History teacher Dr. Ruth Meyer has been chosen for publication in an anthology for her paper on her experiences as one of the first women to attend the University of Oxford in England.

In this interview, she discusses the paper and other work she has been developing, as well as the gender balance at Oxford and in the United States.

Aquila: Can you talk more about your paper and its publication?

Dr. Ruth Meyer: Last April, I went to a conference in London called City Margins. They asked for any experience of someone living in a city who felt marginalized in some way. I wrote about my experiences in 1979 of being the first woman going to college at Oxford that had been all male since it was founded. I used as a kind of mirror for some of the complicated feelings I had around that experience a TV series which was really popular in the 90s and 80s called Inspector Morse, and they’re a series of murder mysteries that are set in Oxford. Those are mysteries that I really like, but there a ton of mysteries that are set in Oxford that have a rather dark side to them. It’s like there’s a whole genre of murder-mystery writing and writing about the dark side that resides at Oxford, so I used that as a mirror as well for some of the difficult feelings of those people that do feel marginalized by the system. The system favors, and it’s probably still the case now, people who’ve gone to the equivalent of schools like Harker in England—they’re often boarding schools, and it’s very hard to people who are not from that world to gain entrance. I was actually very fortunate to get in, and I had a great experience there, but there was also a lot of difficulty in being the first woman.

After the conference was over, the person who organized the conference, whose name is Dr. Lucy Huskinson—she’s a professor at Bangor University in Wales—she is connected with my graduate school where I did my Ph.D., which is Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California, and she invited all the people that attended to develop the talk that they gave into a full paper with citations, pretty much like you have to do for your research papers here. I went to see Ms. Smith, who is my expert on all Chicago-style citations, and I had a rush tutorial in NoodleBib at the end of the summer, and I rushed to get the whole thing written in some sort of form that I thought would work. I hung on and hung on and waited and waited, and I had an email about three weeks ago now to say that Lucy had chosen my paper and eight others to be in an anthology about this topic, City Margins. She’s hoping that Routledge in England is going to publish it, but we just have to wait now to see if she goes with them or another publisher. I’m still waiting to hear what the final title of the book is and who the publisher will be, but when I heard about it, I was so thrilled.

A: What will the publication process look like going forward?

RM: I would think [the publication date] is going to be sometime around November next year. Usually these things often take a lot longer than you think because everything has to be triple-checked. They will check the over 100 endnotes that I put in, and if there’s anything that’s not quite making sense to them, they’ll probably get back to me, but I’ve also told them that I’m fine with them editing it however they want.

The other thing that’s going to happen is I’ll see Lucy Huskinson again this summer at Yale. I’ve submitted a proposal for a paper at the conference that she’s going to be at in Yale, and my Western Political Thought class actually inspired me with what I’m going to talk about.

A: Can you talk more about your topic for this conference?

RM: In my Western Political Thought class, they have their own Facebook page, and I’ve never actually seen it, but they told me that they wanted to find a meme of Carl Jung for the class. The one they chose was Forever Jung. I didn’t know what a meme was, but as soon as I realized what it was, I realized that I’d seen them all over the place. I talked to Ms. Main about it, and she gave me a really rush tutorial on different memes and how they worked, so I had all my Western Political Thought class design their own meme for a philosopher, and I’m going to put it up as a sort of senior legacy board. The conference is going to address the digital divide a lot because a lot of therapists and teachers in their 50s like me feel very challenged by the rise of technology, and they’re trying to address how to bridge the divide and come to terms with the fast path of technological change. I’m going to be talking about, first, how people of my age I know feel threatened by the rise of technology, but how once you have your students teaching you about it, you can actually turn it around and use it as a tool for teaching something new. This was just a fun thing doing the legacy board, but I also thought a lot about—because I’ve been very interested in the ideas of Carl Jung—the memes that people post on Facebook and how they might be representations of what Jung calls archetypal images, which are endlessly recurring images across all cultures. The “angry baby” is definitely an archetype; so is the “avenging hero”—there’s a lot of Keanu Reeves memes out there and he’s definitely some sort of hero figure. These are all reflections of Jung things, like mythological figures that are really powerful and carry a lot of energy, and the fact that people keep posting them—they probably don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re attracted to these figures because they’re mirroring something in themselves, and that’s kind of what I’m interested in.

A: Can you talk more about your experiences as a woman at Oxford?

RM: Right at this time, I would’ve gotten my acceptance to Oxford. I didn’t think of any possible negatives that might happen at all; nothing crossed my mind until my first day there. There were about 17 other women that were admitted, and that first day, we all tended to hang around together as a group and not mix with the men at all. I think if the college had been co-ed that wouldn’t have happened, and I also think that wouldn’t have happened if all the women that had come in had gone to co-ed schools. I had been to a co-ed school for my junior and senior year, so I thought it was strange. We were given one task to do that day, which was to go and buy a gown, like the gowns we wear at graduation. We all went shopping for these gowns, but we all went together as a group, and we spent the rest of the day in one room, all 17 of us, drinking tea and talking, and I think that we did that because we all just felt there was something dangerous out there in being with all the guys because they must not have been particularly welcoming.

I still wasn’t aware at this point that there was anything particularly odd about it until my second day. I decided that I was going to go into the room that you’d probably call the students’ union room. We called it the junior common room. I walked in and all the talking stopped because everyone was, they were all guys. And they just stopped talking. It was a really strange moment, and I realized they were staring at me. I thought, ‘Okay, I have a choice. Either I go down and take my place in this common room and read the paper because I have a right to be there just as much as they do, or I run away.’ I’ve never been one for running away—I always like to face whatever I have to face—so I just did the latter. I went and sat down, picked up the paper, and started reading, and after a couple minutes, they started all talking again, and so the moment was over, but it was just a really embarrassing moment.

In Oxford, you have this unique system called tutorial system, which means that your instruction is very much one-on-one or maybe a couple of you with a tutor. There was one tutorial we had where we had maybe seven of us. The book we were studying was the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville, which was really hard for me because I had only done the equivalent of what you’d call freshman French, and all the other people in the group had done the equivalent of AP French, and they had these great French accents. The other thing my tutor did was he would refer to me as Ruth, which is my first name, and he would refer to all the guys by their last name. That immediately set up a division again. I was so embarrassed every time he would ask me a question. I would just get really frozen because it felt like everyone was so confident, especially the men, and they all had these very upper class accents—in England, things are very determined by how you speak. I felt marginalized not just because I was a woman—there was that aspect, but there was also the class aspect as well.

Things did get a little better in my final year because we all had to do a special subject that you had to study in a lot more depth, and I chose to study Political Pressure and Social Change in England from 1870 to 1914, and for this subject, I was given a tutor at an all-girls college. I had a male tutor at that college, and he was the kindest man, he was so different from my tutor. He actually taught me something instead of making me feel intimidated or like I was stupid.

A: Do you think the situation would have been different if there had been more female faculty members?

RM: I do think it would have been different because I had one female tutor all that time I had been there and I actually had to ask for her. She taught me, she was very kind, she was understanding, she didn’t treat me like I was stupid, and I passed because she taught me really well, and I’m sure if I had more teachers like her, I would’ve definitely done a lot better. Also if you think about it, it would have been a far more accurate representation of how society is because society is roughly 50 percent male 50 percent female. If you did a study at Oxford now, you’d find there are a lot more female teachers, but there’s probably still a mismatch in terms of female tutors, particularly in fields like engineering and math.

A: How do you see the gender balance at Oxford in five or ten years?

RM: I think things are really improving. I’m noticing in [Oxford’s] publications now that there are a lot more women getting published, and I ‘m noticing that there a lot more women giving lectures. I think that generally female academics are on the rise in England, and I think that there’s been a long struggle for them to get there, but I’m seeing a real new confident group of women emerging.

A: What about in the United States?

RM: I’ve been concerned about it in the United States because of teaching Western Political Thought. We watched a documentary called Miss Representation. When I first came to the United States, which was 1999, I attended Pacifica Graduate Institute. For the first time, I had a total gender balance in my teachers. I had my first ever feminist professor, and she raised my consciousness about the whole thing at Oxford, because I hadn’t even thought about it in gender terms. I still feel that California women, at any rate in the Bay Area, are very fortunate because I feel we don’t have such a tough time as we would in other countries because of all the work that was done particularly in the 60s and the 70s by the feminists who fought for equal pay and equal rights, and I think there’s been a lot of consciousness-raising. What I’ve been concerned about more recently with Miss Representation is something that I haven’t realized, which is actually if we look at the statistics for America as a whole, America is sort of going backwards. We had this big drive for more female representation in politics, but if we compare the amount of women that are represented in the House of Representatives to other countries, we don’t nearly have as many women as other countries. Older women, like Nancy Pelosi, for example, had a really tough time because people just judged women so much, still, by their appearance. After watching Miss Representation again for a second time, because you have to keep watching to remind yourself, I was looking at magazines, and I saw an advert for something, but the girl was falling backwards in a swoon, her eyes had been blacked out, and she was being held by this really strong man, and it’s advertising perfume I think, and I suddenly thought there’s something really fishy going on in America with this over-obsession with how women look. That side of things worries me.

Overall, I think my confidence has really grown as a result of living in the United States and being out of that kind of culture that I grew up in and also working at Harker, where I know that the administration works really hard to keep the gender balance equal between the teachers.