The Inspiration behind THE WRONG KIND OF WOMAN

Sarah McCraw Crow

Years ago, when I arrived at Dartmouth College, in small-town New Hampshire, I was a fish out of water, a Southern girl encountering northern New England for the first time. I was enchanted by the unfamiliar landscape—sugar maples, granite outcroppings, distant mountains, the snow—and by almost everything about Dartmouth. I loved my new friends, my classes, my professors. But one aspect puzzled me: Dartmouth’s all-male, WASPy history: I wondered why it had taken the school so long to admit women and people of color.

The college had been around since 1769, yet it didn’t admit women until 1972, and admitted very few people of color until the late ‘60s. In the decade after women began attending Dartmouth, some professors, male students, and alums continued to voice their displeasure about this change. By the time I was a student, in the mid-to-late ‘80s, Dartmouth was more fully coed, but I encountered reminders of that displeasure, and the school’s all-male past, in comments that visiting alums made about how the college had changed for the worse, in misogynistic behavior in fraternities, and in the alma mater, “Men of Dartmouth.”

In the years after I graduated, I wondered about those first women students at Dartmouth, and what their college experience had felt like. I also wondered about the first women faculty on campus: Could a woman thrive in that environment? (Until the ‘70s, Dartmouth hired very few women, and offered tenure to only one woman, the biologist Hannah Croasdale.) Also, as a child of the ‘70s, I’d watched my mom and her friends go back to school and work, finishing college degrees and beginning graduate school, and I had long wondered what their lives had been like as young women. They’d gotten married and had kids before they’d had a chance to finish college or try out a career.

The women of my mom’s generation had fewer choices about where they could go to college and the jobs they could pursue; in the 1950s, a young woman aiming for a career beyond teaching, nursing, or secretarial work would probably encounter pushback from her parents, or from the culture at large. Women who applied to law schools or medical schools in those years were often told that they were taking spots that belonged to men, because men needed to support a family. Women, in turn, were meant to raise their children. I wondered how a mildly ambitious young woman, like Virginia in The Wrong Kind of Woman, might navigate this narrow world.

These bigger questions about women, colleges, and life in the ‘50s and ‘60s percolated as I wrote the first pages of this novel. But in the front of my mind were two people: Virginia and Oliver, and how they coped as they entered midlife. I wondered what Virginia would do if she were suddenly on her own, without Oliver. As it turns out, a lot. And as I wrote, two other characters, Sam, a lonely college student, and Rebecca, a grieving daughter, showed up to help me tell this story, along with a place, Clarendon College, an all-male college in New Hampshire that bears some resemblance to Dartmouth College. I let Clarendon be the flawed (and fictional) place it needed to be, but like Dartmouth, but it’s a place I grew to love. 

—Sarah McCraw Crow

Bio: Sarah McCraw Crow’s short fiction has run in Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, Good Housekeeping, So to Speak, Waccamaw, and Stanford Alumni Magazine, and her articles, reviews, and essays have run in many magazines. She’s a graduate of Dartmouth College, Stanford University, and Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she lives on an old farm in New Hampshire. Her debut novel THE WRONG KIND OF WOMAN (Mira/HarperCollins) is out in paperback now.

Follow her on TWITTER https://twitter.com/sarahmcrow

Find out more about her on her website: https://sarahmccrawcrow.com/

THE WRONG KIND OF WOMAN, Sarah McCraw Crow

“A glorious debut filled with characters grasping to find a place to belong in a world on the edge of change.” —Carol Rifka Brunt, New York Times bestselling author of Tell the Wolves I’m Home

“McCraw Crow deftly navigates the campus and national politics of the ’70s in a way that remains timely and pressing today. A powerful, thought-provoking debut.” —Amy Meyerson, Nationally bestselling author of The Bookshop of Yesterdays

A powerful exploration of what a woman can be when what she should be is no longer an option

In late 1970, Oliver Desmarais drops dead in his front yard while hanging Christmas lights. In the year that follows, his widow, Virginia, struggles to find her place on the campus of the elite New Hampshire men’s college where Oliver was a professor. While Virginia had always shared her husband’s prejudices against the four outspoken, never-married women on the faculty—dubbed the Gang of Four by their male counterparts—she now finds herself depending on them, even joining their work to bring the women’s movement to Clarendon College.

Soon, though, reports of violent protests across the country reach this sleepy New England town, stirring tensions between the fraternal establishment of Clarendon and those calling for change. As authorities attempt to tamp down “radical elements,” Virginia must decide whether she’s willing to put herself and her family at risk for a cause that had never felt like her own.

Told through alternating perspectives, The Wrong Kind of Woman is an engrossing story about finding the strength to forge new paths, beautifully woven against the rapid changes of the early ’70s.

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Category: On Writing