The past is memory

I WENT to my 60th class reunion at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts last weekend. I immodestly disclose that they gave me an achievement award, giving me more credit than I deserve. But Mount Holyoke College, founded in 1837 by Mary Lyon, a pioneering women's educator in Massachusetts in the US, has always been generous. Mary Lyon believed all women had the right to be educated, a very unorthodox idea in the early 19th century anywhere. She managed to put up Mount Holyoke (named after a nearby mountain in western Massachusetts) and charge one-third of contemporary school fees, opening up the school to every woman who wanted an education. She meant every woman, so it was not an elite institution but one that gathered in everyone who wanted an education. Mount Holyoke is the oldest of the Seven Sisters women's colleges, pioneers in women's education in the US. Its prominent alumnae include Emily Dickinson, the poet par excellence, Virginia Apgar, the doctor who invented the Apgar score, the test that every newborn in a hospital is given upon birth, and Frances Perkins, the first woman cabinet member in the US (Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Roosevelt).

I came to Mount Holyoke on a scholarship feeling intimidated and stressed that I might not be able to keep up with the grades to justify it. But I soon learned to shrug it off and get to work as everyone did. The campus was beautiful, bucolic and pastoral, with two lakes, surrounding woodlands, a large vintage greenhouse, an art museum, an equestrian center and even a golf course attached to it. Of course, I was too busy and too poor to consider horseback riding or golf.