You were at JAGS in the mid-late Sixties, which was a very empowering time for women. What was the atmosphere like at JAGS and how do you think it shaped your choices after you left?

Childhood memories are even more subjective than adult ones, but I think it’s fair to say that JAGS was still a throwback to the 40s and 50s until I hit Sixth Form. The ordered minutiae of life absorbed us: we filled our pens with ink, we recited our conjugations and times tables, and we tried to keep the seams of our lisle stockings straight. Even as Flower Power was coming into its own and orators at Speakers’ Corner were urging more equality and freedom, we were still planting our allotments, handcrafting bamboo recorders, and perfecting the lump-less Roux sauce. Who had time to notice the gathering turbulence of the world outside?
 
This homogenous and compliant environment nevertheless provided a strong academic foundation for us. The learning climate was a strong predictor for success; our dedicated, career faculty came to class supremely well prepared and enthusiastic about their subjects. For our part we were self-directed, motivated and focused. As we matured our teachers nurtured our critical thinking, strong study skills, and solid research strategies. We were academically ready for university long before graduating from JAGS.
 
I think we all worked so hard because one message came through loud and clear. Girls, especially JAGS girls, could do anything they set their mind to. This mantra was a little misleading in terms of societal norms for gender equality of the time.
 
Excellence, or at least a strong effort, was something I internalized from my first term in Third Form. We were expected to set high standards for ourselves. After years of being encouraged to think independently and voice my own opinions, I left JAGS with a protective layer of self-confidence and a naïve underestimate of what lay ahead. The real world was a sharp contrast with the sheltered and privileged scholastic life I was leaving behind.
 
In Middle School I had harboured an ambition to become a hairdresser. I loved the grapevine atmosphere of the hair salon, the buzz of news, and the rapid cycle of new trends. I imagined this life to be much less stressful than the path to the bar or parliament to which my Latin, Greek and British Constitution “O” levels might lead me. But the “high standards” message ran deep and I inferred that I should “do more” with the hand I had been given. So in the end I found a way to combine seriousness with adventure. I went straight to the University of Brussels to study journalism instead of taking my History and French Honors place at Kent.
 

What were your interests in while you were here?
 
Despite studying English, French and History “A” levels, I was already turning toward current affairs, journalism, and communication. This was perhaps a halfway point between law and politics, with the fast pace of the beauty salon! I loved reading the daily newspapers in the school library during lunch break and I ran Forum for a year or two. That was a lecture/discussion club. My best booking was a Druid. He was disappointingly clad in a suit and tie, but otherwise delivered on ancient theology and weirdness.
 
As an observer rather than a participant I tended to choose support roles. I helped someone run as a Liberal candidate in a school-wide mock election, but we lost by a landslide to the popular and talented Labour candidate (chapeau, Annabel Marsh!). I sometimes worked in stage crew, tried to help my House (Bourgeois) drag itself from the bottom of the rankings, and “bodied” for the life-saving candidates. I captained the fledgling fencing team and ran an unofficial hair-cutting service in the Sixth Form Common Rooms.
 
My favorite memories involve music—either the constant distant sound of voice and instrument practice emanating from all parts of the school or the cozy piano room under the main stairs where my gentle teacher’s milky coffee cup would balance precariously on the keyboard, just north of High C.
       
                                                                                                                                  
You devoted your early career to print journalism. Can you tell us a little bit about the day-to-day of that kind of work?
 
It will be hard for current pupils to imagine the pressrooms of that era where all news processes were ponderous and mechanical. We wrote our stories without benefit of electronic word processing. We had no Internet to help with breaking news and fact checking. There were no cell phones to call in updates to stories and no means to download an interview to your home office other than driving it there. Type was set in hot lead, so you had to write clean copy and have a very good reason for asking the typesetters to correct a completed column of metal type. The challenges of being a woman, an English speaker, and a full-time student while embarking on a reporter’s career were only surmountable because I didn’t know any better!
 
The Brussels office at my weekly magazine was full of cigarette smoke and the noisy clacking of manual typewriters. We did not have a wire service, so my day started by scanning over a dozen daily papers in the two national languages, as well as international broadsheets and magazines. I weighed the political bent of each story before pitching a news feature to my editor on items I thought would become important over the coming week. Then I’d try to book interviews and find out about relevant news conferences, read around the subject, and call colleagues for their input. The pressure of producing content for a weekly publication is constant. Here the rigour of JAGS and the grounding I had received in English and foreign languages were huge assets.
 
The foreign press corps in Brussels in those days was almost all male. Journalists came form all over the world to cover the growing membership in and daily negotiations at the European Community. Sometimes a hundred or so of us would wait all night for a statement to come out of a Council of Ministers meeting, for instance. My friends were generous in mentoring me and chivalrous in allowing a young, mini-skirted newcomer to head to the front of the crowd and ask a cheeky question.
 
In that sea of foreign correspondents and bureau chiefs, many at the peak of their careers, I decided not to struggle with my inexperience but instead, to specialize in Belgium itself. It was the country in which we all lived and worked, yet it was largely overlooked by these elite reporters. My choice was not a dull one. I covered marches where police fought demonstrators with tear gas and water canons. I travelled on carless Sundays (oil crisis rules) to report on people playing games and riding horses around the capital’s inner city. I interviewed a three star general with some of the first female soldiers in the Belgian army. I even broke a news story on a slaughterhouse that was polluting a pristine Ardennes river.
 

There is a great deal of debate about whether it is possible for women to “have it all” in terms of balancing careers and motherhood. How did you balance raising your family with your work?
 
It is hard not to believe in this myth or at least buy in to “having it all” when we see so many credible people and organizations claiming to make this possible. I even consulted for a company—the now bought-out Work Life Directions in the USA—that mentored businesspeople on balancing all aspects of home and professional life. However, it is very important to realize that such an ideal is illusory and even undesirable.
 
I believe the balance women need is more between the stages of their lives than among the competing elements within each individual stage. Having studied human development over the lifespan (as part of my Master’s theory of Adult Learning) I see it as normal that sometimes we devote more energies to ourselves and in other periods expend more energy on children, community, parents, or hobbies. There are naturally upsides and downsides to all these choices.
 
When my career took off in Belgium I saw no way to combine journalism with married life, let alone children. But a few years later, married with children, I had effectively closed off a serious career path in Europe by not only re-locating to the USA, but also devoting myself to full-time childcare for a couple of years. For the next two decades I would make uneasy compromises, as all parents do, between earning a living and protecting and nurturing family. At one point I was the publisher of an annual magazine that came out in Autumn. This was so that my crunch time came in summer when it was easy to hire bright university students to look after my daughters. As everyone used to head off for the beach each morning, I realized I was the only one in the family not enjoying this clever arrangement…
 
 
Mid-career you worked for over ten years in early HIV/AIDS prevention education with the Red Cross. Can you tell us more about what the climate was like around HIV/AIDS at the time, more about the role and what drew you to it?
 
I decided I wanted to work in one the two biggest health challenges at that time—world population or HIV. I found a job with the American Red Cross (ARC) as it became funded for a national HIV/AIDS health education initiative. At that time, before protease inhibitors where discovered, peer educators rarely lived long enough to serve their own community, so outsiders were needed to help with the prevention effort.
 
I think being a middle-aged, straight white woman gave me entrée into some schools and companies where people felt threatened by the difficulty of speaking openly about personal behaviour. ARC was a credible brand for audiences that viewed other community-based organizations with suspicion. I know that my years in journalism helped prepare me for the many different populations I worked with. I had learned to be open and fair-minded and put my own ego on the back burner. I had become skilled at gaining the trust of my interviewees, and translated this into patience and respect in my facilitation work.
 
None of our work was plain sailing. We faced fear and prejudice among funders, target audiences, the press, and even the front lines of medicine. Within our own coworkers, there was dismay that the agency should expand its disaster mission to include the pandemic. We fought hard for funding, decent office space and equipment, and adequate staffing.
 
However, by the time I resigned from my job (because there were long-term survivors who could replace me) our programs were helping thousands of people. I was overseeing a 24-person team of City Year young adult community peer educators, several university programs, a K to Fourth Form school program, outreach to shelters and incarcerated youth, and a large workplace roll-out in the Boston metro area. The infection rates had slowed dramatically, there were plenty of chronic treatment options, and the general public had started to replace fear with more appropriate, knowledge-based attitudes.
 
 
Given the history of prejudice and misinformation around HIV and AIDS in the early years, how did people react to your work?
 
Some people thought I was brave to become involved, but only because they imagined mistakenly that the virus could be transmitted through casual contact.  Some assumed that I must have some personal axe to grind--either I was infected, closely affected, or I had lost someone to the disease. It was highly unusual to be a complete outsider. I never corrected people’s assumptions. The whole point of our message was this:  Act as if everyone is infected. Take responsibility for yourself because that’s all you know for sure.
 
Even our NGO had to deal with irrational fear and prejudice. A prominent law firm in Boston wanted us to provide employee seminars but was terrified of gossip and damage to their reputation. They insisted on meeting me in a coffee shop rather than in their HR office. In the end, their workplace seminars took place like everyone else’s, at the law firm. Nothing blew up, but perhaps a few tests were taken and fewer recreational steroid needles were shared as a result?
 

You moved from your work at the Red Cross to become an adult learning specialist, consulting with Fortune 500 companies on issues like negotiation, business communication and other skills. What surprised you most about this work?
 
I think the biggest surprise was the intensity of the relationship between the adult educator and the learner as s/he struggles to break the learning-mastery barrier.
 
After I had my first child we needed a baby nurse while I got back on my feet. This nurse was with our daughter every moment of her first two weeks. Then she had to leave, saying, “Have a Nice Life”. I didn’t know how she could do such gut-wrenching work out of choice.
 
Years later, I would spend blocks of only two days with businesspeople in their workplace, supporting them in the acquisition of a new skill. Despite the briefness of the relationship, I found the experience visceral and deeply gratifying. The closeness of that cognitive struggle, the vulnerability of grown-ups humbled by learning in front of their peers, all created a teacher’s high. The privilege is addictive.
 
Corporate learning programs are valuable not only because they update skills; they enable adults to develop long after formal education is over. Learners come to the corporate classroom with complete equality regarding previous schooling. Many adults who failed in primary and secondary education have the capacity to excel at work thanks to employer-sponsored classes, and this success can foster a bigger sense of fulfillment across all their life activities. It’s not half bad for their teacher either!
 

What advice would you give to JAGS alumnae starting their careers today?
 
A life of enquiry and connection is a rewarding and dynamic one. Never be afraid to ask questions or take an unexpected path. Words connect to language that shapes communication. Ideas connect to theories that build plans, policies and movements. People connect to relationships that influence society. I am glad that I have not been merely a bystander. I invite JAGS alumnae to participate fully in their own lives and look for solutions to the problems our generation has inadvertently created.
 
 
What was the most important thing you learned at JAGS?
 
Since that’s such a broad question, I’m going to answer by breaking it down into separate learning results:
·          A crucial hard skill I learned was language mastery: an ability to influence people through the spoken and written word is a powerful tool in all walks of life.
·         The soft skills I started to develop at JAGS were questioning, analysis, and the ability to see patterns and interconnection between and among ideas. At JAGS I was a generalist with no outstanding talent in one particular field. Generalists have been out of fashion most of my career. But specialising in a broad range of topics is essential for communicators and educators. Furthermore, I predict that knowledge workers who are generalists will eventually be valued in a vast field of specialists for their ability to analyse and juggle ever more complex combinations of variables.
·         The attitude that JAGS fostered? Go for it!
·         The behaviour that resulted from the confidence I gained at JAGS was this: don’t take anything lying down. Question authority. Follow the moral high ground. And if you’re the only one doing what you’re doing, it might not mean you’re totally wrong.