Epitaph of a Small Winner: My First Fifty Years in Academe

• In Event: Engendering Latin American History: “Pioneer” Women Historians and Their Stories

Abstract

Machado de Assis wrote that one is fortunate to escape from life as a small winner. I have enjoyed my academic career and have made modest contributions in scholarship, teaching, administration, and editing. Thus, I feel like a small winner.
My career probably resembled that of Forrest Gump more than that of an ambitious professional. I intended to earn an MA at the University of New Mexico and return to high school teaching. Somewhat unexpectedly, I fell into the Ph.D. program and planned a dissertation on Argentinean women. My advisor, Ed Lieuwen, however, proposed that I work instead on the extradition of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela. He counseled that history departments did not want to hire women, especially women who worked on women’s history. In the short run, he may have been wise. I always retained an interest in women’s history, but most of my publishing was on Venezuelan political history. I felt like a small winner as a role model when a young woman graduate student approached me about a LASA geopolitics panel that I’d served on. It’s good to see a woman on a panel like that, she said, rather than only on panels having to do with gender.
When I arrived at the College of William and Mary in 1971 as a visiting professor, there was only one other woman in the department, a situation that continued for over 20 years. By the time I retired in 2004, more than one third of the faculty were women, many of them hired during the six years I was department chair. Not all my doing by any means, but I am pleased at having had a hand in these changes. I did not have the opportunity to direct graduate research in my field, but a number of US history Ph.D. students prepared minor Latin American teaching fields under my direction, and a few of my undergraduate students went on to academic positions in Latin American history. Through various editorial positions, I also had the chance to mentor and work with younger scholars in the field.

Author

• Judith Ewell, College of William and Mary