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A Woman's Education: Jill Ker Conway

In 1975 Jill Ker Conway became the first woman president of Smith College. A Woman’s Education candidly chronicles the ten years she served in that post. It is the third book in Conway’s continuing memoir, which began with The Road from Coorain (1989), followed by True North (1994).

In one passage of A Woman’s Education, Conway describes Smith’s Ivy Day parade:

The parade was a literal embodiment of the field of energy created by an institution, captured and expressed in powerful ritual. I often wondered, as I saluted the parade and its slogans, what Virginia Woolf would have made of it. This was not just a room of one’s own but an entire institution that its graduates owned, beholden to no one but their female predecessors. It gave women, however briefly, a sense of owning their place in life, a place never thereafter easily surrendered.

cover of A Woman's Education by Jill Ker Conway

Jill Ker Conway Papers
Smith College Archives

A Woman's Education
revised page proofs

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