Just some thoughts from your president, Jen Gieseking. All notes below are originally written on the home page and pasted here when something new is added.

January 22, 2007: The class letter has mailed and the class survey is online. Since the survey is private, we won’t post the link here but you can attain it from emailing any of the class officers. Please take the time to fill it out and wax on about you, you, you. The class letter is a brief bit of update to fill your lovely heads with.

May 9, 2006: When the hay did spring happen in the northern hemishere? Well, as the leaves bud your faithful class board is working way on the Las Vegas Not-So-Mini Reunion for 2007. We'll be celebrating our 30th birthdays on the Strip, so do dress appropriately or inappropriately as the mood strikes, but definitely do come to Vegas.
All is well as the class goes. Sadly, Professor Dick Johnson passed away. I know he was beloved by many. If you need a pick me up, Eleanor Townseley and Harold Garrett-Goodyear are fabulous, as are Preston Smith, Lucas Wilson, and Thomas Millette. Ah, the names that take us back.

February 7, 2006: I wrote below that Betty Friedan was unimpressed by Wendy Wasserstein's work. But I have no clue as to what Wasserstein thought of Friedan's work. Sadly, Friedan also passed away, a week ago on Saturday, February 4th, 2006. Friedan, a Smith graduate (we all make mistakes), came to speak at Mount Holyoke in 1966 and the then-students called her the "feminine mistake" when they misinterpreted her demands upon them. She called them to rise at 5am and write medical textbooks and then look after the husband and children. At age 21 and in 1966, I too probably would have thought her a loon. Yet we can all smile a bit wider knowing the '80s have passed and we need not do everything, but that, at least, thanks to Betty and her wee survey of Seven Sisters grads and eventually women everywhere, we have been honest about the desire to have the option to do whatever the hell we want. That little surey became a book entitled The Feminine Mystique. Read Germaine Greer's charged and powerful tale of her friendship with Friedan in "The Betty I Knew".

January 31, 2006: Wendy Wasserstin passed away today, Tuesday, January 31st, 2006, at the age of 55. I never met Wendy but I got to fax her once to invite her to Vespers in New York City. She had another engagement and couldn't make it that night but wrote a personal note. I recall thinking: yep, one of us. I didn't know until I read today's L.A.Times piece that at the end of the three plays that make up the Heidi Chronicles, Heidi's 16 year journey as a feminist and art history professor leaves her feeling sad and lonely but that she adopts a baby. Betty Friedan was unimpressed but I still am at what Wasserstein did for feminism and for Mount Holyoke. I cannot imagine that every alum, student, faculty, and staff member who hears the news will not feel some sense of profound loss for all of the gains Wendy made. It is simple to say that because Wendy went to Mount Holyoke, I feel that I can do whatever she did or even more. But it is true. I often say that Mount Holyoke women are my heroes, and one of those most often named, one of my most hilarious sisters, and one of those who offered me so much hope, will be missed but she will never be forgotten. For everything Heidi and Wendy accomplished in their lives, we can each find another path that is a little less lonely, a little more powerful, and a lot more true to our dreams and wishes.