L.10. University of North Carolina: University Faculty and Diversity,

Transcription

1 Mack 1 This interview is part of the Southern Oral History Program collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Other interviews from this collection are available online through and in the Southern Historical Collection at Wilson Library. L.10. University of North Carolina: University Faculty and Diversity, Interview L-0445 Sara Mack 16 July 2014 Abstract p. 2 Field Notes p. 3 Transcript p. 4

2 Mack 2 ABSTRACT SARA MACK Interviewer: Katie Womble Interviewee: Sara Mack Date: July 16, 2014 Location: Chapel Hill Length: 00:46:56 Sara Mack is a retired full professor of classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her bachelor s in Greek from Smith College in 1961 and received her PhD from Harvard in From 1966 until 1973 she taught classics as the University of California at Santa-Cruz. During this time she had two children with her husband but ended up getting a divorce. Shortly after the divorce she moved her family to UNC, where she had obtained a position in the classics department. She speaks about the difficulties of being a single mother with two small children and a tenure-track professor and how women did or did not support her motherhood within the university. She received her tenure in 1989, and she attributes her success to her hard work and does not consider sexist attitudes as having prevented her from achieving what she set out to achieve. While a feminist, she does not believe that her gender has played a significant role in her university career.

3 Mack 3 FIELD NOTES SARA MACK (compiled July 31, 2014) Interviewee: Interviewer: Sara Mack Katie Womble Interview Date: July 16, 2014 Location: 323 Murphey Hall, UNC Chapel Hill Campus THE INTERVIEWEE. Sara Mack is a retired UNC professor of Classics. She received her BA in 1961 in Greek from Smith College, and completed graduate work at Smith during the following year. She attended Harvard s program and received her master s in 1964 and Ph.D. in 1974 in Classical Philology. From 1966 to 1973 she taught at the University of California Santa Cruz as well as from , all while completing her dissertation. She then came to teach at UNC in 1976 with her two small children, Richard and Anne (then 9 and 4). She got tenure at UNC in 1989, and from was the Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor. She has served as Assistant Dean for Honors students as well as Acting Associate Dean for Honors. THE INTERVIEWER. Katie Womble is a graduate student in the information and library science department at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a field scholar at the Southern Oral History Program. Her undergraduate degree from UNC was in history. This interview is part of the Advancement of Women and Minorities at UNC series within the University History project. DESCRIPTION OF THE INTERVIEW. Dr. Mack arranged with a former colleague for us to borrow his office in Murphey Hall, the classics building, in room 323. It was quiet and spacious. NOTE ON RECORDING. Recorded on a Zoom H4N device. There are no significant interruptions.

4 Mack 4 TRANSCRIPT: SARA MACK Interviewee: Interviewer: Sara Mack Katie Womble Interview Date: July 16, 2014 Location: Chapel Hill, NC Length: 46:56 START OF INTERVIEW Katie Womble: This is Katie Womble interviewing Sara Mack on July 16, I guess we could start out by you talking a little bit about your childhood. When and where were you born? Sara Mack: I was a Yale faculty brat. I was born in New Haven, Connecticut in KW: Did you have any siblings? SM: I have an older sister and a younger brother. KW: How much older and younger? Are they close to you? SM: My sister s almost two years older and my brother was two years younger in school but closer to three years, so we re all--. KW: So about an even spread. SM: Yeah. KW: Can you describe your family, what it was like growing up? Were your parents professors?

5 Mack 5 SM: My father was a professor at Yale and my mother had been an English major but she actually worked in the chemistry lab to support my father, but she did what women then typically did. Once she started having children she didn t work except she volunteered as we got old enough, but she basically stayed home. KW: What was the circumstances of her working in the chemistry department, or how did she get into that? [Pause] If you don t know it s okay. SM: Well actually, I said that she was an English major; that is actually wrong. She told me later on she would have liked to have been an English major. She came from a family with no money at all and she went to Oberlin at sixteen. Anyway, she ended up majoring in chemistry because she thought that would be salable. [Laughs] My father was an undergraduate and a graduate student at Yale and then a professor -- his whole career was at Yale -- but when they got married I guess because she had majored in chemistry she was able to get the job in the chemistry lab, and what she did I have absolutely no idea. [Laughs] KW: Did she work there up until the time that she had children? SM: She did, although it may be that it was only getting my father through graduate school. I m not sure about that. KW: Yeah. Still that s interesting. SM: Yeah. But everybody in my family is professors. KW: Yeah, an academic family. SM: They re coming out the ears. [Laughs] KW: Extended family at all? SM: Oh yes. My grandfather was an English professor; my uncle was an English professor; my aunt was an art professor; my brother is an English professor; my sister got an

6 Mack 6 MAT in English so she didn t go quite as far. I was the great rebel, going into Classics. [Laughs] But yeah, professors everywhere, on my father s side. On my mother s side people were in business. No teachers in that group. KW: How old were you when you went to undergrad? SM: Eighteen. KW: Okay, and you went to Smith. SM: I went to Smith, yeah. KW: What made you decide to go to Smith? SM: Oh, I m afraid we were terribly limited in those days. If you were a good student at a private girls school in New Haven you thought [Laughs] Smith or Vassar or Wellesley, and you really didn t think outside the box, so I chose Smith. KW: What was your experience like at Smith? SM: That s a good question. I didn t like Smith all that much. I got a good education. Socially it wasn t good. Maybe I would have been better off at a coed place but I don t know. In those days, people from my background anyway, the guys, if they could get in, went to Yale, Harvard, Princeton. The girls, if they could get in, yada, dah, dah. The first two years I was in a very social house -- they had houses -- and I was told that they d decided--. My sister was two years ahead and she was in a scholarship house where they in fact worked in the house. They did various chores and whatnot as part of their scholarship. My year they apparently had decided to try to leaven the loaf of some of the quad houses, the more social houses, and so they put some of us scholarship girls in there. I don t think it was a very good place for me to be because it was kind of a place where a lot of the girls would go off for the weekend on Thursday and come back Sunday night and it seemed to be kind of a, holding pen [Laughs] until they found Mr. Right.

7 Mack 7 KW: So getting the Mrs. Degree. SM: Yeah, and I was a serious student and I was involved in Classics, Greek and Latin and things like that, that were really, really time-consuming so that I basically worked all the time, so it wasn t a very good fit for me. But then I went to Munich for my junior year and of course by the time I came back I thought of myself as Miss Sophistication, you wouldn t believe, and there-- KW: Do you want to say more about that? SM: --was a French-speaking house. There had been a German house but it had folded, so there were four of us who d been in Munich who came back and became the German underground [Laughs] in Dawes, the French-speaking house. KW: That s interesting. So did you know French? SM: Yeah, my French was very schoolgirl-ish, and you had to speak nothing but French on the first floor. Ideally you would speak nothing but French anywhere. Well my French certainly wasn t up to that so my friends and I -- there were four of us from Munich -- so we would lapse into bits of German and then two of us were Greek majors [Laughs] so we would [speak in] a polyglot: English, a little German, a little French, a little Greek, a little Latin. It was a very slovenly language but nevertheless it was fun, and we were all misfits. When you come back to a place like Smith after a year of total freedom, and academically, instead of being told you will read pages one to twenty by Monday, well, you re expected to be up on this subject by the end of the semester to take an exam on it. It s a completely different world. So for many people it s an impossible adjustment, coming back, but I enjoyed the French house. That was fun. KW: Good.

8 Mack 8 SM: So I had one good year at Smith and the others, I mean I had good classes. The teachers, on the whole, were very good, and if I had been in a different environment I would have liked Smith a lot. KW: Were most of the teachers male? SM: I would say a fair percentage of them but in those days at a woman s college there were likely to be more [females] -- and I don t know about percentages, but in terms of the--. Let s see. In Classics I had three females. The German [department had], two [women] out of I don t know how large a department. In any case, there certainly was a female presence. Typically it seemed to be the single female, the woman who had either made her choice or had her choice made for her and who put her life into teaching and did not have a husband, family, so forth. They were mostly Miss So-and-So. KW: Did they have tenure, if you recall? SM: Oh yeah, oh yeah. There were a few junior women but most of the females with whom I studied, they were probably full professors but they were certainly established and had been there forever. KW: Okay. What year did you graduate? SM: KW: And then you went on to Harvard. SM: Yeah. I spent an extra year at Smith because there was something called a Faculty Fellowship in German. None of the German majors was willing to stay on for another year at Smith, [Laughs] they all wanted to flee, so I got it and it was two-year thing. The first year you stayed at Smith and taught beginning German, which I did, and took whatever classes you wanted, so I did things in Classics that they turned into graduate courses for me. Then the second

9 Mack 9 year it paid for at least a good chunk of the first year of graduate school, wherever you wanted to go. KW: That s great. SM: It was a very good deal, and the people in German who really should have had it didn t want it. KW: Now were those some of the same people that you knew? SM: Mm hmm. KW: Okay. So you spent two more years at Smith, and were those--? SM: No, sorry, one year at Smith and then Smith paid for me to go to my first year at Harvard. KW: Okay. SM: I don t think I would have gotten into Harvard if I d had to have any money the first year, but I was able to come and then they paid for my second year and I only stayed two years at Harvard. I hated it. KW: You want to speak more about that? SM: Oh, sure. [Laughs] KW: What were your expectations going in? SM: Well, I expected--. Of course I d grown up in an academic household and I d grown up with a father who actually didn t think much of Harvard, I have to say, but the Yale Classics department at Yale at the time I was applying was in a shambles. There was no question of my applying there. But in any case, my expectations for graduate school were serious teachers doing serious work and at Harvard I found there were--. Well, there were so many things wrong with the program. The first thing maybe was the fact that they assumed if you hadn t gotten your

10 Mack 10 undergraduate degree at Harvard you were nobody and knew nothing so you were thrown into undergraduate classes, which was not very exciting for a graduate student, and some of these classes were like our--. They ve now changed all the numbering here but-- Are they the five hundred level now, the ones that are-- KW: Half and half. SM: -- undergraduate? Yeah. So some of them were survey classes of that sort and they were all right but not inspiring. But the thing that was most distressing about it all, was that the faculty did not give a damn about teaching. I shouldn t say--. That wasn t true of all of them but in many cases they came unprepared to class. I mean I would be sitting in what called itself a graduate class in Greek with a professor who was distinguished but was clearly making mistakes in the translation. I mean he hadn t sat down and read over the text [Laughs] before coming to class. So the teaching was, on the whole, very, very disappointing and the atmosphere there also was really cutthroat. I mean it was a huge program. There were a hundred graduate students in Classics. KW: I was about to ask. SM: A hundred graduate students in Classics, a hundred. KW: I ve never heard of a department that large. SM: Our entering class was something like thirty-four, and I don t know how many of us actually got degrees in the end. It would be interesting to know, and I m sure that s information I could find out, but I never have. But there were thirty-four of us and it was very hierarchical so that the second-year students obviously thought the first-year students were, and the faculty was very, very split and they didn t hide their animus, so it was a very uncomfortable, unhappy place.

11 Mack 11 The people who did the things which they thought of as the real hard science despised the people who did literature. Well one thing I can tell you: these people must all be dead by now. [Laughs] In any case, there was a professor who did not approve of women at all and so he had his little lunches, his nice little weekly lunches for male graduate students only, and he is said to have said that either females were decorative, in which case they were distracting, or they weren t, [Laughs] in which case obviously they were beneath contempt. It s a world you probably have not had anything to do with. It s a world that is mostly gone, I hope. KW: Until it isn t. [Laughs] SM: Until it isn t, yeah. KW: All of a sudden. SM: So it was a very unhappy--. I had a small set of like-minded friends and that was fine, and then I got married after two years anyway, so the good thing about it was I only paid two years tuition. KW: And you got your doctorate. SM: I did get my doctorate. It took me a long time because I went to California and I was teaching and having children and doing those other things but I did finally get my doctorate and I didn t even have to pay a dissertation credit semester or anything like that. I didn t pay them another cent, so from that point of view, but I feel I have a worthless PhD really. KW: Yeah? Because of the unwholesomeness? SM: Yeah, and it was a low level. I mean I had had good classes, I d learned how to do things in college, but in graduate school--. Well obviously I learned some but I did not learn

12 Mack 12 anything like what I should have, so I have recommended to people ever since not to think about going to Harvard. KW: Have they evolved into something different, to your knowledge? SM: Yeah. It s better. It s still, not--. If I had a--. KW: They re not tops in everything, that s for sure. SM: I would not encourage somebody to go there. It was funny: a woman who s, I don t know, twenty years younger than I am maybe, fifteen, twenty years younger, [Laughs] we started to talk about Harvard and it was exactly the same. It hadn t changed at all. But anyway, that was not a good experience. KW: Did you meet your husband while you were at Harvard? SM: No. Actually my first husband went to Yale, the father of my children, and we got divorced when I came--. Well, at the time I came here because I needed a job because we were getting divorced. But my second husband was actually a teacher of mine at Smith my senior year [Laughs] and we got married long after that. KW: Let s see. [Pause] So I m trying to follow the narrative. You were in California for about ten years? SM: Let s see. We got married in 1964 and I was teaching at Williamstown. We went in 1965 and I was there until 1976, yeah. KW: Okay. SM: I was there and I taught most of the time, and that was one of those weird and notgood-for-women situations where women were hired late, cheap. The vice chancellor who was actually a friend of ours said, Faculty wives are there to be exploited. KW: As in the idea of trailing spouses?

13 Mack 13 SM: Yeah, basically, and at Santa Cruz there really was--. KW: Like an added bonus for getting the man to teach there. SM: Yeah, although I don t think they really thought in those terms, they knew they could get people who wanted to teach. Wives who wanted to teach were pretty much stuck, particularly if you had small children and you couldn t be commuting very far, and they got away--. Well, a typical professor--. They had a quarter system but people taught five courses in three quarters, that was a full-time load, so two, two, and one, but for me they decided I was a native speaker of Latin and Greek, yeah, so they decided that my full load would be ten, so not only was I being paid at the bottommost rate that there was but I was being paid as if I were teaching only half-time. That s ridiculous. KW: How long did you do that? SM: [Laughs] I taught there about eight years. KW: Wow. SM: Yeah, and it worked out. I was having kids and doing lots of other stuff and writing my dissertation off and on. [Brief break for water] But yeah, that was an interesting world, and I guess there were some female faculty but again it was fairly largely male faculty. KW: Did you see anyone else getting the shaft in terms of courses assigned like that? SM: No, not really, but my life was-- KW: Circumscribed. SM: --very much circumscribed so that I knew about lots of things from my husband. The Board of Studies in Literature included Classics, English, all the foreign languages. But the good thing about my position was that I had absolutely no responsibilities beyond teaching. KW: So no administrative or--

14 Mack 14 SM: No. KW: --overseeing graduate students. SM: No, none of that, so that was good, and even when I had my daughter I didn t take any time off. I mean I had her and went on with the quarter. I missed two classes. But the shorter class there was seventy-five minutes so I was able to be gone only four hours -- teach two classes and have my office hours in between -- three days a week, so that wasn t bad. KW: That s manageable. SM: Yeah, yeah, it was manageable. The next-door neighbor took care of her and she never had to have more than one bottle and usually she didn t even have to have any bottle. KW: So was there a supportive--? Did the faculty wives network at all? SM: If they did, I didn t. [Laughs] There was a faculty wives group. I am not much of a joiner, so I don t think I would have joined even if I had had time. And I suspect I felt that their concerns and mine would be very different. KW: Okay. [Laughs] Good enough. SM: They may have, but I had my hands full. Yeah. [Laughs] KW: So how did you end up coming to UNC? I know you mentioned that you were on the market because--. SM: Right, I was on the market and I was really, really lucky that I got this job. So I came in 1976 and I was thirty-seven years old, so I was too old. The people who had gotten tenure were about my age so I was out of sync, and also I was the first single parent, female, with children they had ever had. KW: Really? SM: Oh yeah.

15 Mack 15 KW: What was that like? SM: [Laughs] KW: How many children? SM: I have two. KW: Sorry; you mentioned that earlier. How old were they when you started teaching here? SM: They were nine and four. Yeah, it was a big transition. I came from California with two children and two Siamese cats and it was my first real full-time job. Yeah, it was interesting. People were nice. They didn t quite know what to make of me because on the one hand I was clearly [like] their wives because I had children and I did the things that wives do, [Laughs] but I was also supposed to be their colleague, which initially was a little awkward. Fortunately most of them--. There was somebody who had retired who was a woman who had never married, who told me at the interview she was worried about what I would do if the children got sick, so that made me very nervous but I didn t get that sense from my colleagues. KW: That s interesting that a woman was the one to bring it up. SM: Yeah. Again this was an older woman who had made her choice. KW: And so maybe couldn t relate as much, or thought she could so it was her duty to say something. SM: Something like that. Apparently my good friend, Cecil Wooten, who has been interviewed for the gay part of this-- KW: I ve seen his name. SM: --he was a graduate student here and he said that this particular professor was very, very hard on female graduate students.

16 Mack 16 KW: About how large was the Classics department when you came? SM: I d say fifteen or sixteen faculty. KW: How many full tenured professors, just an estimate? SM: When I came, let s see, a whole bunch had just got tenure, so maybe--. I could figure it out but in any case maybe six associate professors. Let s see, who else was--? There weren t many assistant professors; maybe three assistant. Six, six, three, something like that. KW: This would already be after Cynthia Dessen had been turned down for tenure. SM: No, she hadn t--. I have never understood that story, even though she asked me to read-- KW: It s complicated. SM: --her file and whatnot, but she had been asked to go up early, first of all. Anyway, I stayed in their house. I took over her job, in a sense, the first year. She and her husband were in Washington and I had their house. So she came back [and] it was after that, that she got turned down. KW: That fits. SM: Yeah, it was weird. An outside reviewer--. I tried to be helpful; I did read her--. Is this an appropriate thing to be talking about? KW: Yeah, but we can move on if you want. SM: No, no, I was just thinking in terms of--. But you ve interviewed her-- KW: I ve interviewed her. SM: --so her stuff is part of the record. KW: Yes. SM: Okay. I didn t want to be saying things that--.

17 Mack 17 KW: No. SM: Yeah. She was always really, really helpful to me but she certainly felt that she got screwed. KW: Yeah, she did feel that way. So can you describe your time working in the Classics department? SM: Ooh. It was--. KW: What were the most challenging parts at first? SM: Oh, the most challenging was it was nonstop. My marriage had not been very good and my husband had not done all that much with the children but [Laughs] there d been another person there, so for the first time having the complete charge of the children and all of their activities, and then a full-time job and trying to get everything done and done well, I didn t stop. The notion that you re supposed to make sure you have some time for yourself, [Laughs] which is a ludicrous, laughable notion, more precisely, a great idea, but totally impossible for a single mother to manage. But it was fun. It was very, very hard work, very tiring. I couldn t possibly do it now. And of course I was trying to do everything and I wanted to make sure that I did everything right so anything I was asked to do I did, and it didn t matter how long it took. KW: Do you mean in terms of your professional--? SM: Yeah. KW: Because sometimes it could have been like for your children too, taking on more things to show that you were trying to cover all the bases. SM: [Interviewee edit: Yes, I didn t pick up on what you were saying. I did try to do all the things two parents might do for their children too. I was very conscious of there being only

18 Mack 18 one of me and I didn t want them to miss out any more than they had to.] Yeah, trying to cover all the bases, but certainly if you re asked to be on such-and-such a committee. KW: Mm hmm. And were you asked to be on committees? SM: Oh yeah, oh yeah, and I don t think--. It s possible that I was treated lightly; I don t think so. Basically people pulled their weight. KW: Were you involved with the association for women faculty here at all, or the Association for University Women? SM: No. KW: Okay. SM: Again, until the kids were pretty well grown, I basically--. Yeah. KW: Did you have friendships with other female faculty across departments or was it--. SM: Some. KW: --not significantly female? SM: No, not significantly, and since my department was largely male most of my friendships were in the department and were with men. A little later, I forget when she came, Nan Michels, Agnes K. Michels, who had retired from Bryn Mawr, she d taken early retirement to nurse her husband who had then died and she came down and I don t know how many years she taught for us but we had offices across from each other and I loved her. She was wonderful. Cynthia was a friend but not the way Nan Michels [was]. Nan and I really, really hit it off and that was really fun. That was both a professional and social relationship. But mostly, well, Marie-Henriette Gates for a while, and she was a friend too but she also had children and so the same problem. But on the whole most of my good close friendships here have been men.

19 Mack 19 KW: What was your role--? Let me phrase that better. In departmental meetings and all that kind of thing, what were those like? Were there any particularly contentious things or decisions that you played a part in that seem memorable, or anything like that? SM: Well perhaps the most--. There was a tenure decision. There was a guy who was going to get tenure who shouldn t have. There was a certain amount of duplicity around the edges of all of this and he was claiming to have done work that he hadn t and various things. But in any case, there I did actually go and talk to the dean to tell him some of the things that I thought he ought to know. That s the one time I can think of when there was something that was a real issue and the department was split, but there was some hanky-panky that I don t think I would want to go into. KW: Sure. So making the jump now to some questions about gender, pretty constrained questions, how would you say you ve experienced gender in your professional career overall, as a woman, any different treatment or not? SM: I don t think so. I know a lot of--. I ve talked to various people over the years and a lot of women here I know feel that they have had problems. Perhaps because the department is as it is, it s small and people of goodwill, and I mean, there was the occasional person who--. I mean it didn t bother me if somebody would pat me on the shoulder or something like that. Some people would find that offensive. I knew it didn t mean anything and it didn t worry me. But no, on the whole I don t have any sense that I had-- KW: That s great. SM: --problems because I was a woman. Yeah. KW: And how do you define feminism for yourself, or in general?

20 Mack 20 SM: Well I generally don t think about it very much, I have to say. I mean basically my notions are I m as good as any man. One place where it s possible, and I don t know for a fact, I was brought up not to talk about money and I know that those of us who started here got compressed, as they called it, in terms of--. I wouldn t be surprised to find that in fact I ve been paid slightly less well because I was a woman, but I also know that a lot of it was that those of us who came and stayed didn t get big raises and so whether there was any aspect of--. But on the whole money was something that we didn t talk about. I m the only person I can think of who didn t actually ask what the salary was when I was offered the job [Laughs] because you don t talk about money, I guess. But no, I feel that I ve been very lucky. Partly, some things that bother other people perhaps don t bother me. My life was always so full that I tended not to worry about things, and I had very good, supportive colleagues and a best friend in the department who has been my best friend since KW: And was she here the whole time you were? SM: He. KW: Sorry. But you mentioned the one woman. SM: Oh, Nan Michels. Yeah. KW: Okay. I got confused. SM: Oh, sorry. Yeah, Nan died a number of years ago. She retired from Bryn Mawr, she came and did several years here, and then she retired from here and she stayed in the area and she taught a little bit at Duke, and we remained friends until the end. Of course once she wasn t coming in here I didn t see that much of her, but for let s say three years, or whatever it was, we were buddies. But my other main friends have all been male and my friend Cecil, in part because

21 Mack 21 most of the time he s been single and my husband died--. Well, first I was divorced and then I got married and then my husband died seventeen years ago, so I ve been single most of the time too and we share lots of interests, so I feel I ve always had a very strong support. If you need a whole support system of ten people, well I probably never had it, [Laughs] but I ve always had strong support with family and then with a few good friends, mostly male. KW: Yeah. It sounds like, I mean you said it, your life was always really full so maybe even if some of the things were real concerns or whatever you were focused on getting through the day with your career and your children, and maybe that--. I mean it s probably good. SM: Yeah. KW: How influential do you think feminism has been on your own learning across your life, and it s okay if that s like ( ) SM: A little. Not hugely, I wouldn t say. I mean the kinds of things I taught, I mean I m basically a very literary person, and it s certainly true that Classics has changed and people are much more aware of the role of women in the ancient texts, so although I didn t actually read much feminism criticism it-- KW: Filtered in? SM: --filtered in, yeah. I d say that s certainly the case. [Interviewee edit: I could have been much more explicit here if I had been thinking more clearly that day. In the late 90s I wrote the chapter on Aeneid 7 for a collection of essays on the poem called Reading Vergil s Aeneid, An Interpretative Guide. The book was intended to for an audience of non-specialist readers. My essay focused mainly on the female characters in Book 7. I did not study feminism specifically but I learned to notice many things that I had not noticed in my original studies of Roman epic]

22 Mack 22 KW: Yeah, and I might be making this up off the top of my head, but I feel like the Women s Studies has done a cross-listed thing with Classics before on women in ancient Greece. SM: Oh yeah, oh yeah, and I ve never been involved in any of that firsthand but obviously--. KW: That d be a draw. SM: Yeah, and it gets you thinking about things and it has worked well. It s been very good for this department because Classics used to be, tended to be, pokey. You ve got these difficult languages to learn and the old way was, And would you now translate, Mr. Snodgrass? and that would be the end of that. You d translate the bit and it s as if you d then done anything worth doing, whereas of course what you need then to do is: all right, now we know what the words are, let s think about it. So Classics had a long way to go to catch up, but by now it has caught up [Laughs]-- KW: That s interesting. SM: --a lot and certainly somebody like Sharon James, in this department, is obviously well-recognized through this country and beyond. KW: Do you still feel like, in Classics, that there s a divide between people who are really interested in the literary aspects and the philology? SM: No. I don t really think so. I m afraid that philology is getting to be less important. That is to say, I worry that as people focus on the theories they sometimes lose track of what the words actually mean, and it seems to me for Classics to have any validity--. Classical literature and translation is wonderful. There s all kinds of stuff and I m delighted that it s accessible to people. But it s not the same thing. The translation s not the same thing. You can devise all kinds of discussions about material that works from the point of view of the translation but in fact it

23 Mack 23 has nothing to do with the text really. One of my favorite examples of something like this: I was asked to review an article -- a potential article -- for publication and it was a discussion of the use of the word for ivory in the Aeneid, and the word for ivory in the Aeneid is very, very interesting, but unfortunately this person had also chosen words for ebony, not knowing that--. KW: Yeah. [Laughs] SM: Well, you can make up whatever theory you would like, but it s--. KW: They re not the same thing. SM: It s just wrong. It was the easiest article to dismiss [Laughs] of any ever. I mean it was very sad, but at least it was absolutely clear-cut: sorry. KW: That s about as clear-cut as it can be. SM: Yeah, yeah. KW: As black and white. SM: So that does worry me, that once you lose that base, and the boring -- not really boring but you can see it as boring -- pedestrian, that -- KW: The rigor. SM: --scut work that you ve got to do to learn those languages, and that s your base, and if the base is wobbly then [so are] the structures on top of it. KW: Do you feel like your children have affected your thoughts on feminism at all, or raising them as a single parent? SM: I don t know. I m afraid I m not a really good person to talk to about feminism because I really have not--. KW: Well it s good to get both sides. SM: Okay. [Pause]

24 Mack 24 KW: There s not really a wrong answer. SM: Yeah. I don t know. I tried to be a really good mother while being incredibly busy, so I tried to do it all, and obviously you can t and you don t succeed in some ways, but my children seem to have turned out well despite it, and I do think they were better off without their father than they would have been if we d stayed. Well, I m sure of that. My daughter, who is now forty-two, has said recently that she wished that there had been a man, [Laughs] not her father, but she would have liked to have had a father figure. She thinks that would have been good in her life. But, no, I tried to be as good as any man, and I guess I can see that I thought I probably had to be even better. But I don t know. I did everything as well as I could possibly do it, and I dreamt of occasionally screwing up on something so that--. [Laughs] Because I did have some colleagues who couldn t be asked to do certain kinds of things because they wouldn t get them done, and I thought occasionally: wouldn t that be nice? What if I really screwed this up so that I wouldn t be asked? I couldn t do it. [Laughs] KW: Yeah, yeah. I can think of examples. SM: But that s not connected with feminism. [Laughs] KW: It s funny though. Is there anything that I didn t hit on that you were planning on talking about, or that you d like to share? SM: No. I really hadn t thought at all. I figured I d see what happened. [Pause] No. I guess--. [Pause] I m glad that there is so much now available for women, maternity leave and things like that, since I didn t have any of it. Sometimes it seems curious to think: my goodness, the department--. The problem for the department is that so-and-so gets maternity leave but the money doesn t come in to pay for somebody else, so yes, she gets maternity leave, but that can be really hard on a small department like Classics. Then of course there s a part of me that says,

25 Mack 25 well, I taught right through. I only missed two days of class. [Laughs] But that s ridiculous. That was a much worse world in many ways. I certainly wouldn t want to go back to it, but it s part of what makes me think in terms of the difficulties. KW: Do you feel like it s as difficult if you re a male, like a husband who s had children? SM: Yeah. I mean obviously in really civilized places like Sweden, when we were in Sweden the guide said that basically either the husband or the wife can have essentially two work years off. KW: Wow. Yeah. I ve heard that before. SM: A part of me says that is fabulous and that s civilization. That s the way things ought to be. Then another part of me says: my goodness; that really makes it very, very difficult. My French daughter-in-law, she s an accountant at a very small company and she has made me aware of the difficulties for the little company who has to keep--. And of course in France they have much better maternity leave and stuff than we do, everybody does, but you have to keep the job open for up to eighteen months or whatever it is, which can be extremely difficult. You have to keep it available but somebody has to do the work, and then it s quite possible that the person will decide not to come back after all. So I ve started thinking of it from both points of view. KW: Yeah. There s a balance. SM: Yeah, and it obviously is difficult, and it s always going to be a problem for women. I know my father, who was a very good person and a man who changed with the times, initially he wondered about putting all that money into training graduate women because they might very well end up getting married and not using it. He came around to seeing, since he was a very fair-

26 Mack 26 minded man, and he certainly thought that I should have every chance a man should have, but you can see why there s a question. KW: Well, that s it. SM: Okay. Well that s fine. All right. [Interviewee edit: Perhaps a final point worth inserting about how far I have come from my beginnings in a culture that totally under-valued women. It is embarrassing to me, but true, that when I was a child, possibly even a teenager, and my best friend told me they were changing to a female doctor, I really honestly thought that was a bad thing, assuming that men were bound to be better doctors than women. How stupid I was, but how much a part of the then culture!] END OF INTERVIEW Transcriber: Deborah Mitchum Date: January 12, 2015 Edited by: Stephanie Cornelison Date: November 2, 2015