By Susan Mills '68 

It was a few days before my birthday last October when Lark Ludlow ‘73 called to break the news while swearing me to secrecy. As Lark has mentioned, I was speechless. I wasn’t multi-tasking or reading the paper, as I sometimes do. I was speechless and for anyone who knows me or has spent more than ten minutes with me will attest, that was remarkable. This award was the best birthday present that anyone has ever given me. This weekend which I am sharing with my dear, dear friends, is like Christmas, New Years, winning the lottery and an Oscar all rolled into one! Thank you very much. And I am truly humbled to be in the same company with all the phenomenal Wells women who have received this award since its inception in 1968. 

I came to Wells in the fall of l964 from a small town in the Hudson Valley. I was neither more nor less remarkable than any of my other classmates. I had had a rather painful high school experience, the kind that some of you may have suffered through. An only, sometimes lonely child, I was one of the smart kids: I wore mother of pearl blue harlequin glasses (which now seem curiously chic in a retro kind of way but were definitely not chic then). I was the editor of the yearbook but not a cheerleader despite repeated try-outs, pulled muscles and tons of Ben Gay. My crush on the high school football captain was unrequited. He would come to my house for help with his homework then drive away in his little red convertible to take out some "bimbo." And with one or two exceptions, my girlfriends were definitely not on the same wavelength I was. During my dateless Saturday nights, my Mother would comfort me with the words, "Just wait until you go to college, you will find people there who are like you and whom you will like." How did she know? 

As only a Mother can know, she was right especially when we found Wells. Despite first-year jitters and anxieties, Wells immediately felt like home, a place where I belonged. Tica Edgecombe Barr, Carroll Wetzel Wilkinson, Rhea Hirshman, and Derry Duncan are friends I made my freshman year who are here with me today. And I was elected class song leader my freshman year: validation for all those pulled muscles and cheerleader tryouts I flunked in high school. 

Even today, Wells still feels like home, a home in all the very best ways, a place of beauty and serenity, a place that nurtured me, let me grow and try out all my changing ideas and new personas at my own pace. There was the tortured artist phase with my jeans splattered with paint, then the preppie in a matching Villager skirt and sweater to a soignée sophisticate with pearls and a cigarette. I even tried scotch for awhile but eventually gave it up when I realized no matter how sophisticated I thought drinking scotch made me look, I hated the taste. I still do. 

Wells allowed me to grow at my own pace in a safe place. My professors and my fellow students never made me feel silly or second rate. They all listened and encouraged me and dealt seriously with my ideas and random musings. 

And the honor system instilled in me a sense of being an adult. True, it reinforced the lessons my family taught me, but the honor code has been a touchstone for me throughout my life, especially in my work place. Trust and be trusted. Give people freedom, tell them you trust them, and with a rare exception they will succeed. 

I was never the student some of my friends were. I was too interested in talking and socializing with all these wonderful women I was now surrounded by, an only child who suddenly found herself with 150 sisters. I wanted to hear all their stories and perhaps that was the germ of my becoming a journalist. I love hearing people’s stories. 

As I was preparing to leave Wells, I was not quite sure of what I would do, in those days, the work world was still rather closed to women. For all that has been said about the 60s, Wells was still a place where most graduates looked to marriage or graduate school as the next step. Recruiters who came to campus were usually from banks or insurance companies, neither of which did much for me. I was an American history major who took many art history and studio arts courses. My love of art was strengthened thanks to two exceptional art professors: Sheila Edmunds and Hannelore Glasser. My visual sense, or my eye, was cultivated high among the eaves of Morgan where I earned money by mounting slides for their art lectures. In the still of the evening hours, I would look, and paste and label, stopping to gaze with wonder at the work of Michelangelo or at a fragment of a fresco. I absorbed images there that are still in my brain today. 

Casting about for what I would do, I remembered seeing the credits at the end of a documentary that listed a credit line for a researcher. I thought, that sounds good. I do like to research my papers. I just don’t like to write them. So, I wrote letters to ABC, NBC, and CBS asking them if they had such a position and if I could have it. CBS sent me a telegram telling me they did in fact have such a position and would I come for an interview? Now, remember I was not the best student, so imagine this happening today. 

I went to New York, parents in toe, with a blue Aline dress, white gloves, and matching purse and heels. Can you visualize it? The woman who interviewed me told me the reason she was going to hire me was because she had had another Wells graduate working for her who had been outstanding, and she assumed I would be as well. Despite my prodding, she could never remember the Wells woman’s name, so if you are someone who worked for CBS in the early 60s thank you very much for doing such a good job. My parents were thrilled but not when I told them I would be making $97 a week. My mother said, "Surely you misunderstood, my dear." Unfortunately, I didn’t. I still have my pay stub from then. 

Women’s liberation was just peaking its head over the horizon, even though Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique had been written in l963. We hadn’t thought much about woman’s liberation while I was at Wells. We were too busy studying, or partying, or railing against the war in Vietnam or the fight for Civil Rights. We might have grumbled about there being no women authors taught in English literature classes, but there were no protests or manifestos written. But I believe a large part of why there was really never much soul searching about women’s liberation at Wells was because we always knew in our bones and in the way we were treated here that we were the equal of any man. We never doubted it. 

So I went to work at CBS News in New York as a researcher. To show you what a different world that was and how long ago, we wore blue smocks over our dresses while we worked in the library and special gloves when we handled the newspapers and magazines in the newspaper morgue. I was surrounded by smart people, the best and brightest, the legends of journalism: Walter Cronkite, Charles Collingwood, Charles Kuralt, Robert Trout, Winston Burdett with his whispered dispatches from the Vatican, and Richard C. Hottelet from the United Nations. It was a heady time. I felt privileged but not awed because I had been empowered at Wells and by my Wells education. I was Mary Tyler Moore and Brenda Starr on her way to the top, or so I thought. 

Now CBS was not a place that intentionally discriminated against women. It was just the old boys’ network, a big corporation like many others. At the time, my salary of $97 a week didn’t seem that much different from my other girlfriends. Little did I know that for every 59 cents an hour I earned, a man earned a dollar. And it wasn’t much different elsewhere. Corporate America 

in l968 was decidedly white, male, and Protestant. So there I was researching away in the CBS News library wearing my smock or down in the newsroom observing how the system worked. 

And how did it work? Walter Cronkite and the producers of the evening news would play tennis at lunch. And whom would they play tennis with? My fellow male researchers – at their club where women weren’t allowed.

And whom did I have lunch with? The other woman, mostly secretaries, the other researchers, but none of the bosses because there weren’t any female bosses. So who got the promotions when they came up? The men they felt comfortable with. It wasn’t an equal playing field. We had no role models or mentors at CBS or elsewhere for that matter. But we and I started to make a little noise. The first time was the now famous "pants out." For those of you who don’t know this seminal moment in the women’s movement, it was January 20, 1970, the day the women at CBS all wore pants to work to protest the dress code that said we could only wear pants to and from the Broadcast Center or on a lunch hour or personal errand. A written memo to that effect fueled the protest, especially the idea that bearded men in blue jeans were tolerated under the guise of being creative types. The New York Times reported the protest almost as a fashion critique, commenting on the different pants ensembles that the protest leaders wore. My friend Claire Neff, who’s here with me today, went out and bought an Anne Klein pantsuit to participate in the protest. Now it seems almost silly, but those were the battles we had to fight. 

A few years later, a wiser CBS held weeklong seminars for those women like me who had made it to middle management. I had gotten part of the way there, but it was becoming more and more apparent that the top jobs were going to men. The seminars, sponsored by CBS, were held by Catalyst, and to this day, I use the things they taught me to teach other young women who come to work with and for me. What did they teach me? Lots. Lessons I never had to learn at Wells because Wells valued women and respected us. But Catalyst taught me to tell my bosses what I wanted career wise, over and over, to point out my accomplishments rather than wait silently for their approval, and to never use the self-deprecating "I’m sorry" or "Excuse me" as a conversation filler unless I truly am and to never, never take the notes in a meeting or serve coffee in a meeting. On my own, I learned never to admit that I knew how to type, change a typewriter ribbon or a cartridge in a copying machine. What is so unsettling is that I am still teaching young women those lessons today. 

In the early 70s when the women’s movement really took off, I was an associate producer on the children’s program, In the News, writing and producing five stories a week for young people. My colleague, a male and friend, was producing the other five. Our boss was a woman (who incidentally had graduated from Wellesley). There was great camaraderie in the office. My friend Virginia Gray who’s here with me today was part of that group. But one day, we were told there was going to be an eleventh story each week. Now we received writers fees for each story we wrote, and while it was not that large a sum, it was significant. My boss called me in and told me that she was giving the extra story to my male associate. When I asked her why, assuming it was something to do with my writing or producing, I was dumbstruck when she told me it was because he had a wife and family. Gulping in disbelief, I asked her, of all people, if she was penalizing me because I was single. And besides, I said, my associate had a trust fund! Well, the fury and disbelief in my response sent her home to discuss the matter with her husband, who was a famous surgeon. The next day, she reported to me that her husband had said I was right, and that from now on we would alternate the extra script between my male associate and me. So while I won, I was incredulous at being discriminated against because I was single and a woman, and by a woman no less. But that was not all that unusual. 

Just because women are in places of authority or visibility doesn’t always guarantee they will help us or advance our cause, mostly because they know they are under a microscope and need to "get along." Even today Heaven forbid we should be considered "difficult." 

After working for many years in children’s news programs at CBS, I wanted more challenges and more frontline journalism. Searching around I realized that it would be very difficult for me to make that change after all those years in an area of news that was dominated by women. One way out was to volunteer to go to a war zone, which is what I did by volunteering and then going to Central America. Few married men wanted to go, so it was opportunity to separate myself from others. As Catalyst taught me, too often women wait to be recognized and rewarded in the workplace. I had to remind myself over and over this wasn’t Wells. 

Working in a war zone, with my colleague Charles Krause, was a heady time. It was all the things people say about war but also a time when there really wasn’t any difference between men and women. I was never treated any differently or even given a break because I was a woman. Long days and the danger of combat meant trusting and counting on each other. You carried your own backpack, you did what needed to be done, you worked the story, you shared your sources, if your camera broke down, someone from another network would help, you hitched rides together and drank and ate the same food, and you all smelled bad together. 

War makes equal opportunity for men and women. And as I had hoped, it helped bring my work to the attention of the higher-ups and others. One of whom was the executive producer of the Newshour, Les Crystal. While covering foreign stories I made the switch to the Newshour where I received promotions but also have felt and seen discrimination, mostly unintended and generational. The Newshour is also where I made good friends, two extraordinary women who are here with me, Lee Koromvokis, a wife, a mother, and the best producer on the planet, and Linda Winslow the deputy executive producer of the Newshour with Jim Lehrer. She is one of the finest journalists I know. It is my privilege and honor to work with them. Now, I’m not here to complain about my employers who are much better than a lot of other companies, but to just to note how pervasive and deep-seated discrimination was and is. The truth be told, the men in my stories and the women as well wouldn’t believe that they discriminated against women. Few in this day and age want to admit they do. But they do and discrimination still keeps women from being all they can be.

And that is what I want to stress today, in my talk. In l968 when I graduated from Wells, there were 11 women members in Congress, ten in the House, one in the Senate. Today there are 61 women in the House and 13 in the Senate. In l968, there was only one woman heading up a major corporation, Katharine Graham of the Washington Post. Today among the Fortune 500 there are only four companies headed by women. The 200 highest paid CEOs in America are all male. Women hold only 11% of the board seats of the Fortune 500 companies: 671 board seats out of a total 6064. Across the country, women are paid less than men in all professions. A 1998 study in the National Law Journal Lawyers noted that 13.6% of the partners in the nation’s 250 largest law firms were women, 86.4% were men. And that the promotion rate for women may be decreasing! By the way I’ve compiled all these statistics from a terrific book, which I highly recommend, entitled Sex and Power by Susan Estrich. 

Three years ago, only 8% of the managing directors of investment and brokerage houses were women while only 8% of the partners in the Big Five accounting firms were women. In engineering, researchers found that women tended to be over-represented in the lower prestige and lower paying ranks while men were over-represented at the top. In academia, men publish more than women, hold higher ranks, and earn more money than women with equal experience. In her book "Why So Slow" professor Virginia Valian noted that not only do women at universities and colleges have lower average salaries than men at every rank, but the "inequalities are progressive," the higher your rank, the greater the disparity. However, the only exception was for women’s schools, which pay women full professors equal to men in contrast to private coed schools which pay women 88% of a man’s salary. 

This inequality even extends to our popular culture. Women are under-represented in the movies and on TV despite making up 51% of the U.S. population. And when they are on the screen they are predominantly thin, young, with a large disposable income, and a designer wardrobe. Male characters outnumber female characters 2 to 1 in primetime TV. Women above a certain age are almost invisible. Just a few weeks ago, one of TV’s four older women, Mrs. Landingham from West Wing, died in a car accident. That leaves only Della Reese, who isn’t a real woman but an angel. Raymond’s mother, in Everyone Loves Raymond and Ms. Smartypants, From the Weakest Link, Anne Robinson. 

In TV news, my field, the top three anchors are still male. And the heirs apparent are all men-in-waiting. Today, women in general make only 72 or 79 cents for every dollar a man earns. 

That’s up from the 59 cents when I graduated. That’s the good news, sort of. The New York Times Magazine reported in l999 that at the rate we’re going, it will be another 270 years before women achieve parity as top managers in corporations and 500 years before we achieve equality in Congress. What happened?

As the commercial said, "We’ve come a long way" from when I graduated in l968, but we have a long way to go. And perhaps the toughest battles are ahead. Why do I have to teach young women the same lessons I had to learn? In large part because they think the battle has been won. And true we have made progress from which they have benefited. Overt discrimination, the kind we could easily see and hear is pretty much a thing of the past. The law is now on our side. Title 9 is the reason we have the wonderful women athletes who are so famous we know them by their first name, such as Brandi and Mia. Corporations are very careful to not break the law but most come as close to the bar as they can. In the workplace there is much more sensitivity to women and minorities. Off-color jokes, ethnic slurs, and pin-ups are for the most part a thing of the past, and people aren’t afraid to say something if someone is offensive. At the same time things haven’t changed all that much. 

The best computers and equipment are kept for the boys. As a colleague of mine told me just last week, as he sat in from of his new computer, "Why do you think they call them boys’ toys?" Few companies are family friendly. Women still bear children and in doing so, as the statistics remind us, fall behind in wages and promotions when they return to the workplace. Women’s voices are drowned out in meetings or we’re talked over as if we had never said anything. Look and listen carefully next time you’re in a meeting and see if this isn’t true. You won’t like it. So what do we do about it?

I would say, remember Wells, and how we felt and how we were treated. And expect and demand the same wherever you go. Don’t be afraid to make a little noise. What do you have to lose?

As all these statistics tell us, we aren’t going anywhere. And you know ? You’ll feel better about yourself. What else can we do? Support women candidates whenever they appear on the ballot, whether it’s for the local school board, the water board or a corporate board. Even more importantly, send more women to Washington. Don’t you think the tone in Washington would change dramatically if more women were in the Congress? I do. 

Women’s colleges do make a difference. Support Wells with your time and money. Look around you. See your friends from your days here. Make them once again your support system. Women need women friendships, not just when they are in college but when they are married or in a relationship and parent or single. Back in l993 a large group of my classmates gathered at my home for a brunch to make plans for our 25^th Reunion. On and off, since then, we’ve had similar gatherings and I’ve come away from them, bone tired, from lack of sleep, sometimes hoarse from talking so much, yet at the same time, simply exhilarated by spending time with such exceptional women, hearing their stories, the ups and downs, offering advice, getting advice. They are the best resource any woman could ever want. Whether it’s gardening advice, a recipe, thoughts on how to make a presentation in the workplace, strategies for dealing with a difficult boss or a husband’s health crisis, you name it. 

My success, in my career, and in my life, could not have been accomplished without the strong friendships of women, starting with my mother. And some of the most important friendships and the lessons I learned here at Wells have supported and sustained me my whole life. And so I say, to my friends, and to Wells, thank you.

Delivered Saturday, June 2, 2001, at Wells College.