Women's Moment: Memory, Meaning, and Purpose

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This week, we added materials about Kenyon’s first female tenured professor, Harlene Marley, to our presentation folder. She was a professor of drama, so her materials—especially the photographs—strike me as artistic, bold, and avant-garde. The dramatic nature of these materials fittingly mirrors Professor Marley’s own story as the first woman to receive tenure at Kenyon—a story that is courageous, pioneering, and worth remembering.

Chapter 2 of The Struggle for the People’s King introduces a framework for analyzing memory in contentious politics that emphasizes the deep entanglement of memory with others. This framework centers on three dimensions: relationality, temporalities, and perceptions. Relationality highlights how collective memory is shaped by the power dynamics between groups, and interactions with institutions, rivals, and the state. Temporalities emphasize how groups invoke the past to make claims in the present and envision futures, showing that memory work is also time work—rooted in historical narratives and projected futures. Perceptions underscore how individuals and groups interpret social realities through their cultural and social positioning, shaping what they see as threats or opportunities. Together, these dimensions reveal that the political use of memory is not just about choosing historical references but about navigating a shifting landscape of identity, power, and meaning across time.

To be honest, it's difficult for me to know how others at Kenyon interpreted Professor Marley’s tenure-track appointment at the time she received it. I also don’t know what kind of emotions they held when they decided to include this event in the Kenyon Archive. However, the attitude of the Kenyon archive staff who provided us with her materials is much clearer than that of people in the past—they see her story as relevant to our group’s project on “Women Activism at Kenyon.” And when our group decided to include her materials in our presentation folder, our attitude was the clearest: we believed this information was extremely valuable to our presentation. Since Yazdiha points out that people often strategically use the past for their own purposes, I find it even harder to determine why and how others—especially members of the Kenyon community from decades ago—have used this material. So, I can only focus on our group’s own stance: the dimensions of relationality, temporalities, and perceptions are reflected in our own identities as women students at Kenyon in the 21st century. We are aware that gender inequality still exists today, and we feel proud of the gender struggles fought by women in our school’s past. That is why we hope to draw back on that legacy to help legitimate our present efforts to continue pursuing gender equality. Even so, through reading Yazdiha’s book, I’ve come to deeply realize that we shouldn’t overlook the original meaning of Professor Marley’s story at the time just because it happens to align well with the goals of today’s Kenyon students. After all, there will always be moments when historical realities do not perfectly match our present-day agendas. In my view, staying constantly aware of this issue is a way to respect history—not by distorting it to fit our own purposes—and it also helps us avoid relying too heavily on the past when envisioning our future.


References

Yazdiha, Hajar. 2023. The Struggle for the People's King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.  

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