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Page 127 text:
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.. ..-l»|.UllP.. lMm.l. A Woman ' s Place when I was invited to be your investiture speaker I talked informally with several of you about the subject you wanted to think about on this special occasion. The topic that turned up again and again was whether these years at this college for women have made any real difference in the way you will have to, the way you will want to, and the way you will be able to live your life as a private and as a professional woman; and, ... if Agnes Scott has made a difference, you want to know what that difference is, what these four years here will have been worth to you as a woman . . If colleges, like those who inhabit them, have identities, then like those same inhabitants, colleges have secrets, private centers, integers, out of which they move and in terms of which they function. Eliot would call this center, this integer, the obstinate and tougher self . . . . Agnes Scott ' s tougher self ... is its deeply imbedded and essentially unselfconscious regard for the worth of the woman, a regard which has informed this academic community from its beginning and worked its subtle influence into the very fabric of the institution . . . Although never aggressively feminist or overtly engaged in the present struggle for women ' s rights, Agnes Scott has always been a woman ' s place. It h as never subscribed to the derogatory view, commonly held by society when Agnes Scott was founded and still prevalent, even in some colleges for women, that women are intellectually, emotionally, and physically unable to pursue with any degree of seriousness or success a demanding course of study in the liberal arts, or in the graduate schools, or in preparation for the professions . . . Instead, it has tacitly but tenaciously acted on the conviction that for the woman-as for all human beings-that which Dante in the Convivio calls the proper love of myself, is, as he says, the beginning of all the rest. From the day of its founding this College has been an academic place which has fostered in its women the discovery of a sense of self-worth. The College continuously has conferred a sense of community which, as Howard Lowry says, answers to one of the deepest human needs, the need for belonging, ' exposing the student to her individual weaknesses but also making her aware of the shining margin of possibility for herself and others ' and directing her to what she can love and honor and serve. In this atmosphere, at once protective and provocative, the College has nurtured this proper self-regard in the best ways possible for a college for women: by the substance and quality of the curriculum it has maintained down through the years; and by the kind of faculty it has sought, got, and kept. Unlike many women ' s colleges, which designed their curricula to accommodate the woman s so-called frailties and her role as wife and mother and offered courses in what M. Carey Thomas, Bryn Mawr s famous feminist president, disparagingly called elegent accomplishmants, ' Agnes Scott from its beginning chose a rigorous classical curriculum which Was steadily augmented by new knowledge, the kind of curriculum which of itself honors the woman student intellectually and emotionally. [In 1911] the curriculum leading to the degree . . . required advanced study in Latin, in Greek or German or French, in English literature, history, mathematics and laboratory sciences. Electives were offered in the new fields of learning, ' new for undergraduate colleges at that time. For instance, there was a course in General Sociology, which included a study of the legal status of women before women even had the right to vote. The College still holds to its conviction that the traditional curriculum of the liberal arts, continuously infused with new knowledge, recognizes the woman ' s ability and her worth, that it serves her in the way it has served the man down through the centuries as the best possible basis upon which to build a professional career in law or business or medicine, and that to interlard this curriculum now with vacational courses meant to produce salable skills in the job market would simply be substituting in elegant accomplishments ' for those elegant ones that Agnes Scott chose never to offer its women. Both demean the intelligence and the value of the woman by refusing to take seriously her personal worth and professional promise. In the first half of this century . . . when most universities and colleges, including many colleges for women, had nothing more than a token woman on their faculties, the array of women professors at this College with Ph.D. degrees from distinguished institutions was impressive, and the ratio of women to men on this faculty was staggering. For example, in 1917, of the 20 members of the faculty, 15 were women, 5 of whom held Ph.D. degrees (in Classics from Cornell; in German from Columbia; two in Chemistry, one from Bryn Mawr and the other from Johns Hopkins; and one in Religion from Wooster) and one held the M.D. from Syracuse University. Among those holding the M.A. degree on the faculty in that year were two Agnes Scott graduates who had taken their advanced degrees from Columbia and Chicago . Neither the depression nor the war seems to have affected the traditional constituency of this faculty, for in 1950, with a faculty of 43, 33 were women and, of these, 19 held the Ph.D. degree and 1 the M.D., and by now there were two Agnes Scott graduates among those holding the highest degree , , . Shaped by the great humanities in which she was tutored, nourished by a faculty that valued self-definition, and provided always with that sense of belonging that cushioned but encouraged the risk of individuation, the woman at Agnes Scott down through the years has discovered that she is something worth, as Donne would say. She has learned, too, that this proper regard for self is exactly what Dante says it is: the beginning of all the rest. Out of this proper self-love come all the great human virtues: dignity, strength, simplicity, courage, straightness of spine, (in Danby ' s lovely words) and the greatest of them all . . the ability to love another, someone outside oneself, precisely because one knows and respects and loves her own person. This sense of self characterized the Agnes Scott woman . . even in those years when it was a given of society that woman ' s place was in the home, taking care of her husband and children . . . Yet, even in those years the graduate of Agnes Scott assumed she could honor her personal self by following a profession, or taking on business, cultural, or civic responsibilities, and recognize her human need as a wife and mother without denying either her professional, feminist right or her private, human need , , . Now, in the closing decades of the twentieth century, the woman expects (and is expected) to be both a professional person and a wife; what was once an option is now an absolute-economic, social, and personal absolute. And, not all women have been able to manage this change in their lives . Joan Didion rebukes [some of them] for turning this chance for growth and renewal into totting up the pans scoured, the towels picked off the bathroom floor . . . ' or, worst of all, for behaving like perpetual adolescents in throwing over a life with husband and children to go find themselves in the Big Apple and there play out ' their college girl ' s dream of becoming this famous writer or being that ' gifted potter. She goes on to remind them that they have forgotten what it means to live actual lives with actual men, and in so doing they are denying to themselves the real generative possibilities of adult sexual life. Helen Vendler speaks ... of those who traumatize [the women s movement] with what she calls ' the puritanical regrouping of women without men, the new theology of male evil . . and those who call the world, in Adrienne Rich ' s burning rhetoric, a world masculinity made Unfit for women or men. As Miss Vendler observes . . none of these radical stances offers a solution to the problems they confront. It would be presumptuous to suggest that there is any single solution to all the problems which the awakening of the woman has provoked ... for years to come she will be coping with and struggling against what has been called the real elements of historical and social evil which contribute to the oppression of women . . Nor is there any real doubt that during these same years she will be working through and trying to find again a proper relationship with her erstwhile companion, the man, who has had to endure with her the predicament of estrangement and who is sometimes as bewildered and rebellious and fearful as she. During these years of change and stress, the essence of the woman ' s strength and the only constant on which she can depend is her sense of her own worth, her self-regard. Her proper love of self can be for her the beginning of all the rest of her life. If this College, this woman ' s place, has given you this place in you, its women, then it, like you, is something worth. ' -Margaret Pepperdene (excerpted from Investiture address) 123
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Page 126 text:
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