Alumnae Bulletin
November 2010
President's column
Dear Alumnae/i,
Under a bright noonday sun on 23
September 2010, I experienced a
quintessential Bryn Mawr moment. Our
students had streamed out of labs,
libraries and classrooms to gather on
Merion Green. Cheering with
anticipation, they welcomed the arrival of
the College birthday cake, a splendid
confectionary recreation of Thomas Great
Hall and the Cloisters. One might
reasonably have expected that the students
who orchestrated this event would simply
lead us in song and start cutting the cake.
But in true Bryn Mawr fashion, they had
invited Professor Kate Thomas of the
English Department to mark the occasion
with special remarks.
Kate delighted us with a lively
disquisition, drawn from Virginia Woolf,
about how important dining well is to
thinking well. In describing her dinner at
an Oxbridge men’s college, Woolf
enthuses, “And thus by degrees was lit,
half-way down the spine, which is the seat
of the soul, [a] profound, subtle and
subterranean glow which is the rich
yellow flame of rational intercourse.”
“Having shared this rich yellow flame
with the male scholars,” Kate Thomas
continued, “Woolf then trudges back to
her lodgings in one of the women’s
colleges, which sadly offers no such
comforts. Instead, they serve her brown
soup and that most dreaded of deserts:
prunes. ‘The lamp in the spine,’ Woolf
laments, ‘does not light on [. . .] prunes’.”
Professor Thomas, whose research
involves literary culture and food studies,
finished with the rousing assertion that
we at Bryn Mawr know that “when we
join together to celebrate 125 years of
educating women, we should serve not
prunes, but cake.” Students cheered,
broke into song and then dove into the
birthday cake.
With a happy heart, I then made the
quick dash to Goodhart to open our international anniversary conference,
“Heritage and Hope: Women’s Education
in a Global Context.” It was exhilarating to
walk into the Mary Patterson McPherson
Auditorium and find so many students,
faculty, alumnae, friends and visitors
assembled for the inaugural session.
Participation in this conference was
stronger and more enthusiastic than I
could have predicted, and the many
emails and notes that I have received in its
aftermath signal its success.
The title of the conference, “Heritage
and Hope,” was chosen with great care. It
was wonderful to celebrate 125 years of
Bryn Mawr’s heritage, its aspirations and
accomplishments, and more broadly the
leadership of women’s colleges and girls’
schools in expanding educational access
and equity. It was equally exciting to look
ahead with hope, anticipate all that we
can be and all that we can do in the years
to come. The education of women and
girls has been and can be a powerful
instrument of progress. Graduates of
women’s colleges and girls’ schools have
been a fearless force for change for the last
two centuries. New female-focused
institutions at all educational levels
continue to be founded and to flourish
around the world.
In her keynote address at the
conference, U.S. Ambassador for Global
Women’s Issues, Melanne Verveer, summoned us, as institutions focused
upon the education and empowerment of
women, to become agents of global
advancement. She asked us to exercise
what I call our institutional agency, to be
advocates for women whose lives are
stifled by social circumstances and
cultural practices that constrain and
constrict. In the final speech of the
conference, Nicholas Kristof, co-author
with his wife Sheryl WuDunn of the
bestselling Half the Sky: Turning Women’s
Oppression into Opportunity, echoed this
call to activism.
To meet this challenge we need closer
connections and more robust affiliations
with female-focused educational
institutions around the world and with
non-governmental organizations devoted
to gender justice.
I am convinced that we are on the
cusp of change and that this is a moment
in which women’s education can align
itself with powerful currents of progress.
September marked the 10th anniversary
of the UN Millennium Development
Goals, which include gender equity and
universal education among their eight
mandates. During the same week as the
“Heritage and Hope” conference, the UN
General Assembly held a plenary summit
to accelerate progress toward the 2015
deadline for these goals. Also convening
in New York during that week, the
Clinton Global Initiative made
empowering girls and women one of the
major themes of its annual meeting. I
think we will look back on the fourth
week of September 2010 and these three
major gatherings as a turning point in the
history of women’s education and the
history of women’s advancement.
Sincerely,
Jane McAuliffe
Back to top »
