It’s been 35 years since I became the first female president of The Phillipian, so I was both delighted and disheartened to be asked to contribute to this conversation about gender and leadership on the Andover campus. Delighted because it’s always nice to be remembered; disheartened because — sheesh, have we still not come any further than this?
Well, no, we haven’t, as I know from my own world as well as yours. Certainly there are more women in newsrooms than there were when I began, and those of us working in features sections are generally there because we want to be, rather than because the “women’s pages” are the only ones that will let us in. But at the top of news organizations, women’s leadership is still, unfortunately, news — that is, not old, not routine, not so normal as to be too boring to mention.
The news that Andover students are still predominantly electing male leaders, however, gave me a real pang. I came to Phillips Academy in its first year of coeducation, so I had imagined, and hoped, that whatever obstacles I encountered — and all of us did, despite the best efforts of head of school Ted Sizer and many courageous faculty members — would fall away as coeducation became the norm.
But, again, I’m not really surprised. We’ve had so many waves of antifeminist backlash and postfeminist humanism and who knows what else since my own Second-Wave feminist generation (or was it Third?) that I’ve come to see just how complex and unending the struggle to be treated as both fully female and fully human can be.
That certainly was a lesson I began to learn even in my year of running The Phillipian, when some of my male colleagues routinely challenged, undermined and even openly flouted my decisions — not because they were wrong, as they may well have been, but simply because they came from a girl. People think I’m making it up when I say this, but there was a night when two other editors “jokingly” wrestled me to the floor in the basement of Evans Hall because they didn’t like something I’d said.
The wrestling matches in my career since then have been less literal, fortunately, but sometimes no less frustrating. And I wish I knew what to say to young women who want to pursue a similar path, but I don’t have much brilliant advice. Except this: Keep trying, keep putting yourself out there, keep trying to be the leader you want the world to have.
And remember, as I was sometimes too young and foolish to see, that there are a lot of women out here who have stood in your shoes. (Sensible flats for me, thank you very much.) Draw strength and comfort from that, and keep going. You know what my mother’s—your grandmother’s—generation always said: Sisterhood is powerful. It’s time we used that power, together.
Louise Kennedy ’76 was the first female President of The Phillipian and has worked as a journalist since 1979. She is now the theater critic of the Boston Globe.