Deputy Secretary of Education Madeleine Kunin spoke to about 50 students and professors about her reasons for writing her autobiography, titled "Living a Political Life," yesterday afternoon.
"I think the feminist side of me felt very strongly that women were going to have to explain their lives if we wanted to be role models," she said.
Kunin, a former governor of Vermont, said she wrote the book to "really define myself ... and I did it for the people who asked me, 'How did you get into politics?'"
The hardest part of writing the book was "letting go of my public and political persona," she said.
Kunin said she did not write the autobiography chronologically because "life isn't necessarily chronological."
The book starts by describing the day she decided not to run for governor again, Kunin said. It "turned out to be more about getting to be governor than being governor."
Kunin served three terms as governor of Vermont from 1985 to 1991. She released her autobiography in February of this year.
She said she felt extremely possessive about her book and was "afraid to send it off into the world." She needed to create distance to deal with the concept that anybody can read, comment and respond to the book, she said.
"Nobody reads the book in the way you write it," she said.
Kunin said she was thrilled to see people of other generations relating to the book. "People are intrigued by autobiographies" because they are searching to find meanings to their own lives, she said.
Writing the book was a "way of connecting to the world and to other people" and lets the speaker have an "uninterrupted conversation" with an audience, she said.
Kunin concluded her speech by reading excerpts from her book, including a part about a cow chip throwing contest she competed in when she ran for lieutenant governor in the late 1970s.
Kunin is not new to the College. She served as the College's first Nelson A. Rockefeller Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the fall of 1993, during which time she worked on writing her recently published book. Kunin also served as a Montgomery Fellow from February to June 1991. During her stay as a Montgomery Fellow, she co-taught a government class called "Women, Politics and the Law" with Government Professor Lynn Mather.
The event was the academic year's final public program sponsored by the Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences and was held in the Hinman Forum.
