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High Achievers Recall Their Epiphanies By John Sippel They were without question an extraordinary group--"women of vision who have often perceived the world rather differently than the majority of their contemporaries, courageous women who have recognized the need for social change and acted on their own vision for a better world." So Susan Bourque, Smith College's Esther Booth Wiley Professor of Govern-ment, described the four highly accomplished panelists who, just a day shy of receiving honorary degrees from the college during Commencement, assembled one bright May afternoon on the stage of Wright Hall auditorium. They were there to take part in a roundtable discussion of the passions, promptings and ideals that have shaped their lives. The four were: Jane Alexander, stage and screen actress, former chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the next day's Commencement speaker Romila Thapar, renowned historian of India, just concluding her tenure as William Allan Neilson Professor at Smith Hanan Ashrawi, internationally recognized spokeswoman for the Palestinian people and for human rights, perhaps best known in the U.S. for her appearances on such television shows as Nightline and 60 Minutes Carol Gilligan, distinguished psychologist from Harvard University whose research explores women's experience with unprecedented depth and understanding. (The year's fifth honorary-degree recipient, Harvard law professor Lani Guinier, who became the center of a national controversy in 1993 when nominated by President Clinton to serve as assistant attorney general for civil rights, was unable to attend the roundtable.) Although Smith College has been granting honorary degrees for nearly a century, this was the first such roundtable ever offered. An audience of graduating students, their families and friends, and assorted others heard Professor Bourque set things off by asking the panelists to tell how they first came to determine the object of their life's work. Their responses ran in part as follows: ............................ Jane Alexander Well, if you can have an epiphany at seven years old, that's what I had. My father had been away in the Second World War for the better part of my young life. He came back late in 1945 and didn't know his eldest daughter. And he took me to the ballet one afternoon, the Royal Copenhagen Danish Ballet Company in Boston. It was really magical for me. I sat there looking at the costumes and the lights and said, "Does this exist in the world? If it does" And that did it for me. I was bound and determined from then on that the performing arts were going to be my life. ............................ Carol Gilligan My epiphany came later. It was in the early '70s, after the Roe v. Wade decision. I was interviewing women who were pregnant and thinking about what they wanted to do [about it]. And I remember sitting in my kitchen, reading these transcripts, and suddenly making sense of something that I had observed during years of teaching at the university: I would hear women students ask in class what were, I thought, the most wonderful, brilliant questions, and I would hear myself say, "But that's not what we're talking about here." And I realized that there was no way for women to speak and say what they knew firsthand through experience, given the way issues, including the abortion issue, were framed. [A friend] happened to come into the kitchen at that moment and I said to her, "You know, this is really interesting, this disparity between women's voices and what's said to be morality or whatever." And she said to me, "Why don't you write about it?" And I think otherwise the moment could have passed and I could have thought, "That's interesting, but it's not what we're talking about here." ............................ Hanan Ashrawi It's very hard for me to say that I've had the luxury of choice [in my career]. I think once you are born a Palestinian, you are born with tremendous historical baggage. You are born with a label. People are after you not as an individual, as a human being, as Hanan or whatever, but as a Palestinian. So rather than being a victim of history, I decided to be a shaper of history. Rather than having others decide my future and my fate for me, I decided I had better articulate my own narrative and my own message. [One] among many turning points in my history came in 1967. I was a young undergraduate at the American University of Beirut. The June 5 war took place and all of a sudden my home town was under occupation. I heard rumors that my house had been shelled, that my family had died. It wasn't true; the house was shelled, but fortunately my family hadn't died. But I couldn't go home. And ever since then my main motivating drive has been to go home-and not just to any home-and to vindicate our own identity, to gain recognition and legitimacy for the Palestinian as an equal among equals. My real aspiration is to get to the point where we can say "We are Palestinians" in normal tones, neither as whispers nor as protests, but as a statement that people can take for granted and that can be included within the common terms of reference of humanity. And the only way to do that is to gain justice for the Palestinians and peace for everybody. ............................ Romila Thapar I seem to have missed out on an epiphany altogether; mine was very much a process of slow simmering. But there were various stages. [My generation] was in school at the time of Indian independence, [a time when] one moved from the past to the future and back to the past and on to the future, continually. One moved from the past searching for an identity: What exactly was the Indian? Was it what the colonial construction had made out or was it something different? And we moved to the future because embedded in the notion of liberation and independence was the idea that we were going to build a new society, a different society, [and therefore] had to know what the old society was like in various stages. So that egged on one's interest in history. I finally started studying ancient history. My first proper job, as it were, was at Delhi University in the 1960s. [At one point] I was training in an archaeological excavation [at] a site up in northern Rahjasthan, an Indus Valley civilization site. And once a week we had a break. On one of these occasions I went into a village about four miles away, and the wife of the head man of the village organized a sort of impromptu get-together; all the women collected and sat down. And they looked at me as if I was some strange creature from Mars, and said, "Why are you digging? Are you looking for gold?" So I tried to get across to them what I was looking for. And they were very puzzled and they finally sort of nodded their heads and said, "Oh yes, history. But tell us: what does all this mean to us?" And that was the question that I began with: What does it really mean to someone like that? ............................ And so it went, for each of the questions that followed. The talk was wide-ranging, spontaneous, reflective, often humorous. Behind it seemed to hover an unspoken sense that these women, however divergent their lives may have been, shared a deep kinship. The nature of that bond was best suggested when at one point Ashrawi noted that only troublemakers can change the world, and Gilligan chimed in, "That's like a blessing on this whole panel!"

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