Jill Ker Conway - In Her Own Words: Womens Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States

Jill Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia, graduated from the University of Sydney in 1958, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1969. From 1964 to 1975 she taught at the University of Toronto and was vice president there before serving for ten years as president of Smith College. Since 1985 she has been a visiting scholar and professor in M.I.T.s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and she now lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Also by Jill Ker Conway

When Memory Speaks: Exploring the Art of Autobiography
True North

The Politics of Womens Education
(with Susan C. Bourque)

Written by Herself:
Autobiographies of American Women (editor)

Written by Herself:
Womens Memoirs from Britain, Africa, Asia, and the United States (editor)

The Road from Coorain

Learning About Women
(editor, with Susan C. Bourque and Joan W. Scott)

Women Reformers and American Culture

The Female Experience in Eighteenth
and Nineteenth-Century America

Merchants and Merinos

Copyright 1999 by Jill Ker Conway

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
In her own words : womens memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States / edited and with an introduction by
Jill Ker Conway.
p. cm.
A Vintage original.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79724-7
1. WomenBiography. 2. Biography20th century.
3. Autobiographies. I. Conway, Jill K., 1934 .
CT3235.I5 1999
920.72dc21 98-44745

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The autobiographer writes a narrative where subject and object are intermingledwhere knower and the known are part of the same consciousness. This makes for riveting reading when the narrator can move seamlessly between the self as object and speaker, providing text which conveys both inner life and external events. That is why we often use memoirs as windows on the worlds the writers inhabit. They are social documents as well as literary textsone reason why historians quote them so frequently.

This anthology is a window on the lives of talented women from the old British colonial world and their twentieth-century counterparts in the United States. Nine of the twelve authors represented are successful writers, a predominance suggestive of the extent to which the colonial experience is a forcing ground for womens literary consciousness.

A product of the pre-1950 British Commonwealth world, I have lived my adult life in Canada and the United States. This means I have often played the game of wondering what life might have been like had I stayed in my native Australia, and during journeys home, I have reflected on the various ways in which being a woman in one segment or another of the English-speaking world is different yet the same. This anthology is an exploration of that difference and sameness.

We learn a great deal about the social and cultural context of an autobiographers life, because at every stage in the story the writer must tell us whether she or he is responding to the world around them in ways that were typical of or deviant from her or his society and times. A subtext of any such story then is the life plot the writer assumes is to be expected, and not in need of explanation. A striking aspect of the memoirs in this collection is the extreme sense of deviance the authors report, and the trouble they had finding a life plan which both fit their experience and was even marginally acceptable to those around them.

Because of this difficulty, memoirs are invaluable documents for the historian for the patterns of culture they delineate, even though memoirs are invariably shaky sources of factual information about the writers life. Our memories are deceptive. People, events, life circumstances change depending on the point in life from which we choose to view them. Because, of course, the structure of the autobiographers narrative is shaped by the end point toward which the story leads. The factual record is something a biographer may compile after a lifes end point is known, but only the autobiographer can tell us what that experience felt like and seemed to be about at a given point in the life history.

Four women in this selection chose expatriation for all or part of their lives. Their journeys from colony to metropolis are instances of a near universal phenomenon for British colonial intellectuals and leaders, a theme as marked in the lives of men as of the women selected here. Gabrielle Roy, doubly colonized as a French-Canadian living in English-speaking Manitoba, had to experience France and England before she could see her French-Canadian world straight. Dorothy Livesay found her mtier on a journey to England, and tested her newfound independence as a widow on a journey to Africa. Robin Hyde and Janet Frame, two outstanding creative talents from New Zealand, endured acute alienation from a world that perceived their creativity as a form of madness. They took flight for Europe and the dream of a more congenial cultural environment, a flight from the frontier to complexity, a reverse version of the American flight to the frontier to escape the confines of settled society. Both Hyde and Frame were able to mine their experience of New Zealand mental institutions to make the predicament of madness the vantage point for seeing the world with dazzling clarity, but Hydes travels, in contrast to Frames liberating ones, underline the dangers of travel for the solitary and impoverished woman with few resources to withstand the dangers of deep depression. Frames and Hydes journeys have their origin in the same alienation which sent countless male Australians and New Zealanders to Europe. What is different about their stories is how much harder it was for a woman to get together the money to get away, and how vulnerably alone she was on reaching the fabled England.

Rosemary Brown and Shirley Chisholm both kept the counter-world of their native Jamaica and Barbados, where women were strong and influential leaders, in their inner minds eye as they followed their political vocations in Canada and the United States. Browns years as a leader in British Columbia politics and on the national Canadian scene emphasize the value of travel and expatriation for women. The newcomer, from outside the society, is less disturbing to its social and political hierarchies when she seeks power than the local woman, who occupies a clearly defined place in societys kin and status networks.