By Leanna James Blackwell
It was a warm Sunday in August 1953, and Katherine Butler Jones ’57 (above) had one more person to visit before leaving her childhood home in Harlem for college. A family friend, Aunt Ida, was expecting her. Aunt Ida cooked her meals on a hot plate and worked in service, spending her small savings on gifts for others. Five-dollar bills were slipped quietly into Jones’s hand during every visit. But this time, when Jones arrived at the familiar brownstone, Aunt Ida had another surprise. It was a carefully folded hundred-dollar bill, enough for transportation to and spending money at Mount Holyoke.
It was the biggest bill she had ever seen. Jones’s first-year tuition, room, and board were covered by her mother’s cashed-in life insurance policy. These sacrifices represented, she knew, years of hard work and the belief of a community in the power of education to change lives.
That belief is the frame around everything Jones has achieved since, as professor, activist, historian, and writer. After Mount Holyoke, Jones earned a master’s in education from Simmons College and a doctorate in educational administration from Harvard. She settled in Newton, Massachusetts, with her husband, Hubert Eugene “Hubey” Jones. together they raised eight children, an achievement Jones calls “a political act” for its “power to shape the future.”
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Suzan-Lori Parks ’85 Traces Her Journey From Theatrical Underdog to Topdog
By Leanna James Blackwell
Suzan-Lori Parks ’85 knew she had arrived well before she got to Broadway. Go back about 20 years to the late 1980s—before the Pulitzer Prize for Topdog/Underdog, before the MacArthur “genius grant,” before the Obie for best new play. Leave the Times Square theatres, the lights and the crowds behind.
Look instead for a grimy little neighborhood bar that was formerly a gas station, a place you’d never hear about unless you happen to live around the block. Walk into the bar and that’s where you’ll find Parks, sitting on a stool behind a makeshift curtain. It’s opening night of her first play and there are five people in the audience.
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By Mieke H. Bomann
This article originally appeared in the spring 2007 Quarterly.
From her bedroom window in MacGregor Hall, Senia Bachir-Abderahman ’10 has a beautiful view of Upper Lake and the forest that surrounds it. The college’s rural quality was enticing to this North African for whom woods and lakes had been, for the most part, the stuff of dreams.
The desert landscape of southwest Algeria where Senia grew up is not only treeless and arid but nearly devoid of sand. The bare rock and small-stone terrain is inhospitable to all but the most hardened of life forms. Nevertheless, some 200,000 refugees from neighboring Western Sahara have subsisted there since the mid-1970s. Senia’s family was among them. (More)
By Meg Massey ’08
This article originally appeared in the spring 2007 Quarterly.
Jade McCarthy ’02 knew that she was making an impact her first week on the job. While interviewing Philadelphia Eagles fans after the team’s loss to Seattle, a man driving by rolled down his window and yelled, “Finally—a female doing sports in Philadelphia!”
It was about time, indeed. Last year, Jade became the first female sports reporter in the history of Philadelphia’s major television networks when she joined the sports team at NBC-10. The city had had female sports writers and cable sports news anchors but never a woman sports reporter on a local network.
“When I was interviewing, they asked, ‘Do you think you can handle going into the locker room or club house and asking the tough questions? Can you handle the light that will be shone upon you as the first woman in this city to do this?’” Incredulous, she guaranteed her abilities and hasn’t looked back. (More)
By Julie L. Sell ’83
This article originally appeared in the winter 2006 Quarterly.
She may be only five-foot-one and 105 pounds, but Janet V. Lustgarten ’82 holds her own in the male-dominated world of financial traders and computer engineers. As chief executive officer of Kx Systems, a California technology firm that sells database products to corporate and government clients, Lustgarten has closed business deals with some of the world’s top financial brokerages.
“In twelve years, I’ve only interacted with two women [clients] who were the decisionmakers on this sort of technology,” says Lustgarten. She contends that her gender softens the impact of her direct business style, which she attributes to years spent in New York. “Because I’m a woman, people hear it differently,” she says. “It doesn’t become an ego battle.”
Ten years after the US government’s “glass ceiling commission” published a report on the challenges facing women in attaining senior executive positions in the private sector, the numbers reveal that women like Lustgarten are still vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts. Women account for more than 46 percent of the American workforce but hold less than 8 percent of top management positions. Among women managers, average earnings are less than three-quarters those of their male colleagues. (More)
