Alumnae Break New Ground Preventing Disease and Promoting Health
By Hannah Wallace ’95
The public health challenges of the twenty-first century are vast—antibiotic resistance is on the rise, childhood obesity is rampant, and nearly fifty million Americans are still without health care. Add the effects of global warming, cholera outbreaks in Africa, and the continuing HIV/ AIDS pandemic and these combined hurdles seem overwhelming, possibly insurmountable. Fortunately, Mount Holyoke alumnae are making significant strides in public health by founding innovative community-health organizations, launching national wellness initiatives, and collaborating with communities in Zimbabwe to stanch the cholera epidemic, to name just a few.
Deborah Klein Walker ’65, EdD
Title: Vice president and principal associate at Abt Associates, a public health consulting firm; former president of the American Public Health Association
Major at MHC: Psychology
Thirty years ago—when she was working at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—Deborah Klein Walker didn’t even know what public health was. Today, she’s a nationally respected
public health expert known for her leadership on maternal- and child-health issues as well as substance abuse programs. She discovered public health while teaching community child-health studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and “never looked back.”
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Since a “perfect storm” swept the US economy off its foundations last fall, the waves have eroded finances everywhere, including at Mount Holyoke. As President Joanne V. Creighton wrote to the campus community in January, “In the past six months we have seen the financial markets move from shaky to steeply lower and the economy as a whole move from weakness to serious recession.”
“The consensus view among financial experts is that the worst may not yet be over and that the recovery will be long and slow. The negative impact on Mount Holyoke and on higher education in general is already being felt, and it will continue well into the future. As a result, like many other institutions, the college needs to make both short term and longer-term changes to remain financially stable.”
MHC’s endowment—the income from this fund accounts for about one-fifth of each year’s operating budget— dropped by $155 million in the last half of 2008. But Mount Holyoke is hardly alone in being hammered by the recession. A national survey released in late January noted that American college and university endowments lost an average of 23 percent during fall 2008. “This is the most challenging environment that any of us in higher education have seen in our professional lifetimes,” Molly Broad, president of the American Council on Education, told the Washington Post in January.
This is true even though higher education’s endowments generally outperformed the market during the fall slide. For example, the S&P 500 index dropped nearly 29 percent during the second half of 2008, while MHC’s endowment value slid 22 percent during this period.
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By Emily Harrison Weir
Girls never went to school when Tashi Zangmo FP’99 was growing up in a remote corner of Bhutan. She’s working to change that. (Photo by Ben Barnhart)
Many an alumna has been described as “following in Mary Lyon’s footsteps,” but the comparison fits Tashi Zangmo FP’99 better than most. Zangmo, a citizen of Bhutan— where many girls still lack even a primaryschool education— says her life’s work is to elevate the standard of female education in her country. And the parallels don’t end there. Both Lyon and Zangmo were raised in small villages, yet became highly educated women when this was rare in their society. Both aimed to create something large and lasting to benefit girls and women; and spirituality is central to the visions of both educational reformers.
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President Joanne V. Creighton to Step Down in 2010
President Joanne V. Creighton will step down at the end of the 2009–2010 academic year after nearly fifteen years of service. The seventeenth president of MHC, Creighton informed the college’s faculty of her decision at a special meeting in February.
“An extraordinary and palpable esprit de corps emanates out of the college’s inspiring history and mission; that spirit has been the engine of our collective success during the past dozen plus years,” Creighton wrote in a message to the broader community.
Creighton’s tenure has been marked by significant achievements. Since she assumed the presidency in 1996, applications for admission have risen by 50 percent; ninety new tenuretrack faculty were hired, and 81 percent of alumnae have participated in two fundraising campaigns.
“Joanne has a remarkable ability to bring out people’s best selves in service of the greater good,” said Mary Graham Davis ’65, president of the Alumnae Association. “The constructive agenda she has set for the extended Mount Holyoke community has kept alumnae informed and engaged. We have seen we really can make a positive difference in the life of our alma mater. The strong partnership we enjoy between the association and the college is no doubt one of Joanne’s most important legacies.” (More)
By Hannah Clay Wareham '09
Photography by Paul Schnaittacher
I got my first tattoo a month after my twenty-first birthday. I had been imagining it for six months and was ready. Or so I thought.
Having had surgery earlier in the month, I didn’t anticipate the pain being much of a problem. As soon as my tattoo artist-friend’s needle touched down, however, I was writhing in agony. I yelled louder than the TV I was supposed to be distracted by and ended up shaking in a cold sweat.
But the meaning of my tattoo wasn’t lost in those moments of concentrated pain. I focused on my tattoo’s story instead of the needle.
Before I could even talk, I would look at Audubon bird guides for hours. When I started talking, I could name most of the birds. My grandfather and I used to play a game in which he’d name the species of a bird and I’d find it in the book. That’s how I decided I wanted a bird tattoo.
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Words Worth a Second Look
Non-Fiction
Sex and Power: Defining History, Shaping Societies
By Rita Banerji (Penguin Books)
In this sociological and historical study, Banerji examines changes in the dynamics of sexual morality and customs in India and argues that the social power hierarchy determines the moral overview of society, not a set of preexisting or enduring ethics. Overpopulation, AIDS, and female genocide are the result of collective sexual malfunctioning, she argues, and must be addressed in the context of the social and economic power hierarchy.
Rita Banerji ’90 is a freelance writer and photographer based in Calcutta. She is the founder of the online campaign, The 50 Million Missing, www.50millionmissing.in featured in the summer 2008 Quarterly.
Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema
By Negar Mottahedeh (Duke University Press)
Throughout the 1970s, feminist scholars bemoaned the fact that the desiring or malegaze approach to camera angles dominated almost all movies and objectified women. Mottahedeh argues that after the revolution in Iran, convention was unintentionally turned upside down when modesty laws required women be veiled at all times, transforming the desiring gaze into an averted one, and national cinema into women’s cinema.
Negar Mottahedeh ’90 is assistant professor of literature and women’s studies at Duke University. She was born in Iran.
On the Line: Inside the World of Le Bernardin
By Eric Ripert and Christine Muhlke (Artisan Books)
On the Line is a fascinating look at the inner workings of the world-class restaurant Le Bernardin in New York. Told from the point of view of the principal players— chefs, maître d’, sommelier—the story lets you feel the creativity and accomplishment as 150,000 plates of culinary perfection are sent out from the kitchen every year.
Christine Muhlke ’92 is an editor at The New York Times. She has written for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Food & Wine, and other publications.
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New AA President to Stress Good Work, Strong Values of Alums
Cynthia L. Reed ’80 has been nominated to serve a three-year term
as the Alumnae Association’s next president.
Cynthia L. Reed ’80 has a very clear understanding of the importance of women’s education. “The single most important factor in improving healthcare for women, children, and communities is to provide education for girls and women. The higher the level of education, the better the health and living standards,” she says.
Reed, a management and technology consultant for healthcare providers and medical-device companies, has been nominated as president of the Alumnae Association for a three-year term beginning July 1. Helping to spread the word about an MHC education by engaging and celebrating the good work and strong values of alumnae is tops on her to-do list.
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Ethanol Options 
Regarding “Trouble in Your Tank? Ethanol Fuels More Problems Than It Solves” (fall 2008), in the state of Illinois we have Archer Daniels Midland Co., which pioneered in the production of ethanol from shelled corn. This firm is cooperating with Monsanto, John Deere, Conoco-Phillips, and Purdue University in the development of biofuels from cornstalks and husks. Two universities in Illinois offer degree programs in ethanol. Gas pumps in Illinois contain 10 percent ethanol. E85 (motor fuel containing 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline) corridors are being established. I have not understood why ethanol from sugar cane is not considered in the United States when this has been a success in Brazil.
Janet Galbreath MA’52
Ava, Illinois
Dream Living Rather than ‘Green’ Living
Kara Baskin’s article, “Down to Earth” (winter 2009), seemed to extol the virtues of moving west, developing land, [and] building new houses no matter how “green” the materials, and buying new appliances, no matter how energy efficient. How about focusing on those alumnae who move closer to town and city centers, walk, use public transportation, buy at farmers markets, sell a car, and hang out the wash. Aren’t those the ones reducing their footprints?
Anne Sanborn Lombard ’56
Northampton, Massachusetts
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By Hannah Clay Wareham '09
In October of 1942, a group of eight songstresses debuted their skills at Junior Show. As the accompaniment to a student dance number called “My Pajama Ballet,” the singers were off stage, hidden from the audience. By the time their performance was over, however, the crowd had made it clear by demanding encore after encore that the women had created something spectacular.
To this day, Mount Holyoke’s V-8s is the longest-running female a cappella group in the nation, a well-known fact among Mount Holyoke students. Their legacy extends far beyond campus, however, as the original V8s found fame in New York City by entertaining World War II servicemen at one of the most popular clubs of the 1940s.
The original group can be credited with a turning of the tides on the Mount Holyoke campus. A 1944 article in the Mount Holyoke News described the original performance of the V-8s as “the only evidence, so far as we know, of a former [Junior] Show success continuing as a new college tradition.” In a 2002 letter to the current V-8s, founder Abigail Halsey Van Allen ’44 wrote, “[the group] was conceived as an opportunity to have fun!”
While opposition the original V-8s faced was very slight, it did exist. “Often the music director of the Glee Club and choirs of the time … looked in on us, but did not seem too happy with what we were doing,” Joan Morris McNally ’44 remembered of rehearsals. The selection of modern songs for performance created some waves within the music community, but the V-8s had found something that stuck.
The origin of the group’s name is about as telling of the times as the hairstyles and dresses the women boast in faded photographs. The “V” stood for “Victory,” Winston Churchill’s rallying call of the World War II era. The 8, of course, stands for the eight original members. “Churchill’s raised index and middle fingers of his right hand forming a V for Victory was very pervasive,” Van Allen wrote. “Victory became the spirit of the times.”
The fame of the V-8s began to spread off-campus soon after their debut in Wilbur, Mount Holyoke's then-student center. They performed at the Westover air force base, parties held for textile-mill workers, and meetings of the Junior League. The V8s were also the first amateur group invited to perform at the Stage Door Canteen in New York City, the most famous entertainment venue for servicemen and the subject of a feature-length Hollywood film (Stage Door Canteen) that debuted the year before the V-8s made their appearance.
The women were largely unimpressed by the Canteen at first glance, according to a scrapbook put together about the original V-8s. Described as reminiscent of someone’s basement, it was not at all what they had been expecting, considering the Canteen’s publicity and fame. The noisy, smoky room in which they performed was so small that some of the servicemen in the audience were actually sitting on the stage with them. The V-8s delivered a rousing performance of popular songs like “The Farmer and the Maiden” and “The Hawaiian War Chant.” Despite the lack of a microphone for half of the performance, Van Allen described the concert as “the zenith and swan song of our original group.”
While a recording was created by the original V-8s, none of the copies exist today. All that is left are a few boxes of yellowed letters and song lists in the college Archives, the memories of the original V-8s, and, of course, the women today who bear the group’s name and legacy. While today’s V-8s have expanded to a group of fifteen, they still feature 1940s classics by Etta James and the Andrews Sisters in their repertoire, reminiscent of the women who have come before them.
Above: the original V-8s performing at the Stage Door Canteen in New York City.
The V-8s pictured are (left to right) GG Graff, Caroline Lacey, Abbey Halsey, June Hart, Joan Morris, Joan McMahon, and Connie Rheaume.
NOTE: The MHC Archives and Special Collections is searching for an original copy of this photo, which was published in the Feb. 11, 1944, Mount Holyoke News. If you have one, please contact the archives staff (archives@mtholyoke.edu).
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