This spring, the St. Andrew's Women's Network hosted two Book Club Discussions for alumnae and parents of the School, one in Charlotte, North Carolina, the other in New York City. The Charlotte event, where guests discussed Toni Morrison's Beloved, was held in the home of Sarah Belk P'06,'09,'12,'16 in late February, while Mary Malhotra P'17 hosted in New York this past Tuesday; women gathered in Mary's Manhattan apartment to discuss Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Both discussions were led by St. Andrew's faculty members and by Women's Network co-chair Elizabeth Roach.

"The Women's Network holds these book discussions not just to enjoy an evening of great food and great conversation with alums and parents (although that's certainly part of it)," Roach said. "We want to give our alumnae and current and past parents the opportunity to connect or reconnect with St. Andrew's—with our teachers, with each other, but also with the kind of intellectual exploration that occurs on campus. In essence, we're trying to recreate the Harkness table discussions we have in our classrooms, in the living rooms of our Book Club hosts. I particularly love these discussions because adults—with their varied life experiences—have a different perspective than teenagers on the issues in the novels we explore. It's enriching for me as a teacher."

Book Club attendees are "assigned" a text—always one that St. Andrew's English students are also reading—some months in advance. In the week leading up to the event, Roach sends out a list of questions and, in some cases, primary and secondary sources about the text, so that attendees can mull over the various issues within the text and angles of analysis in advance of the actual discussion. Roach and an additional St. Andrew's faculty member then travel to the host's home to lead the book discussion.

"I've loved doing these events over the years," said History Department Chair Emily Pressman, who helped lead the Beloved discussion in North Carolina. "Our group in Charlotte was terrific: they had wonderful insights into the novel, putting it into conversation with questions of historical memory that are, perhaps, more acutely present in the South. To have a group of such smart and engaged readers working through questions at the heart of Beloved was particularly powerful for me, as both a teacher and an historian."

"I attended the Charlotte meeting with Elizabeth and Emily," noted Cynthia Oates P'13. "It was great to be able to envision the two of them conducting their class, reading their favorite passages to us, asking us the same questions they ask their students. It reminded me of the great teaching that goes on at St. Andrew's."

"I often hear alums wistfully say how much they wish they could get back to the seminar table at St. Andrew's," Pressman added, "and parents visiting campus will often describe their envy at the work we get to do with their children in our courses on a daily basis. These events are a way of bringing a little bit of that classroom experience that is at the heart of St. Andrew's, to them, where they live."

"I loved the Wuthering Heights book discussion," said Liz Manocha P'18, who attended the New York gathering. "It was an evening of great conversation in a lovely setting with interesting women. Wuthering Heights is a strange and dark story, and Elizabeth Roach lead a discussion that helped me better understand the unique aspects of the novel and why it has earned a prominent spot in the canon of English literature. It was great to experience first hand some of the St. Andrew's magic. My inner English major was reawakened!"

New York host Mary Malhotra P'17 noted that her son just finished reading Wuthering Heights in his V Form English class, and that the Book Club was a great window into his classroom experiences at St. Andrew's. "I was able to ask Elizabeth, 'How did this book work in a V Form classroom?'" Malhotra recalled. "She explained some of the roadblocks students face while reading it, and how they work through that. I think we were all blown away that our kids have access to these kinds of minds, and scholarship, and talent, within their classrooms."

"Elizabeth was so great," agreed English teacher Katherine Crowley, who helped lead the New York discussion. "She really helped us to think critically about Wuthering Heights, about the characters and their development. She brought the book to life for the women, and helped a lot of us to understand the text in a whole new way."

"We talked a lot about what we think Emily Bronte is trying to say about love and eternity and the transcending of time," Crowley continued. "Our own life experiences often so influence our reading of a text. So considering that we were twenty women of all different ages and backgrounds, it was a pretty incredible conversation."

"It was also such a great opportunity to connect with other people who are part of St. Andrew's," Malhotra said. "We had women of all different ages attend, and we each got to meet current parents, alums, or past parents we didn't know. One woman who came was an old friend of mine I hadn't seen in ages, and I had completely forgotten that her son went to St. Andrew's. She was actually the person who told me about St. Andrew's in the first place!"

"I truly don't think any other school is doing something like this," Malhotra concluded. "These Women's Network book discussions are unique—and fabulous. I think everybody was wishing we could do these once a month!"

*****

The St. Andrew's Women's Network was founded in 2010 with a goal of connecting, celebrating, and harnessing the power of the School's alumnae through events held both on and off campus. When alumnae gather for Women's Network events, they share their experiences and insights with students and faculty, and reconnect with each other and with the School. Since its inception, Women's Network events have expanded in size and scope, and have become central to our mission to provide community, inspiration, and mentorship for all members of our community.

Halimah Delaine Prado '93 entertained an audience of students, faculty and St. Andrew's alumnae during the 2012 Women's Network Weekend keynote address. Halimah built her beautiful talk on a quotation from Maya Angelou: "My mission in life is not to merely to survive, but to thrive and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor and some style." Her journey to wife, mother of two girls and Director of Legal at Google had more than a few twists, including an initial rejection of admission to St. Andrew's (she reapplied the following year). A must-listen.

In mid-September 2009 on a chilly afternoon, seven St. Andrew's women met outside Founders Hall, climbed into a School van, and headed for Washington, D.C. Dean of Students Ana Ramírez courageously took the wheel, while Director of Admission Louisa Zendt '78 P'03,'05,'09 sat shotgun. The rest—English Department Chair Elizabeth Roach P'04,'07,'13, Math teacher and lacrosse coach Jen McGowan, Major Gifts Officer and Coordinator of the Women's Network Bernadette Devine '99, Director of Student Activities Jolene Hyde, and me, English teacher Jean Garnett—piled into the back for the two-hour trek. We were headed to a meeting of the St. Andrew's Women's Network at the home of Sally Pingree P'01, a philanthropist who has been a friend and advisor to Tad and Elizabeth Roach for years.

It's not every day that seven women of all different ages, backgrounds and talents, come together for a road-trip. And it's fitting that the occasion for this convergence was the St. Andrew's Women's Network, which, since its launch less than a year ago, has brought together more than 100 women of all walks of life for discussion in four cities. The Network was created by Bernadette Devine and her friend and former advisor Elizabeth Roach as a way to deepen the bonds of alumnae, mothers and friends with the School and with each other, and to create opportunities for St. Andrew's women to share their ideas and experiences, learn from one another, and connect personally with the St. Andrew's community.

Meetings over the past year have taken different forms: Elizabeth Roach met with 10 women in New York last spring to discuss Virginia Woolf 's To the Lighthouse over a meal that host Laurel Durst P'07,'10 fashioned after the novel's famous dinner party scene. In January of this year, Kate Werble '98 hosted a reception at her New York City gallery, where she gave a private tour and talk on a group exhibition exploring self-portraiture. At Sally's house, more than 30 women (and Headmaster Tad Roach) gathered in the candle-lit backyard, and talked about how St. Andrew's prepared them for the challenges of college, work, life. They talked about what they wished they had known as high school students and shared ideas for how to teach today's young women strength and self-knowledge.

The meeting at Sally Pingree's was, like every other meeting of the Women's Network so far, an affirmation of the essential need for this association, for these unique opportunities for conversation, learning and mutual support. But even before we arrived at Sally's house, the meeting was already underway.

Soon after our departure from campus, Elizabeth Roach pulled the latest New York Times magazine from her bag and turned to Maureen Dowd's piece. "Women are getting unhappier," Dowd wrote. "In the early '70s, breaking out of the domestic cocoon, leaving their mothers' circumscribed lives behind, young women felt exhilarated and bold. But the more women have achieved, the more they seem aggrieved... women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier."

This seems at first like a paradox. In an article for Time Magazine, "What Women Want Now," Nancy Gibbs reminds us just how far women have come since those "early 70s": In 1972 only seven percent of students playing high school sports were girls; now the number is six times as high.... College campuses used to be almost 60-40 male; now the ratio has reversed, and close to half of law and medical degrees go to women, up from fewer than 10 percent in 1970.... For the first time, five women have won Nobel Prizes in the same year (for medicine, chemistry, economics and literature).

Despite a staggering expansion of opportunities for women since the early seventies, Dowd still wonders about the repercussions. A committed feminist, Dowd acknowledges that feminism has increased the burden on women, even as it has freed them from many constraints: "When women stepped into male-dominated realms, they put more demands—and stress—on themselves." And the demands that modern life makes on women are accompanied by lingering pre-feminist prescriptions. "[W]e've internalized the good mommy, happy homemaker ideal," writes columnist Shannon Kelley. "The socialization that succeeded in keeping us in the home for centuries was potent: the hangover lingers, and we continue to measure ourselves, in some part, against that feminine ideal—even while we say we don't."

Part of aspiring to this ideal still means feeling pressure to look a certain way. Desperation to be thin contributes to low self-esteem, obsessive dieting and eating disorders in high school and beyond, and grown women are stranded in a youth-obsessed culture. Thanks to a media barrage of impossible ideals of beauty, these pressures not only set in early and hang on, they also conflict with cultural expectations about motherhood and professional success. Should we strive to fulfill ourselves or to impress others? Is it more important to be smart or beautiful? Honest or likeable? Ambitious or nurturing? For girls and women in America, this chorus of demands can be a confusing soundtrack for self-discovery.

As Ána heroically weaved through rush-hour traffic, we discussed Dowd's essay, trying to make sense of the problem she articulated, trying to weave our own experiences into this abstract narrative of "American Women". Four of us were seasoned working mothers; three were recent college graduates. Together we represented a kind of history of feminism, a reflection of its evolutions, its achievements and perhaps some of its digressions. We talked about a time when women were entering schools and workplaces that were still oriented towards men and male concerns. When Louisa Zendt came to the newly co-ed St. Andrew's in 1974, the School was still struggling to evolve out of an exclusively male culture. A few years after Louisa's graduation, Elizabeth became one of the first female teachers at the School, juggling a full schedule of teaching, coaching and mothering before there was a day care at St. Andrew's. While teachers and students today have their pick of inspiring female mentors, pioneers like Louisa and Elizabeth managed without a fountain of precedents, advice and support from and for women.

Even in the 21st century, when our culture is much more aware and accommodating of the double lives women often lead, all of us in the van were familiar with the imperative to compartmentalize ourselves, to divide our lives into a series of separate roles ("work" mode, "mother" mode, "friend" mode), and then struggle to prioritize them. Yet as Elizabeth recalled the challenge and exhilaration of balancing work and family in those early years, I was struck by how interconnected the two roles were for her. "Being a teacher made me a better mother," she said simply, "and being a mother made me a better teacher." I remembered these words because they inspired me; they gave me something to aspire to.

Even though we had not yet reached Sally's house, I realized something in the van that informed my vision of the evening, and helped me to see, in a kind of flash, the mission of the Women's Network. If many women today are feeling less happy and more stressed, the culprit is not the increase of choices and responsibilities afforded by the feminist movement, but a lack of open channels of communication. Women need to hear from women—from their elders, from their peers, from members of younger generations—in order to learn about life and to share what we have learned. It is precisely this kind of continuity that the Women's Network is making possible for St. Andrew's women.

The switch to co-education revolutionized St. Andrew's, and now, over 30 years after the first female students entered Founders Hall, more than a thousand women often lead, all of us in the van were familiar with the imperative to compartmentalize ourselves, to divide our lives into a series of separate roles ("work" mode, "mother" mode, "friend" mode), and then struggle to prioritize them. Yet as Elizabeth recalled the challenge and exhilaration of balancing work and family in those early years, I was struck by how interconnected the two roles were for her. "Being a teacher made me a better mother," she said simply, "and being a mother made me a better teacher." I remembered these words because they inspired me; they gave me something to aspire to.

Even though we had not yet reached Sally's house, I realized something in the van that informed my vision of the evening, and helped me to see, in a kind of flash, the mission of the Women's Network. If many women today are feeling less happy and more stressed, the culprit is not the increase of choices and responsibilities afforded by the feminist movement, but a lack of open channels of communication. Women need to hear from women—from their elders, from their peers, from members of younger generations—in order to learn about life and to share what we have learned. It is precisely this kind of continuity that the Women's Network is making possible for St. Andrew's women.

The switch to co-education revolutionized St. Andrew's, and now, over 30 years after the first female students entered Founders Hall, more than a thousand that the St. Andrew's culture is not confined to campus; it is an internalized ethic carried by many people in many places. Listening to fellow alumnae talk about tough transitions, Kate (Harrington) Dickie '96, who was hosting the Boston meeting, had an idea: "I would love to meet St. Andrew's kids who are in college in Boston," she said. "They could have me as a touch point."

Out of this discussion between 14 women in Kate's living room, the St. Andrew's College Network was born, a new initiative to match graduating seniors with alumni at or near the college or university they attend. These mentors can help incoming St. Andreans navigate their new environment by recommending professors, courses, extracurricular activities, and community service opportunities. They can help new students identify areas of the school they want to get involved in, making their college experience richer and more connected. This year, the Network aims to match every senior with a mentor before graduation.

In the creation of the College Network, and in the intergenerational exchange that happens naturally at meetings, the Women's Network is helping to ensure that current students are prepared for the transitions to college and to "the real world" of professional and family life that lie ahead. "Our girls now are hungry and eager to connect with older girls and women," says Elizabeth. "They have a lot of questions for them. That came out last year when we took four senior girls down to a Washington, D.C., meeting. They are thinking about their futures and wondering, 'how?'"

Louise Dufresne '09, one of the seniors who attended this meeting, reflected on the experience afterwards. Her words affirm the power of the Network to create meaningful connections across generations of St. Andrew's women: "I was so impressed with women I met at the event. The St. Andrew's experience is so unique, so I immediately felt like I had substantial common ground with the remarkable women I met. What astounded me the most was the diversity of career paths the women had taken. I left the event with the strong feeling that our St. Andrew's education prepares us to be writers, politicians, producers, teachers, environmentalists and business professionals. Their insight, advice and encouragement are invaluable as I prepare to enter college next fall."