Susan Wright joined a group of about 30 female Dartmouth students Tuesday night for a discussion hosted by Women in Leadership, a Rockefeller Center-funded group that advocates women assuming leadership positions in society. The event addressed a wide breadth of issues ranging from women in the presidency to masculinity in the workplace.
One of the main topics discussed by Wright, wife of College President James Wright, was a woman in the U.S. presidency. Some students believed that they would vote for a woman just because she was a woman, but most did not agree.
"There's some pretty awful women out there," Amie Sugarman '07, the group's discussion leader, said. "I'm Jewish, but I hate Joe Lieberman. I would only vote for a woman if she shared my ideology."
Another worry was the possible effect on the feminist movement should the president do a bad job.
"I would hate to have a woman president and have her not do as good a job as a man," Natalie Todd-Zebell '09 said. "That would set things back significantly."
Wright, meanwhile, stressed the ability of women to effect change in their societies. She talked about how she had attended this same event with Women in Leadership two years ago and had spoken to a student whose mother went to college with her.
"We began to talk and she told me that she didn't think that Dartmouth was feminine enough," Wright said. "This is a great place to talk abut women's issues, and we talked about what was needed for women. By her senior year she had helped give rise to the 1972 Society."
Wright, the executive director of the Montgomery Endowment Fund, started the discussion by explaining how she ended up at Dartmouth. As a college student, she had gone to Vassar in the last class to graduate from the school when it was exclusively female. She majored in history with a focus on social issues in the South. Despite growing up in a more male-dominated world, Wright said she never personally felt constrained by her femininity.
"I never thought, 'Gee, I can't do this because I'm not a man.'" Wright said. "The world had opened up by the end of the '60s, and we thought we had many opportunities to succeed."
From an early age Wright knew that she wanted a job in education, and hoped to be leader of a school. After college she went to Canada to teach in an inner-city school in Toronto. She later landed a job as a history professor at Dartmouth and has remained here for 30 years. Although Wright never accomplished her goal of becoming the president of a school -- a job her husband has held since 1998 -- she said she has no regrets.
