The Résumé

Suzanne Selby Grenager grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs. After graduating from from The Baldwin School, she attended Mount Holyoke and Barnard Colleges and received her BA in English literature. She went on to teach English and French at the Woodstock School in the Himalayan foothills. In 1965, she was selected to be the NBC Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School For Communication Masters program. Following stints as an actress, advertising copywriter, education publicist and publications director, she became an education columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. An early advocate of job-sharing for mothers of young children, she herself shared two significant positions. Read more . . .

The Real Story . . .

I grew up feeling like a frigging freak on Philadelphia’s old-moneyed suburban Main Line. The best thing about it was The Baldwin School for Girls, where my parents sent me to get me away from boys. The teachers at Baldwin, many of them strong, in-the-closet Lesbians, were committed to making sure we Baldwin girls used our brains to best advantage. My steely English teachers—Miss Stearns and Miss Burr—taught me how to think by teaching me how to read and write smart. They also helped me get comfortable being brainy and a girl at the same time, for which I’m beyond grateful.

Dutifully following in the footsteps of my mother, grandmother and Auntie Babs, I went to Mt. Holyoke College, one of the all-women “Seven Sisters.” Though I was madly in love with a pre-med from nearby Amherst, I wept the entire way up there that fall. I must have known that playing a lot of bridge and being rounded up en masse at boozy Amherst frat parties to beat Holyoke’s eleven p.m. curfew was not going to do it for me. I transferred to Barnard College, Columbia University in New York City and began coming into my own. Several affairs, a little pot and two years of useful, heavy-duty English majoring later, I got my BA and headed the next day for India—beating the Beatles there way before it was cool. Read more . . .