Wellesley magazine Winter 2011

winter 2011

| A DARK STUDY COMES TO LIGHT | “DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL” | THE MORE THINGS CHANGE

When Life Doesn’t Measure Up

Clockwise from top: Lara Yeo ’11, Eun Anna Kim ’11 and Sung Daniella Kim ’14, Perry Hodgkins ’11, Lily Byerly ’12, Jennifer Parke Sesler ’11, Joy Clarke ’11, and Molly Shanley ’12

28

Is there a Wellesley generation gap?

Get a glimpse of the College through the eyes of eight current students— and see what their alumnae mothers, aunts, and grandmothers remember about life on campus.

36

RCHARD HOWARD

24

BRIAN CRONIN

20

COURTESY BETH F. COYE ’59

winter 2011

Features 24 WHEN LIFE DOESN’T MEASURE UP

By Karen Grigsby Bates ’73 The Wellesley culture, with its lofty models of success, seldom encourages discussion of the ways we fall short or don’t live up to expectations. Alumnae examine their failures, or perceptions of failure, and the lessons gleaned from them.

Departments 2

From the Editor

3

Letters to the Editor

4

From the President

5

Window on Wellesley

by Alice Hummer, Lisa Scanlon ’99, Jennifer Flint, Jennifer Garrett ’98, and Abigail Murdy ’12

28 THE MORE THINGS CHANGE

By Marcy Barack Black ’71 Do today’s students live the same lives on campus that their alumnae relatives did?

Multiple generations of Wellesley families offer a unique view on the way student experiences and the College itself have evolved through the decades.

18

Shelf Life

20

First Person—“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”: A Personal Journey to Activism

by Beth F. Coye ’59

40

WCAA—Your Alumnae Association

42

Class Notes

76

Endnote—My Recession

by Amy Mayer ’94

36 A DARK STUDY COMES TO LIGHT

By Louisa Kasdon ’72 Professor Susan Reverby found herself at the center of an international media frenzy after she unearthed medical files from the 1940s revealing that American doctors had intentionally infected hundreds of Guatemalan men and women, prisoners and mental patients, with syphilis.

Cover illustration by Brian Cronin Portraits opposite by Richard Howard

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issue 2

Editor Alice M. Hummer Associate Editors Francie Latour Lisa Scanlon ’99

Design Friskey Design, Sherborn, Mass.

Wellesley (USPS 673-900). Published fall, winter, spring, and summer by the Wellesley College Alumnae Association.

Editorial and Business Office: Alumnae Association, Wellesley College, 106 Central St., Wellesley, MA 02481-8203.

Phone 781-283-2342. Fax 781-283-3638.

Periodicals postage paid at Boston, Mass., and other mailing offices. Postmaster: Send Form 3579 to Wellesley magazine, Wellesley College, 106 Central St., Wellesley, MA 02481-8203.

Wellesley Policy: One of the objectives of Wellesley, in the best College tradition, is to present interesting, thought-provoking material, even though it may be controversial. Publication of material does not necessarily indicate endorsement of the author’s viewpoint by the magazine, the Alumnae Association, or Wellesley College.

Wellesley magazine reserves the right to edit and, when necessary, revise all material that it accepts for publication.

Unsolicited photographs will be published at the discretion of the editor.

KEEP WELLESLEY UP-TO-DATE!

The Alumnae Office has a voice mailbox to be used by alumnae for updating their computer records. The number is 1-800-339-5233.

You can also update your information online when you visit the Alumnae Association website at www.wellesley. edu/Alum/.

DIRECT LINE PHONE NUMBERS

College Switchboard Alumnae Office Magazine Office Admission Office Center for Work and Service Resources Office

781-283-1000 781-283-2331 781-283-2344 781-283-2270 781-283-2352 781-283-2217

INTERNET ADDRESS

www.wellesley.edu/Alum/

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fall 2010 winter 2011

From the Editor

E

VERY MORNING ON THE WAY TO THE OFFICE, I climb the brick staircase from Founders parking lot,

glance out over the “Romeo and Juliet” balcony, and then head up to Green Hall. I often marvel at how worn the stone steps are, thanks to many generations of Wellesley women. Sometimes, when students are barreling down on their way to class, I squeeze against the wall and walk on the less-trod section of the stairs. And occasionally—like last summer when the building was being repointed and old mortar was raining down at the top of the stairs—I take a totally circuitous route, through the depths of Green Hall, where it can be hellishly hot and loud with clanking machinery.

Putting together this issue, I’ve thought a lot about the paths we all take to get where we are going. I hear Wellesley students talking about their plans for the future, which often include graduate school at a certain time, marriage and kids by a certain age, and achievement in their chosen careers. They live the ethos of “making a difference in the world,” whether it means wanting to eradicate hunger in Africa or educate children in underserved schools. They have inspiring role models—the scores of Wellesley women who have gone ahead of them. These students have grand visions, youthful energy, and loads of talent, and I admire them for that.

Still, they often see their life paths as straight lines from A to B to C. Those of us with, uh, a few more miles on our shoes occasionally say to them that life just doesn’t work like that. You might be at the pinnacle of your career and suddenly have an elderly parent who needs a caregiver—and you’re it. Or a spouse who gets transferred to the Middle East, and you go with. Or you find point C really isn’t the right place for you after all—and you actually have a passion for W or X. You regroup and shift course, sometimes in unexpected directions.

In this issue, we feature quite a number of women whose lives have taken turns like that. Beth Coye ’59, one of the first female commanders in the Navy, writes about her experience as a closeted lesbian in the armed services and how her regret at leaving the military eventually led her to a life of activism (page 20). Amy Mayer ’94 talks about her job choice and unexpected struggle to make ends meet (page 76). And a group of alumnae discuss perceptions of failure and falling short of expectations (“When Life Doesn’t Measure Up,” page 24).

We received more than 100 e-mails from alumnae wanting to tell us their stories for this last article. Some women were in very difficult circumstances, struggling to get through. (Our support and good wishes go out to them.) Others had gleaned life lessons from failure and spoke about their experiences with wry humor or thoughtfulness. And still others—sometimes egged on by the successes reported in this magazine—worried that they just hadn’t achieved as much as other alumnae. The author of the article, Karen Grigsby Bates ’73, challenges readers to talk openly about their stumbles, even on these pages. It can help other alumnae, she says, to “see that failure is a part of life . . . and that many, instead of being flattened by it, go on to not only survive but thrive.”

When we’re climbing the stairs, we don’t necessarily have to step where all the other Wellesley women have walked. Some powerhouse barreling down may jam us over to the side for a time. We may be forced now and then into winding subterranean routes, because of what is raining down outside. But really, who says there’s a “right” way to get where we’re going?

Alice M. Hummer, Editor

RICHARD HOWARD

Student Assistant Abigail Murdy ’12

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

THE FALL ’10 ISSUE

I’ve been getting the alumnae magazine for more years than I care to think about, but I don’t recall ever seeing such stunning graphics before. I was blown away by the vibrancy and clarity of the colors!

Caroline Seager Weymar ’58 Princeton, N.J.

JUSTIN KNIGHT

ARTISTS’ BOOKS

I am fortunate to volunteer as a web writer in a collection of artists’ books at Florida Atlantic University (www. jaffecollection.org) and am thus especially appreciative of the fine article on Wellesley’s collection (“Books Unbound,” fall ’10). Justin Knight’s accompanying photographs are brilliant in their evocations of the works and fittingly artistically gorgeous.

In addition, Francie Latour, who wrote the article, has given me a whole new vocabulary with which to describe these wonders. My thanks to them for their expertise and to Special Collections Librarian Ruth Rogers for the magnificence of her choices. I think it’s an exceptional collection.

Judith Rulnick Klau ’56 Boston

THAT FAMILIAR LOOK

THE NEW LOOK

Laura Rubenstein’s (’09) comment on Alice Neel’s portrait of two Wellesley girls, “I know those girls,” in the article “Collector of Souls” (fall ’10) reminded me of a similar experience.

I went straight from Wellesley into a Ph.D. program in philosophy at the University of Texas. My first semester, the distinguished philosopher and Wellesley graduate Marjorie Glicksman Grene ’31 was teaching a seminar on Kant. At one point, she paused in a lecture, looked at me quietly sitting in my navy blue skirt and white blouse and asked: “Where did you go to school?” “Wellesley,” I replied. “Yes,” she said. “I thought you looked familiar.”

Beverly Bardsley ’67 Austin, Texas

Bravo! I love the new format of Wellesley. It’s elegant, clean, contemporary, and the best college magazine out there! You and your designer should be very proud. It makes me even prouder to be a Wellesley alum than I already am.

Julie Moir Messervy ’73 Westminster, Vt.

ACCURATE REPRODUCTION

Kudos to the magazine for printing an accurate reproduction of Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, rather than the truncated version on the book cover (“Portrait of a Portrait,” fall ’10). Erica Hirshler ’79 may have written a good book, but what were she and the MFA, Boston, thinking when they lopped off the sides of one of the museum’s most famous paintings (losing one of Boit’s four daughters)?

While I’m writing, I’d like to request larger type in the magazine. I found this issue hard to read; by the time I got to Lynn Sherr’s (’63) inviting article, which was in a lighter font, I gave up. Since Wellesley is an alumnae magazine, most readers probably have similar problems. I’d gladly settle for fewer words . . . if I could read them.

Paula Rosenfeld Glatzer ’61 New York

BIGGER, BOLDER

©STEVE WINTER, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC IMAGE COLLECTION

Wellesley welcomes short letters (a maximum length of 300 words) relating to articles or items that have appeared in recent issues of the magazine. Send your remarks to the Editor, Wellesley magazine, 106 Central St., Wellesley, MA 02481-8203, or e-mail comments to magazine@alum.wellesley.edu.

I wanted you to know that I immediately noticed the new, larger size of the magazine.

It really makes a statement! Bravo! And the colors seem to “pop” more than ever on those glossy pages.

What a fabulous magazine ine and a tribute to Wellesley. Many thanks for your outstanding efforts.

Kathy Stone Kaufmann ’67 Wellesley Hills, Mass.

GLARE AND READABILITY

My comment is on the new format, which looks absolutely gorgeous until I tried to read it! At first, I blamed it on the sunny glare in the room . . . but that turned out not to be the worst trouble. The print appears smaller— much smaller—which is great if you can read it. I can’t. Between the glare and small print, I can’t anticipate the magazine’s arrival any more! That is sad, as its content is so good. I tried just reading the class notes . . . ended up quickly with a headache. It’s tough.

I wish it was on the internet!

Eloise Hatch Nielsen ’49 Sacramento, Calif.

NOTE: You can find the magazine online, with the exception of the

class-notes section, at www.wellesley. edu/magazine.

NEW DESIGN, OLDER EYES

Your recent issue asked for comments on the redesign of the magazine. I was not surprised to see the new look; indeed I believe Wellesley is the last of several such publications we receive to have a facelift. However, when I started to try to read it, my aging eyes had some difficulties. Modern graphic designers seem to think that everyone has perfect eyesight, or else perhaps that text is not important.

I realize that one must go with the new and fashionable, and that the number of those able of us born before World War II was never large and is rapidly diminishing, but we are also print readers. Think ahead to all those baby boomers we so often hear about who are aging too. Thank you for a good magazine content-wise, when I can read it.

Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg ’51 Alexandria, Va. FROM THE EDITOR: Barbara Schnorrenberg is correct: The magazine was redesigned to conform with new visual-identity guidelines developed by the College. We will continue to work to meet the needs of our readers— including making the copy legible to alumnae of all ages—while complying with the visual-identity standards. You’ll see some adjustments in this issue. We continue to use the same paper we have used for several years, which contains recycled content and is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

(Continued on page 70)

CONTRIBUTORS Karen Grigsby Bates ’73 (“When Life Doesn’t Measure Up,” p. 24) is a Los Angelesbased correspondent for NPR News.

Marcy Barack Black ’71 (“The More Things Change,” p. 28) and her daughter, Amanda Black ’10, were both English majors who lived in Claflin Hall.

Louisa Kasdon ’72 (“A Dark Study Comes to Light, p. 36) is an award-winning journalist with more than 500 published articles on food, health, business, and lifestyle to her credit.

Beth Coye ’59 (“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: A Personal Journey to Activism,” p. 20) spent two decades in the Navy as one of the first female commanders.

Wellesley magazine is available online at www.wellesley.edu/ magazine.

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From the President

‘Shovel-ready’ Students: A Dilemma

H

But it is important that we ask: Who are we educating for? Is it is facing an interesting dilemma. for the short-term benefit of the corporate world or the long-term benAs I first pointed out in my inaugural speech, efit of our students (and, importantly, the good of our society)? Our liberal-arts education was devised as a public good, ultimate purpose must be the education of responsible, thoughtful necessary for a well-functioning society, and it citizens, rather than just good entry-level corporate employees. Most has never been more important than it is now. importantly, we must convey the important fact that liberal-arts eduHistorian Richard Greenwald of Drew University cation can and does do both. In the long run, businesses will be better noted, “We are witnessing a new way of working off with broadly educated employees; the business or finance major developing before our eyes. Today, breadth, cultural knowledge and with specific skills may be cheaper at sensitivity, flexibility, the ability to the outset, but the liberal-arts graducontinually learn, grow, and reinvent, ate will be there for the marathon, technical skills, as well as drive and pasnot just the sprint. sion, define the road to success.” These We must push back against this attributes, of course, are the primary growing trend. It’s time to (re)educate goal and outcome of a liberal-arts edupeople about the long-term benefits cation, which produces students whose of liberal-arts education, and provide skills never go out of date—students compelling evidence of this fact not who have been educated to reinvent only to students but to their parents, themselves regularly and know how to their future employers, and to society. do it. In short, there is a good match History is on our side in this argument. between the needs of the new century The liberal-arts approach works; and liberal-arts education. it has produced the creativity, innoSo what is the problem? The vation, and ability to cope with problem is that, increasingly, students change and challenge that have are majoring in job-focused areas. made our nation productive and Nationally, for example, only 8 perforward-looking. cent of undergraduates today major It is important to the future in the humanities, compared with 17 competitiveness of our country that we make our percent in 1966, and the most popular undergraduate ‘It’s time to case strongly. And who better to do it than Wellesley? major is business. Students and their parents, as well as (re)educate people about Liberal-arts education is still what we do here—and we a significant portion of the public at large, are calling for the long-term benefits of do it extremely well. The distribution of our majors “relevant” education. And by relevant, they mean educaliberal-arts education, across broad fields has changed little: In 2009, we had tion that employers look for in their new hires. and provide compelling 35 percent in the humanities, 43 percent in the social This makes sense, given the growing insistence of sciences, and 16 percent in the sciences, compared to many employers on specific skills in their new hires. evidence of this fact not 38 percent, 46 percent, and 14 percent, respectively, Banks used to want liberal-arts-educated employees, only to students but to in 1968. At the same time, we have dramatically but many now insist on accounting, finance, and gentheir parents, their future increased the opportunities for students to gain valueral business majors—people who can “hit the ground employers, and to society.’ able practical experience via internships, public running,” as they put it. These are difficult times for busiservice, and other related cocurricular activities, so nesses, and the forgone skills-training costs are, to them, —President H. Kim Bottomly that employers get both early productivity and lifetime a significant saving. They want “shovel-ready” employees, potential from Wellesley graduates. able to be immediately productive without further investOur students’ success in the world beyond our gates, and the ment, so we can hardly blame students and their parents for wanting a continuing high demand for a Wellesley education, are the best argucurriculum that caters more directly to potential employers and gives graduments I can think of for the current and future value and relevance of ates an edge in competing for good starting positions. That edge, after all, is a liberal-arts education in the 21st century. why many think they are paying that high tuition. So we can’t blame either employers or students for what they are each demanding.

H. Kim Bottomly

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RICHARD HOWARD

IGHER EDUCATION

WoW

WINDOW ON WELLESLEY A NOTEBOOK OF NEWS AND INFORMATION ABOUT THE CAMPUS

BY ALICE HUMMER, LISA SCANLON ’99, JENNIFER FLINT, JENNIFER GARRETT ’98, AND ABIGAIL MURDY ’12

The Albright Experience DURING THE MONTH OF JANUARY, the life of an

Albright Fellow is a busy one. A typical day for the 40 students in the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs might include back-toback lectures on everything from global health issues to social entrepreneurship, late-night dormroom conversations on international aid . . . and perhaps a break to frolic mid-blizzard in 2 feet of snow. But the main event for the fellows is their group presentations to the Mary Jane Durnford Lewis ’59 Distinguished Visiting Professor, who again this year was Albright herself. The former US secretary of state asked the fellows constructive questions, shared stories from her career, and engaged the students in lively discussions about pressing global policy issues.

“She was very down to earth, kind, and honest. I really appreciated that, and I felt meeting her allowed us to see a more personal side of her,” says Albright Fellow Maliha Rahman ’12, a political-science major from Pleasanton, Calif., and Dhaka, Bengladesh. Rahman’s group To listen to Albright Institute lectures given by faculty and alumnae, visit www.wellesley.edu/ albright/index2.html.

addressed the question, How can the changing status of women improve the human condition?

“Since this was such a

broad question,” Rahman says, “we focused on primary and secondary education for girls, as

‘From the Albright fellowship, I learned . . . how truly complex problems are, even when initially they seem quite simple.’

improving the status of women, including health, RICHARD HOWARD

—Maliha Rahman ’12

we felt education connected to many aspects of labor, and political participation.”

—LS

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inPerson

DON LEACH, Assistant Director of Residential Life/Resident Director, Lake House

In Residence ASK ANY STUDENT who

Don Leach is, and you probably won’t get much about his work as assistant director of residential life. You probably won’t hear that he helps to administer the honor code and the alcohol policy and supervises the resident directors in the residence halls.

What you will hear (from an entire generation of students) is how he doled out home-baked pumpkin bread and hot cider for weeks on end every fall—or gallons of handmade ice cream in the spring—to any student who accepted his invitation to drop by and hang out in the Stone-Davis living room. Or how he’s now teaching breadbaking on Friday nights in the Lake House kitchen: naan, challah, gingerbread.

Besides his administrative role, Leach has also been a beloved resident director since 1993, first in Stone-Davis, now in Lake House. He sat down with the magazine to talk about Wellesley students and the role of the adults who support them in the residence halls.

Q

You’ve spent a lot of time over the years baking bread and making ice cream. What was the idea

behind this programming?

It was about providing a space where students could stop in, linger, talk to one another and to me. The overarching educational intent was to help people discover that there was a kind of rhythm to living here and figure out what rhythm would be right for them— stopping and starting and having space for conversations.

Q

How do you see programming for the residence halls?

—Don Leach

and that you can provide spaces that aren’t really scheduled spaces, where people can kind of show up because they want to, not because this is one more thing that they have to do on their schedule. That’s very much a piece of finding out that you can make a place that’s a home for yourself in the world.

Q

How do you view Wellesley students?

I like to read philosophy and poetry, because you have to read them slowly and more than once to understand them. Wellesley students are like good poetry—you have to show them regard slowly and over time to understand them.

My impression of Wellesley students is that they’re actually happier and healthier than the frenetically paced, anxious world in which we all live almost allows us to be.

What I like to think that we can do in residence is help people connect and identify the ways in which they’re not just reflecting the anxieties of their social world or the sort of frenetic pace of life around us, but actually composing lives that make sense for them. One of the most important things that I see students doing as they live their lives here is developing a kind of narrative competency, being able to tell their stories and developing the ability to do that in ways that allow them to live the life that they want to live.

Q

How do you do that?

A piece of it, of course, is simply listening and learning how to listen to different people.

Another way is to speak out of that listening so that you learn how to say appropriate things to people in ways in which they can hear. [If] you don’t communicate well to people, you don’t have any impact upon people. And so that’s both the difficulty of the work but also its beauty, because if you can do that, it actually does make a difference. . . . If I have anything that’s a gift—or maybe it’s an obsession more than a gift—it’s figuring out with students how they can beat the odds. I take pleasure in doing that.

—AH RICHARD HOWARD

I’ve always thought of programming in the residence halls as a kind of deprogramming, really. Wellesley is over-programmed, and I think sometimes that we run on fear of unstructured time. If the schedule’s not filled to the brim, the fear is that everything will become chaotic, and my life will come undone. And it’s good to realize that that really isn’t the case

‘I like to read philosophy and poetry, because you have to read them slowly and more than once to understand them.

Wellesley students are like good poetry—you have to show them regard slowly and over time to understand them.’

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WINDOW ON WELLESLEY

5

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT

YOGA FOR THE OFFICE

YOGIS HAVE LONG BELIEVED IT, but now a scien-

left hand (your thumbs will be

tific study proves that yoga can have a profound

pointing toward your face). Lift

effect on an individual’s emotional and physical

your arms upward. Now bend

health. Liz Owen, who teaches yoga at Wellesley,

forward from your hips. Breathe

was part of the research team whose work was

deeply and feel tension release

funded by the National Institutes of Health. Results

from your hips and shoulders

were published in the Journal of Alternative and

with every exhalation. Repeat

Complementary Medicine last November.

on the opposite side.

Here, Owens prescribes five poses for those of us who spend more time stuck to a key-

4. Standing Backbend

board than a yoga mat. “At least once or twice

Stand tall with your feet an inch or two from

a day, it’s important to undo the tightness and

your desk. Place your fingertips on your desk.

tensions that come from working at a computer

Tuck your tailbone in and up, and lean your

all day,” she says. Owens recommends holding

hips into the desk. Press your fingertips down

each pose for anywhere between three and five

and lift your spine up-

breaths, but never to a point of discomfort.

ward with each inhale, creating length in your

1. Neck Stretch

lower back. Remember

With your chest lifted, hold onto

to draw your shoulder

the side of your chair with your

blades away from your

right hand and lean to the left.

neck. To come out of the

Exhale and drop your left ear

pose, use your fingertips

toward your left shoulder. For

to press your hips away

more stretch, place your left

from the desk. Repeat

hand on the head. Exhaling,

two or three times.

gently apply pressure to the right side of the head. Repeat

5. Standing Forward Bend

on the opposite side.

With your hands resting on the back of a chair, walk your feet away from the chair until your

2. Seated Cow Face Pose

torso and arms are parallel to the floor. You can

Raise your right arm straight

either look forward or down at the floor, but be

up, then bend at the elbow and

careful not to push your head and neck down-

drop your hand down to the

ward. Stretch

nape of your neck. Bring your

through your

left arm behind your back and

arms and your

try to clasp your fingers. If you

spine, press-

can’t reach, simply stretch your

ing your hips

fingers toward one another. Re-

away from

lease with an exhalation, shake

your head. Lift

your arms out, and repeat on

your tailbone

the opposite side.

all the way up toward the ceiling. If this stretch is too intense for the backs of your legs, bend

3. Sitting Eagle with Forward Bend

your knees. This should feel good on your back

Place your right ankle on your left knee, then

after a backbend, and the hamstring stretch is

cross your right arm under your left arm at the

an added benefit.

F.CO

elbows. Raise your forearms upward and place the fingers of the right hand to the palm of your

Namaste.

BOTANY, ARTFULLY ARTISTS HAVE OFTEN SOUGHT INSPIRATION

in the Ferguson Greenhouses, but especially so during the long, gray grip of winter. And particularly now that the Friends of Horticulture’s certifi cate in botanical art and illustration program is in full swing: 30 individuals are enrolled in the For more information program, which is on the program, visit www. wellesley.edu/WCFH/Courses/ open to everyone— foh_courses.html. students, alumnae, or local residents alike. It provides a background in botanical art and techniques, plant anatomy and development, and native New England species and their conservation. Sandy Snow Adams ’59, who painted the porcelain berry pictured above, helped the program get its legs in 2006 and is also one of its first graduates.

—JF

—JF

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SUSTAINABILITY

WELLESLEY LEANS GREEN

OVERHEARDONLINE

THERE’S A NEW STAR by the Wellesley sports field: a

The following are snippets from a discussion on Community, an electronic bulletin board.

48-panel, 10.5 kilowatt solar-powered electrical system. It will generate enough electricity each year to power about two homes. The system has a display that will allow interested students, faculty, and staff to see how much

5-7-5: HAIKU WRITING FOR EXAMS

electricity is generated on a day-to-day basis. “It’s a beta RICHARD HOWARD

for us to explore photovoltaic energy,” says Peter Zuraw, assistant vice president for For more on sustainability at Wellesley, facilities management and planvisit tinyurl.com/4em5ndf. ning and director of the physical plant. “We’re excited about that.”

You always know exams are in the offing when students (and faculty) break out in haiku.

There is much to do and

The solar array is part of several “green” changes on campus that recently caused Wellesley’s sustainability rating to jump to an A– on the the annual College Sustainability Report Card, released by the Sustainable Endowments

such little time to do it.

Why oh why oh why!

Institute. Last year, the College received a B–. The College has made improvements in the areas of transportation, green building, administration, and food and recycling.

—LS

Laura Dear Wellesley how did I get so behind if I don’t do fun things.

Oh, wasted youth, what will I say when I am old: I sort of studied?

Jamie Personal hygiene Will not be on the exam Therefore, out it goes.

Rebecca That’s a little gross.

Shower’s just twenty minutes’ procrastination.

Megan Hypothesis tests Chance I learn them by tonight p = .5 Tub of cookie dough Add four friends plus forty books “Gluttons” for knowledge

JUSTIN KNIGHT

Kara Haiku—Periodic Table Version: protactinium einsteinium fermium rutherfordium

SNAIL MAIL

Flick Coleman, chemistry

THANKS TO A GIFT from Nancy Dean Kingman ’53, Special Collections has a new (old) treasure: A

handwritten letter from Beatrix Potter, the author and illustrator of The Tale of Peter Rabbit. As a child in the 1930s, Kingman spent vacations with her grandmother, Bertha Mahony Miller. Founder of both the first magazine and bookstore for children in Boston, Miller also enjoyed a 16-year correspondence with Potter. One night at bedtime, Miller read Potter’s The Fairy Caravan to her 9-year-old granddaughter, who was smitten by the tale. Miller wrote to Potter on Kingman’s behalf, asking after the characters, and received the playful two-page response dated July 30, 1940, from the reclusive author.

It’s now available for study by students, visitors, or any other curious rabbits who happen by.

—JF

carbon, gold, silver as an art hist’ry major these are all i know.

Emma Writing haikus is better than writing essays any day. Love, Me. Emily

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WELLESLEYAWAY

WINDOW ON WELLESLEY STUDENT LIFE

LIVE FROM WELLESLEY COLLEGE WHEN GRACE CHENG ’12 arrived at Wellesley College, alma mater of broadcast luminaries like Diane Sawyer ’67 and Lynn Sherr ’63, she was surprised that the school’s television station had been defunct for several years. During her sophomore year, she decided to do something about it. After talks with deans, meetings with interested students, and hours in the editing room, Wellesley College TV was back on air—or as anchor Holly Boland ’12 put it in the inaugural show last spring, “We are live from somewhere on campus at some point in time.”

WCTV was made possible thanks to equipment in the Knapp Media and Technology Center, which includes a TV studio and control room, two state-of-the-art digital editing suites, and a voice-over room. It is broadcast across campus on channel 10 with new episodes appearing about once a week, and all the episodes are posted on YouTube. WCTV has covered everything from the volleyball team’s stellar season to a proposed café in the Science Center. They also aren’t afraid to tackle sensitive topics, like the “culture of stress” at Wellesley and what can be done about it. Cheng thinks that tackling stories like these are perfect for WCTV, because “We are still fresh. . . .

We are not entrenched in any bureaucratic stuff,” she explains. But they do take care to make sure they report stories fairly and accurately.

“We’re not here to lambast anyone. We’re here to report,” she says.

Among the topics Cheng (below, with Naomi Wossen ’12) and the two dozen members of WCTV plan to take on are campus dining and “the inflexibility of the meal plan,” and transportation at Wellesley. One of the advantages of working in film, says Cheng,

WHEN IN NORWAY, EAT TACOS STUDENT: May-Elise Martinsen ’12

THE RECEPTION YOU’VE GOTTEN AS

MAJOR: Music

AN AMERICAN STUDENT HAS BEEN:

ORIGINALLY FROM: Osprey, Fla.

Most young people in Norway imagine

STUDYING IN: Oslo, Norway

American life as one great High School Musical experience. I find myself

YOU CHOSE NORWAY BECAUSE:

explaining that not all American teen-

I’m writing a musical based on

agers play football, cheerlead, and

Norwegian history and integrating

throw wild keg parties on the weekend.

perfect place to do both the historical

THE MOST SURPRISING THING

and musical research.

THAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE YOU

Actually, I lived in Oslo for the first

ARRIVED IS:

10 years of my life. But coming back to

I discovered that Norwegian students

Norway, I realize how much I still have

have a passion for tacos. Who knew!

to learn about the country.

ONE SURVIVAL TACTIC YOU’VE THE KINDS OF THINGS YOU’VE

LEARNED THE HARD WAY IS:

LEARNED OUTSIDE THE CLASS-

I try not to eat out at restaurants any

ROOM HAVE BEEN:

longer, unless I plan on eating porridge

I learned how to move into an apart-

for the following two weeks. The last time

ment and buy furniture, curtains and

I set foot in a restaurant, I paid $22 for a

all. In Norway, students have no

bowl of soup! I also have a new wardrobe

guarantee of housing and have to

staple: wool. Lots and lots of wool!

fend for themselves.

—AM

RICHARD HOWARD

Norwegian folk music. Oslo was the

is that you actually get to see the faces of the people who are doing the reporting and the people who are being interviewed. “There is accountability,” says Cheng, in a way that there isn’t in, say, the College’s online forums. There’s a fun side to television, too—the student reporters become “mini-celebrities” and informal campus experts on the topics they cover, Cheng says. And who knows, perhaps some of the current crop of WCTV reporters will become the next Sawyer or Sherr.

To watch WCTV online, visit www.youtube.com/user/ WellesleyCollegeTV.

—LS

winter 2011

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wellesley 9

FIRST-YEAR SEMINARS

NOT YOUR AVERAGE 101 that “education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

Unfortunately, this idea can get lost pretty easily in introductory-level courses, where bucket-loads of material must be taught, says Professor of Political Science Tom Burke. But Burke hopes that the new First-Year Seminar Program, which he directs, will help kindle flames. The program launched this year with 18 courses designed to create a more participatory, active learning environment than often comes in your standard lecture-hall 101.

Classes in the First-Year Seminar Program are typically capped at 15 students and are discussionor project-based. “We wanted to give students an environment where they get to know each other and get to know the faculty member. . . . One objective is just for students to experience a kind of intellectual comradeship,” says Burke.

The courses are also on “advanced” subjects, tackling topics like the storage of nuclear waste, the reading and writing about race in American fiction, and women’s art and activism in Latin America.

“We wanted to make a much more clear break between high school and college, and show them, here’s what college is like, this is what academics do, this is how college-level inquiry is different,’” says Burke. First-year seminars emphasize critical thinking and problem solving, rather than the passive receiving of information.

Following are three examples of first-year seminars that are anything but your standard textbook intro course.

RICHARD HOWARD

THERE’S AN OLD SAYING

others were sent by alumnae or people who had a connection to the College and thought these would be useful,” says Bryan Burns, assistant professor of classical studies. For years, many of these objects languished in storage or were hidden in dim cabinets in the hallways of Founders.

“It’s a resource that has been waiting,” says Burns. Organizing the collection seemed like an ideal way to introduce students to archaeological methodology through hands-on activities.

In the class, CLCV 110 Archaeology and Artifacts: Exploring Classical Cultures Through Objects, students worked together to design an exhibition of select pieces from the collection. They also traveled to local museums to study the presentation of ancient objects, and went through exercises like picking through a bag of trash to see what could be discerned about the person that tossed it. “I found them to be very enthusiastic and game for things like sorting through garbage,” Burns says. And the fact that the class is small and only includes first-years has made them more willing to contribute to conversations, he says. “Not only do they all know each other and can really speak to each other, but also I think we’ve done a good job of maintaining the conversation from week to week.”

HANDS-ON ANTIQUITIES FROM THE 1920S TO THE 1970S, the Department of Classical Studies gathered a modest, haphazard collection of antiquities—Greek pottery, lamps, and figurines. “Some of them were sent by scholars in the 1920s,

ROBOT WORKSHOP

in the Science Center looks like a cross between a mad scientist’s workshop and a toy store. On a typical day in class, students in CS 116/ PHYS 116 Robotic Design Studio might be constructing miniature houses out of balsa wood, programming a small wheeled vehicle to follow a black line on the floor, or building an “indestructible” LEGO® box that can be dropped from a height of 2 meters without breaking.

The philosophy behind the course is that students learn best when actively engaged

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LISA SCANLON ’99

LISA SCANLON ’99

THE ENGINEERING STUDIO

WELLESLEY

It’s very different from my other classes because . . . you can’t just ask for the answer.

You have to figure it out for yourself and make it work. It’s a lot of luck and intuition.

You have to work at it, but then when you do get it, Lucia Perez ’14 her first-year it’s so satisfying. on robotics seminar

EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITES

A MAGICAL NEW SPORT ON CAMPUS

«

IT’S NO SECRET that the campus is populated with Harry Potter fans—witness the

brick wall outside Green Hall that’s been marked and re-marked in chalk as “Platform 9 3/4” for more than a few years. Now, fans of the children’s book series can act out

in hands-on projects, rather than listening to a “talking head in front of a classroom,” says Professor of Physics Robert Berg. “Mostly, we’re having discussions about ideas, or we’re working on our robots and then showing them off,” says Lucia Perez ’14, a student in the class. For her final project, Perez and her partner created a game based on a scene from the Pixar movie Up. The idea is that players steer a robot that’s dragging a house suspended by balloons around a classroom full of obstacles. “It’s very different from my other classes because . . . you can’t just ask for the answer. You have to figure it out for yourself and make it work. It’s a lot of luck and intuition. You have to work For a window on the Engineering at it, but then when you do get Studio, read the blogs of students it, it’s so satisfying,” she says. in CS 116/PHYS at cs.wellesley.

a popular part of Hogwarts life— the game of Quidditch. Played while astride brooksticks, the “Muggle” (that’s nonmagical folk) version of the game has several key differences from the version in the books. For one, the role of the “snitch,” a flying winged ball, is played by a human. The extracurricular team plays three times a week on campus, but they hope to compete with Quidditch players at other nearby colleges

JOHN MOTTERN

«

WINDOW ON

soon.

—LS

edu/~rds/museum10.html

SPEECH, SPEECH!

was contemplating designing a first-year seminar on freedom of speech, he thought to himself, “Could I unleash this material on first-year students?” He ultimately decided to go for it, hoping the course would teach them both about broad philosophical issues and also about legal reasoning. “It’s been tremendous,” he says.

“In some weeks, I would swear that the first-year students are outperforming my seniors.”

One assignment early in the course involved a hypothetical case involving an offensive post to an online bulletin board at the fictional “Lake Waban College.” The students, who had recently read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, a 19th-century British philosopher, were charged with making their own recommendations for the proper disciplinary actions, and with suggesting what actions Mill would recommend. “They did wonderfully,” says Burke.

“We had fantastic debates. . . . You didn’t have one John Stuart Mill emerging from these papers, you had probably 15 John Stuart Mills emerging from these papers.” And, in the process, undoubtedly some fires were lit.

WHEN TOM BURKE

RICHARD HOWARD

OBJECT OF OUR ATTENTION

THE BOUNTY OF EL TABLE SINCE EL TABLE IS TUCKED AWAY in the basement of Founders d Hall, Wellesley

students often don’t stumble upon it until their sophomore year, says manager Sonrisa Cooper ’11. “But once they discover it, they never leave.”

Originally a table by an elevator in College Hall where students could post notices, El Table is now a student-run cooperative café where faculty, staff, and students enjoy a wide variety of sandwiches, snacks, and beverages. Among the most popular are those pictured here: the Beth DeSombre (named after the eponymous Frost Professor of Environmental Studies), a salad with pears, walnuts, and gorgonzola cheese, and the Tenure Track, a sandwich invented this year that features turkey, provolone, and avocado on wheat.

—LS

—LS

winter 2011

|

wellesley 11

ART

OF WELLESLEY

From the Deep Dreamcatcher Harpoon David Teng-Olsen 2010 Five-channel video installation with canoe and glass sculpture

Professor David Teng-Olsen finds richness in associations—between art and science, for example. A studio artist with a background in bioengineering and scientific illustration, he’s also a co-director of Wellesley’s media arts and science program. That allows Teng-Olsen to keep one hand in computer science, the other in the arts. “That dialogue, with so many different minds and expertise, creates such a rich and wonderful place to work and think about things,” he says.

Visitors to the Davis Museum’s 2010 Calculated Risks show got a glimpse of how Teng-Olsen thinks in his installation, Dreamcatcher Harpoon.

Outside the room, which was as dark as the ocean is deep, was a sign that invited viewers to “please DO” touch the whale, represented by an overturned canoe, breaching up through the floor. Human contact triggered animation: Floodlights illuminated two harpoons—cartoonish, colorful hand-blown glass baubles.

Whales, projected in video, circled the room, while audio tracks alternated between whale To see a video of Dreamcatcher Harpoon, cries and children’s visit www.wellesley.edu/ chatter (actual MAS/dreamcatcher/. recordings of Teng-Olsen and his sister). Who, exactly, was being hunted? The orca? The viewer?

“It’s about bringing up memories and dreams and hopes,” says the artist.

“That’s why they’re called dreamcatcher

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winter 2011

RICHARD HOWARD

THE ART DEPARTMENT’S Assistant

harpoons, even though they’re the opposite of what dreamcatchers usually do.”

The installation was inspired in part by Teng-Olsen’s fascination with whales—their history and our country’s debt to them. “But another important part of this, running parallel to what I’m making, is that I like associations with the

Assistant Professor David Teng-Olsen

micro and macro world. I like the idea that there’s a huge ocean, and whales can communicate from thousands of miles apart— much in the way that our body and our brain, at this microscopic level, communicate in this abstract way,” he says. See that? It’s all about the associations.

—JF

WINDOW ON WELLESLEY TANNER 2010

Learning in the Real World: Great Expectations Meet Arrested Development OVER THE SUMMER, students traveled to all corners of the world, brandishing high ambitions for the work they would accomplish in various internships, fellowships, or research projects. But on arrival, many of them stumbled—sometimes quite clumsily—over tangles of bureaucracy, miscommunication, unfamiliar lab equipment, or cultural misunderstandings. Life outside of the classroom, after all, can be untidy. And yet, there are lessons to be found in the gulf between high expectations and life’s messy reality—presuming you don’t fall in. Students brought this lesson home in their presentations at the 10th annual Tanner Conference last October.

Julia Wucherpfennig ’12 (below and right), for example, spent six weeks in Cayos Cochinos, a marine biological reserve off the coast of Honduras. Her team planned to dive twice a day to count fish, invertebrates, and coral populations—data they would use to evaluate the effectiveness of the area’s conservation efforts. But some days they had to wait out hurricanes. Or battle with time constraints. “Or sometimes your dive master might forget to bring a tape measure,” she says. “Or your slate might float away, with all of your data on it.” Frustrating? Yes. But pointless? Not at all. “I learned that fieldwork is in no way perfect,” says Wucherpfennig, a biology major.

Sometimes life’s unscheduled lessons are just plain painful. Take the team of six students who launched a community-health program in rural Guatemala: Proyecto Doctoritas. Their goal was to train 10 teenage girls to be doctoritas, or health promoters, for their community. The girls had to pass a series of tests, but when almost all of them failed the second exam, the organizers hit what they called “the Bump.” The 10 girls had been hand-selected, so the Wellesley team To read abstracts of the 2010 presentations visit www. knew they were smart. wellesley.edu/CWS/Tanner/Tanner So what went wrong?

2010ProgramandSchedule.pdf.

“We finally realized that it wasn’t them, it was us,” says Angelica Ramirez ’12. The team had been requiring the girls to use testing formats— multiple choice, for example—with which they were not familiar. “Our preparation was all wrong, and we initially blamed everyone but ourselves,” says Emma Chung ’12. “‘The Bump’ was a blow to our pride, but acknowledging you can be wrong is powerful.”

When Sarah Shaer ’11 decided to work in a publicsector office in Cairo, she fully expected to step outside

WELLESLEY IN THE WORLD:

30

NUMBER OF WELLESLEYSUPPORTED INTERNSHIPS IN 1999

300

NUMBER OF WELLESLEYSUPPORTED INTERNSHIPS IN 2010

35

NUMBER OF COUNTRIES STUDENTS TRAVELED TO FOR WELLESLEY-SUPPORTED INTERNSHIPS

40

NUMBER OF COUNTRIES STUDENTS TRAVELED TO FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDY

THE TANNER CONFERENCE Established in 2000 through

the generosity of Estelle “Nicki” Newman Tanner ’57, the Tanner Conference celebrates the value of off-campus learning. It provides a venue for students to discuss with the larger community their diverse experiences in internships and fellowships, service learning, and international study.

«

«

Your slate might float away, with all of your data on it. . . .

I learned that fieldwork is in no way perfect.

Julia Wucherpfennig ’12

her comfort zone. But even so, reality did not match expectations. Shaer, who expected to be working on issues related to women and children, found herself assigned instead to smoking- and drug-related initiatives. After three long weeks of negotiating and pleading, she finally wrestled her way into the program area of her choice. On reflection, she says, “I could have spent that time being more productive. I could have adjusted my expectations. You really have to adapt, instead of expecting things to work out. Because you can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes,” she says with a smile, “you’ll find you get what you need.”

—JF

winter 2011

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wellesley 13

WELLESLEY ATHLETICS

THERE IS ONE DAY BONNIE DIX looks forward to most every year: the first day of practice.

As head coach of the swimming and diving team, Dix is never not busy—recruiting, leading swimming and sailing classes, researching fitness and taper methods—but she is happiest during swim season. “The first day, just being back in season—that’s the best,” she says. Luckily for her, the swimming and diving season stretches from September to February.

Dix manages to get a lot in during those six months. As head coach at Wellesley for nearly 25 years, she has helped 19 students qualify for competition at the national level; she’s coached 10 All-Americans and two New England champions; she’s had three undefeated seasons. Her team has won 14 straight Seven Sisters titles (the latest last month). And one year, her team had the highest grade-point average of any Division III swimming and diving team in the country—men’s or women’s.

When you visit her office, nearly every surface has a trophy or plaque or accolade of some kind, but what she’s happiest to show you are pictures of her “kids”—the swimmers and divers she’s coached, plus the pictures they send her of their children. She remembers their names, their nicknames, their events. “I have the best job in the world,” Dix says. “I’ve had some wonderful colleagues, but it’s really the students and the connection that you can make with them.”

Her students feel the same way about her—and that connection doesn’t end with graduation. Dix “continues to be a mentor and friend,” Jacqueline “Jack” Woo ’96 says. “On the most fundamental level, I sensed that Bonnie had an unerring faith in each of her swimmers—that we’d To keep up to date on fully commit to the team, to the sport, and to the Blue swimming and ourselves as growing individuals.” diving season, visit www.wellesleyblue.com/ That faith continues in Dix’s coaching today. sports/wswimdive/index.

When she talks about her team, you’d almost think she was discussing any of the academic courses offered on campus: “They’re really interested in the material and committed to learning,” Dix says. And according to her, there is a lot to learn. “Swimming is a mentally challenging sport,” she says.

“Every time you learn something, there’s something more to learn.”

And Dix is there to teach her students—not just about the mechanics of moving a body through water, but also about life. “One of the things I respected most about Bonnie and learned from her is the importance of every

SPORTS SCOREBOARD

RICHARD HOWARD

The Coach With the Most

single individual on the team,” Bridget Sipher ’95 says. “Bonnie also helped me learn to deal with disappointment.” After a great regular season, Sipher had a disappointing performance at the championship meet one year, but Dix was there to help her put that into perspective.

“My win-loss record can go up and down,” Dix says. “The emphasis at Wellesley is that it’s a quality program, and the students are learning.”

She laughs. “I do like to be successful, I won’t deny that. I am competitive.”

But at the end of the year, Dix derives the most joy from watching her kids perform to the best of their abilities.

“Stephanie Lancsek [Spinner ’92] and Jack Woo, when they got here, they really were not very fast, but they left as All-Americans. That’s exciting,” she says. “Then I’ll have swimmers or divers who don’t achieve at that level, but they perform better than they ever have before. To see them when they hop out of the water. . . . I have the best job in the world. I can’t imagine that anyone has a better job.”

by representing Wellesley at the NCAA Cross Country Championships, where she notched a 25th-place finish for All-America honors.

The CREW TEAM’S varsity-8+ boat finished second at both the Textile River Regatta and the Quinsigamond Snake Regatta. In the annual Head of the Charles Regatta, the Blue took fourth in the Collegiate Eights event, the best finish recorded in the program’s history. In the Collegiate Fours event, the Blue took 12th of 30 entries, securing a bid for the event next year.

FIELD HOCKEY finished the season with an overall record of 5–11. Sarina Sawyer ’11 recorded games of 22 and 21 saves, putting her in the top-20 in Division III, and Emily Lewis ’13 scored five goals against WPI, ranking her second in the country in goals per game.

CROSS COUNTRY took second overall at the 2010 NEWMAC championships, as well as at the annual Seven Sisters Championships. Randelle Boots ’13, the NEWMAC Runner of the Year, capped her season

GOLF finished their fall schedule ranked 10th in the nation, with Kim Eaton ’11 ranked second as an individual. A highlight included a third-place finish at the Ann S. Batchelder Invitational.

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winter 2011

‘One of the things I respected most about Bonnie and learned from her is the importance of every single individual on the team.

Bonnie also helped me learn to deal with disappointment.’ —Bridget Sipher ’95

—JG

Wellesley SOCCER finished the season with an overall record of 7–8–3, and 4–3–2 in conference. The Blue ended the season in the NEWMAC Tournament Quarterfinal against MIT posting a 0–0 tie, but falling in penalty kicks.

TENNIS ended the fall season as NEWMAC runner-up after a win over MIT in the semifinals and a loss to Wheaton in the NEWMAC Championship match. The Blue finished the fall with an in-conference record of 6–1 and an overall record of 8–3.

VOLLEYBALL finished the season with an overall record of 18–9, and a 7–2 mark in conference. The Blue recorded a total of 11 sweeps over the course of season.

WINDOW ON WELLESLEY

THE COLLEGE’S NEW CIO

CollegeRoad

IN NOVEMBER 2010, Ganesan “Ravi” Ravishanker

assumed the role of chief information officer, overseeing Wellesley’s libraries and information technology. Ravi

REPORTS FROM AROUND CAMPUS

comes to Wellesley from Pace University, where he served as CIO and vice-president for

CHANT FOR THE CENTURIES

information technology services.

IN AN EVENT THAT GAVE VOICE to music that hadn’t been heard in several centuries, the Blue Heron

He also had a long career at

Renaissance Choir sang a chant from the Durant Gradual, a 15th-century illuminated manuscript that

Wesleyan University, where his

contains the music of the Latin Mass (picture,

last role was associate vice president for infor-

right). For the concert in November 2010, the

mation technology services. He holds an M.A.

large Italian choir book—which once belonged

in computer science from Queens College of

to Wellesley founder Henry Fowle Durant—was

City University of New York and a doctorate in

very carefully moved from the library’s Special

chemistry from CUNY.

Collections to Houghton Chapel.

To learn more about Special Collections, visit web. wellesley.edu/web/Dept/LT/Collections/SpecColl.

BETTER TIMES AHEAD “IT GOT BETTER FOR ME, I hope that it gets better

for you, and I think it will,” said Claire Grossman ’12 in a student-made video posted on YouTube as part of the “It Gets Better” campaign. The project, which was launched last fall by syndicated columnist Dan

BY THE NUMBERS: SUSTAINABILITY AT WELLESLEY

Savage, aimed at keeping lesbian,

6,000,000

gay, bisexual, and transgender youth from despair and suicide. osted more LGBT adults and other supporters posted than 5,000 videos on YouTube, describing their

30,000,000 GALLONS OF POTABLE WATER SAVED EACH YEAR SINCE 1999

50

THE NUMBER OF OLYMPIC-SIZED SWIMMING POOLS THIS MUCH WATER WOULD FILL EACH YEAR

316,500

POUNDS OF MATERIAL RECYCLED DURING THE FALL SEMESTER, NOT INCLUDING ELECTRONIC WASTE

experiences and offering encouragement.

Watch online at www.youtube. com/watch?v=C6SMVanj6yg.

OVERHEARD

‘We are an active ppart off a maturingg gglobal movement ffor social jjustice, a movement that no longer g sees women as the pproblem, but rather finallyy recognizes g women’s human rights as key to success for all.’

—Susan McGee Bailey ’63, retiring director of the Wellesley Centers for Women, speaking at a gala celebrating the 35th anniversary of the centers

JUSTIN KNIGHT

790

THE NUMBER OF MASSACHUSETTS HOMES THIS REDUCTION COULD POWER FOR ONE YEAR

JUSTIN KNIGHT

KILOWATT-HOURS OF ELECTRICAL CONSUMPTION SAVED

BY THE COLLEGE EACH YEAR SINCE 2004

USING YOUR BEANIES A JUNIOR? A FIRST-YEAR? At Convocation and

other events last fall, you just had to glance at the beanie perched on a student’s head to see if she sported the 1950s style in purple, green, red, or yellow. As students moved back on campus last fall, so did the beanie trend.

winter 2011

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wellesley 15

FocusonFaculty

WRITING

No Stranger To Fiction: A Novel’s Evolution

16 wellesley

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‘Most writers, no matter how much success they have, feel like they’re still in the process of learning how to do it with each book they write.

And that’s why I’m anxious to move on, so I can see whether I’m a different writer.’

—Adam Schwartz

Only at the end of this process did Schwartz realize that the book was autobiographical. “I always thought at some point in my writing career I’d write a novel based on my family,” he says. “But it felt too complicated.” Many writers will get a book or two under their belts before tackling the complexities of their own families, he says. “But after I’d completed it, I realized that I had probably written the book I had thought I would wait until later to write.”

He also never assumed that his first book would turn into a “20-year labor.” But as a long-term nontenure-track faculty member with a full-time teaching load, Schwartz enjoys many benefits—but sabbatical is not among them. When classes are in session, his schedule swells with the concerns of 30 to 40 young writers. “It doesn’t leave much mental space for my own writing,” he says, which happens over the summer and winter breaks.

Now that the first novel is behind him, Schwartz looks forward to the next chapter of his

writing career: “I have ideas for another novel, which I’m hoping will be very different from this one. Part of the reason I’m anxious to move on is that you grow up a lot intellectually in 20 years. I am more clear about certain things that I want to say and a certain way of looking at the world,” he says. “I’m a different person now than I was when I started writing this book.”

Is he a different writer now, too? “Most writers, no matter how much success they have, feel like they’re still in the process of learning how to do it with each book they write. And that’s why I’m anxious to move on, so I can see whether I’m a different writer.” That process, he says, never ends. “And that’s the reason people keep doing it, even though the rewards are so capricious and there are no guarantees,” he says. “It’s the only way I’m able to feel like I’m changing and developing as a person, the only way I feel like I can figure out what I think and believe.”

—JF

RICHARD HOWARD

WITH THE INK OF HIS FIRST NOVEL barely dry, Adam Schwartz is eager to move on. Not that Schwartz, a senior lecturer in the Writing Program, isn’t happy about A Stranger on the Planet and its publication in January. He is. But the book’s characters have been taking up real estate in his brain for the last 20-plus years. Although, he says, “I had no idea that anything I was writing 20 years ago would end up in the novel.” Much of this process has been a departure from his expectations, p in i fact: from what books he would write, about whom, w and a when, to how his writing career would unfold. “Books, c like l life, don’t turn out the way w you expect,” he says.

Sections of the novel were w published as short stories, beginning with “The Gramb mar of Love,” New Yorker in 1988. Loosely Love ” in the N based on Schwartz’s experience as an English teacher in Chicago, the story received good reviews. Schwartz assumed he would follow it up with a collection of short stories, then a novel. The same cast of characters wound up populating his work over the years, and as he explored their lives, the narratives ran far too long for the short-story format. “When I began sending the book out around 2008, I wasn’t sure myself whether to call it a colAt work on your magnum lection of related opus? Take a look at the stories or a novel resources that Wellesley’s Writing Program recommends in stories.” Once to writers and writing teachers: Soho Press bought www.wellesley.edu/Writing/ it as a novel, Program/resources.html.

Schwartz set about sewing the chapters together to read as a whole. The book follows its protagonist, Seth, from adolescence through adulthood, as he tries to distance himself from his family at the same time that he tries to find a more meaningful connection with them.

WINDOW ON WELLESLEY ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

WHEN HIKING on a wilderness pre-

The act created a system of federal

serve, the last thing you expect to see

protection for designated public lands

is a sign warning you to watch out for

throughout the United States. “Instead

live munitions. But that is exactly what

of seeing that as an end point, my

Assistant Professor of Environmental

research takes it as a starting point

Studies Jay Turner encountered in

for a new history of American envi-

the Dolly Sods in the Allegheny Moun-

ronmental politics,” Turner says. His

tains of West Virginia—and it got him

research on wilderness began nearly

thinking.

10 years ago, and his efforts have

“The history of wilderness is

resulted in The Promise of Wilderness:

much more complicated than just set-

A History of Environmental Politics,

ting aside these primeval areas,” he

1964–2009, expected out late next year.

says. “These places have a history

In the book, he posits that wilder-

of human use—sometimes they’ve

ness is at the heart of environmental

been logged earlier, sometimes

politics in the US—more than other

they’ve been bombed earlier—but

issues that have come in and out of

it’s about valuing a restored nature as

the public consciousness over the

much as a wild nature.” It turns out the

RICHARD HOWARD

AH, WILDERNESS!

way for engaging people in the work

years, like population growth, nuclear

‘The history of wilderness is much more complicated than just setting aside these primeval areas.’

Dolly Sods were used as an artillery

safety, and global warming. “Wilder-

—Assistant Professor Jay Turner

and has grown to encompass roughly

range during World War II, and as an

ness and the public lands have been

environmental historian, Turner was

this omnipresent issue at the local

intrigued.

level, at the national level, in the East,

One of the most important things

is an accomplishment, Turner says.

“The idea of wilderness looms so

in the West, among Democrats and

the Wilderness Act did, according to

“We have, as a nation, an interest in

large in the American environmental

Republicans,” Turner says. He uses

Turner, was create a system for

having some areas that are set aside

imagination, but when scholars have

the wilderness movement as a win-

ordinary citizens to get involved in

and protected,” he says. “It’s a mark

studied it, the story of wilderness has

dow into the story of the changes in

effecting change. “The secret to the

of humility as a society to set these

always culminated in the passage of

environmental politics and policy in

Wilderness Act’s success is that it

places aside.”

the Wilderness Act in 1964,” he says.

the US over the last 50 years.

created this really open, democratic

PROFILE OF A MAJOR

of protecting wild lands and advancing environmental reform,” he says.

The Wilderness Act originally protected 9.1 million acres of land 750 areas covering 109.5 million acres—and each new area protected

—JG

MATHEMATICS

IT’S AN EXCITING TIME to be a math major at Wellesley. “It’s really

in mathematics. “It’s helping them make that transition by exposing them

been quite an amazing period. . . . We’ve hired five faculty mem-

to some topics that . . . they won’t necessarily have seen as an under-

bers in five years,” says department chair Frederic Shultz. The new

graduate,” he explains. And there’s also some fun and games—namely,

faces are Ismar Volic, a topologist; Alex Diesl, a ring theorist; Andy

Math Games, an annual event each April where students solve problems

Schultz, a number theorist; Karen Lange, who works in math-

in a quest for “glory, chocolate, and cash prizes.”

ematical logic; and Oscar Fernandez, who studies geometric mechanics.

There’s been a recent surge in interest in mathematics courses, too.

The names of those specialties might make the average person’s

“We’re really having a boom. The enrollments in general in the department

head spin, but for a math major, it’s a dream come true. “[Wellesley is]

are up 20 percent in the last five years,” says Shultz. Still, it’s a small,

doing pretty complete hiring in an environment where a lot of places

intimate department, which is a draw for many math majors. “You really

weren’t. And so we really had a tremendously strong pool of applicants

get to know the other majors and the faculty,” says Jane Rieck ’11. In

and very strong people that we were able to hire,” says Shultz.

fact, it’s the personal touch that led Rieck to be a major. “The first math

One of the benefits of having so many new faculty members is the

professor I had at Wellesley pulled me aside one day and suggested I

ideas that come with them. For example, the department has instituted

be a math major. This was my first semester here, so naturally I thought

a voluntary seminar series where students give talks on subjects that

he was crazy, but I kept the idea in the back of my mind and just kept

interest them. Another new program

taking more math classes,” she says. Turns out the professor wasn’t so

is a summer “boot camp” for stu-

crazy: Rieck is planning on heading to graduate school in mathematics.

dents going on to graduate school

—LS

For a sample Math Games question, visit www.wellesley.edu/ Math/activities_mathgames.html.

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ShelfLife REVIEWS OF BOOKS BY WELLESLEY AUTHORS

Behind the Wallpaper HELEN LEFKOWITZ HOROWITZ ’63

WILD UNREST IS A BIOGRAPHY of the private life beautiful but sporadically educated; she earned of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, before she became money teaching art and painting stationery. She a feminist theorist. From her birth in 1860 to her was prone to bouts of adolescent “blues,” but it second marriage in 1900, it chronicles the causes of wasn’t until artist Walter Stetson’s courtship that her mental breakdown and describes the treatment she suffered more debilitating breakdowns. At 23, of hysteria in women in late 19th-century AmerGilman aspired to be a writer or a reformer. He ica. Mining Gilman’s extensive journals, corredismissed her ambitions for “independence and spondence, and reading, and those of her intimate achievement,” demanded to be the center of her friends, Horowitz tracks the inner and outer life of attention, and aroused her physical passion. her subject. She lacks only a record of those days Marriage and intercourse or an active life of Gilman was too distracted or depressed to write, ideas and engagement was the either/or conunincluding the month in 1887 when she was treated drum imposed on middle-class white women by

by Physician S. Weir Mitchell, the social mores and scientific which became the basis of her Marriage and intercourse or theories of the era. Reading, 1892 horror story, “The Yellow writing, indeed thinking could an active life of ideas and Wall-Paper,” about a young injurious to fragile female engagement was the either/or be mother’s descent into madness. health and undermine womconundrum imposed on A distinguished professor en’s ability to be dutiful wives emerita of history at Smith, middle-class white women and mothers. Gilman believed author of a biography of Bryn she could expand her “individby the social mores and Mawr’s M. Carey Thomas and strength and . . . personal scientific theories of the era. ual of Alma Mater, about women’s power of character, myself as a colleges, Helen Lefkowitz self” only if she stayed single.

Horowitz ’63 is steeped in “Since I have been with you I this field and era. She writes have lost in great measure that cogently about psychology strong self-confidence which and literature and succeeds in was my greatest happiness,” she treating all the players sympawrote to Stetson. thetically, rather than stereoGilman worried that the typically. “confinement [and] restricting Gilman’s parents’ divorce possession” of marriage would left her impoverished in destroy her love for him. She Providence, R.I. Described as hoped they might find a com“strong, vivacious,” she was promise between a traditional

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JULIE S. GRAHAM

Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” Oxford, New York 251 pages, $24.95

marriage and celibacy. She offered to be his mistress or to marry but maintain separate households except for sex. Stetson was shocked by her proposals, which he denigrated as selfish and immoral. After bouts of paralyzing headaches and inactivity, Gilman eventually embraced Stetson’s romantic vision.

They married in 1884 and had a daughter in 1885, before Gilman suffered a recurrence of nervous prostration. Unable to care for the baby, she finally spent six months in Pasadena, Calif., in the stimulating, cosseting company of Grace Channing.

The separation restored Gilman’s equilibrium, but she “fell back into her misery” when she returned to the bonds of matrimony and motherhood. In 1887, terrified that she suffered “brain disease,” Gilman contacted Mitchell. He prescribed a regimen of isolation and inactivity, prohibiting reading or writing.

Gilman was not cured; she feared insanity.

She followed Mitchell’s prescription to get more exercise, so she could carry out her domestic duties. Mitchell valued physical activity to counter the nervousness that resulted from women being “house-caged,” but he did not encourage her literary pursuits. By August 1887, Gilman “decided to cast off Dr. Mitchell . . . and do exactly as I pleased.” Gilman took her daughter and returned to California to collaborate with Channing. She believed her well-being depended on physical separation from Stetson and creative stimulation.

In that environment, she crafted her Gothic tale of madness brought on most likely, as in her case, by postpartum depression, anxiety, financial stress, and the confinement of marriage. In her short story, the protagonist’s husband is also her doctor and jailer.

Bibliofiles

Horowitz’s analysis of 19th-century attitudes about women’s roles, marriage, and mental health is important because they were so pervasive, powerful, destructive, and resonant. It suggests parallels to the “cult of true womanhood” in the 1830s and the lives of the women from the 1950s described

by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. How did women resist the pressure to fit into confining definitions of appropriate behavior? No wonder Gilman’s economic opus recommended community kitchens and child care, to free women to define their own roles, find rooms of their own, and a balance between affection and achievement.

—Elisabeth Griffith ’69 Griffith is the author of In Her Own Right, a biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and is working on a history of the ERA. She recently retired after 22 years as head of the Madeira School in McLean, Va.

NORA’S MEMORIES

Nora Ephron’s (’62) last

“I didn’t expect either

book, I Feel Bad About My

of my parents to turn up at

Neck, was full of wry self-

my graduation, but a few

deprecating anecdotes about

days before it, my mother

aging. Suffice it to say she

. . . arrived in all her stylish

and Bette Davis have come

glory. She wore her suit, and

to the same conclusion,

her three-inch heels, and her

albeit in different decades:

drunk, and somehow his

clip-on earrings that matched

“Old age ain’t for sissies.”

alcoholism was more benign.

her brooch. She slept in the

Ephron’s current collection

“By the time I went off

dormitory, in the room next to

of musings, I Remember

to Wellesley, their movie

mine, for two nights. I lay in

Nothing, proves she’s still

work had dried up, but some-

my bed and listened through

one of the best cranky writers

how they were sober enough

the paper-thin wall to her

around—and she’s not a very

in the daytime to collaborate;

drunken mutterings. I was ter-

good liar. Ephron remembers

they wrote a successful play

rified that she’d burst from her

a lot—from her two divorces

called Take Her, She’s Mine,

room into the halls of Tower

to her enduring love for

about a Southern California

Court and mortify me in front

journalism—despite her best

family whose daughter goes

of my classmates, that she’d

efforts to forget some of it.

off to an eastern women’s

stagger down the hall bang-

Such as her thoughts on her

college. It quoted the let-

ing and screaming, and my

Back From the Brink

mother’s alcoholism, which

ters I’d written from college,

friends would learn the truth.

haunted her for years:

and it opened on Broadway

JACQUELINE BRIGGS MARTIN ’66

an alcoholic when I was

starring Art Carney as the

The Chiru of High Tibet Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, Boston 40 pages, $17.99

fifteen. . . . Around midnight

father and Elizabeth Ashley

original narrative; I was a

she would come flying out of

as the daughter. Everyone

true believer. My mother

her bedroom, banging and

at Wellesley knew about it

was a goddess.

screaming and terrorizing us

and about my remarkable

all. My father drank too, but

mother, the writer who could

he was a sloppy, sentimental

do everything.

trekked, with the support of Wellesley’s Mary Elvira Stevens Traveling Fellowship, to Tibet’s remote Chang Tang Reserve, to see firsthand the home of the chiru.

In this children’s book, she tells the true story of these shy, deerlike animals, who managed to survive in the reserve, despite its hostile climate and sparse vegetation, mainly because of m ttheir fine wool, ccalled shahtoosh.

But when luxuriB oous shawls made oof shahtoosh bbecame the musthave accessory for h wealthy women w tthe world over, tthe chiru were sslaughtered nearly tto extinction.

With illustrations W Wingerter, Martin reco recounts the journey

by Linda Wingerter of four conservationists who tracked the chiru to the then-unknown calving ground so it could be protected from the threat of poachers.

—Jennifer Flint JACQUELINE BRIGGS MARTIN

“My mother became

during my senior year,

“But what was the truth?

“I was invested in the

“But my mother was an alcoholic.”

—Karen Grigsby Bates ’73

FreshInk Ruth Kramer Baden ’54—East of the Moon, Ibbetson Street Press, Somerville, Mass.

Sheila Connolly ’72—Fundraising the Dead, Berkley Books, New York

Mary Jane Beaufrance ’88—The River, Little Brown Books for Young Readers, Boston

Susan Greenhalgh ’72—Cultivating Global Citizens: Population in the Rise of China, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

R. Stephanie Bruno ’74—New Orleans Streets: A Walker’s Guide to Neighborhood Architecture, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, La. Liza Campbell ’02—The Dissemblers, The Permanent Press, Sag Harbor, N.Y. Michelle Caruso-Cabrera ’91—You Know I’m Right: More Prosperity, Less Government, Threshold Editions, New York Krista Comer ’88—Surfer Girls in the New World Order, Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., and London

Margaret Hayes Hollister ’39—Inheriting China: A Memoir, Eastern Branch Press, Washington, D.C. Nannerl Overholser Keohane ’61—Thinking about Leadership, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. Jacqueline Briggs Martin ’66 and Linda Wingerter—The Chiru of High Tibet, Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, Boston (Continued on page 73)

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FIRST PERSON OPINION

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”: A Personal Journey to Activism

O

By Beth F. Coye ’59

I awoke at 5:45 a.m. with great anticipation, knowing the Senate would take a cloture vote on repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT). An hour later, I listened to my senator, Ron Wyden, D-Ore., speak with great passion from the Senate floor, telling his colleagues, “I don’t care who you love . . . if you love your country enough to risk your life, you shouldn’t have to hide who you are.” After many more speakers pro and con, a vote to end debate took place. We won, with 63 voting in favor of cloture.

After the cloture vote, Senator Wyden phoned me. The call was emotional for both of us. I cried. He told me how important repeal was to him and to all Americans. Several friends and I watched the final vote (65–31, with eight Republicans voting “yes”), filled champagne glasses in our hands, tears streaming. For me and others in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community, as well as for our straight allies, it was the culmination of many years of work.

Our time had come!

N SATURDAY, DEC. 18, 2010,

LAUNCHING A NAVY CAREER My own path to becoming an activist for military minorities has been rocky, filled with personal challenges. The daughter of a career naval officer (my father) and a liberal-minded New Englander (my mother), I decided to join the Navy in 1960. My wise mother counseled, “You’re too independent to become a career naval officer without incurring a great deal of personal angst.” As usual, she was Beth F. Coye ’59 lives in Ashland, Ore. She is the publisher and lead author of My Navy Too (a creative memoir, written with six others including Esther Bain Bell ’59 and Kitty Riley Clark ’59) and editor of We Are Family Too (available at tinyurl.com/2579qag). Over the years, she has been grateful for the liberal values and critical thinking encouraged within the Wellesley community and for her classmates—especially Esther Bell, her companion of more than 30 years.

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right. She knew her daughter, who more often than not spoke and acted upon her liberal values; she knew the Navy to be conservative by nature. I listened, but decided to follow my dream of becoming a WAVE anyway.

Upon graduation as an ensign, I fell in love with the Navy—and with another officer, a woman. The Navy was just right; so too was the officer, who became my partner for several years and remains a best friend. Although I fought against it, falling in love with a woman was surprisingly natural. Being as clueless about homosexuality as most Americans were in the 1960s, I certainly did not give much thought to self-identifying as a “queer,” as my mother referred to homosexuals back then.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, I was assigned to a demanding job at the Naval War College, as well as an after-hours project that would help rectify the lack of opportunities offered to Navy women. I had been tapped by the chief of naval personnel to author a study that would become a benchmark regarding the status of military women and a conceptual framework for opening up military women’s opportunities, as directed by the secretary of defense.

Being an outspoken feminist was unacceptable behavior to most members of our Navy, both male and female. Something about speaking up for those women who were more silent, more junior, more threatened, and less cerebral, motivated me to take to the library and analyze and present a solid case to the admirals for Navy women’s equality. Wellesley’s motto had kicked in: Non ministrari sed ministrare.

Besides, condoning or forgiving the Navy’s unjust personnel policies toward its women was not my style.

COMMANDAND A TURNING POINT The goal of every line officer is to become a commanding officer. Despite my reputation as a vocal “feminist,” my career continued to flourish and on March 17, 1977, I took command of a new shore activity (women were just beginning to be allowed to serve at sea). What a thrilling day! The ceremony inside the flag-decorated

PHOTOS COURTESY OF BETH F. COYE ’59. PHOTO COLLAGE BY F.CO

To be one of o the Navy’s first women w commandingg officers was, and conttinues to be, a great hon nor. But my sexual orieentation kept obstructin ng my job satisfaction, m my hopes, and dreaams.

auditorium went smoothly, my proud parents, family, and friends beamed, as the troops stood tall in their dress whites.

To be one of the Navy’s first women commanding officers was, and continues to be, a great honor. But my sexual orientation kept obstructing my job satisfaction, my hopes, and dreams. During that 2½-year command tour, I discharged at least eight young, competent men and women “for cause of homosexuality.” Each discharge tore at my heart.

Almost two years into the assignment, a stunning event occurred. I learned that my commander, suspicious of my living with two other women, wished to force me out of command. He put a tail on me for several weeks to prove his suspicion. Fear and a sense of betrayal bubbled within me. Pure outrage toward my boss, the

Navy, and my country roiled below the surface. After this breach of trust, the next discharge of two young lesbians was a pivotal turning point.

I had come out to my parents the year before. I told my dad, an admiral, that I was contemplating early resignation. Even knowing my sexual orientation, he counseled me to stay in the Navy.

“You’ll make captain, Beth, and who knows, perhaps be our first lady admiral.” To make captain would fulfill a long-held goal for my naval career. My assignment officer told me he was sending me to the Pentagon to a captain’s billet, and he expected me to be selected for promotion at the next selection board.

But my integrity, my belief in providing justice for myself and other gays who simply wished to serve our country with honor,

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won out over serving my beloved Navy, which rigidly enforced senseless regulations about being gay. I could no longer live the lie of being a closeted lesbian naval officer. I retired, with regret, in 1980.

OUTRAGE REKINDLED I joined the efforts to repeal DADT in the mid-1990s and quickly witnessed a clash in political values playing out through our often-messy democratic process. A key to understanding any law or policy starts with the core values that its stakeholders uphold. In the case of DADT, security, freedom, and equality were the primary values behind the arguments for and against gays serving openly in the military.

Opponents raised the specter that repeal would seriously damage morale and unit cohesion, thereby impacting the military’s ability to accomplish its mission, especially within combat units. And a number of very conservative religious groups feared that repeal would open the floodgates of “homosexual activity” in the military and would force

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their chaplains to make difficult choices about whether and how they would serve. Proponents believed that the military would be stronger by not requiring gays to hide and lie, and also that the DADT law violated constitutional rights, including privacy, freedom of speech, and due process.

Over the years the numbers of advocates of repeal grew exponentially, with 70 percent of Americans with diverse backgrounds ultimately in favor of repeal.

In 2006, while I was lobbying the Congress for DADT repeal with colleagues from the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN), Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., spoke powerfully about gays in the military. Referring to Congress, she raised the question, “Who do they think they are? Who are they to draw the line? . . . I am outraged . . . that the number of gay discharges under ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ goes up or down according to the needs of the services. The services are being crassly pragmatic. They are using you but don’t give you your basic rights.”

Norton concluded her remarks to our group by saying, “I salute

FIRST PERSON

My integrity, my belief in providing justice for myself and other gays who simply wished to serve our country with honor, won out over serving my beloved Navy. . . .

I could no longer live the lie of being a closeted lesbian naval officer. I retired, with regret, in 1980.

you, my friends, for stepping up and reclaiming your human rights.” She then saluted us and departed. Her words, her forceful stance, rekindled my outrage that my military had maintained this unjust policy since 1778, and my country then reinforced the policy by legislating the DADT law in the late 20th century. (In 1778, Lt. Gotthold Frederick Enslin was discharged for cause of homosexuality with approval of Gen. George Washington.)

At the 2007 SLDN Lobby Day, one of the strongest proponents in our team’s deliberations with congressional members was a University of Vermont law student and Iraqi war veteran—a straight former Marine staff sergeant who had supervised and fought with gays. He shared that he had come off an Iowa farm as a straight, white “bigot.” Once in the Marine Corps, he had learned to trust and respect men and women of diverse backgrounds, including gay Marines who were some of his best fighters. He asked that Congress give the same civil rights that he and his straight Marines enjoyed to his gay buddies—now.

A LIFE STORY MADE PUBLIC Political cries to repeal DADT began to increase early in 2010.

Senior military officers, such as the commandant of the Marine Corps and a retired Air Force chief of staff, went public against repeal. I felt the urge to fight back, to defend those 65,000 or more LGB service members who were serving in silence and in fear of losing their careers. When the website www.military.com published my story (“Lesbian Vet Decries Living a Lie”), along with many online comments from readers, I flinched. But my internalized values as instilled by my parents, Wellesley, my former shipmates, and my Unitarian Universalist friends helped me to withstand the less-thancomplimentary comments that attended the article.

When opponents of justice and equality for the LGBT community became rancorous, I remembered what I learned from the ’70s and feminism: The turtle never gets ahead without sticking her neck out. I also would reread John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, or Thomas Paine’s On Common Sense, and other political thinkers whom I first encountered at Wellesley.

I learned many years ago the pen can be mightier than the sword, though the writer must be prepared to receive wounds just as soldiers and sailors do. Indeed, one endures a form of combat in responding to the attacks to justice, freedom, and equality on radio and television, in the halls of Congress or in cyberspace. Ironically,

my freshman English professor, Miss Helen Storm Corsa, who was horrified by the quality of my compositions, would be surprised that I chose to take up the pen.

2010: A ROLLERCOASTER YEAR FOR REPEAL In early spring 2010, votes for or against repeal in the House of Representatives were about to be counted, and a Pentagon study group on military gays was under way. (It ultimately reported that a majority of troops were comfortable with repealing the legislation.) As a member of the Military Outreach Committee, a group of LGB veterans, I originated the idea of sending letters to key officials at the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, and the White House from LGB veterans. As the letters streamed across my monitor, I held back tears of sadness, anger, and outrage that our military had lost the service of these outstanding individuals. To read the letters from women who had graduated from West Point was particularly poignant and bittersweet, for I had worked in the ’70s to allow them to become cadets. This book of letters, We Are Family Too, written by 37 LGB veterans from all services, is an eloquent, powerful statement of why DADT needed to be repealed. The Outreach Committee made certain the package landed on the desks of many influential politicomilitary people. Our voices were heard.

The congressional votes in both chambers favored repeal.

With the votes to repeal DADT, our politico-military leaders are taking deliberate steps toward implementation of a new era for the LGB military community. There may be a few bumps in the road, for that’s the nature of implementing a civil-rights program.

The program, which will transform how military members view their LGB peers, subordinates, and seniors, will be similar to the integration of African-Americans and women into our armed forces. It will be significant, bringing about more positive attitudes and behaviors toward the LGBT community in our country.

When the president signed the bill on Dec. 22, 2010, a wrongful societal mandate was finally dismantled, crumbling against democratic forces. I am proud of us Americans, gay and straight, who worked to bring equality and justice to the lives of LGB military members. These members will soon no longer be required to serve in silence, with an ongoing sense of non-acceptance by their military family, as well as their country. Thank you!

And now I am able to close the chapter of 50 years of my life and truly feel that it’s my Navy too!

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At one point or another, we all hit rough patches: We may trip, fall, and fail—or even just perceive that we haven’t lived up to expectations. Yet the Wellesley culture, with its lofty models of success, can discourage discussion about the ways we come up short. Join us in starting the conversation about failure, what it is, and what we can learn from it.

When Life Doesn’t Measure Up

By Karen Grigsby Bates ’73

I

in the depths of winter. Alumnae Hall is completely dark, packed with an expectant, hushed audience.

Silently, the doors at the back of the hall are pulled open, and a sliver of light from the foyer is the only illumination as twin lines of young women slowly glide down the aisles. Each holds a single white candle. And they are all singing a cappella, softly at first, then louder, as they approach the stage: T’S A FEBRUARY EVENING,

I am sitting here wanting memories to teach me To see the beauty in the world through my own eyes. . . . . . . I think on the things that made me grow into a being full of pride.

I think on these things, for they are true.

Every recent Alumnae Achievement Awards ceremony begins this way, with the Blue Notes’ version of “Wanting Memories.” For alumnae in the

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audience, it can evoke quick tears and a complicated mix of emotions: “How beautiful this is!” “How proud I am of these women, of this place!” But also: “How little I’ve accomplished compared to the awardees tonight!”

The Alumnae Achievement Award is Wellesley’s highest honor, and this gorgeous, moving ceremony, in which the College salutes the accomplishments of women who have changed the world through their various works, is an exuberant celebration of those alumnae and this place that gave them wings.

It is an occasion for joy, but also for a little despair for some of us: Wellesley has been the springboard for so many astonishingly successful women, the publicity of their work has been so widespread, many of us consider ourselves slackers if we aren’t among them.

There’s even an informal name for it: the I’m-Not-Hillary Syndrome. It means if we’re not Hillary (or Madeleine, or fill-in-the-name here), we may believe that we are, ipso facto, a failure.

Illustration by Brian Cronin

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wellesley 25

On the surface, that’s almost laughable—why should the achievements of an elite few make the very real accomplishments of the many seem insignificant? But in an environment such as Wellesley’s, where young women have had to achieve so much even to be accepted to the College, it shouldn’t be surprising that their ambitions continue to grow with each year. Lofty goals are encouraged; the presence on campus of women—faculty, alumnae, and visitors—who have achieved much fuels the intent of that upward trajectory. As one young alumna pointed out, you don’t hear failure discussed much on campus; it’s as if even talking about it could make it actually happen.

A

few months back, the magazine invited alumnae to share their thoughts on failure with the Wellesley community at large—what it is, how it has affected our lives, what it means to us personally. More than 100 alumnae responded with thoughtfulness, often wry humor, sometimes sadness, and even exhilaration, that the editors thought the best way to share those musings was to give you a sampling of the e-mails we received.

Some alumnae considered themselves maybe not failures, but underachievers, because they “hadn’t done anything” with their degrees. They had jobs, but they didn’t run their companies. They didn’t work outside the home for pay but had raised children and volunteered in their communities. To the outside world, they have enviable lives—but to themselves, they’re not household names. (“Only at a place like this would any of that be considered failure,” an alum friend said drily.)

There were stories from people who are or have been in real dire straits, though—e-mails about bankruptcy, about grappling with substance abuse, about severe and chronic health problems that have interrupted careers or prevented the simple enjoyment of life. And lots of stories of mourned marriages that had collapsed or slowly unraveled.

Many who responded have ‘I think there is not one transcended their particular model of success. I think challenges and are philosophical if there is one place that about failure, but others are still struggling to find solutions. “I needs to teach that it’s hope you will resist the temptaOK to fail, it is schools.’ tion to make it seem that —Kathy Flaherty ’88 everything comes out right in the end,” one alumna wrote.

For some of us, even the notion of contemplating failure can be problematic. A class officer wrote to tell us her 30th reunion was approaching and worried that the very idea of discussing failure before that might discourage some alumnae from attending. Others doubted that failure could be discussed fully among alumnae: It’s almost as if, even in failure, there is a Wellesley Way. (Does one always have to learn something from it? Can’t one just . . . fail?)

The worried class president does have a point: No classes can boast anything close to complete attendance at reunion. Besides the last-minute emergencies and illnesses, and work and family commitments, there are

Karen Grigsby Bates ’73 is a Los Angeles-based correspondent for NPR News. She’s well acquainted with failure but hasn’t allowed it to become her roommate, or keep her away from class reunions.

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always women who decline to come because they’re afraid they’ll be measured and found lacking. (Sad irony: We are often our own worst critics.) So if you haven’t ever been to a reunion because you feel as if you’ll be the only one who hasn’t made a medical breakthrough, interviewed a head of state—or become one—made $1 billion while raising four children, or received an Oscar nomination, you’re not alone.

Many of our correspondents contemplated careers that had been planned, then derailed, by change of heart, or various life circumstances.

The majority realized that not becoming a doctor, lawyer, tenured professor, or M.B.A. didn’t ruin their lives—but in many cases, it changed the life plans they’d counted on being able to execute.

D

anni Duggan ’94 writes that she was planning to become a lawyer; she worked as a paralegal for what was supposed to be a couple of years before law school— except she never went. Duggan says overall, life is good: “I have a loving home and a wonderful husband. I love my friends, my new home, now in Portland, Ore., my hobbies, my mostly full and happy life.” She’s spent years volunteering as part of a wildlife-rescue effort: “I am part of a network of people who save lives every day, or help to end suffering when a life cannot be saved.” And she gets a lift every time she sees something she’s saved fly or dash away: “Each time, I think to myself, ‘I helped make that possible.’”

Despite that, the arrival of Wellesley magazine in her mailbox makes Duggan clutch a little. “When I start comparing my life with some of Wellesley’s amazing alums,” she says, “I remember that I have not written a novel; I have not traveled the world; I have not attended law school or any other degree program post-Wellesley. I am not rich. I am not famous. I have invented nothing. In sum, I am not a woman to be featured in the magazine.

I’m just a woman living her life, scraping by and paying her bills….”

Kathy Flaherty ’88, a class secretary who e-mailed with the story of her battle with bipolar disorder since her days in law school, says she wishes more classmates would share their stories of struggle. “I cannot tell you how many times classmates say they don’t want to share their story because it is not a story of great success at something,” she writes. “I think there is not one model of success. I think if there is one place that needs to teach that it’s OK to fail, it is schools.”

Perhaps, especially, women’s schools. Alice Umans Solomon CE/DS ’84 says that for a decade after she graduated at age 50, she searched for templates that would meet her needs as an older woman, and found the pickings woefully slim.

“My crowd, those who attended high school and college in the late ’40s, ’50s, and early ’60s were, and are, a relatively sane, stable group,” she writes.

“As a result, we were not noteworthy enough to be studied, written about, criticized, or even celebrated very much.” She could not find a job after she finished at Wellesley—she saw her age as a likely factor—and says she had to “resort to anything that would pay the rent.” By 1994, Solomon was miserable in a retail job. She considered herself a failure, dismissed because of her age.

But that dismissal and some wise counsel from the College’s career office helped Solomon see that she might have talents that younger, allegedly more employable, women didn’t: She understood that her age demographic had economic clout and began writing a newspaper column addressing issues relevant to her contemporaries. Eventually the column became syndicated. It begat two books, two radio shows, and a lot of public speaking. “Failure for me turned out to be a good thing, indeed,” Solomon notes.

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or many alumnae, failure was the catalyst to changes that may have saved lives—theirs or others’. More than a few wrote to say they’d conquered problems with drinking and/or substance abuse, and that this victory was more significant and cherished than an advanced degree could be.

A member of the class of ’84 spoke candidly about her struggles with alcohol. We don’t name her here because, as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, she’s required to refrain from identifying herself in the press and other media. She wrote: “I drank for eight years. Half of my drinking occurred while at Wellesley. People have asked me over these 24 years if I regret not going to med school, and the answer is an emphatic, ‘No!’ I might not be alive today had I kept on drinking and drugging. When I first stopped drinking in 1986, I thought I was deprived of something. A turning point in my early sobriety occurred when I went ‘Is it my dream to work from feeling deprived to feeling here? No. Is it my dream as if I had been given a gift. Each to live here? Yes. day, I am given the chance to make something of my life.”

Compromise is not failure.

The ’84 alumna believes Learning to live with that that concentrating on selfis a tall hill to climb, and renewal came at the cost of a forsaking the expectations potentially prestigious career, one that would have been in of others is Everest.’ sync with the expectations —Mary Bryan ’95 inherent in a Wellesley education. But she has no regrets: “Sometimes I tell people that I went to the same school as a slew of famous women: Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Ali McGraw, Cokie Roberts, Diane Sawyer, Madeleine Albright, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and me.

Maybe in comparison with them I failed, but I chose life, and that has made all the difference to me and my loved ones.”

An alumna from the 1970s, who requests anonymity at the advice of an attorney, finally walked away from a husband who had abused her, psychologically and physically, for years. Leaving the marriage, which required many years in court, made her put her own goals—she’s an artist—on hold. “I am,” she writes, “professionally 20 years behind where I thought I would be in my 50s.” Some would consider that failure. But the alumna’s decision to file for divorce allowed her children to be raised in an abuse-free environment. Her three daughters are all thriving adults. And all are dedicated, she says proudly, “to protect, empower, and heal others.”

The alumna notes that she doesn’t possess “that long list of awards, exhibits, memberships, or professional and artistic successes that I had once hoped I might have at this point in my life.” But she says that “failure” is greatly outstripped by something else far more important: “I have reclaimed my own spirit, and I am reconnecting with the woman I was at Wellesley, albeit older and wiser.”

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he financial reversals of the past few years have meant that many young alumnae have had to struggle to establish or maintain careers. In Northeast Harbor, Maine, sailor Mary Bryan ’95 works for “a company that builds worldclass sailing yachts,” but since the economy crashed, she’s a jack-of-all-trades in order to keep her job and live in a place that she loves. Now, she not only answers phones, but scrubs toilets

at the company “and anything else that is no longer being hired out.” All to remain employed. Just as for Danni Duggan, the quarterly receipt of Wellesley magazine leaves Bryan comparing what she reads with what she’s doing to survive, and “that can feel like failure.” She says, “Is it my dream to work here?

No. Is it my dream to live here? Yes. Compromise is not failure. Learning to live with that is a tall hill to climb, and forsaking the expectations of others is Everest.”

With a national divorce rate hovering at 50 percent, according to some sources, it’s not surprising that many of the “failure” e-mails we got were from women whose marriages ended. But many, like Barbara Furne Simmons ’69, spoke of finding themselves after losing their marriages.

“I do see my divorce not as a failure, but as a ‘call’ for me to learn to navigate my world as a parent, as a mother, as a worker, and as a person with faith in myself and in others who would figure in my life. Some years of counseling, of working, of extended family networks, of discovering old talents that have lain buried, have all helped me become more of the person I think I was hoping to become, and indeed was probably destined to become.” And, a happy coda: “I have remarried—at age 62!”

Outward success, especially for public figures or people who are prominent in their fields, is easy to measure: First Woman to . . . , Youngest This or That, Most Powerful Woman (in business, medicine, law, politics, entertainment, you name it) are accomplishments that are clearly visible and measurable. But there are no award ceremonies for alumnae who are raising happy, healthy, centered children, or who are enjoying a long and loving partnership, or who are keeping the local food pantry running. Women who struggle through the chronic, perhaps life-threatening illness of a child, spouse, or parent should receive notice and medals. So should women who are themselves grappling with disabling or life-threatening diseases, but insist on moving forward nonetheless.

Obviously, the paradigm of what success is needs to be broadened, but that’s a job we have to do ourselves. Talking openly about our failures, and sharing them with others, is one way to allow undergraduates and young alumnae to see that failure is a part of life, and that everyone (even Hillary, even Madeleine) experiences it, and that many, instead of being flattened by it, go on to not only survive but thrive. But who would know that if we don’t start sharing those stories?

While many have cited this magazine as the source for their angst about not having achieved enough, it can also be used to share how we deal with failure, and how we can recover from it.

“I often wonder about the classmates we never hear from,” e-mails Victoria Foote-Blackman ’76. “Are they so happy and busy they have no time for their alma mater, or do they feel likee failures—even if they have been good people, good wives, good mothers?

Or good members of the Want to join the conversations? community? We always seem Visit an online discussion group about to hear from those who are failure and perceived failures at www. doing brilliantly in their careers, s, wellesley.edu/Alum/perceptions. If you or retiring at a moment when wish to speak with the ’84 graduate some of us have had to go backk about recovery from alcoholism may e-mail to work and expect to work magazine@alum.wellesley.edu, and the until we keel over. . . .” editor will put you in touch with her.

But maybe what we don’t know is what failures happened to those women before they became household names that eventually brought them to the point of celebration. And until we hear those stories, too, we can’t begin to make new templates for success that acknowledge the inclusion of failure as part of a life well-lived.

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By Marcy Barack Black ’71 Portraits by Richard Howard

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Multiple generations of Wellesley families offer a unique view on the way student experiences and the College itself have evolved through the decades.

COLLEGE HALL PHOTO COURTESY OF WELLESLEY COLLEGE ARCHIVES

The More Things Change

AT EACH COMMENCEMENT SINCE 1879, Wellesley

College has sent her daughters out into the world. Sometimes,

Opposite: College Hall, which housed classrooms, libraries, a chapel, and dormitory space early in Wellesley’s history. It was destroyed by fire in 1914.

Above: The Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center, which opened in 2005.

those alumnae send their own daughters and granddaughters back to Wellesley, a place that made an important difference in their lives. There is a continuity to their college experiences—lively debates with professors, secrets shared with roommates, energetic walks around Lake Waban, and quiet study in the library.

But today’s students attend a different Wellesley than previous generations. Wellesley women have seen Tower Court rise from the ashes of College Hall, class trees take root and flourish, and dining halls disappear.

And the student body has evolved as society offers more opportunities to educated women. In her day, Barbara Olson Hodgkins ’47 says, “We had no cars, no TV, no internet, no birth control, no abortion, no cell phones.

We didn’t talk about sex, religion, social inequality, race, gender discrimination.” That’s a far cry from the experience of her granddaughter, Perry Hodgkins ’11, who attends Wellesley at a time when students can practice Buddhist meditation in the Chapel, take a class on gender studies or Shakespeare, and finish the day by dancing at an MIT party or a Girl Talk concert.

In order to appreciate how Wellesley has changed, and how it has stayed the same, we talked to three generations of Wellesley women: four grandmothers, four mothers and three aunts, one sister, and eight current students. They provided eyewitness testimony to enduring traditions, and changes that reflect those in the greater world beyond Lake Waban.

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The Parkes’ Place At Wellesley was “kind of like an arranged marriage” for Cecily Parke Sesler ’56. Her mother, Harriet Doyle Parke, graduated in 1920. During Harriet’s time on campus, the revered author of “America, the Beautiful,” Katharine Lee Bates, was teaching, and Mayling Soong ’17, later Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, was attending classes. Parke’s classmates were among the first to attend classes in what is now Wellesley’s oldest academic building, Founders, which opened in 1919.

Listen to Cecily’s memories of her mother: “Mom loved acting in the dramatic presentations, loved attending tea dances on Saturday afternoons at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, sledding down Norumbega Hill [now the site of the Academic Quad], eating Wellesley fudge cake at the [Wellesley] Inn, and crewing for Wellesley.” In her own time, Cecily recalls going on blind dates with boys who had cars just to get into the city, and witnessing lavish Tree Day pageants with costumes and skits, presided over by the Tree Day mistress and her court.

By the time Cecily’s daughter, Liz Sesler-Beckman ’85, arrived at Wellesley in the 1980s, classes still planted trees, but Tree Day festivities had disappeared. Liz helped found the Prism Jazz group and was hired to play piano for Tau Zeta Epsilon and Zeta Alpha parties. In comparison to the usually casual dorm mixers of her day, she recalls that these society soirées seemed like an odd throwback to the ’50s, with guys in tuxes and girls in black cocktail dresses.

Fourth-generation Wellesley student Jennifer Parke Sesler ’11 plays alto sax in the same jazz group her aunt Liz founded, since ATTENDING WELLESLEY

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The Wellesley generations of Jennifer Parke Sesler ’11 (above): Harriet Doyle Parke ’20, Cecily Parke Sesler ’56, Liz Sesler-Beckman ’85

redubbed Wellesley BlueJazz. Rather than heading downtown for tea dances like her great-grandmother, Jennifer says students boogie at parties like Remix, an event so big it takes place in the Davis parking garage.

But the biggest change may be in attitudes. “More than trying to find our own path,” Cecily says her ’50s classmates “did

what people expected of us.” Fifty-five years later, Jennifer says Wellesley “opened my mind and opened my eyes to accepting a lot of people.” From meeting gay teammates in the rugby club to attending the Dyke Ball with its come-as-you-are attitude, Jennifer has found that Wellesley allows women to define themselves however they wish.

‘When I was in college, I didn’t study much.

I was very young, and I fooled around a lot and didn’t really apply myself. . . . Lily is a real scholar. Lily works really hard.’

—Annie Spader Byerly ’77

Lily Byerly ’12 and her mother, Annie Spader Byerly ’77

Psychology and a Little Frivolity ACADEMICS AT WELLESLEY have always been challenging. Over the years, more courses have been offered in more majors. Annie Spader Byerly ’77 and her daughter Lily Byerly ’12 both chose to major in psychology.

In Annie’s day, all students had to take three courses from each of three general academic areas. Those distribution requirements have been refined over the years, but are similar. Cinema and media studies, computer science, and environmental studies are some of the new majors available to Lily that her mother didn’t have. Language instruction has expanded to include Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, and Korean.

The 1976–77 College Bulletin lists 36 psychology courses; the current catalog offers 52. In both catalogs, the psych offerings begin with Introduction to Psychology followed by Statistics. Psych 207 used to be Child Development. “Now it’s Developmental Psychology,” says Lily, reflecting a change in the discipline.

Annie admits that “when I was in college, I didn’t study much. I was very young, and I fooled around a lot and didn’t really apply myself.

I was really enjoying everything about college life.” Annie says her daughter is different. “Lily is a real scholar. Lily works really hard.” Lily answers, “It’s a sign of the times. You couldn’t get away with it now.”

Annie and Lily shared other experiences at Wellesley. They both worked in the Child Study Center located through the big gates close to the Vil. And they both worked on Junior Show.

“In my day, it was a much bigger affair,” says Annie. “We rented a house on the Cape. For a week, Cape committee wrote the whole thing before school started. That kind of immersion isn’t possible nowadays to write an original book, music, lyrics, and choreography.” Lily tried to revive some of the traditions. “I went to the archives to look at the programs. . . . I tried to get my classmates as excited as I was,” she says. In the end, they put on a review with new lyrics to familiar tunes.

Instead of Alumnae Hall, they performed in Tishman Commons in the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center, serving food to people seated at tables. Lily counts it a success with about 200 in the cabaret audience.

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International Sisters,Then and Now

Mother Chi Hyun Han ’86 (top left), aunt Joon Hee Han Kim ’84 (top right), and daughters Sung Daniella Kim ’14 and Eun Anna Kim ’11

ASIANS MADE UP THE LARGEST international contingent on campus in the early 1980s. Not surprising for a school that had educated Mayling Soong Chiang ’17 and Nehru’s nieces, Chandralekha Pandit Mehta ’45 and Nayantara Pandit Sahgal ’47. With 23 citizens on campus, Koreans were the largest group of foreign students when Chi Hyun Han ’86 arrived from Seoul as a first-year student.

Chi spoke fluent English and was familiar with American culture from exposure to friends, television, movies, and traveling to the United States. Having a sister on campus—Joon Hee Han Kim ’84—also helped ease the transition to Wellesley. Chi says, “I always had my sister to go to if I was homesick.”

Joon admits, “I got homesick a little bit the first week,” when she arrived on campus two years earlier. She says the international orientation program helped her feel at home. “They were there if I needed anything.” She found a close group of friends in her dorm and the Slater International Center, dedicated in 1972. Older Korean students “took really, really good care of me.” She joined the Korean Students Association and organized parties and meetings with other Korean student groups up and down the East Coast.

Chi’s daughter Eun Anna Kim ’11 says her mom, aunt, and their Wellesley friends “would always talk about how they enjoyed college.” So Wellesley was an easy choice for her, and for her sister, Sung Daniella Kim ’14. Sung says, “My sister and I are really close; this has brought us even closer. It’s really nice to know someone who knows you best.” They have even taken a history class together.

These days, international students from 56 countries make up 11 percent of the Wellesley population.

Unlike some American students away from home for the first time, the younger Kim sisters report that dorm living was an easy adjustment since they attended boarding school in New Hampshire. Sung, fresh to campus this year, says the biggest surprise for her was getting accustomed to all the women, a common reaction for any student new to single-sex education.

Running Through the Years MARATHONER Karen MacCarthy Shanley ’76

says, “I’ve always been a runner, but there weren’t any running teams” when she was at Wellesley.

“I did crew, because that’s what was available.”

As a junior exchange student from Smith, Karen arrived on campus when her younger sister, Krista MacCarthy Shields Blair ’77, was a Wellesley sophomore rowing crew for her dorm. Karen decided to stay. Back in high school, she had run with the boys her junior year, and senior year she ran with the first girls’ track team. “No women’s colleges had

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big athletic programs for girls back then.” She says, “I ran on my own on campus.”

Fast forward 30 years, and Karen has not one, but two daughters who have run for Wellesley Blue. Kerry MacCarthy Shanley ’08 recalls how Bridget Belgiovine invigorated sports at Wellesley when she arrived as the new athletic director Kerry’s junior year. The athletic department distributed “Go Blue” shirts on campus. The school newspaper ran an interview with an athlete of the week.

Kerry says, “I used to read it every week.”

She ran varsity cross-country, representing Wellesley in the New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference. NEWMAC’s precursor was founded in 1985, the same year the

Finding Faith have expanded dramatically since Sonja Novak Koerner ’51 arrived on campus after 12 years in a Roman Catholic convent school in Lima, Peru. “I never really sought very much religion after writing 100 times: ‘I must not ask questions in catechism,’” she says. She enjoyed the required sophomore year of Biblical History with Professor Ernest René Lacheman and attended Protestant chapel services once in a while. “It wasn’t compelling enough to make me go each Sunday,” she says.

Sixty years later, Sonja’s granddaughter, Lara Yeo ’11, experienced a spiritual awakening during Wintersession sophomore year while at a Tibetan Buddhist community in California. Lara’s spiritual journey began in her hometown of Toronto. “I was the kid who always put her dress on early, eager to go to church with my mom.” But Lara refused confirmation. “I couldn’t say ‘I do’ to God.” Her mom, a yoga teacher, had East Asian religious texts around the house. Lara remembers her mom saying, “‘Don’t knock on my door, I’m meditating,’ which, to a 10-year-old, looks boring.”

When her mom passed away in 2005, Lara found solace in reading Buddhist works. By the time she reached Wellesley, Bible was no longer a required course. The Chaplaincy had been reorganized in 1993 into the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life. Dean Victor Kazanjian led the drive to “nurture a multifaith environment which truly responds to this rich diversity of religious tradition and experience represented in the Wellesley College community,” as he said in an address that year.

Her junior year, Lara moved into the Multifaith Living and Learning Community, a corridor in the Munger basement. The 2005 initiative brings together people of diverse traditions. Lara found the intersection of cultural differences stimulating. “I heard some eye-opening, faith-based conversations, something you would be hard pressed to find in any other living situation at Wellesley.”

As a Buddhist representative on the Multifaith Student Council, Lara remains active in the interfaith community, helping to organize activities exploring interreligious understanding, conflict, and dialogue. These events are well attended. She says, “People are finding the programming to be very compelling.” Exactly what her grandmother says was lacking in chapel services in her day.

RELIGIOUS OPTIONS AT WELLESLEY

Lara Yeo ’11 and her grandmother Sonja Novak Koerner ’51 (above)

Molly Shanley ’12 (far left), Kerry Shanley ’08 (center), and their mother, Karen MacCarthy Shanley ’76

Keohane Sports Center opened on campus.

Like their mom, Kerry’s younger sister, Molly Shanley ’12, was a transfer student, leaving Brandeis to enroll at Wellesley in her

sophomore year. She found a sense of community with Wellesley runners, “built-in friends to hang out with.” As with any team, “We do a lot of stuff together, like eating food after practice.” But, she says, “there’s not a ton of pressure on a varsity team” at Wellesley, which competes in Division III. Today, Wellesley supports eight club and 14 varsity sports, the newest—track. Molly competed with the track team last year and intends to again, after she gets back from studying abroad. And Karen is still running, now with the Liberty Athletic Club, the oldest women’s running club in the United States.

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‘With all its past and history, Wellesley still can be a progressive institution.’

—Perry Hodgkins ’11

Wellesley, from Both Sides IN HER SEPTEMBER 2010 CONVOCATION SPEECH,

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Perry Hodgkins ’11. Above, a Tree Day shot from 1947, the year her grandmother Barbara Olson Hodgkins ’47 graduated.

Her maternal grandmother is Alice Haughton Rice ’53.

Alice recalls no drinking on campus, but “nearly everybody smoked.” Research was conducted at the library, “where the books were.”

Students wore jeans or wool bermuda shorts with knee socks, even in winter. “We always dressed for dates” in a dress, stockings—with seams— and high heels. Students had to sign out if they’d be off campus after 10 p.m., and sign in no later than 1:00 a.m. or face disciplinary action.

Hers was the first class to adopt green as its color. Alice says, “We wore our class beanies every day until about Thanksgiving.”

Grandaughter Perry grew up with these stories. She observes that bell desks sit empty now. Students carry ID cards that they swipe to get into buildings. The library is still full, but many students have laptops and can conduct research in their rooms. Smoking is not allowed in any building on campus.

One thing that hasn’t changed—the rigorous academics. “My grands have kept letters they sent home about how hard their classes were, how demanding the workload was.” Perry says, “I completely empathize.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF WELLESLEY COLLEGE ARCHIVES

College Government President Perry Hodgkins ’11 described being drawn to Wellesley “by virtue of having not one, but two grandmothers who loved their experiences here.”

Perry’s paternal grandmother, Barbara Olson Hodgkins ’47, entered Wellesley during World War II. Barbara describes it as “a great black cloud.” During her last two years on campus, she and her classmates dated “boys returning to school who didn’t talk about their war experiences. We must have seemed incredibly naive, too sheltered to understand.”

College President Mildred McAfee Horton spent the war years directing the WAVES, the women’s branch of the Navy. Due to the war, Barbara believes “the ’40s classes were more career-oriented than the pre- or post-war classes.”

Perry’s maternal grandmother, Alice Haughton Rice ’53, roomed in 233 Severance, the same room Perry lived in her junior year.

Alice says her decision to major in political science was influenced by the outbreak of the Korean War, citing a “need to know more about our present world, about our government and international relations.”

“In my day,” Alice says, “formality diminished.” She remembers maids in black uniforms with white aprons who answered the telephones and greeted visitors, then came to your room to announce them. Students eventually took over the bell-desk duties.

At dinner in the residence halls, Alice recollects, “We had to wear a skirt, not pants.

We all entered the dining room promptly at 6:15, stood behind our chairs while grace was said or sung, then sat down. Student help brought food to each table, and we’d serve each other, family-style. When everyone at the table had finished, we left as a group.”

The Evolution of Ethos JOY CLARKE ’11 says,

“I love how small Wellesley is; I understand the benefits of small-sized things, classrooms, one-on-one mentors.” It is the intimacy that she values at Wellesley, “the fact that my first-year roommate was someone I randomly met on spring open campus, the familiar face walking in the door.”

Joy’s mother, Carol Cooke Clarke ’75, says the same friendly welcome wowed her when she arrived on campus her first year. “I was impressed by the fact that my Vil junior knew my name when I got out of the car. She called me by my first name. She’d been studying that facebook.”

Carol was a member of Ethos, the AfricanAmerican student organization formed in 1966 and headquartered in Harambee House since 1969. She arrived on campus as Wellesley was admitting larger numbers of women of African descent. Ethos offered a wealth of activities to accommodate their interests.

Carol sang with the Ethos choir, which performed widely.

Ethos has adapted its initiatives to changing student needs, reports Joy, current copresident of the group. “The divisions between cultural organizations are breaking down.” She reports more collaboration between campus groups. “A lot of our members are doing other things besides just being Ethos members,” she says. Joy also dances with the Wellesley College Dancers.

The ALANA population (African-American, Latina, Asian-American, Native American, as well as biracial and multiracial students) makes up 43 percent of the class of 2014. As an alumna active in recruitment, Carol says, “I am more passionate than ever about growing diversity on campus—racially, ethnically, socioeconomically. It can be such a right place for a young woman.”

As a young woman in her final months at Wellesley, Joy plans to partake in those college traditions that haven’t changed much over the years. “I’m going to stepsing for the first time this year because I’m a senior.”

Asked about Hooprolling, she vows, “Oh, yeah. I’m gonna win that!”

Marcy Barack Black ’71 is the author of Season Song, a children’s picture book, and many web and print articles for folks over 50. She’s also the mother of Amanda Black ’10. At home in Maine, she writes and dreams of sending a granddaughter to Wellesley.

Joy Clarke ’11 and her mother, Carol Cooke Clarke ’75 (above)

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Professor Susan Reverby found herself at the center of an international maelstrom after she unearthed archived medical ďŹ les from the 1940s revealing that American doctors had intentionally infected hundreds of Guatemalan men and women, prisoners and mental patients, with syphilis.

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By Louisa Kasdon on ’72 7 72

Photos by Richard Howard

he first sparks of Professor Susan Reverby’s media firestorm were kindled in a warehouse on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Alone at a table, with boxes of archived medical papers from the 1940s, the historian tucked into her research, work that with luck would transform random bits of information into int academic revelations. Rarely does a historian’s dogged detective work turn into a news tsunami with news vans on a professor’s front lawn, and international apologies exchanged between the president of the United States and the president of a foreign nation. But that’s what happened on Oct. 1, 2010, to Susan Reverby, Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and professor of women’s and gender studies. The day was hot. She was unprepared for the frenzy. She was wearing shorts when the reporters showed up.

In June of 2009, Reverby was in the last months of research for her second book on the “Tuskegee” Syphilis Study, Examining Tuskegee. She had spent two decades studying the infamous 40-year United States Public Health Service (PHS) experiment where 437 African-American men in Alabama with late-stage syphilis were observed but not treated, even after penicillin’s efficacy for the disease had become standard winter 2011

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The Guatemala Syphilis Study: The Facts medical practice. Now, Reverby was ready to submit her final manuscript, pack up the boxes of notes and research materials that she had kept for years in her daughter’s bedroom in Cambridge, and move on to another topic. Maybe something on women’s health?

Truly, Reverby was sure she was done with syphilis.

But syphilis was clearly not done with her. That historian’s desire for completeness, that last afterthought, and just enough sponsored-research money for a plane ticket from Boston to Pittsburgh brought her to the box with the file labeled “Guatemala.”

Reverby planned to comb through the papers of Thomas Parran, the sixth surgeon general of the United States (1936–48), whose tenure overlapped the Tuskegee study. By now, Reverby had spent years poring over medical records in Macon County, Ala. She had read everything on Tuskegee in the archives in the National Library of Medicine. She’d been to the archives at Johns Hopkins. As a last gesture, just to make sure that she had turned over every stone, Reverby bunked with family in Pittsburgh, to spend a few days with Parran’s archives at the University of Pittsburgh, where he had been the first dean of the Graduate School of Public Health. Reverby recalled that the papers of John Cutler, a controversial physician associated with the Tuskegee research in the 1960s, were also boxed up at Pitt. Maybe she’d take a look at them, too. “I was just following the leads. You just never know. History is always about working with incomplete information,” she says.

‘Go to the Source’ As a teacher, Reverby’s dictum for her students is “go to the source.” And so here she was in the warehouse, scanning the index for Cutler’s collected papers. The words jumped out at her: Inoculation—Syphilis.

“Flashing red lights. I’d spent nearly two decades explaining that there had been no inoculation at Tuskegee, that while the PHS service had used deplorable ethics, they had never infected anyone with syphilis. And here it was: In 1946 and over a period of three years, the US government’s health service had deliberately infected 427 Guatemalan men and women, prisoners and mental patients, with syphilis,” Reverby says, her energy still rising as she tells about it.

At first glance, Reverby wondered if the Guatemalan research had possibly been a treatment study. Unlike Tuskegee, by the time the Guatemalan

Louisa Kasdon ’72 is an award-winning journalist based in Cambridge, Mass., with more than 500 published articles on food, health, business, and lifestyle. She is the food editor of the Boston Phoenix and a contributor to the website ZesterDaily.com.

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FOR SEVERAL DECADES, there were rumors within the Centers for Disease Control about a study

on syphilis in Guatemala, but they remained unsubstantiated until Susan Reverby found the documentation in a medical archive at the University of Pittsburgh. Reading the papers of researcher John Cutler, Reverby unearthed the facts: Between 1946 and 1948, the United States Public Health Service (PHS) conducted a syphilis-inoculation program in Guatemala on 696 men and women in the National Penitentiary, an army barracks, and the National Mental Health Hospital.

Permission was gained from the Guatemalan authorities, although it is unclear whether authorities knew the kind of study PHS was doing. Permission was not secured from the individuals being studied. Medical supplies were offered to the institutions in return for access to their populations. In some cases, the subjects were infected by granting them free access to infected prostitutes, a practice that was legal for federal prisoners in Guatemala at the time. In others, the syphilis bacteria were applied to abraded skin on the forearm, penis, and face, or even through spinal puncture.

The experiments occurred in the early days of penicillin treatment and were motivated by the PHS’s interest in whether penicillin could be used to prevent as well as treat syphilis infection, and to establish appropriate dosage, perfect blood tests, and understand the process of syphilis reinfection. Of the 696 men and women who were exposed to the infection, 427 were judged infected, and 369 received what is considered “adequate treatment” with injections of penicillin.

Unlike the “Tuskegee” Syphilis Study, the study in Guatemala involved both men and women and required infecting but also providing of treatment. (Despite the rumors to the contrary, the PHS did not infect the men in Tuskegee, although Cutler worked on this research, as well.) When it proved more difficult than expected in Guatemala to infect men and women with syphilis and other research priorities appeared, the study ended.

—LK Professor Susan Reverby

research began, PHS doctors knew that penicillin cured syphilis, and the infected subjects were given the drug, though possibly not in the appropriate clinical dose. On a second trip to the archive, Reverby had a much stronger response. “The letters were stunning. It was clear that Cutler and Parran weren’t telling anyone what they were doing. Nowhere in the Tuskegee correspondence do you get the doctors saying, ‘This is wrong,’” she says. Cutler’s correspondence clearly revealed secrecy and deception. Both physicians knew the research could not be done in the US and would be damaging to US interests if it came to light.

Reverby had a nuanced understanding of the historical and strategic contexts for the study. Its probable goal: Creating a syphilis prophylactic for US soldiers (much like an antimalarial regimen) to replace the ineffective Pro-Kit used during World War II. And she knew that although the study was shocking, using ill-informed foreign nationals as the experimental subjects for a treatment that would benefit American citizens was not out of the norm for medical research at the time. Plus, Guatemalan prisoners and mental patients presented a “controlled, contained research population” in a fragile state where the US government presumably had

significant sway. “It’s not clear that the Guatemalan government even knew what the PHS was doing,” she says. For Reverby, the ethical parallels were chilling. “It is hard not to think about medical research under Nazis or about much of the drug research still conducted today out of the country on vulnerable populations.”

Going Public In academic, rather than activist, mode, Reverby made her copies of the relevant letters and of the hundreds of photos of the subjects, and returned to campus to focus on the final draft of her book on Tuskegee. Her notes about the secret inoculations in Guatemala remained in a box until the following spring when she was asked to give a paper to the 2010 American Association of History of Medicine Conference in Rochester, Minn.

With understatement, she recalls, “It seemed like a good topic for a quiet academic presentation.”

Reverby was the “last speaker on a Sunday afternoon, in a weekend conference where everyone, including my closest colleagues, had to make at least two connections to fly home. There were maybe 50 attendees left in the room when I presented.” She recalls there were “some

gasps in the audience, but these are historians. No one rushed out to call the National Enquirer.” A colleague, Professor Joel Howell from the University of Michigan, was in the audience. “Everyone in the room knew that this was something horrific. You could tell that she was flabbergasted, amazed. But Susan always has instincts for path-breaking work. Wellesley is very fortunate to have her. As a scholar, she always goes after the primary source and is never content to take received wisdom.”

In June of 2010, a few weeks after the conference, Reverby was putting the last touches on a follow-up article in the Journal of Policy History, an “obscure journal” that she estimates “maybe 30 people ever read.” To ensure she had all her medical facts straight, Reverby asked her colleague, David Sencer, a physician and a former head of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, to review it for medical accuracy. Almost immediately, Sencer called her back.

“Would you mind if I sent this to the CDC?” he asked.

Reverby said, “Oh, David, don’t bother. No one is ever going to read this paper.”

But Sencer knew, an obscure journal or not, the article would get publicity. “Better for the government to get out in front of it than to face a hostile press,” he said. Harold Jaffe, the associate director for science at the CDC, took the call. “We knew the study was very bad news, but it was news we had to know,” Jaffe says.

Up the Chain of Command Within a week, Reverby received a call from the CDC. There were lots of questions. She was asked to make sure that all further correspondence on the topic with Sencer be sent to his home address so that it would be “un-FOIA-able,” sheltered from the Freedom of Information Act. But the CDC didn’t choose to keep the information out of the public sphere.

Quickly, the foremost syphilis expert in the CDC, John Douglas, was dispatched to the medical archives in Pittsburgh. He confirmed Reverby’s findings. The alarm moved up the chain of command through the CDC, to the National Institutes of Health and its head of bioethics, to the Department of Health and Human Services, and by mid-July Reverby’s research was at the White House. (A side note of interest: The head of bioethics at NIH, Ezekiel Emanuel, made sure that the notice got to his younger brother, Rahm Emanuel, then chief of staff for President Barack Obama.)

Other than a call from a communications specialist at CDC, Reverby had no idea that the disclosures about the PHS research in Guatemala “would go viral.” Until the evening of Sept. 30, 2010, when Reverby’s daughter, a senior foreign-policy advisor on Capitol Hill, called her mother and told

‘The checks and balances on ethical research are in place today in a way that they were not during the time of the Guatemala study. But in the galaxy of medical research, I am sure that abuse still happens.’

—David Sencer, former head of the CDC

her, “Mom, this is going to be big.” Reverby learned from her daughter that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ’69 and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius were planning to issue a joint apology for the work done more than 60 years before. What Reverby didn’t know is that President Obama was also making a call to President Álvaro Colom of Guatemala. Or that the government had given the story to NBC’s science reporter Robert Bazell to break. “The next morning, all hell broke loose,” Reverby says. “My cell phone. My e-mail. Vans pulling up to the house. NBC, CNN, NPR, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal. It went worldwide in a nanosecond. Seventeen different reporters from the BBC.” Everyone wanted to interview Reverby, and each reporter hoped for a “visual”—access to the photos of the subjects in the study. When Al-Jazeera and the Iranian state press agency called, Reverby made a fast judgment call. She would not release the photos. For a longtime board member of the American Civil Liberties Union, it was a tough but instinctive reaction. “All I could think of was Abu Ghraib, and the damage that would come from another series of photos with white US hands on dark bodies,” she says.

The story had everything: sex, secrecy, foreign relations, cynicism, and suspicion. It also had righteousness. Unlike the Tuskegee study, where the government spent years denying its 40-year role, this time the response from the top was swift and candid.

Still, it took weeks for the media frenzy to quiet. Hundreds of articles and blog postings. Much posturing by all the talking heads on all the cable shows. Reverby, who was already occupied with teaching a brand new fall course at Wellesley, was besieged by requests for interviews and speaking engagements, even before her book, Examining Tuskegee, won the 2010 Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from the Phi Beta Kappa Society in a totally unrelated development.

The Ramifications This would be a breathless 15-minutes-of-fame story, an isolated if horrific chapter in American medical history, if the questions raised by the research were not so deadly important, and still so current. “Yes, clearly, the checks and balances on ethical research are in place today in a way that they were not during the

time of the Guatemala study,” says Sencer. “But in the galaxy of medical research, I am sure that abuse still happens.” According to Reverby and her peers, the Guatemala experience offers an important window for assessing pervasive, continuing institutional racism in the medical-research environment, and for questioning the bioethics of experimentation on vulnerable populations—for whom the concept of informed consent may be functionally meaningless.

Both Reverby and Sencer caution against turning the perpetrators into “stick figures.” “It is important not to create Cutler or the PHS system as a monster.

If you see him as a monster, you miss the point. The point is that bad things happen even when the best men are doing the work. We can’t feel comfortable, for example, about the terrible things that Dr. [Josef] Mengele did and let him off because he was a Nazi,” Reverby says. “Nice, well-meaning Americans can do bad things, too.”

Sencer warns, “We have to pay attention to what happens when we fool with people’s lives, to keep asking ourselves if we are truly ethical in all aspects.

What Susan has done is to look at things in both Guatemala and Tuskegee, not as isolated instances and narrate what happened, but to put them in perspective. She reminds us that despite our efforts to do good, it is not always so.”

Jaffe of the CDC says, “It is tempting to look back at this and simply say, ‘It was a terrible episode’ and go on. But are there other stories that haven’t come to light? We don’t want to feed on the paranoia in the media, for example, of biological warfare, or AIDS as a cooked-up infection in a foreign country, but stories like this have to remind people of those stories.” Will Reverby’s work have a chilling effect on medical research? “Yes,” says Jaffe. “I think it will, and I think it should.”

Reverby’s colleagues laud her for re-energizing the discussion of bioethics in the United States. The president has given the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues until September 2011 to conduct a “fact-finding investigation” about the Guatemala study and to determine if federal regulations and international standards keep medicalresearch participants from harm or unethical treatment.

But as Harold Jaffe of the CDC wonders, “The question we can’t answer is the test of time. If people look back on work we are doing now—and we think we are so careful—will they be equally amazed?”

winter 2011

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wellesley 39

YOUR ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION

NEWS AND INFORMATION FROM THE WORLDWIDE NETWORK OF THE WELLESLEY COLLEGE ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION

Alumnae Connections supports more than 80 clubs and alumnae groups around the world, as well as nearly 80 classes. Some of these groups are large and organized, some small and informal, but they all bring Wellesley women together. “Alumnae Connections” is an occasional feature with news of various events and activities. Alumnae who would like more information about organizing events like these should contact Marisa Shariatdoust ’09 for clubs (wclubs@wellesley.edu, 781-283-2332) and Susan Lohin for classes (wclasses@wellesley.edu, 781-283-2330).

THE ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION

Members of the class of ’54 and friends in Old Orchard Beach, Maine

for a lobster feast. They also heard a talk by a local historian and visited an old-fashioned candy store.

The Wellesley Club of Tampa Bay hosted

A group of alumnae from the Wellesley Club of Pasadena participated in their annual day of service by helping with the “Donation Giveaway Day” at the Good Shepherd Center in downtown Los Angeles. Alumnae provided clothes and household items for the giveaway, helped staff, and provided food to women and children.

Members of the class of ’54, plus

spouses and guests, gathered in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, at the home of Eleanor “Honey” Reeves Hoffman

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winter 2011

a luncheon for Professor Chip Case on his last tour of clubs before his retirement. Fifty-four alumnae listened as Chip untangled some of the mysteries of the housing boom and bust and shared his love of Wellesley.

San Francisco alumnae from the class of ’64

gathered after Thanksgiving for brunch.

Last fall, the Chicago Wellesley Club went on a tour of Chicago’s Green City Market, where alumnae met farmers and heard about their farms and the organic-certification process.

The alumnae from South Carolina and coastal Georgia

enjoyed a tour of the Benedetto Guitar Factory, with a picnic following the tour at the home of Sarah Thornburg Westcott ’92 in a Savannah, Ga., suburb.

The class of ’64 gathered for a mini-reunion in San Francisco

CE/DS ALUMNAE are celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Continuing Education program and the 20th anniversary of naming the Davis Scholar program. Seven CE/DS alums met at the College’s CE House last October to launch a history project. They plan to produce an illustrated history of the program, based on information found in the college archives and gathered from class members.

This magazine is published quarterly by the Wellesley College Alumnae Association, an autonomous corporate body, independent of the College. The Association is dedicated to connecting alumnae to the College and to each other.

WCAA BOARD OF DIRECTORS:

President Karen Gentleman ’77

TEST YOUR REUNION SMARTS

Treasurer/Secretary Debra Drew DeVaughn ’74

True or False?

Martha Goldberg Aronson ’89 Anne Crary Berger ’91, chair of alumnae admissions representatives Katherine Collins ’90 Aniella Gonzalez ’93 Karen Capriles Hodges ’62 Georgia Murphy Johnson ’75 Suzanne Lebold ’85 Willajeanne McLean ’77 Inyeai Ororokuma ’79 Paulina Ponce de Le´ on Barid´ o ’05 Shelley Sweet ’67 Mei-Mei Tuan ’88 Sandra Yeager ’86, chair of annual giving

1. Skinny-dipping in Lake Waban is an officially sanctioned activity.

2. Among our peer colleges, Wellesley has one of the highest reunion attendance rates.

3. Reunion is profitable for the College and the Alumnae Association.

4. President H. Kim Bottomly and husband Wayne boogied to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” at last year’s all-classes dance party.

5. More than 4,500 pounds of ice are consumed each year at reunion.

6. Blue is a class color.

7. Returning alumnae should feel free to park for the weekend in front of their dorms.

8. The class of 1956 holds the record for the largest number of alumnae attending a single reunion (245).

9. You shouldn’t bother attending because all the other alumnae who come are wildly successful in all areas of their lives.

10. Alumnae from the 80th reunion class have participated in the parade within the last five years.

Ex officiis: Susan Challenger ’76 Alice M. Hummer Katherine Stone Kaufmann ’67 Alumnae Trustees: Linda Cozby Wertheimer ’65 Nami Park ’85 Ruth Chang ’81 Sandra Polk Guthman ’65 Shelly Anand ’08

’28—who, at age 102, waved energetically from antique cars—had the assembled masses in tears three years ago. class beat them? 9. False. Go back and review the story on page 24. 10. True. Two alumnae from the class of tune of $250,000 a year. 4. True. 5. True. 6. True. The class of ’49 is the last blue class. 7. False. 8. True. Can your goose droppings. 2. True. 3. False. The Alumnae Association and the College subsidize the cost of reunion to the 1. False, but every year, some alumnae insist on reliving their misspent youths. A word to the wise: Beware of Answers:

ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION SENIOR STAFF:

Executive Director Susan Challenger ’76 Director of Alumnae Events Heather Tromblee Director of Alumnae Groups Susan Lohin Director of Alumnae Technology and Communications Michelle Gillett ’95 Alumnae Office Financial Administrator Greg Jong ALUMNAE NEWS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

LAST OCTOBER, 16 alumnae from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France, and Belgium gathered in Ludwigsburg, Germany, for a few days of culture and camaraderie. The weekend included an organ concert in the Stadtkirche on the huge market square of the town. “After telling us about both of the organs, [the church organist] proceeded to play on both of them,” wrote Jane Freedman Helmchen ’61. “It was a moving and exciting experience to

sing the ‘Alma Mater’ and ‘America, the Beautiful’ in a baroque church in the middle of Germany!” The festivities also included visits to museums, palaces, markets, and restaurants. “It was an exciting, eye-opening, talkative, and thoughtprovoking experience from start to finish,” Helmchen reports.

The Alumnae Calendar of events appears on page 73.

To read Wellesley magazine online, visit http://www.wellesley.edu/magazine.

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wellesley 41

FRESH INK

WCAA

(Continued from page 19)

(Continued from page 41)

Amy Mayer ’94, contributor—Fits, Starts & Matters of the Heart: 28 True Stories of Love, Loss and Everything in Between, Freelance Success, Farmington Hills, Mich.

ALUMNAE CALENDAR

Susan Meyer, faculty—Black Radishes, Delacorte Books for Young Readers, New York

the Alumnae Office at 781-283-2331.

Gail Marcus Monaghan ’69—The Entrées: Remembered Favorites from the Past, Rizzoli, New York

MARCH

Barbara Frank Okun ’57—Saying Goodbye: How Families Can Find Renewal Through Loss, Berkley Books, New York

Susan Lohin, director of alumnae groups, at

Claire Parkinson ’70—Coming Climate Crisis?

Consider the Past, Beware the Big Fix, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Lanham, Md.

The Alumnae Association announces the following take place at the College. For more information, call

13

Translating the liberal arts into action President Bottomly speaking to Atlanta

781-283-2330 or check www.wellesley.edu/Alum/ presidentialtour.

SHIFTING GEARS: WOMEN IN CAREER TRANSITION

APRIL

1

President Bottomly speaking to Indianapolis

Wellesley Club. For more information, call Susan

Beth Taylor ’51, Deborah Meier, and Brenda S. Engle—Playing for Keeps: Life and Learning on a Public School Playground, Teachers College Press, New York

Lohin, director of alumnae groups, at 781-283-2330 or

Susan Dubinsky Terris ’59—The Homelessness of Self, Arctos Press, Berkeley, Calif.

1

Tanya Turton (Tatiana Rubinsky Turton ’51)— The Phoenix Rises: Medley of Prose and Poetry, Trafford Publishing, Bloomington, Ind.

Susan Lohin, director of alumnae groups, at

Bonnie Shubart Wood ’68—Lecture-Free Teaching: A Learning Partnership Between Science Educators and Their Students, National Science Teachers Association, Arlington, Va.

Re-entering?

Rethinking?

Reconfiguring?

Wellesley Club. For more information, call

Liane Strauss ’84—Leaving Eden, Salt, London

Pamela Robertson Wojcik ’86—The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975, Duke University Press, Durham, N.C.

CENTER FOR WORK & SERVICE

events for 2011. Unless otherwise noted, events

check www.wellesley.edu/Alum/presidentialtour.

A WORKSHOP FOR ANYONE CHALLENGED BY WHAT TO DO NEXT WITH HER LIFE.

MAY

President Bottomly speaking to Wellesley-

in-Westchester. For more information, call

Whether you have “opted out” and are thinking about “opting back in,” are facing today’s changing job market, or making midcareer (and midlife) decisions, this program will allow you to: > envision what your options > could be; > connect with others facing > similar challenges; > develop an action plan to keep > you moving forward.

781-283-2330 or check www.wellesley.edu/Alum/ presidentialtour.

25

Senior lunch and induction into the

Alumnae Association JUNE

2–3

WCAA board of directors meetings

3–5

Reunion for classes ending in 1s and 6s,

and CE/DS

THURSDAY, JUNE 2, 1 P.M.– FRIDAY, JUNE 3, 2 P.M.

The 2011 Albright Fellows carried on with their work during a January blizzard that closed the rest of the College.

RICHARD HOWARD

Registration fee is $60 and includes Thursday dinner and all materials.

For more information or to register, go to MyCWS Events, www.wellesley.edu/cws/ mycws.html. winter 2011

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END NOTE

By Amy Mayer ’94

Y SON picked

and ate a green bean and raced off to choose one of the giant sunflowers growing nearby. We’d take it home with the rest of the beans and tote bags brimming with greens, squash, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, and other fresh organic vegetables. It was our weekly summer ritual that year, and although we stretched to pay for the farm share over the winter, in the summer of 2009, I welcomed the prepaid food.

We were broke, but we ate well.

Elias was four that summer, and I spent much of it single parenting. I am a freelance writer, and my partner is a doctoral candidate. We have flexible schedules, and when Elias was little we divvied up child care pretty evenly.

Things shifted as Elias grew older, but even doing more child care I managed to grow my business. Then two things happened: The Great Recession ransacked the publishing industry, and my partner, Beth, spent two months doing shipboard research in the Bering Sea. That summer, I worked fewer hours, and getting assignments took longer.

The reality that Beth was our primary breadwinner forced me to take stock of my situation.

I’ve never had a permanent, full-time-with-benefits-and-paid-vacation job.

The feast or famine reality of self-employment is the yin to the yang of working my own hours and never having to attend staff meetings. Still, the stats were grim. In the first six months of 2008, I sent out 35 invoices; for that same period in 2009, the total was 15. Week after week, the expenses exceeded the income.

Beth e-mailed daily, thanking me for holding down the fort, but I saw myself coming up short professionally. Surely even the Wellesley grads who never took Econ 102 know that it’s not sustainable to spend more than you earn. It’s utterly demoralizing when you’re working hard but not earning enough.

With Beth away, I decided that reducing our expenses might be a more realistic goal than earning more. But saving money takes time and effort—and it clearly isn’t a career move. Would I let down Mother Wellesley if I used my “work time” to turn farm-share kale into something edible? (I hate kale, but clearly I couldn’t waste it.) I tried to finish building a clothesline Beth

Amy Mayer ’94 pinches pennies, writes, and produces radio in Greenfield, Mass. See her work at www.amymayerwrites.com.

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had started, and the result was disastrous. I scoffed at people who made their own yogurt—then I did the math. Now, every couple of weeks I’m pouring half a gallon of milk into a heavy pot and monitoring the temperature. Once it’s been heated and cooled appropriately, I stir in a quarter-cup of old yogurt and stick the whole pot in a barely warm oven. The next morning I have two quarts of yogurt.

Beth and I consciously decided a couple of years ago to prioritize her work over mine, so she could finish her degree. I never contemplated the emotional impact of that decision. The recession hastened the economic one: a great disequilibrium in our earning. I’m not sure how I could have prepared myself for the change, even in retrospect. I didn’t leave the workforce voluntarily or unexpectedly get laid off. Rather, I gradually worked less and had the income to prove it. I valued the time with my son, but it was sometimes tinged by the stresses on our budget. I repeated a mantra I’d often heard, “When I’m old, I won’t look back and say, ‘Gee, I wish I’d spent more time working when my son was little.’” But a part of me wished I was working more.

Beth’s shipboard pay got delayed. Small checks came in from my work, but I turned to credit cards. Then, two of Beth’s professors loaned us money, which hit my ego hard. I certainly appreciated a short-term, no-interest loan in place of credit-card debt, though, no matter how humbling.

As Elias and I enjoyed our trips to the farm, I realized organic, local produce would strike many as indulgent. Sometimes I even questioned our priorities. But that’s where education—and math—matters in the face of low income: We can make informed spending decisions. If they deviate from some social norm, or from those made by others in our tax bracket, we don’t mind.

For us, a farm share is a necessity, and broken down over the year, it’s also a bargain. Cell phones for each of us and a second car we can skip. At times we feel “poor,” but we know that we earn more than many, many Americans and we remind ourselves frequently that we have made this choice—and it is temporary. Elias started kindergarten this year. My work hours increased slightly, and our childcare costs evaporated. Soon, Beth will finish school and have a job that pays much more.

There have been low points, and bounced checks, but I cherish this truth: I choose not to hold down a “real” job, knowing that I could if I ever had to.

But I’d still use the clothesline Beth finished this spring and make my own yogurt. Doing it ourselves saves us about 75 percent on the cost. It may not take a Wellesley degree to do that math, but I think Mother Wellesley would be proud.

F.CO

M

My Recession

Albright Fellows line up to have former US Secretary of State Madeleine Korbel Albright ’59 autograph their books during the secretary’s visit to campus in January.

Photo by Richard Howard

KEEP IN TOUCH | KEEP INFORMED WWW.WELLESLEY.EDU/ALUM

10%

RICHARD HOWARD

Cert no. SW-COC-002556