Women's Education Worldwide 2004

June 2, 2004, Mount Holyoke College

Joanne V. Creighton

The following address was delivered at Women's Education Worldwide 2004, the inaugural gathering of leaders in women's education from around the globe, co-hosted by Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges.

Welcome to Mount Holyoke College and thank you for joining us at this conference. We know that many of you have come a very long way -- from Australia and Africa, from the Middle East and Asia, from Europe and Canada and from across the United States. We are deeply grateful to you for joining with us. We are excited about the possibilities of our collective power and potential, and we are united by our shared commitment to education of the women of the world.

The idea for this conference was that of Don O’Shea, Dean of Faculty at Mount Holyoke, who shared it with Susie Bourke, Dean of the Faculty at Smith, who immediately liked the idea and so the partnership began. Smith and Mount Holyoke are part of Five Colleges, Inc., a vibrant, long standing consortium of 5 nearby institutions here in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts that also includes three coed institutions, Amherst, Hampshire, and the University of Massachusetts. We come together in multiple ways in rich consortial cooperation, including allowing our students to take courses on each others’ campuses, operating a free bus service, connecting our libraries and computing resources, and running shared departments and programs including the Five College Women’s Research Center, which is located here on our campus. We are also part of a much less formal, but historic alliance of women’s colleges called “The Seven Sisters.” Indeed, it was this annual meeting of presidents and deans of the “Seven Sibs” that inspired the idea of this conference. We call ourselves the Seven Siblings now because one of our number, Vassar College, has been coed for over thirty years and recently another of our number, Radcliffe College, has been fully absorbed into Harvard University as Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. But nonetheless Vassar, Radcliffe, join the other sisters, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Smith, and Mount Holyoke in these annual meetings. It’s an opportunity to talk about shared educational concerns and to experience good camaraderie.

It seems like a good model for a larger group, and, as we think about the increasingly globalized work we live within, we thought it could be a mechanism for building a global network of colleges. And so we got on the world wide web and invited you all.

We didn’t have a data base of colleges to draw from and we know we missed a number of institutions, especially in India, among other places, that should be here. I hope you can help us to develop such a list. In some places of the world we were foiled by poor internet connections and search capabilities. We added a number of American institutions to the original seven sisters, but not all of roughly 65 women’s colleges in North America because we did not want to overweight the conference with American institutions. In the future, though, we may want to affiliate with the Women’s College Coalition, an organization of North American women’s colleges. For this meeting, our goal is to build bridges and connections across the continents in a relatively intimate setting of about 50 people or so.

We hope this is the first of gatherings every two or three years. We tried to make the format relatively simple, informal, and affordable, so that others of you would not find it overly burdensome to host future gatherings in other wonderful places in the world.

Why have such a gathering at all, you may well ask? What are our hopes and dreams? First, we admit that it is experimental, a pilot, a trial.

But one hope is that it will open up opportunities for colleagueship amongst us. We hope to learn from one another and to brainstorm together about how we can help each other and how we can work together.

We hope that this meeting will be the catalyst for further connections among our institutions, making possible not only colleagueship among the leaders of the institutions but also exchanges among student and faculty and staff.

We hope as well that we will find common cause in our shared commitment to the education of women. And very much to this point will hear later today from our keynote speaker, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen in his provocatively titled talk, “What is the Point of Women’s Education?”

A further question that we might address at this conference is what is the point of single-sex education? We are interested to hear the way each of you answer that question.

While our institutions are very different from one another – some are of venerable age and others quite new; some large, some small; some comparatively privileged, and others not at all, the common ground is that all of us share the mission of educating women, and this puts us out of the mainstream, makes us a little suspect, and makes our existences a little fraught. Compared to traditional men’s and now mostly coed, institutions with whom we compete for students and faculty, we face unique challenges.

In the United States, despite the fact that there remain roughly 65 women-only institutions, our numbers have diminished dramatically over the past four decades from a high of nearly 300 before the widespread coeducational movement.

Most of us were founded when opportunities for educational advancement for women were severely limited. Historical forces over the past forty years, including the civil rights and women’s liberation movements and our own success in educating women for leadership and social action, have had a profound effect on changing the landscape of higher education. Now, women are welcomed at higher education institutions of all kinds, being, in fact, the majority population of students in this country today.

Have we, then, lost our historical reason for being? Should we declare victory for women’s education and go coed? I don’t think so, but I do believe we must change as the world changes around us, and so we are, and I hope we’ll discuss that and how we are responding to the challenges and opportunities of our identity as single-gendered institutions in the 21st century.

From our perspective, the best reason for our continuing existence is that the agenda of women’s education is far from complete. Indeed, taking the long view of women throughout history, women’s education is in its infancy. Here at Mount Holyoke we draw inspiration from Mary Lyon who founded this college 167 years ago, making it the oldest continuing institution of higher education for women in the world. Mary Lyon is not only literally with us, buried on the campus grounds, but with us in spirit. She was a revolutionary who believed in the transformative power of education and the transformative power of women to make positive change in the world. “Go where no one else will go. Do what no one else will do,” she urged her students, and successive generations of graduates heeded her call becoming pioneers in a number of fields and founding well over forty schools and colleges across this country and in Canada, Argentina, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Armenia, Persia, India, China, Japan, Hong Kong, and South Africa and serving as president or principal of over a hundred others. Several of the schools they founded served people excluded from traditional educational systems: Native Americans, African Americans, the blind, the deaf, the educationally impaired.

While, to be sure, tremendous progress has been made in the 167 years since Mary Lyon founded Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1837, still advancing educational opportunity for women across all ethnic, racial, age, and socio-economic groups within each of our countries and across the world continues to be the great unfinished agenda of the 21st century and thus the title of this conference. Integrally intertwined with that is an even more pressing issue and a much larger agenda, that of social justice for women worldwide.

Indeed, it is the world stage that we educators must see our work. The forces of global economics and interconnectivity are changing the world. Global responses to many problems are needed, but few institutionalized structures to deal with such problems are in place. We live in an era where collective identities—nation, ethnicity, religion, gender—are called into question, but the quest for personal identity and meaning is stronger than ever.

How do we educate students in such a world? We believe we should turn the challenges of globalization into opportunities to engage students in analysis of its multifaceted dimensions, including the connections between local and global issues and contexts. We should educate students about the historical contexts of today’s realities helping them to understand a variety of cultures and societies over the course of time, to ponder the links among them, and to search for meaningful ways to respond and to interact across cultures.

Some of us in the U.S. have highly international student populations: we at Mount Holyoke are the most international of any leading liberal arts college, coed or single sex, with roughly 16% of our students from 82 different countries. To be sure, originally our international reach was connected with missionary work. Now, in transforming ourselves for twenty-first century realities, it is about diversity and global citizenship. Our goal is to prepare students, domestic and foreign, for purposeful lives in the complex, highly interconnected, multi-ethnic world that is their inheritance. We want them not only to embrace being women but to recognize a plethora of identities and roles, responsibilities and opportunities within global citizenship.

And in this task, we believe we have much to learn from you who run other women’s institutions around the globe. We want to explore further the programs, alliances, and initiatives that will enable us to reimagine and reinvigorate the possibilities of internationalized liberal arts education in the twenty-first century.

In addition to preparing students for global citizenship, many of us are also committed to being good citizens of our local communities and to recognizing within them populations that have been traditionally excluded from education: older women, certain socio-economic and ethnic populations. Among the group of institutions within this room are many heartening examples of schools which meet the needs of needs of women within indigenous populations and neighborhood communities and, in addition to questions about access, many of you have expressed your concern about barriers these women face entering the workforce and about balance in women’s lives between the personal and the professional, and about preparing them for a life of dramatic change. Several of you cited developing confidence in your female students as a major challenge.

Indeed, this is not surprising. Some of you are dealing with blatant, systematic and systemic gender discrimination, and all of us are dealing with social and economic and psychological effects of the continuing gender imbalance of power in the world.
In addition to gender inequity, many of you have also raised questions and concerns about access and affordability. Others are concerned with the under-representation of women in scientific and technological fields, and what we might do about it. Our keynote speaker tomorrow, Professor Sheila Widnall of MIT, will address that issue.

The common ground we share is that all of us are advocates for women and women’s education. Our goal is to encourage our students to take their place along with men in the highest reaches of the professions, society, and government. We want them to imagine themselves as scientists and artists, as politicians and intellectuals, as movers and shakers.

Of course, educating women for consequential and meaningful lives and advancing a social justice agenda is not a mission we carry on alone, but in conjunction with the schools, and with coed colleges and universities, and with governmental and nongovernmental agencies, and with well-intentioned educators, political leaders, and activists across the country and around the world.

But our very existence is a statement about the importance of women’s education. Moreover, together, we have critical mass. Together we can help to ensure that issues of women’s education and gender equity get attention on a larger stage. If indeed we can serve that larger purpose while also benefiting from the pleasures of colleagueship with one another, then we will have fully justified coming together like this.

I thank you all for coming and I look forward to our conversations.