Montgomery Fellow Jill Ker Conway, Pulitzer prize-winning author and first woman president of Smith College, spoke yesterday afternoon to a packed audience of over 400 community members and students in Cook Auditorium.
In a speech based on her current book "When Memory Speaks," which was released yesterday, Conway described the difference between the memoirs of men and women.
"The standard life form of a female narrative plot is a romance," Conway said. "This is in contrast to the standard male plot, which is an epic like the Odyssey."
According to Conway, in the autobiographies of men, the narrator has to use courage and cunning to overcome obstacles and return to his faithful Penelope and rightful place in society.
The memoirs of women, by contrast, have passive narrators, even if the woman in question has led an active life.
This is dangerous, according to Conway, because women end up concealing the truth from even themselves. This makes it hard for them to judge the moral implications of their actions.
Conway, who is on the board of directors of several corporations including Nike, Merrill Lynch and Colgate-Palmolive, said this trait of being unable to take credit for actions adds to the executive glass ceiling.
"Women will not get promoted because they won't claim their victories," she said. "So they'll be passed over, not in malice, but because they haven't explained their work."
Conway has had a long interest in memoirs. While a doctoral student at Harvard University, she wrote her dissertation on the first generation of women who had access to higher education, those born in the 1860s.
"These women were tough, they were really good political activists," Conway said. "They knew they were part of history."
However, when it came time to write their memoirs, "they presented themselves as the nicest and softest ladies to whom things just happened," she said.
According to Conway this discrepancy is due to the historical roots of the female autobiographical genre. The first female writers were nuns writing about their relationships with God.
When that plot is secularized, explained Conway, the story is a woman's erotic quest that finds its meaning in family life.
"It is similar to the plot of an opera. You have a young beautiful soprano, who bumps into the tenor in the first act and they sing some beautiful love duets," she said. They "spend the second act looking for each other. In the third act they find each other and sing some more love duets. And in the fourth act she drops dead on the stage."
She found this trait present even in the memoir of social reformer Jane Addams, the first American woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
Addams founded Hull House, a settlement in a poor area of Chicago that became an important social laboratory, with the intent to devote her education to being proper neighbors to the poor.
According to Conway, Addams spent three years researching women's communities in Europe before create a 16-page plan titled "The Scheme" outlining her plans for Hull House.
However when Addams wrote her autobiography "20 Years at Hull House" she never mentioned any of this planning. Instead, Addams described her life as a philanthropic romance, Conway said.
"She made herself fall in love with a cause," Conway said.
Conway also compared the memoirs of Mary Kingsley, a British explorer of Africa at the same time as Sir Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone.
According to Conway, Kingsley downplayed the adventure of her voyage. Kingsley described finding fresh human body parts in a headman's hut as if it were a kitchen recipe.
"By domesticating this experience she was able to ignore the fact that she was as much an agent of the British Empire as Stanley or Livingstone," Conway said.
Conway wrote her own autobiography in an attempt to create a different form of women's narrative.
"The Road to Coorain is an acknowledgment of the influence of the men in my life. But it is also clear the story is about how I was able to reach that decision [leaving Australia] and ends with me coming to the States," Conway said.
Readers do not always accept this ending. According to Conway, her publisher still receives thousands of letters asking "how did the story end?"
"I could have written it to end three years later when I met and married my husband in Massachusetts," she said. "Then everyone would know how the story ends."
"True North," the second installation of her memoirs, deals with the life of an adult woman.
"A story that is usually ignored in romances ends in 'and so, reader, I married him,'" Conway said. "The capacity to reflect on our life is what brings us wisdom."
Conway will be in residence in the Montgomery House until April 10. Besides participating in classes and workshops, she will give several more lectures, including the keynote address for the Rockefeller Leadership Conference this weekend.
Conway received an honorary degree from Dartmouth in 1990 and gave the Commencement address the same year. She holds honorary degrees from over 30 North American institutions.
