Yesterday was All Saints’ Day, a day when we honor not only the official saints but also some of the personal saints who shaped our lives. We learn from our mentors and role models and pass what we learn on to those whom we become mentors and role models. For women, mothers offer both mentoring and a role model, one which we may choose to embrace in part or all or reject. In my transition generation, rejecting in part if not totally the traditional model was more often the norm than the exception. That left us to search for other role models and later mentors. Role models are examples of what is possible. Mentors are dispensers of advice and wisdom.
One mentor for me and my sister was our Aunt Marion, who was married but childless and very drawn to her brother’s abandoned children. She was also a close friend of my mother, but she lived in a different, less domestic world, one of arts and intellect and social engagement. Another was my high school Latin teacher, a strict and demanding woman who was a mentor in my intellectual life and a role model in teaching. Being a voracious reader, I found my other role models in the female creations of Lucy Muad Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott, Anne of Green Gables and Jo March. (I especially like Anne who, like me, had a silent e added to her name.)
Becoming an academic economist means being part of a small gender minority, so many of my professional mentors were men. I still smile when I recall my welcome to the Economics Department at Clemson by my department head, Harvey Wheeler. He said, well, there are six of us men and you are the only woman. I said that was fine. Then he went on to say that my pending Ph.D., was from a northern university, and all of them had their graduate degrees from southern universities. I was a Yankee, they were southerners. I was a liberal, they were conservative. He paused, and I wondered where this was going. Finally, he said “You know, if you were just black, you’d be perfect!” I was relieved that he not only acknowledged but also celebrated the many minorities I brought to the table.
Two women who stand out from my graduate student days were both mentors and role models, Dorothy Goodwin and Audrey Beck. Dr. Goodwin specialized in state and local public finance, a field to which I was very much drawn. Unable to choose between international economics and public finance, I wrote a dissertation that combined them: Sales Tax Harmonization in the European Economic Community. While I taught international economics some 40 times, it was federalism and state and local public finance that was at the core of my research and policy work.
Audrey, an economics instructor with a master’s degree, introduced me to the League of Women Voters, and inspired me tor organize a League in Clemson six years later. (I was also inspired by my mother telling me that her grandmother had marched for “Women’s suffrage.) Both Goodwin and Beck subsequently served in the Connecticut legislature. Audrey connected me with League leaders at the state level in South Carolina, who taught me how to advocate effectively in a not always welcoming political environment. Sarah Leverette, Keller Barron, and Lynn Teague were especially important in shaping my public policy work and my organizational leadership skills. With their encouragement, I served two two-year terms as the Co-president of the League of Women Voters of South Carolina.
As we reflect on our heritage from personal mentors (or personal saints) In this month of celebrating women’s history, I invite you-all but especially women to reflect on who your mentors and role models have been, same gender or not. And consider whom you may have served as a role model and/or mentor, which can be one of the joys of our later years. Mentors and role models form links between earlier generations and those yet to come. We need each other.
