AC_1965_Web

132 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z R O B B I N S own computer typesetting system in 1983. I devised the new traffick- ing and deadline procedures, and trained the editorial staff and free- lancers, almost 60 people, in how to use the new system.All of which was excellent training for my next job in 1986, teaching copy editing in the journalism department at NewYork University and maintaining its com- puter system, my second career. I had already tried teaching, do- ing a one-month workshop in copy editing at the School of Visual Arts. Distilling everything I knew about copy editing into four sessions turned out to just fit and I enjoyed imparting my enjoyment of the work to others.When I heard about the NYU tenure-track opening in the journalism department, I applied, taught one course while still work- ing at the Voice , and got the job start- ing in the fall of 1986. Quitting the Voice in midsummer allowed me to play on the Voice ’s softball team in the Publishers’ League, which coin- cided with the Mets’ amazing run to World Series victory and reignited a childhood fascination with baseball. Teaching both undergraduate and graduate students at NYU on a tenure-track line required that I get a post-graduate degree, so I en- rolled at the CUNY Graduate Center in Women’s Studies, writing my the- sis on “Depoliticizing Motherhood: Women’s Magazines Construct Mothers: 1956–1985.”Taking classes helped me learn how to teach,while also acquainting me with mid-’80s feminist theory and theorists, sup- plementing my participation in No More Nice Girls, a feminist guer- rilla theater group. I also published book reviews and academic articles, and started trying to turn my thesis into a book, sending out proposals to academic presses. I got a positive review from one in 1990, but some- thing else was happening in the world that turned my career in an entirely new direction. The fall of Communist govern- ments in Eastern Europe aroused this red diaper baby’s interest, and I was glued to the news from that region. A chance discussion with Ellen Willis at an NYU women’s fac- ulty gathering brought me to a meet- ing of women discussing how to help women activists in the former Communist countries. We invited women whose names we’d gotten from Slavenka Drakulic, who’d just written an article for Ms. magazine about how women were faring in the new democracies (not well), to a conference in Dubrovnik,Yugoslavia, in June 1991.This was possibly the most exciting moment of my life: many of these women were politi- cians or writers or educators in their countries, English was their third or fourth language, and most were ea- ger to let us know what life had been like under “really existing socialism” while also bemoaning women’s gen- eral disappearance from public life. I came home with many names of more women to invite to our new organization and many new friends. I also faced the choice of try- ing to work on a book so I would have something substantive to pres- ent in a tenure dossier that fall or diving into work for the Network of East-West Women, informally called NEWW. I could always write a book, I thought, but NEWW was a once- in-a-lifetime situation. So I declined tenure (which allowed me to con- tinue teaching as an adjunct at the journalism department for another 10 years), and became the NEWW communications director, my third career, compiling and writing the occasional newsletter, inviting new members, helping to organize meet- ings, trying (and failing) to become a fundraiser and becoming the moder- ator of our online organizing when we connected 30 women’s centers in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to email and the Internet in 1995. I also helped start a semi- nar on Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe that’s been meet- ing at the NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies for 20 years. I also returned to my first career, freelancing as a copy editor until I lucked into regular freelance work for Publishers Weekly , which became a part-time, then a full-time job, and finally managing editor in 2010. In 2013 I retired but have continued to work for PW as a free-lance copy edi- tor on special issues. I’ve also started a Twitter feed called @warnfrcopy- editr, which is my cranky copy edi- tor’s take on issues of language and grammar. I’ve continued writing, with memoir pieces published in the book Red Diapers: Growing Up on the Communist Left and And Then , a small magazine, as well as fiction, which remains in my drawer so far. I did a stint of quilting, turning more than a dozen of my T-shirts into a quilt and wall hangings. I read; go to the mov- ies; started a women’s group where we talk about women, aging and sex; travel; and keep up with the world I’m looking forward to seeing friends and classmates at the 50th anniversary in 2015. Even if I’m not technically an Antioch graduate, I definitely feel part of the Antioch community.