Jill Ker Conway – författare

In this powerful new collection, the author of two of the most celebrated memoirs in recent years presents the autobiographical writings of 14 of her English-speaking predecessors and contemporaries. The women who tell their stories in Written By Herself, Vol. II represent three generations, four continents, and a range of experience that is equaled only by the diversity with which they transform life into literature.Here are England''s Vera Brittain, commemorating the deaths of the men she loved in the carnage of World War I; Emma Mashinini, who endured imprisonment and torture as a labor organizer in South Africa; Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the daughter of Indian aristocracy who became an architect of her country''s independence; and Edith Mirante, the wisecracking American whose passion for justice took her to the opium trails of Burma. Collected in this stirring volume, their voices demonstrate the ways in which women strive for power, inclusion, and autonomy-- and never fail to move, inspire, and instruct us. Contributors include: Margery Perham,Isak Dinesen,Shudha Mazumdar,Vivian Gornick, Vera Brittain, Elspeth Huxley, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Gloria Wade-Gayles, Angelica Garnett, Emma Mashinini, Meena Alexander, Edith Mirante, Mary Benson, and Ruth First.

J ill Ker Conway, one of our most admired  autobiographers--author of The Road from Coorain and True North--looks astutely and with feeling into the modern memoir: the forms and styles it assumes, and the strikingly different ways in which men and women respectively tend to understand and present their lives.In a narrative rich with evocations of memoirists over the centuries--from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand to W. E. B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, Frank McCourt and Katharine Graham--the author suggests why it is that we are so drawn to the reading of autobiography, and she illuminates the cultural assumptions behind the ways in which we talk about ourselves. Conway traces the narrative patterns typically found in autobiographies by men to the tale of the classical Greek hero and his epic journey of adventure. She shows how this configuration evolved, in memoirs, into the passionate romantic struggling against the conventions of society, into the frontier hero battling the wilderness, into self-made men overcoming economic obstacles to create an invention or a fortune--or, more recently, into a quest for meaning, for an understandable past, for an ethnic identity.In contrast, she sees the designs that women commonly employ for their memoirs as evolving from the writings of the mystics--such as Dame Julian of Norwich or St. Teresa of Avila--about their relationship with an all-powerful God. As against the male autobiographer''s expectation of power over his fate, we see the woman memoirist again and again believing that she lacks command of her destiny, and tending to censor her own story.Throughout, Conway underlines the memoir''s magic quality of allowing us to enter another human being''s life and mind--and how this experience enlarges and instructs our own lives.

Jill Ker Conway, author of one of the most celebrated memoirs of recent decades, is also the premier anthologist of women''s autobiographical writing. In Her Own Words is Conway''s distillation of women''s experience from the British Commonwealth world she came from, compared with major themes in women''s lives in the United States, which is now her home.   In this dazzling collection, we meet twelve remarkable women−from Shirley Chisholm, the West Indian-raised girl who became the first black woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress, to Janet Frame, the brilliant New Zealand writer who overcame involuntary treatment in a mental institution to write one of the archetypal analyses of the post-colonial experience. We learn how the world of politics and the private self intersect in the four offshoots of the old British world, and see how these women have made a difference−by their honesty, by the scale of their struggle for self-knowledge and autonomy, and by the power of their writing.         Patricia Adam-Smith        Lillian Hellman         Rosemary Brown             Dorothy Hewett         Kim Chernin                    Robin Hyde         Shirley Chisholm              Dorothy Livesay         Lauris Edmond                Sally Morgan         Janet Frame                    Gabrielle Roy

The bestselling author of The Road from Coorain presents an extraordinarily powerful anthology of the autobiographical writings of 25 women, literary predecessors and contemporaries that include Jane Addams, Zora Neale Hurst, Harriet Jacobs, Ellen Glasgow, Maya Angelou, Sara Josephine Baker, Margaret Mead, Gloria Steinem, and Maxine Hong Kingston.From the Trade Paperback edition.

True North is the inspirational Canadian Chapter of Jill Ker Conway''s life story, which began with her much love, bestselling memoir, The Road from Coorain.  Beginning with her departure from Australia, Jill Ker Conway tells of her romance with Harvard House Master John Conway, of coming to grips with his manic-depressive disorder, and of their move to Canada in 1964 where she became the first female vice-president at the University of Toronto.  In this vibrant memoir, we watch as a most private woman makes of herself a public persona in Canada.From the Hardcover edition.

In the last twenty-five years women have made remarkable progress in access to the classroom and broken new ground in educational opportunity, yet educational equity remains elusive and politically contested. The Politics of Women's Education: Perspectives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America collects essays that reveal the complex changes in women's education throughout the world and together offer the first comprehensive assessment of what has been attempted, what remains to be done, and what the options are for reform.The volume presents the voices of Third World women and men relating their efforts to improve the position of women through education. They raise important questions for readers from both high- and low-income countries, questions about whether formal or nonformal education will best serve women's needs; whether the state or private initiatives are most likely to succeed in raising women's status through the delivery of transforming knowledge; and whether Western dreams of modernization have any relevance to non-Western societies.A diversity of countries is covered, including India, Pakistan, Korea, the Philippines, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. Each contributor locates the issues surrounding women's education in the larger national context, thus unraveling the matrix that links gender and education to race, ethnicity, social class, and political change. Two essays offer analysis of the worldwide movement for women's education froma comparative perspective and raise fundamental questions about the relevance of the educational models, approaches, and assumptions currently in use.

The Road From Coorain is the beautifully written narrative of Jill Ker Conway's journey from girlhood on an isolated sheep-farm in the grasslands of Australia to her departure for America (and eventually the presidency of Smith College).

Conway opens with her assessment of her life, passions, possibilities and the making of her decision to leave Canada and return to the United States to become Smith's first woman president. Settling into her new environment, she is at once struck by the beauty of the Connecticut Valley and the Olmstead-designed Smith campus - but also by the College's financial problems and a quarrelsome and complaining faculty engaged in disputes and trivial lawsuits. The jolt of energy she gets from being in the presence of several thousand young women enables her to take on the various Smith constituencies: the self-appointed custodians of the great western male tradition of humanistic learning, the puzzled liberals, the younger male feminists, the 'lady scholars doing intellectual petitpoint', and the young committed feminists of all stripes. We see her harnessing the negative energies in more positive directions, redefining and redesigning parts of the institution, strategising, positioning herself and building a political base, introducing feminist scholarship into the curriculum, creating a programme for older students and a funded research centre, adding fields of study and athletic programmes, developing strong career counselling, changing investment strategy, increasing the endowment - and, in general, mobilising the institution to share the urgency she felt for shaping the kind of women's institution that would attract the students of the '90s and beyond. Through it all we see her continuing to cope with her husband John's ill health and learning to protect and sustain her inner self in the quiet solitude of gardening at their country home - a North American variant of the solitude of her native Australian plains. As the end of the Smith decade approaches she reviews what she has learned and decides that she has had her education and that it is time to 'graduate'.