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Jill Ker ConwayJill Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia, in 1934. Her father was a sheep rancher, her mother a nurse, and Conway and her brothers were brought up in almost total isolation on Coorain, their 18,000-acre tract of land, which was eventually enlarged to 32,000 acres. With the unexpected death of her husband, on top of a devastating drought, Mrs. Ker was compelled to leave Coorain with her family for Sydney, where they led a relatively conventional middle-class life. Jill was educated at the all-female Abbotsleigh School and the University of Sydney, where she took an honors degree in history.Conway emigrated to the United States in 1960, and completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1969. As a historian she specialized in American social and intellectual history, and in her own private intellectual concern, the history of American women. She taught at the University of Toronto from 1964 to 1975, where she eventually became vice-president; she then spent ten years as the president of Smith College, the first woman to hold that position. Since 1985 she has been a visiting professor at M.I.T. in its Science, Technology and Society program.
Also by Jill Ker ConwayMerchants and Merinos (1960); The Female Experience in 18th- and 19th-Century America (1982); Women Reformers and American Culture (1987); True North (1994: the second volume of her autobiography); editor of Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women: An Anthology (1992); editor (with Susan C. Bourque) of The Politics of Women's Education (1993).
Back to The Road from Coorain Back to True North
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