Surrounded by the packed bookshelves of the Brace Center, Kathleen Dalton and Tony Rotundo, Instructors in History, recline on a plush sofa as they speak about their lives and work, their answers soon slipping into a conversation between the two spouses. Rotundo and Dalton look at each other while they talk and only interrupt each other to murmur in agreement or praise the other’s work. At the same time, they remain modest about their own achievements. The dialogue shifts so naturally between the two that it is hard to imagine that they grew up on different coasts. Dalton grew up in Martinez, California, while Rotundo spent his childhood in Schenectady, New York. Despite this contrast, Dalton and Rotundo both grew up in households that held regular family discussions about politics and history. The two first met in the Library of Congress in 1979 when they were writing about similar subjects. Rotundo said, “That’s the first place we ever saw each other.” Dalton said, “One of the reasons we met in the 70’s was that I was looking at gender issues related to Roosevelt. I was very interested in [Rotundo’s] work, and we were both interested in gender studies.” Dalton moved from Washington, D.C. to Andover in 1980 to begin teaching History at Phillips Academy. Rotundo, her fiancé at the time, joined Dalton in 1981 after finishing graduate school. Dalton and Rotundo have also served as Co-Directors of the Brace Center for the past seven years. Since Dalton stepped down from her position in June 2010, Diane Moore, Instructor in Religion and Philosophy and the founder of the Brace Center, is now working with Rotundo to lead the Brace Center. “Students are talking about gender issues all the time,” Dalton said. “The Brace Center not only invites students to explore research topics, but it is also a place where we don’t enforce conformity. We want both young men and young women to be able to realize their full potential and not be held back by stereotypes or prejudice.” Rotundo said that the opportunity to work with his wife has a lot of benefits. “We bounce ideas off of each other. Even when she doesn’t change my mind, it helps me shape my thinking,” he said. “When I come home upset or depressed, she understands why because she lives the same thing that I live.” Dalton said, “Colleagues can be a part of a very interesting conversation about how to teach better, and I have a very thoughtful colleague in [Rotundo].” Dalton made a significant contribution to academia with her biography on Theodore Roosevelt titled “Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life.” Due to the success and critical acclaim of her book, Dalton has lectured in various locations around the country. Rotundo said, “A number of reviews said that [her book] was the best one-volume biography of Roosevelt that we have, which it is.” Dalton’s interest in Roosevelt began in graduate school as she recovered from cancer. “I picked up an essay on Roosevelt, which was a very popular essay that was dismissive of him. He did have some unusual foreign policy views… but I thought as a whole person, he hadn’t been studied well,” said Dalton. “I’m sure I also picked him because [he had fought] ill health as a child,” she continued. Rotundo, on the other hand, was one of the first people to study “manhood and masculinity in a historical perspective.” He has written about the “history of fatherhood, the ways in which parent-child relationships have shaped boys and girls, how the experience of boyhood has changed over time in the United States and the concept of romantic friendship between men.” Rotundo said, “In the 1800’s, men had intense friendships with each other, which, in a world that wants to call everything homosexual or heterosexual, don’t fit into our categories [today].” Dalton said, “When Time Magazine was trying to understand Abraham Lincoln’s sexuality, they called Tony.” She added that many colleges still use Rotundo’s book American Manhood as a text in courses. Rotundo attended graduate school during the height of the Women’s Movement, which contributed to his interest in studying manhood. Rotundo said, “Women’s role was what everybody around me was talking about, but it was clear to me that gender is a whole system, not just women.” “It also had to do with the fact that I was a smart, skinny kid in a tough neighborhood, and I had to figure out how to navigate and negotiate the world of the playground,” he continued. “So from an early age, I spent a lot of time thinking about what’s the right way to deal with being a guy.” For the tenth anniversary of the merger between Phillips Academy and Abbot Academy in 1983, Dalton led a school study that assessed “where the school was after ten years of coeducation.” Dalton said, “That was a period when Phillips Academy had mostly full-time male teachers, and most of the women were part-time. It was mostly male faculty, and it was a 60 percent male student body. So [the school] wasn’t fully coeducational in every way.” “There were still some opponents to coeducation on campus. Most of the Abbot faculty didn’t get hired, so the Abbot voice was not a loud one,” she continued. As a follow-up to her observations, Dalton lobbied to incorporate a gender studies course into the history curriculum, which evolved into Gender Studies in Gender Relations, a course currently taught by Rotundo. She also co-founded Women’s Forum, a club that discusses gender issues and promotes awareness of these problems, in 1987. Dalton said that she finds History interesting to teach because of how it helps people understand the present. “I think we often find ourselves not only in current political circumstances but also current cultural and social circumstances, and we don’t really understand how we got there,” said Dalton. “If people don’t understand [history], they really don’t understand the times they live in.” Rotundo said, “The present didn’t just happen. Things aren’t the way they are now randomly. The world we live in, the institutions that we function in and our own lives are all products of past events. People need to know that the moment they live in is not the only moment that ever existed.”
