Katya’s Reviews > An Unexpected Life: A Memoir > Status Update

I remember women students being called up onstage for a rehearsal, and when the first five or six were Black women, a white male professor called out, "Shouldn't there be some women onstage?"

[Florynce Kennedy] and a white friend and colleague of hers had applied to Columbia University Law School at the same time. Both had been denied entry because in those days there was a 5 percent quota for women, which had already been reached. Flo charged race discrimination and was admitted, but her white friend was not. Flo always said it was at that moment that she became a feminist.

In my generation, we were asked by the Smith Vocational Office how many words we could type a minute, a question that was never asked of male students at Harvard or Princeton.[...]As one of my classmates said, “I didn’t have a job, I had ajobette.” We weren’t trying to change the world to fit women, and neither was Smith in those days. We were trying to change women to fit the world.

(.)my father’s summer dance pavilion was a stop for the big dance bands of the 1930s and ’40s, both white and Black, as they toured the country. I remember such names as Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Chick Webb, and Joe Venuti and His Blue Six. Since there were no restaurants for miles around, my mother cooked for the band members, and there were often musicians around our table.

I wrote to my Smith classmates in an alumni newsletter a few decades after graduating, “I’m quite broke, not at all who I thought I would be—and consciously happy.”

The experience I brought to college was one of not going to school, an atypical amalgam of a childhood indiscriminately bookish, a show-business adolescence spent dancing in variety shows, second-place finishes in beauty contests that might provide a scholarship, and occasional work as a magician’s assistant.

Whatever may be happening in life, books are reliable.

It’s amazing that time future is always present in time past, yet how rarely we understand that.