor did not believe women should be chemists. She left and got a master’s in chemistry at Wellesley.

She became the first woman research chemist I kept coming at American Cyanamid back to the meetings in New Jersey, opening the door for women from because I met a MHC to join her there.

When my brother number of my mother’s and I were young she and our father—also a classmates there.” chemist—fostered our numerous crazy science projects, including helping me dissect a deceased pregnant hamster on the kitchen table when I was nine years old. Once we were older, she retrained as a math teacher (working until she was seventyfive) and coached the Central Jersey Math League until she was over ninety. A former student of hers—and an MHC classmate of mine, Mitra Dutta-Choudhury Signal ’76—used to sit in the back row of math class, drawing cartoons of my mother on ice skates. “I have her to thank that I ended up at Mount Holyoke,” Mitra told me recently. I know of at least four other women who attended Mount Holyoke because of my mother’s encouragement.

In her late seventies my mother volunteered to help with her Mount Holyoke class reunions, helping chair her sixtieth and leading the reunion booklet committee for her sixty-fifth. In 2010, at the age of ninety-two, my mother took on the role of class scribe when the previous scribe

9/22/15 2:24 PM

T

Because we met ...

Kimberly Dunn Adams was the director of choirs at MHC, and an incredible mentor. Her dynamic conducting inspired us to musical excellence, but it was her warmth and grace as a leader that had the most profound effect on me. Her conducting class taught me more about leadership than I could have imagined. She helped me find my voice as a singer and as a leader, preparing me for success in my MBA program and all my future endeavors. Kim, because we met ...

I am an excellent leader.

Beckie Markarian ’07

This year The Mount Holyoke Fund is offering you a way to thank someone who changed your life, while you invest in the current students who are just starting on their own paths.

With your support, students will find their voices, discover their passions, and develop their skills to improve the world.

The Mount Holyoke Fund

MHQ_Fall15_DeptsR4.indd 25

To learn more, go to: mtholyoke.edu/go/BecauseWeMet

Make someone’s day, Change someone’s life.

9/22/15 2:24 PM

50 College Street, South Hadley, MA 01075

Jennie Wood Sheldon ’83 and Theona Jundanian ’86. Live a half-mile from each other on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Met in fall 2012 through a carpool for their daughters’ rowing team. Soon discovered they both lived in Mead Hall during Jennie’s senior year and Theona’s first.

They—and their daughters—have become lifelong friends.

Discover what the power of the network can do for you. Update your information and start connecting.

alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/directory Theona Jundanian ’86

Jennie Wood Sheldon ’83

Read more about this Mount Holyoke connection at alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/findyourpeople.

MHQ_Fall15_BackCover_Final.indd 2

9/25/15 1:31 PM