Jill Ker Conway, women's historian

Jill Ker Conway

It is the birthday of historian and author Jill Ker Conway (1934), who lived with her family on a farm in the Australian outback and eventually became the first woman president of Smith College in Massachusetts. Her memoir, The Road from Coorain (1989), tells her story of tending sheep in the wilds of New South Wales in the 1940s.

Her father drowned while trying to improve the family's water supply and her mother struggled for three years more but eventually moved the family to Sydney where Jill eventually attended a private girls school and the University of Sydney.

After graduation, she traveled with her mother in Europe . She eventually moved to the United States and entered the history program at Harvard University, where she assisted John Conway, a Canadian professor whom she married. John Conway died in 1995.

Jill Ker Conway now serves as a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has written 21 books, among them The Female Experience in 18th and 19th Century America: A Guide to the History of American Women (1982); The First Generation of American Women Graduates (1987), her doctoral thesis in American History at Harvard; True North (1994), a memoir of her life from Harvard to Smith College; and Written By Herself (1995), an anthology of the changing status of women throughout history.