Opening Convocation
"A Narrative of Our Own"
Wellesley College
September 5, 2001

Diana Chapman Walsh
President
Wellesley College

Today we cross the threshold into our 126th academic year. With glad hearts and high hopes, we welcome to this community all the newcomers who now join our cause- students, faculty, and staff from so many and such varied points of embarkation, geographical and metaphorical. We eagerly anticipate the fresh energy and ideas you will bring as you settle into this fluid space and begin to make it yours. It is yours, remember that; it is ours.

Wellesley has a strong culture and firmly-rooted traditions that resist change. Ask anyone who has tried to move so much as a tree or a parking space -- or to advocate for a cultural advisor. Yet each of us reshapes this venerable institution, each of us invents it anew as we make our way through. We do it with the stories we bring, and with the narratives we enact in whatever span of time we are given to inhabit this place. That makes all of us, in a sense, trustees of Wellesley College. Now there's a radical thought that we'd better keep under wraps. Each of us holds this college in trust for our time. Each of us daily chooses the difference we will make here.

And collectively, through our choices, through the stories we inscribe here, we make and remake this college: a college captured on our lamp post banners (the colorful vestiges of last year's anniversary and campaign festivities); a college committed to providing, as we so often declaim, an excellent liberal arts education for women who will make a difference in the world.

But what kind of difference? And what kind of world? Are we educating women to make a different world? Is that what you are being called to, after you leave this place? Or are our ambitions for you - and yours for yourselves -- more modest, more humble, more circumscribed? Will we all be entirely satisfied if you make your way through this world displaying the integrity, dignity, wisdom, and critical acuity, and wearing the mantle of mature responsibility expected of any liberally-educated person, male or female? That's plenty to ask of anyone, after all. What sorts of claims are we truly prepared to make -- and to defend -- about the special role of our college in a changing world? Surely the answers are different -- deeper, more subtle -- after 30 years of co-education than they were before.

In my era - the sixties -- we came to Wellesley as one of the few top colleges that would have us. Simple as that. There weren't many rigorous choices beyond what the head of my school always called "the heavenly seven." We were conformists, doing what was expected of us. In contrast, you students here today have made - and been compelled to explain to dubious peers - a much more complex and discerning choice to become Wellesley women. You are non-conformists: braver than we were; smarter too, I think; surer of yourselves. You are here for an education you understand to offer something particular, and something real, for you as a woman. How clear are any of us, then, about what that something is?

These are the questions we are left to ponder together as we come down from the high of our anniversary celebration, as we take down the banners, pay off the bills, trim the budget, clean up the place, and take stock of where we are now as we contemplate another quarter century -- our sixth. These are not new questions to be sure; we've asked them many times. But the times change and so, presumably, should our answers.

The 125th anniversary symposium demonstrated that what we are offering works. We can summon a growing honor roll of impressive graduates in every field of endeavor, and they can bear eloquent witness to the enduring meaning Wellesley has had in their intriguing lives. We needn't claim that the education we offer works better than coeducation, or that it is for everyone, to justify our continued existence.

Our alumnae know what they experienced here; they understand its value. And they have shown in the first year of the campaign that they will support the college because they want to ensure its availability for those who will follow them. In that sense, swimming against the tide, as we are, may work to our advantage. If our ability to continue educating only women is not a foregone conclusion -- never has been; likely never will be -- then securing the college's future is a cause to rally around. And rally our alumnae do, much to our benefit and comfort.

But still the question gnaws: Do we stand for something larger than the mere survival of an attractive consumer option? Should we see ourselves as more than an engine of social mobility for women in domains from which they were once excluded and are now infiltrating in larger numbers every year? Can we also bear a standard for a broader, more utopian vision? Can we craft new ways of thinking about sustainable leadership?

We have roots in a feminist moral vision suggesting not only that we can reach higher and farther, but that we must. This view posits a consciousness, an epistemology, an ethic and an aesthetic that are prototypically female - a "morality of responsibility," in Carol Gilligan's words, in contrast to the masculine "morality of rights." Now, I hasten to remind us all not to fall prey to essentialist categories or stereotypes. These prototypes do not neatly predict individual attributes. Rather, they are broad cultural constructions of "gender schemas" or expectations. Each of us comprises elements of the masculine and the feminine. I have a hunch, for example, that if we were to take a poll right now, we would find among the men in this audience proportionately as many committed feminists as among the women.

Nevertheless, we know that a distinctly feminine worldview -- a product of historical conditions that have shaped women's experiences as "the other" - embodies those aspects of human striving that are more contextual, more holistic, and more attuned to the environment, to connections, to relationships than is the patriarchal male model within which this feminine prototype has had to make an uneasy peace. In contrast, the masculine project has denied the feminine, dominated women, and advanced competition, militarism, imperialism and environmental degradation.

Virginia Woolf's fiery 1938 essay, "Three Guineas," cleverly spins out this argument in reference to a salient question for us, as we enter year two of our comprehensive campaign: How should she respond to a letter requesting contributions to a fund to rebuild a women's college? Maybe she'll direct her gift, she muses, toward "rags and petrol and … matches" to burn the college down. (We won't be accepting any such gifts to our campaign, I assure you). But, Woolf continues, if the college will teach a women's ethic, if it will take up its role as custodian of a uniquely feminine value system, if it will do its part to prevent fascism and war, then perhaps it will merit one of her three guineas. We have 400-million dollars to raise and we're not accepting guineas (they're no longer legal tender), but can we extrapolate from Woolf's rumination to our own circumstance?

I found a partial answer this summer in a more recent book, Disappearing Acts, by Joyce K. Fletcher, a senior research scholar at the Stone Center's Jean Baker Miller Training Institute. Her study illuminates how a women's ethic might operate (and be resisted) in the contemporary world of work. Fletcher describes in some detail what she calls, citing Jean Baker Miller, "relational practice" in the workplace - a set of behaviors and values that put a premium on empathy, honest exchange, mutual support, and sensitivity to emotional nuance.

The women engineers in her study consciously employ these relational behaviors as pragmatic strategies for getting the job done. They are not defaults, not simply natural, and they are certainly not symptoms of weakness or deficiency. The relational practices require special skills and an expanded "logic of effectiveness," she argues, and she shows how these valuable skills - team-building skills that all corporations say they desperately need in this era of interdependence and diversity - how these skills are trivialized and suppressed by the male-dominated corporate culture. As a consequence, the women themselves - accomplished engineers who have made it in a man's world -- sound diffident, ambivalent, and self-contradictory when they try to articulate why and specifically how they are challenging conventional wisdom as to what it takes to produce good work. They simply don't have the language.

The process Fletcher uncovers was captured earlier by Carolyn Heilbrun, in her wonderful book entitled Writing a Woman's Life. If you haven't read it, you should. A distinguished Columbia University professor of English literature, a 1947 graduate of Wellesley College and the 1984 winner of our alumnae achievement award (parenthetically, also the pseudonymous mystery writer Amanda Cross), Heilbrun's insight brings us full circle to the urgency of telling our stories.

"Men trivialize the talk of women," Heilbrun writes, "… in order to make women themselves downgrade it." "Women must turn to one another for stories; they must share the stories of their lives and their hopes and their unacceptable fantasies. …We must begin to tell the truth, in groups, to one another. Modern feminism began that way, and we have lost, through shame or fear of ridicule, that important collective phenomenon."

Only when we recover it, she believes, will women break loose of the confinement and oppression of patriarchal language, stop denying their life's experience, and write a "narrative of their own."

If women writers need a room of our own, as Virginia Woolf famously insisted, then women leaders need a narrative of our own, a narrative that will embolden us to forge our identities, organize our struggle, and remake the moral order out of which our lives derive their meaning and take their shape. A collective narrative of women's leadership - such as the one we began last April at our 125th anniversary symposium -- would allow women leaders to name and claim the inner work we do, the special connections we make and maintain, the special gifts we have for the world, the special hopes we have for the future.

Isn't that, then, what we are doing here after all -- inventing the language we will need to bring what has been a vulnerable private process out into the public sphere? Once there, with powerful words, we can challenge the conventional wisdom, uncover the common wisdom we share from internal struggles each of us may have thought were uniquely our own, reduce our isolation, mine our differences, and build collaborations that will be sturdy enough to stand up against oppression and injustice around the world.

Now there's a cause worthy of support, don't you agree? Let me know, and, meanwhile, I wish for each and every one of you a happy, healthy, productive, and satisfying academic year. Keep telling your stories to yourselves and to one other.