Jill Ker Conway AC
7th President ofSmith College
In office 1975–1985
Preceded by	Thomas C. Mendenhall
Succeeded by	Mary Maples Dunn
Personal details
Born	Jill Ker (1934-10-09)9 October 1934 Hillston, New South Wales, Australia
Died	1 June 2018(2018-06-01) (aged 83) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Nationality	Australian, American
Spouse	John Conway (d. 1995)
Alma mater	University of Sydney Harvard University (PhD)
Occupation	Writer
Academic background
Thesis	The first generation of american women graduates (1969)
Academic work
Discipline	History
Institutions	University of Toronto Smith College Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Writing career
Genre	Autobiography
Notable works	The Road from Coorain
Notable awards	National Humanities Medal 2012
Literature portal

Jill Ker ConwayAC (9 October 1934 – 1 June 2018) was an Australian-American scholar and author. Well known for herautobiographies, in particular her firstmemoir,The Road from Coorain, she also wasSmith College's first woman president (1975–1985) and most recently served as a visiting professor at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 she was designated aWomen's History Month Honoree by theNational Women's History Project.^[1] She was a recipient of theNational Humanities Medal.

Ker Conway was born inHillston,New South Wales, in the outback of Australia. Together with her two brothers, Ker Conway was raised in near-totalisolation on a family-owned 73 square kilometres (18,000 acres) tract of land called Coorain (theAboriginal word for "windy place"), which eventually grew to encompass 129 square kilometres (32,000 acres). On Coorain, she lived a lonely life, and grew up without playmates except for her brothers. In her early years, she was schooled entirely by her mother, with the aid of correspondence class material for her primary school and early grade school education.^[2]

Ker Conway spent her youth working the sheep station; by age seven, she was an important member of the workforce, helping with such activities as herding and tending the sheep, checking theperimeter fences and transporting heavy farm supplies. The farm prospered until it was crippled by a drought that lasted seven years. This and her father's worsening health put an increasing burden on her shoulders. When she was eleven, her father drowned in adiving accident while trying to extend the farm's water piping.

Initially Jill Ker Conway's mother, anurse by profession, refused to leave Coorain. But after three more years ofdrought, she was compelled to move Jill and her brothers toSydney, where the children attended school.

Ker Conway found the local state school a rough environment. TheBritish manners and accent ingrained by her parents clashed with her peers' Australian habits, provokingtaunts andjeers. This resulted in her mother enrolling her atAbbotsleigh, a private girls school, where Ker Conway foundintellectual challenge and social acceptance. After finishing her education at Abbotsleigh, she enrolled at theUniversity of Sydney, where she studiedHistory andEnglish and graduated with honours in 1958. Upon graduation, Ker Conway sought a trainee post in theDepartment of External Affairs, but the all-male committee turned down her application.

After this setback, she travelled through Europe with her now emotionally volatile mother. In 1960, she decided to strike out on her own and move to theUnited States. At age 25, she was accepted into the history program ofHarvard University'sRadcliffe College,^[3] where she devoted her studies towomen's history, not yet an established historical discipline, and wrote her dissertation onJane Addams and the establishment ofHull House.^[4] Her interest in Addams and Hull House was sparked by her neighbor and friend, former Librarian of Congress,Archibald Macleish.^[5] At Harvard, she also assisted aCanadian professor, John Conway, who was her husband from 1962 until his death in 1995. Ker Conway received herPh.D. at Harvard in 1969 and taught at theUniversity of Toronto from 1964 to 1975. Her bookTrue North details her life inToronto.

From 1975 to 1985, Ker Conway was the president of Smith College. After 1985, she was a visiting professor at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. She received thirty-eighthonorary degrees and awards from North American and Australian colleges, universities and women's organizations.^[3]

Throughout her career, Ker Conway served as director on a variety of corporate boards. These include stints of more than a decade on the boards ofNike,Colgate-Palmolive, andMerrill Lynch.^[6] Ker Conway was also the first female Chairman ofLendlease.^[7]

After 2011, Ker Conway served as the Board Chair ofCommunity Solutions.^[8] It is a non-profit organization with a focus on homelessness and related issues, based in New York City.

Conway died on 1 June 2018 at her home in Boston at the age of 83.^[9]

In 1975, Ker Conway became the first female president ofSmith College, the largestwomen's college in theUnited States. Located inNorthampton, Massachusetts, Smith, a privateliberal arts college, is the only women's college in the U.S. to grant its own degrees inengineering.

Ker Conway launched theAda Comstock Scholars program, initially proposed by her predecessorThomas Mendenhall. This program allows non-traditional students, many with work and family obligations, to study full or part-time, depending on their family and work schedules. These women can take classes for a bachelor's degree over a longer period of time. Conway House, dedicated in 2006, a residence for Ada Comstock Scholars was named in honor of Ker Conway.

One of Ker Conway's more notable accomplishments is a program she initiated to help Ada Comstock Scholars onwelfare. At the time, many students who were also welfare mothers were not pursuing higher education, as accepting ascholarship would cause them to lose their welfare benefits. The mothers were forced to choose between supporting their children or furthering their education. By not giving them scholarships but paying theirrent instead, Ker Conway circumvented the state's system. She also gave the students access to an account at local stores, access tophysicians and so on.ABC'sGood Morning America profiled graduates of the program, giving it national exposure. Eventually the state ofMassachusetts, convinced about the importance of the program, changed its welfare system so that scholarship students wouldn't lose their benefits.^[10]

She also led the creation of the Smith Management Program (now called Smith Executive Education) and the Project on Women and Social Change. She worked to expand the curriculum leading to the development of programs in women's studies, comparative literature, and engineering. Conway took a keen interest in fundraising and under her presidency the endowment nearly tripled from $82 million to $222 million. These efforts enabled several large-scale projects including the construction of the Ainsworth Gymnasium, and expansion of the Neilson Library. The Career Development Office was also expanded under her tenure to better educate alumnae about career opportunities and graduate training.

In 1975, Jill Ker Conway was named byTime as aWoman of the Year.^[11]

Ker Conway started writing her first memoir after leaving Smith College, during her period atMIT.The Road from Coorain was published in 1989 (ISBN 0-394-57456-7) and details her early life, from Coorain inAustralia toHarvard in theUnited States.

The book begins with her early childhood at the remote sheep station Coorain nearMossgiel, New South Wales. Ker Conway writes about her teenage years inSydney and especially her education at theUniversity of Sydney, where university studies were open to women but the culture was focused heavily on the men. She describes herintellectual development and later her feelings when she realizes that there is abias against women; based upon her sex, she is denied atraineeship at theAustralian foreign service.

In 2001,Chapman Pictures produced atelevision film,The Road from Coorain, featuringKatherine Slattery as the grown-up Jill andJuliet Stevenson as her mother.

This list isincomplete; you can help byadding missing items.(September 2012)

• 1960 Jill Ker Conway was a 1960Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar in History from theUniversity of Sydney toHarvard University.^[12]
• 1975 In the first year of her presidency at Smith College, Conway was named a "woman of the year", one of a small group of notable women selected for that award byTime magazine.^[13]
• 1989L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award,The Road from Coorain
• 2001 Inducted onto theVictorian Honour Roll of Women.^[14]
• Ker Conway was appointed a Companion (AC) in the General Division of theOrder of Australia on 10 June 2013 for hereminent service to the community, particularly women, as an author, academic and through leadership roles with corporations, foundations, universities and philanthropic groups.^[15] On 12 June, she was removed as a 'Companion' and invested as an 'Honorary Companion' of the Order of Australia, because she no longer held Australian citizenship.^[16]
• On July 10, 2013, she received a 2012National Humanities Medal from PresidentBarack Obama.^[17]

In 2017 the John and Jill Ker Conway residence for veterans was opened in Washington DC.^[18]

• Conway, Jill Ker (1977).Modern Feminism: An Intellectual History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• ——; Kealey, Linda; Schulte, Janet E. (1982).The Female Experience in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America: A Guide to the History of American Women. New York: Garland Pub.ISBN 9780691005997.
• —— (1987).Utopian Dream or Dystopian Nightmare?: Nineteenth-Century Feminist Ideas about Equality. Worcester, Massachusetts: American Antiquarian Society.ISBN 9780912296890.
• ——;Scott, Joan W.; Bourque, Susan C. (1989).Learning about Women: Gender, Politics and Power. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.ISBN 9780472063987.
• —— (1989).The Road from Coorain (1st ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf Distributed by Random House.ISBN 9780749303600.

Reprinted as:—— (1992).The Road from Coorain (2nd ed.). London: Minerva.ISBN 9780749398941.

• —— (1992).Written by Herself: An Anthology. New York: Vintage Books.ISBN 9780679736332.
• ——; Bourque, Susan C. (1995).The Politics of Women's Education: Perspectives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.ISBN 9780472083282.
• —— (1995).True North: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books.ISBN 9780679744610.
• —— (1992).Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women. An Anthology. New York: Vintage Books.ISBN 9780679736332.
• —— (1992).Written by Herself: Women's Memoirs From Britain, Africa, Asia and the United States, volume 2: an anthology. New York: Vintage Books.ISBN 9780679751090.
• —— (1998).When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.ISBN 9780679766452.
• —— (1999).In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. New York: Vintage Books.ISBN 9780679781530.
• ——;Kennan, Elizabeth;Munnings, Clare (2001).Overnight Float. New York: Penguin Books.ISBN 9780142000113.
• ——;Marx, Leo;Keniston, Kenneth (1999).Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.ISBN 9781558492219.
• —— (2001).A Woman's Education. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.ISBN 9780679744627.
• —— (2006).Felipe the Flamingo. Illustrated by Lokken Millis. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing.ISBN 978-1-55591-547-6.

• Conway, Jill (1998), "Points of departure", inZinsser, William (ed.),Inventing the truth: the art and craft of memoir, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 41–60,ISBN 9780395901502
• Conway, Jill (2001), "Foreword", in Freeman, Sue J.M.; Bourque, Susan C.; Shelton, Christine M. (eds.),Women on power: leadership redefined, Boston: Northeastern University Press,ISBN 9781555534783

• Ker, Jill (1960)."Merchants and merinos".Royal Australian Historical Society Journal.46 (4). Royal Australian Historical Society:206–233. Archived fromthe original on 14 August 2014. Retrieved14 August 2014.
• Conway, Jill (Winter 1971–1972). "Women reformers and American culture, 1870-1930".Journal of Social History.5 (2):164–177.doi:10.1353/jsh/5.2.164.Pdf.^{[dead link]}

• Jill Ker Conway atIMDb
• Tinley, Frances G. (28 April 1999),"Conway Speaks About Views of Female Body (at Lowell Lecture)",The Harvard Crimson, retrieved15 June 2018
• National Women's History Project - Jill Ker Conway biography
• Jill Ker Conway: A Life
• Penguin Randomhouse Books - Jill Ker Conway
• A Woman's Education by Jill Ker Conway
• Reading Group Guides for The Road from Coorain and True North, The Book Report Network, retrieved15 June 2018
• Excerpts fromThe Road from Coorain
• The Road from Coorain atIMDb
• Masterpiece Theatre -The Road from Coorain, aired May 13, 2008Archived 24 May 2016 at theWayback Machine
• Appearances onC-SPAN
• Booknotes interview with Ker Conway onWhen Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography, May 24, 1998.

• 1934 births
• 2018 deaths
• Honorary companions of the Order of Australia
• American historians
• American memoirists
• Australian emigrants to the United States
• Naturalized citizens of the United States
• Harvard University alumni
• Lendlease
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
• Nike, Inc. people
• University of Sydney alumni
• Academic staff of the University of Toronto
• National Humanities Medal recipients
• American women historians
• Presidents of Smith College
• Women heads of universities and colleges
• American women memoirists
• People educated at Abbotsleigh
• 21st-century American women

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Use dmy dates from August 2014
• Articles with hCards
• Pages using embedded infobox templates with the title parameter
• Incomplete lists from September 2012
• All articles with dead external links
• Articles with dead external links from January 2025
• IMDb title ID different from Wikidata
• Webarchive template wayback links
• People appearing on C-SPAN