Quest For Knowledge Jill Ker Conway, Former President Of Smith College, Has Made A Career Of Opening Educational Doors For Women

Working side-by-side with her father, her brothers and scores of male hands on a sheep ranch in Australia was a valuable experience for Jill Ker Conway.

It was an unusual beginning, but a solid preparation nonetheless, for a woman who would later head Smith College in Northampton, Mass.

Conway, 60, received her first schooling outside the home after her father died and the family left the ranch for Sydney in 1945. Not until she had earned her degree in history at the University of Sydney in 1958 did she realize that, as a woman, she could never fulfill her quest for learning or attain the status she desired in her field if she stayed in the society in which she was raised. After a year of teaching at the university, she knew she had to make a major change in her life.

“You can be as intellectual as you like and sit up all night and argue about Marx and Freud with a group of male students,” says Conway, “but you’re always anomalous in that group and your interests are, therefore, anomalous. But when you suddenly find a group of women peers who are equally intellectually committed and equally able to argue all night over philosophy, history, religion and science, you suddenly don’t seem anomalous anymore. It just seems normal.”

When Conway left Australia in 1960 to study for a doctorate at Harvard, she found an environment in which she could pursue her goals in the company of other intellectual women.

“In Australia I was too crushed and too uncertain of myself,” she says. “And I didn’t have the sense of anyone standing beside me. Once I got to that wonderful group of women with whom I lived in graduate school and was working with other women, I had a different feedback system about what I was doing.”

At Harvard, she met and married teacher John Conway in 1962. They moved to Toronto, where she first taught history and then became a vice president of the University of Toronto before returning to the United States to accept the presidency of Smith College in 1975.

At Smith, Conway created educational opportunities for older women that she wishes her mother had had. She created a program of admissions for older women, “people my mother’s age when she should have gone to college,” she says, “and (I was able to) bring those people into the institution as full-fledged participants rather than in adjunct programs.”

Within that program, Conway raised the money to admit welfare mothers who were talented and able. She also created a program for women in middle management.

“I could see the crunch coming,” she says, “from the downsizing of the American corporation that was going to take place as a result of electronics and the computer. Women were just reaching the ranks of middle-management as those jobs were about to be eliminated, so we created an intensive management-training program for middlemanagement women to make them eligible for promotion, and that’s kept a lot of very talented women moving up in the ranks of corporate America.”

Conway also created an endowed program, the Conway Fund for Research on Women, to study women’s lives.

“When I was retiring,” she says, “I told the trustees I didn’t want a building named after me, I wanted an intellectual enterprise.”

Conway credits her mother and her life in Australia with inspiring her to fight for women’s rights in education and elsewhere in society.

“Imagine living as a child in a place where I could see my mother was a full 50 percent partner in this enterprise, in terms of labor, brains, analysis - she knew whether they were making a profit or a loss. And she had invested all her savings in it. And yet she had to pay inheritance duties (when my father died) on the wealth that she created. That stuck in my mind.”

Conway retired from Smith in 1985 to devote time to her writing.

Her first book, “The Road from Coorain” (Vintage, $11), spent 54 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list when it came out five years ago. It describes her childhood on the sheep ranch. The recently released “True North” (Knopf, $23), the second part of her autobiography, covers her time at Harvard and in Toronto.

In it, Conway says, she “wanted to describe a happy, enriching relationship with a man because so many young women today believe it’s not possible.

“My husband was the major influence in my life,” Conway says. “We’ve been married for going on 33 years. But my childhood work and my mother are other great influences. And the fellowship and colleagueship of the group of women scholars that I met at Harvard. With this wonderful husband supporting me I had all the psychological resources one needs, which I didn’t have the first time around. In Australia I didn’t know whether (the prevailing ideas of the culture) might be right. I think that’s the unnerving thing about bias. If you don’t have anyone to tell you the opposite, you think, ‘Well, I might be wrong.’

“If you marry somebody who respects your working self, you don’t have any guilt about doing a good job. You just figure out how to manage the other aspects of your life.”