Conway, Jill Ker

ENCAENIA, MAY, 2005
JILL KER CONWAY AND NATALIE ZEMON
to be Doctors of Letters

Today UNB honours two distinguished historians. Therefore it is appropriate that we begin with a story from the past. It is even more appropriate that this story not only has a beginning, but is about beginnings.

First, it is about the beginning of a friendship.

During the 1950s, at the University of Michigan, Natalie Zemon and husband Chandler Davis stood among the small group of American academics courageously prepared to defy Senator Joe McCarthy and the anti-communist persecutions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Blacklisted from American university positions because of their political stance, they sought refuge in Canada at the University of Toronto, he to become Professor of Mathematics, she to join the Department of History in 1963.

On the opposite side of the world, Jill Ker was born on a remote sheep station in new South Wales. By age seven she had become one of her father’s main station hands: patrolling fences, prodding sheep and one paddock to another, and enduring with her parents the droughts that added financial and personal devastation to the social isolation of life in Australia’s great outback. After she graduated from the University of Sydney, the lure of scholarship led her to Harvard University for doctoral work in history. There she met and married a Canadian war hero, John Conway, and this Canadian connection brought her, too, to the University of Toronto in 1964.

The meeting of assistant professors Conway and Davis in Toronto was explosive. Both were dynamic young women, brought together at a time and a place in which male concerns and male interests dominated University affairs, and in which the very presence of faculty women was a new and to some unsettling phenomenon. Quickly emerging as two of the University’s most popular young teachers, they threw themselves into the struggle to eliminate salary discrimination, establish day care facilities for women students, and ensure equity for women in appointments and promotions. Today it is hard to imagine how radical these objectives sounded forty years ago. Out of this mutual collaboration was forged an enduring friendship and a professional alliance that persists today.

The collaboration of Drs. Conway and Davis at the University of Toronto also marked another beginning: the launch of two spectacular careers.

In 1975 Smith College lured Jill Conway, by now Vice-President at the University of Toronto, back to the United States to serve as its first woman president. She led Smith during a decade of economic and political turbulence in American life, in the process helping to redefine the mission of women’s colleges for the late twentieth century. Since stepping down from the presidency of Smith in 1985, she has served on the Boards of Directors of at least ten major international corporations. She continues to publish acclaimed works on woman’s history, women’s education, and women’s autobiography, and (most recently) a foray into detective fiction (the murder victim is a college treasurer). Her writings also include the three-volume autobiography that begins with her classic, The Road from Coorain. Burning through all this work is the justice, compassion, and moderation that have shaped Dr. Conway’s career as historian, educator, feminist, and humanitarian.

Similarly, the Toronto years launched Natalie Zemon Davis upon a meteoric scholarly career that led her to a chair at Princeton University; to visiting professorships at Yale, Oxford, and Toronto; and to honours from many of the world’s most distinguished institutions. Her 1983 classic, The Return of Martin Guerre, confirmed her status as the world’s most influential historian of early modern Europe and a guiding force behind a whole new genre of historical scholarship, called cultural history, the history of consciousness, or the history of mentalities. Whether she writes about 17th-century women scholars, or impostor-peasant husbands in the 16th, or convicted murders pleading for clemency before early modern courts, Dr. Davis’s work is always about personal identity and self-construction. It is always about the “stories we tell ourselves about ourselves,” those acts of the imagination that define our social being and collectively make up the unique culture of a time and a place. No wonder that the influence of her scholarship has spilled over out of history per se into anthropology, films studies, and literature. Dr. Davis has what most scholars only dream of – readers from beyond her profession and from beyond academia, drawn by the vibrancy, imagination, compassion, and rich human interest demonstrated in her work.

Reason enough and more here for UNB to honour Drs. Conway and Davis. But let us consider one more beginning.

History if an ancient discipline, but traditionally its purview has embraced the actions, ideas, and fates of males alone. Save for the passing queen or the occasional female saint, historical writing prior to the mid-20th century had had little to say of the experiences and actions of women. Drs. Conway and Davis belong to a generation of scholars that was to change all that. Shortly after arriving in Toronto they conceived a truly audacious plan. They would design and offer an entire university course devoted exclusively to women in history. They would build their course around primary documents composed by women themselves in the past, documents out of which the voices of women lost for generations would be restored to the historical record. Toronto’s famous History 348 represents what we believe was the first course in women’s history to be offered in Canada. It was, by universal testimony, an inspiration. It inaugurated in this country not only a new genre of history, but also a new understanding of what history as a form of the imagination could be. Among the many students and teaching assistants in History 348 that year were young women (an men as well) who would spread the idea (and the ideal) of women’s studies and women’s history to other institutions across Canada, where it continues to flourish.

Through their learning, their leadership, and their example Drs. Conway and Davis have given much to the world. But to Canada they have given one additional gift: the vision of a history made universal by its expansion to include all human beings and made whole by its embrace of all human experience. For that gift – for that special beginning – we honour them jointly today.

From:Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 2