|
|
Ali (l) and Dale Crown as infants portrait of a woman we know It is the nature of the workplace that we can be well acquainted with someone—even friends—but not know the most pertinent details of that person’s life story. We step into the stream of their narrative in the tributary labeled “work” and know little about their formative years. Ali P. Crown’s professional narrative—at Emory—has been well documented. She came here in 1980 from the University of Miami to set up the Law and Economics Center. It moved on, but she stayed at Emory and took a year to complete an interrupted degree, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1985. Her early involvement in women’s issues led to her serving as chair of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and later being selected as founding director of the Center for Women at Emory. She lives in the Emory community with her life-partner, David Edwards, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience.
As Ali steps down from the position she has held for fifteen years, I received a rare opportunity to learn another part of her narrative. And I discovered that we have much in common. Our parents are of the same generation. Hers were the children of Jewish immigrants and, like my own mother, Ali’s mother worked as a seamstress in a factory. She learned the craft from her father, who was a tailor for the Metropolitan Opera and used to sew his daughter garments from scraps of the material used for costumes. Ali’s mother gained her love of music from her father, an appreciation she later worked to cultivate in her own children. Ali particularly remembers her mother calling her at work, playing arias over the phone. Our mothers both grew up as schoolmates of boys who later would become famous comedians. My mom cites Nipsey Russell as one of her best high school buddies, while Ali’s mom attended New York’s P.S. 149 with Danny Kaye. Like my own dad, Ali’s father, a commodities broker, was known to sit down at a card game or two. Each of us eventually moved south—she to Phoenix, I to Atlanta. And we both had troubled siblings who died too young. As far as we know, the similarities end there, but in sitting down to talk with Ali as she prepares to retire from the Center for Women, the stories she told shed new light on the hardworking, unabashed feminist with good taste. Ali Crown’s unique nature was apparent early on. Ali and her sister, Dale, were born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1941, the first of two sets of fraternal twins born to their parents, Estelle and Greg Crown. The second set of twins, Elizabeth and Robert, were born nine years later. Ali attended Erasmus Hall High School, well known as the alma mater of Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand, who were there at the same time. In the mid-1950s, Ali’s father opened a second branch of his firm in Chicago, and the family moved there. “We lived in East Rogers Park, about two blocks from Lake Michigan, and we graduated from Nicholas Senn High School,” Ali remembers. Senn, at that time, was about 97 percent Jewish, quite the contrast from the diversity at Erasmus Hall. “Dale and I were in culture shock. It was the first time we were in such a homogenous environment.” Although the high school itself was not very diverse, the family’s neighborhood was. Ali’s father might consciously have sought out non-Jewish neighbors. His family, unlike that of her mother, was not religiously observant. The youngest of three boys, her father graduated high school at age fourteen and went off to City College of New York, finishing at nineteen, after spending an extra year preparing to teach high school. He never did. At eighteen he met Ali’s mother, who was a year younger. Although they didn’t marry for five years, Ali’s father decided early on that a teacher’s salary wasn’t adequate to support a family.
Greg Crown became Later, after her father died suddenly at the age of forty-eight, Ali’s mother was faced with the choice of maintaining her husband’s ruse or revealing his identity. In deciding upon a Jewish funeral, she quite intentionally, but not vindictively, chose to unmask him. Many of his colleagues were pretty surprised by the discovery, Ali remembers. After her husband’s death, Estelle Crown chose to live in Phoenix, near his family. Although by this time Ali was an adult and making headway toward a successful career, she took a leave of absence from her job to help her mother care for her younger siblings. “My mother decided that we were going to take the train across the country. She loved trains. She used to take us to terminals,” Ali says. Her mother’s goal was to make the transition from Chicago to Phoenix a bit easier for her children. “She bought first-class tickets. We ate in the dining car every night. We left Chicago at the end of January, and it was 22 degrees below. We arrived in Phoenix two and a half, three days, later and it was some 80 degrees,” Ali remembers.
Six months after their arrival in Phoenix, Ali became pregnant. Still trying to help her mother cope, Ali kept her secret and never seriously considered keeping the baby. “It was a different time. Having a child ‘out of wedlock,’ as they used to say, was a terrible stigma,” she says. Ali did confide in Dale and a close friend in Chicago, who helped her find a doctor to perform an abortion, then an illegal procedure. Ali returned to Chicago, where the abortion was performed in the doctor’s office. But serious complications followed. “It was done under such clandestine circumstances and without an anesthetic, a terrifying experience,” she says. “But I don’t think I really realized I was risking my life.” Ali returned to Phoenix with an infection and had to be hospitalized. The Crown family moved on as well as they could in the years after her father’s death, with the younger twins eventually growing up and going off to college, graduate, and professional school. Liz, now at Stanford University, became a medical writer and editor. Bob became a veterinarian and now practices in Edmonton, Alberta. Although very close, Ali and her younger siblings led lives that were different—and not just within the realm of their family. Roe v. Wade, the case that legalized abortion, was upheld in 1973. In the span of half a generation, young women no longer had to risk their lives, as Ali did, to end a pregnancy. It really opened her eyes to the ongoing issues women faced. “I saw that there was a lot of work to be done. What should have been our rights were our privileges. That never felt good to me,” Ali explains. Shortly before Ali’s arrival at Emory, her mother died at age sixty-three. “It was another sudden, horrible loss,” she says. Many years later Ali would receive news of Dale’s death, which was not entirely unexpected. Her sister had spent more than a decade as an alcoholic. “The most estranged I ever felt from Dale was when I realized she had a drinking problem and we couldn’t talk about it,” Ali says. “Twins have a special relationship. Having been a twin, having lost a twin, I don’t know how else to explain it. We slept in the same room, woke up together, went to bed together—and told each other everything. We were always together until we parted as young adults. But we remained very close for years.” Ali wrote about Dale’s death in the spring 2000 edition of this newsletter. As Ali wraps up her active working life at Emory, she plans to pick up a thread from her past and weave it into a future life. After a break to refresh and regroup, she wants to work again on the reproductive rights issues that came to the fore for her so concretely as a young woman and which are now threatened by changes in the political environment.
As we end our conversation, she muses about her tenure at Emory and how many things have changed for women here. “I think we’ve made a lot of progress in the twenty-seven years I’ve been here. But we’re not where I’d hoped we’d be in terms of how many women have moved up the ranks,” she says. “You know, there are some people who refute this with me and others, but there are some very outstanding women at Emory—whether they are professors or middle managers—and there presently aren’t enough upper-level positions for them to move into. So, while there are more women with leadership potential, there just aren’t enough opportunities yet for them to become women of power and influence.” As she talks, she fishes out a recently published Wall Street Journal article that details the progress, or lack thereof, of women in business and industry. “Women hold about 16.4 percent of Fortune 500 corporate officer jobs—positions of vice president or higher that require board approval,” Ali says. This is an increase of just .07 percent from 2002, according to a survey by Catalyst, the advisory group looking at women in business. She’s grateful to hear that women at the top are grooming younger women to succeed them, just as men do, but she is aware that there is a pipeline full of female talent who may stay stuck just where they are. If Ali’s legacy at Emory should speak to anything, it should be to the fact that she wants her successors—not just those who helm the Center for Women, but all women at Emory—to continue to stand up for the rights of women here and anywhere in the world where women and girls continue to be oppressed. In doing so, they will honor her own commitment to women’s well-being and to the progress that she and other women have helped to usher in for those who came after them. Stacey Jones is a writer and editor in Emory Creative Group, secretary of the Center for Women Advisory Board, and a member of the editorial board of Women’s News & Narratives. She will greatly miss regular workday contact with Ali Crown but relished this chance to have heard and told Ali’s story.
|
