Jill Ker Conway

Jill Ker Conway (9 October 1934 – 1 June 2018) was an Australian-American scholar and author.

After finishing her education at Abbotsleigh, she enrolled at the University of Sydney, where she studied History and English and graduated with honours in 1958.

Upon graduation, Ker Conway sought a trainee post in the Department 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 the United States.

At age 25, she was accepted into the history program of Harvard University's Radcliffe College, where she devoted her studies to women's history, not yet an established historical discipline, and wrote her dissertation on Jane Addams and the establishment of Hull House.

Her interest in Addams and Hull House was sparked by her neighbor and friend, former Librarian of Congress, Archibald Macleish.

At Harvard, she also assisted a Canadian professor, John Conway, who was her husband from 1962 until his death in 1995.

Ker Conway received her Ph.D. at Harvard in 1969 and taught at the University of Toronto from 1964 to 1975.

Her book True North details her life in Toronto.

Well known for her autobiographies, in particular her first memoir, The Road from Coorain, she also was Smith College's first woman president (1975–1985) and most recently served as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From 1975 to 1985, Ker Conway was the president of Smith College.

In 1975, Ker Conway became the first female president of Smith College, the largest women's college in the United States.

Located in Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith, a private liberal arts college, is the only women's college in the U.S. to grant its own degrees in engineering.

Ker Conway launched the Ada Comstock Scholars program, initially proposed by her predecessor Thomas 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.

After 1985, she was a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She received thirty-eight honorary degrees and awards from North American and Australian colleges, universities and women's organizations.

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 of Nike, Colgate-Palmolive, and Merrill Lynch.

Ker Conway was also the first female Chairman of Lendlease.

In 2004 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project.

She was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.

Ker Conway was born in Hillston, New South Wales, in the outback of Australia.

Together with her two brothers, Ker Conway was raised in near-total isolation on a family-owned 73 km2 tract of land called Coorain (the Aboriginal word for "windy place"), which eventually grew to encompass 129 km2.

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.

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 the perimeter 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 a diving accident while trying to extend the farm's water piping.

Initially Jill Ker Conway's mother, a nurse by profession, refused to leave Coorain.

But after three more years of drought, she was compelled to move Jill and her brothers to Sydney, where the children attended school.

Ker Conway found the local state school a rough environment.

The British manners and accent ingrained by her parents clashed with her peers' Australian habits, provoking taunts and jeers.

This resulted in her mother enrolling her at Abbotsleigh, a private girls school, where Ker Conway found intellectual challenge and social acceptance.

After 2011, Ker Conway served as the Board Chair of Community Solutions.

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.