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The Cosmos Club is an elite private club, the kind of place where important people host fancy lunches to hash out the issues of the day. Until 1988, however, the club was all male. It is a measure of Catherine McArdle Kelleher’s brilliance that she was nevertheless invited to give a talk there.
This probably seemed quite the honor, until she presented herself at the entrance and was told that, of course, no woman could be seen in the club’s public spaces. However, as a special concession to her illustrious host, she would be smuggled in a side door.
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Those who knew my Aunt Cathy can picture her expression at that moment. Those of you who don’t can try imagining what Queen Elizabeth’s face might have looked like after someone handed her a can of spray paint and invited her to scrawl a few naughty words across the altar at Westminster Abbey.
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I suspect there was a brief pause, giving the manager some time to appreciate the magnitude of his error. Then she told him to find the host and explain that unless she could go in via the front door, she would not go in at all.
She gave her talk, as planned.
I couldn’t have done it myself; I’d have been too chicken. But then, I also doubt I’d have been brave enough to sew money into the hem of my dress and carry it across Checkpoint Charlie to people trapped on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. Which is my second-favorite story about Aunt Cathy.
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For that matter, I doubt I would have had the grit to defy social convention and become one of the first three women in the United States to get a PhD in security studies. I cannot imagine mustering the resolve it took for a woman of her generation to become a professor, the “founding mother” of the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies, founding president of Women in International Security, and a deputy assistant secretary of defense. And if I’d somehow managed her courage and her work ethic, I suspect I would not have been quite so conscientious about holding those doors open for other women to walk through — mentoring younger female scholars, writing “nastygrams” to conference organizers demanding to know why no women were on the program.
I had no idea about any of this when I was growing up. She was just Aunt Cathy, who served lime sherbet floating in cranberry juice at Thanksgiving, and joked about the “family recipe” for cranberry sauce: “Take one can,” she’d say, rather grandly, “and decant it onto the plate.” This is the gift of her generation: Women did extraordinary things and, in the process, made them seem ordinary for those of us lucky enough to follow.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot during my end-of-year taking stock. We lost Aunt Cathy in February and, ever since, I’ve been meaning to write about her. Something always kept intervening — mostly, I think, my fear that I wouldn’t do my subject justice.
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But then, last month, Sandra Day O’Connor died, and it reminded me that every year we all lose more of that amazing generation of women who went first. They did a thing almost no one wanted them to do, without even being sure it could be done.
“When I was first on the job market after I got my PhD,” said Isabel Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, “we still had help-wanted female and help-wanted male ads.” She recalled being rejected by a PhD program because the man who interviewed her wasn’t sure how it would work, having a housewife — and later pretending to her friends that her professorship was a part-time job, because she was embarrassed to admit she was working full-time with a young child.
“You didn’t expect to do great things,” said Frances Kissling, president of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy. “Men made the decisions, and women implemented.”
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I asked Sawhill and Kissling for their stories because I realized, with regret, that I had not asked my aunt for enough of hers. I heard too many new favorites at her memorial service, when it was too late.
These are the sad thoughts of a dying year, but they’re also a hope for the new. All of us know some of the incredible women who blazed their own trails to the careers that men were offered as by right. This year, ask them for their stories, and ask the women who knew them, too. Because in addition to being our friends and relatives and colleagues, they are the ones who can tell us how far we’ve come, and what it took to get here.
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Everyone has a favorite story about my Aunt Cathy — okay, sometimes more than one. But I have a definite favorite: the time she forced an all-male club to let her walk through the front door, becoming possibly the first woman to ever do so at D.C.’s Cosmos Club.
The Cosmos Club is an elite private club, the kind of place where important people host fancy lunches to hash out the issues of the day. Until 1988, however, the club was all male. It is a measure of Catherine McArdle Kelleher’s brilliance that she was nevertheless invited to give a talk there.
This probably seemed quite the honor, until she presented herself at the entrance and was told that, of course, no woman could be seen in the club’s public spaces. However, as a special concession to her illustrious host, she would be smuggled in a side door.
Those who knew my Aunt Cathy can picture her expression at that moment. Those of you who don’t can try imagining what Queen Elizabeth’s face might have looked like after someone handed her a can of spray paint and invited her to scrawl a few naughty words across the altar at Westminster Abbey.
I suspect there was a brief pause, giving the manager some time to appreciate the magnitude of his error. Then she told him to find the host and explain that unless she could go in via the front door, she would not go in at all.
She gave her talk, as planned.
I couldn’t have done it myself; I’d have been too chicken. But then, I also doubt I’d have been brave enough to sew money into the hem of my dress and carry it across Checkpoint Charlie to people trapped on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. Which is my second-favorite story about Aunt Cathy.
For that matter, I doubt I would have had the grit to defy social convention and become one of the first three women in the United States to get a PhD in security studies. I cannot imagine mustering the resolve it took for a woman of her generation to become a professor, the “founding mother” of the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies, founding president of Women in International Security, and a deputy assistant secretary of defense. And if I’d somehow managed her courage and her work ethic, I suspect I would not have been quite so conscientious about holding those doors open for other women to walk through — mentoring younger female scholars, writing “nastygrams” to conference organizers demanding to know why no women were on the program.
I had no idea about any of this when I was growing up. She was just Aunt Cathy, who served lime sherbet floating in cranberry juice at Thanksgiving, and joked about the “family recipe” for cranberry sauce: “Take one can,” she’d say, rather grandly, “and decant it onto the plate.” This is the gift of her generation: Women did extraordinary things and, in the process, made them seem ordinary for those of us lucky enough to follow.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot during my end-of-year taking stock. We lost Aunt Cathy in February and, ever since, I’ve been meaning to write about her. Something always kept intervening — mostly, I think, my fear that I wouldn’t do my subject justice.
But then, last month, Sandra Day O’Connor died, and it reminded me that every year we all lose more of that amazing generation of women who went first. They did a thing almost no one wanted them to do, without even being sure it could be done.
“When I was first on the job market after I got my PhD,” said Isabel Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, “we still had help-wanted female and help-wanted male ads.” She recalled being rejected by a PhD program because the man who interviewed her wasn’t sure how it would work, having a housewife — and later pretending to her friends that her professorship was a part-time job, because she was embarrassed to admit she was working full-time with a young child.
“You didn’t expect to do great things,” said Frances Kissling, president of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy. “Men made the decisions, and women implemented.”
I asked Sawhill and Kissling for their stories because I realized, with regret, that I had not asked my aunt for enough of hers. I heard too many new favorites at her memorial service, when it was too late.
These are the sad thoughts of a dying year, but they’re also a hope for the new. All of us know some of the incredible women who blazed their own trails to the careers that men were offered as by right. This year, ask them for their stories, and ask the women who knew them, too. Because in addition to being our friends and relatives and colleagues, they are the ones who can tell us how far we’ve come, and what it took to get here.
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