My philosophy is to love everyone you meet and treat everything as an adventure. I am a political activist and by a political activist I mean that I am committed to social justice in this world now. That is what I do and have done most of my life. At the moment I am involved with four different international groups. Diverse Women for Diversity has its headquarters in India and Women For Life on Earth has its headquarters in Germany. People's Global Actions has no headquarters because we don't believe in it; it operates on the basis of a manifesto that whoever meets and calls themselves PGA gets to add to or rewrite within our hallmarks. Locally I work with Western Massachusetts Global Action Coalition. I have also worked closely with a number of local groups, Western Mass Coalition against Domestic Violence, Stop the War Coalition, Arise for Social Justice, and other groups of similar ilk.

Higher education put some barriers in the way of my activist work for a time. Graduate School does a trip on your head. It makes you forget that you have roots in a community that cares about things. It makes you try to divorce yourself and look at the world and what is going on from a distance. I worked on my doctorate at MIT. My teachers had sent me on trips to Asia, so I felt an obligation to them. But then as I went to Southeast Asia each summer because of the grants they gave me, I got more and more involved with what was going on in Asia. And I became convinced that the American policy in Asia was wrong. All my mentors were consultants with the State Department, which made it very difficult for me, but I could not help myself. So in 1966 I lost all of my funding. And I was then no longer a protégé of a mentor at MIT.

I taught at Mount Holyoke College. I was a very good teacher, with many students. I was an early feminist and worked on bringing feminism into the curriculum of the women's studies programs in the Connecticut Valley. I saw that work as part of the fight for social justice. I had learned a lot from Black women in the civil rights movement.

Even though I have retired from teaching I am still not retired. I spend a lot of time in local organizations with young people who need to learn how to be less arrogant, how to listen to people better. I teach them the things that I have learned—the factual material that I have learned. I try to encourage these young people to go out and do their own things and then I stand behind them in case they mess up too badly, to keep them from falling. I do the same work that I did as a teacher: lead students to the edge of their mind and then shove them and say “go baby.” Then they try to figure out their own stuff. I do the same thing now, only I do it in a different context.

My main job is to bring the knowledge I have gained from my work with international grass roots women's organizations to the people and groups I work with here. I am committed to regime change in this country and to the creation of a just system, or one that would try to be just, or at least just try to be just. Then I would spend a lot more time with local groups to help them get a voice internationally. These local groups seem to know stuff that people here don't; they are very well aware of what is going on in the world. If you ask them about American empire they can tell you in chapter and verse exactly what that means. So I want to get their voices, bring their voices, so that people can hear them. I don't have time to do that now because I am busy trying to bring the empire down.

The other thing I am doing is writing my memoir. Martha Ackelsberg is one of the women that got me into this. I had this rather cosmic notion that I could write a book rethinking the world. And I read everything: myth and legend, philosophy, and science. I read and read. I took a sabbatical and went to Hawaii and I wrote this tome. It's about 650 pages long. It was a wonderful time for me. I learned a great deal. I brought it back and I showed it to some of my activist friends, and they said it needed more examples, and I showed it to my academic friends and they said it's not nuanced. Then I showed it to Martha and Martha said, write your own story, write your own life, tell us how you got to be an activist and what this means. So I started writing my memoir, and I am having the time of my life, I really am. My partner tells me that I can't make up my mind whether I want to be a comedian or a queen. But anyway, I love it and I strongly recommend it.

Right now I am on my way to Cancun, working with Mobilization Against Globalization and the Mexican women workers. We are trying to bring the Indian women farmers, the Philippines farmers, and the Mexican farmers together in an international coalition that will lead the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization. We think we are going to win on this one. We think that the third world is so opposed to the American policies on agriculture, on services, on health care, that they will be there and because we are out there the governments will have the strength to stand up to the American/European monolith and say no. (P.S. In fact we did…the talks collapsed.)

So we are going down there in large numbers to try to bring the world's attention to this disaster that is about to happen. Then I will come back and I will go to my next meeting in Miami and do some demonstrations there and then I will go to the People's World Water Forum and World Social Forum in India. Diverse Women will caucus with international activist women on issues of food and water. Then I will go on to meet with women in Germany under the auspices of Women for Life on Earth. Meanwhile, I will be working in my local groups trying to bring them up to speed on all these actions.

I still have obligations to the academy. I am retired but, unfortunately, there is still a call on my time and service. Like most women's studies programs, ours was founded by a group who began to object to the male dominance we saw in our departments and in our professional associations. We began to take women seriously as subjects and as agents. We began to include women's lives in our research and teaching. And, after some fighting we got our women's studies into the curriculum. We did a pretty good job of it.

Now we have all of these bright young women (and men) going to graduate school in women's studies and they have a whole different view of women's studies—which is great, which is what should happen. Some of my colleagues are not so happy about this. They are not very accommodating of the new field and the new research. And you top that with the usual personality conflicts, which you always have, and it's all falling apart.

It seemed to some of us that the answer was not to try to marry all this random enterprise together but to go back to the foundation and redesign the whole program. Hopefully there will be a place for everyone. So at Mount Holyoke we are giving the women's studies program a two year sabbatical and bringing in outside people to talk about where women's studies is going and what it should look like, and I am going to chair the no-program and keep the students from falling apart and insure that they graduate.

I don't really want to do this. I have enough to do with my memoirs and trying to change the world. But this small women's college has great potential and great students. There are things that you have to do, and you have to do them, and that's the way it is.

It never occurred to me that I would quit working. Ever since I was 13 I had a paycheck and not having a paycheck scared me to death. The idea that somehow or another money was going to come to me that I wasn't going to have to work for was ridiculous. And all those pieces of papers that TIAA-CREF sends you—I did not believe that stuff; that's paper, that's not money.

So I was going on not paying much attention and the college decided they have a lot of deadwood. You know what deadwood is. Regardless of what is offered they are never going to retire. The college decided to try to get rid of these people, to offer them early retirement and a year's paid leave. So another two women and I jumped at the offer. So the next year they said: “Jean, you can have a leave but please come back and help us out of a jam.”

At some point you have to go away and let other people come in. You are holding down someone else's job; that's the way I felt about it. And also what I would like to do is…I want to know about Genghis Khan. Who was this joker? He came out of Asia, he conquered much of the known world, he brought patriarchy to Eastern Europe. I want to know how he did that and I want to know who he was and I want to know the relationship between horses and patriarchy. One of these days I will be in South Asia looking for the truth of Genghis Khan.