Women's Dinner 2024, Special Speaker Nancy Keller-Coffey P'13, '14

99 years ago, in 1925, my mother, a staunch Anglican, was born in London and raised in Dublin. I think a lot about her journals, in which she was trained to use an epistle style beginning in early elementary school. Entering a couple of sentences each day, she created a tapestry of her life. And she also used that technique to help herself understand a complicated world.

 

In 1940, as World War II began to enflame the world, my mother was sent to the safety of the United States while my grandfather remained back in London working in the Consulate office. Becoming a boarder at Spence School in 1940, my mother was deeply influenced by the war, and she found opportunities to write about the world around her. She graduated in 1942, and it was in 2006 that I first read her core belief, It Must Be Better. As the senior yearbook editor, she wrote:

 

 

WWII became a watershed for my mother. She had been raised with deep roots in religious faith, but she turned away from her religious belief because she could not understand how and who allowed the death and destruction of that war. Rather than allowing that complicated world to destroy her goals, she sought ways to challenge what she saw as a broken world that could be better.

 

She credited her women’s education at Spence, then her education at Bryn Mawr College, Class of 1947, and ultimately her admission to medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated with the Class of 1952 as only one of seven or eight women in that medical class.

 

She continued with her writing epistles her entire life, using brief (and often cryptic) sentences that expressed her thoughts and intentions. Training as a pediatrician, she focused on her commitment to social justice and living her credo: it must be better. She sought medical work that helped children at The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, The Philadelphia General Hospital, and a Children and Youth Clinic. The final phase of her career was when she became the Director of Rehabilitation for the Department of Health of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In each of these roles, she worked with families and children who were often ignored by the medical care they needed.

 

My mother then looked at the values she wanted to impart to the next generation. I grew up talking about these complex ideas at the dinner table that it must be better. I was aware that she traveled to Mississippi to work on Civil Rights when I was about five or six, and I understood Roe v. Wade by the time I was twelve. In middle school and high school, we talked regularly about racism and gender issues. I was intrigued by my mother’s focus on the work of Marian Wright Edelman, the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), and many connections to her work on advocacy. In 2001, my mother went to a plenary on Women Transforming the World for Children in Washington, D.C. As her political focus shifted, she added working on Vietnam War protests and abolishing the death penalty.

 

Following her path through my own life, I see that there still remains so much to work on, to make it better. It sometimes seems as if we are playing “whack a mole,” helping make one issue better while a new issue arises. And yet, I think it is critical that we, my mother and I, remained positive and kept an eye on what has improved, that we held the ability to continue making it better.

 

Mirroring my mother’s goals that helped create a better world while focusing on my very different work, I reflect now on my first role in my work: the Peace Corps. I remember talking with my family about that work in high school, and I was eager to enter the Peace Corps in Thailand the summer I graduated from college. Two and a half years later I began teaching high school, and I fell in love with education. Earning my master’s degree in social justice seemed to continue yet another way to make the world better, and after I earned my master’s, I was able to teach a graduate course on Racism, Sexism, and Social Justice at SUNY New Paltz from 1996 until 2010.

 

At the same time, my mother showed me that it is possible (and essential) to balance family, friendship, and career with that commitment to social justice. I think often about what that means: understanding my mother’s through-line, the way she modeled her life. She taught me that connections to family and friends also taught me that those relationships helped me understand the world must be better.

 

She also taught me the enduring power of female friendship, and that has been a cornerstone of my life. Focusing on deep friendships that go back to my first friend when I was three (and who is still in my constellation of friends) has given me yet another reason to consider the importance of "our world must be better." Indeed, I am blessed to count many of my closest friends in decades rather than years, and I am able to talk with them about our lives and our work. We talk about our commitments to social justice and how that remains necessary.

 

I want to end with words that I believe were written by Stephen Grellet, who lived from 1773 until 1855. My father, also deeply committed to social justice, used this for a piece he wrote for the United Fund:

 

I encourage each of you, all of us, to acknowledge that in our imperfect world, we contain the future, and we have the ability to make it better.