Women of Georgetown College: The First Quarter Century
Healy Hall
1995 — When I graduated from Georgetown in 1977, I expected to be a writer. I was a writer and had been for some time. I’d been in Roland Flint’s band of merry poets who read for an appreciative audience every Friday afternoon at Healy Hall. I had published stories and poems, had begun a novel thought fine enough by my professors to submit to Johns Hopkins’ graduate writing program, and had written a play under the direction of Donn Murphy who compared it favorably to a work by a new playwright named Beth Henley.
Graduation day with my sons.
I chose the very practical University of Maryland for graduate school, hoping to get an MFA in creative writing, but after one semester of listening to sour professors advise us to find jobs and make our way in the world with a modicum of physical comfort rather than as starving artists, I left. My 15-year marriage had dissolved and I had two sons and a mortgage and bills to pay.
I went to work. I edited trade publications, first medicine then aviation, and climbed rapidly from editorial assistant to managing editor to editor-in-chief to, currently (and probably finally—I am 51), editorial director. My forewords, editorials, memos, proposals, etc., are written with skill, sometimes flair, a throwback to the days when I was a writer.
My sons are grown men now (31 and 27), both musicians and composers. They have chosen to be the starving artist I never had the courage to be—the part of me that was and is still devoted to creation is in them and I respect and admire that.
Twenty-five years ago, when Georgetown opened its doors to women, I was a young suburban mother and housewife without aspirations, uneducated, writing alone in my bedroom. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, et al, rescued me, helped me believe that I could become educated, that I could be and have more than I had been taught to expect. I chose Georgetown to put those theories to the test, and Georgetown took me in, at the ripe old age of 32, made me feel wise and smart and talented, gave me the confidence to break down doors of discrimination lo these 17 years since I graduated, often as the first or only woman in professional situations. I am forever grateful. I live well—a good life in the sense taught by my beloved philosophy professor, Wilfred Desan—and I am proud of my accomplishments.
This essay appeared in
Women of Georgetown College: The First Quarter Century
Georgetown University, 1995