WSPN staff reporter Marissa Mendoza sat down with educator, advocate, writer and scholar Dr. Peggy McIntosh to discuss her recent induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame (NWHF) on March 5. McIntosh was recognized for her work in writing about white privilege and challenging automatic assumptions of authority. She is the founder of Wellesley’s Center for Women’s national organization, Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED). She is also the well-known author of her articles: “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work on Women’s Studies” and “Feeling Like A Fraud.”

This conversation has been edited for length and accuracy.

How did you feel when you first heard that you were nominated for the National Women’s Hall of Fame?

“When I was told I was going to be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, I felt like a fraud,” McIntosh said. “I’ve written six papers on feeling like a fraud and how to overcome it, yet I still felt like a fraud. The purpose of my published papers was to say that the public roles we are asked to play are filled with fraudulence. People in high places, even the president, are fraudulent. We must not let other people make us feel like frauds. Let us continue to spot fraudulence in the public roles we are asked to play; because the public role often is within a higher social hierarchy that makes you feel better compared to people who are below you. You’re not better than the other people.”

What were the beginning stages like of the national organization you founded, Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED)?

“In 1986, the same year I started SEED, sometimes men would join our seminars to show us that they were our allies,” McIntosh said. “This was very good and brave of them, but they were teased by other men for coming to Wellesley College, a women’s college, to talk about bringing women into the curriculum. They took a lot of flak for that choice.”

What did you notice of men who attended your seminars?

“I began to pick up a trait in the men who attended the seminars, who were about one quarter of the population of the seminar,” McIntosh said. “I noticed that when the women made a particular recommendation for academics, the men would turn it down. In two separate cases, two years apart, men suggested giving a senior seminar at the end of the students’ college experience, in which you bring in women lecturers for the first time. In both cases, the women said a seminar during senior year was too late, and the college needed to put the study of women into the freshmen curriculum. In one case, a man had said, ‘you can’t put women in the beginning because in the freshmen year you are laying the foundation blocks for knowledge, and if you’re laying the foundation blocks for knowledge, you can’t put in soft stuff.’ I’m grateful for that man speaking up, because he showed us women in the seminar what he really thought about all this stuff, which was that it was soft. The other case was when a different man said, ‘I’m sorry you just can’t put women in the beginning. Freshman year is when students choose their major, and their major is their discipline. If you want students to think in a disciplined way, you can’t put in extras.’”

How did this man’s statements affect you?

“A few days or weeks after his comments, I thought, ‘he thinks that the person who birthed him is an extra to his life,” McIntosh said. “‘He thinks that all the mothers of the world are extra. What had been done to his head to make him think that all women are extra in life?’ Then my accompanying question was, ‘what has been done to my own mind to make me say nothing, to make all of the women in the seminar say nothing when he had called women extra?’ So, right then I knew he had the privilege of calling women ‘extra’ or ‘soft’ because he was a man, though a very nice man.”

What was the process of writing your article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”?

“Around 1986, Black women in a Black collective group in the greater Boston suburbs wrote a statement called, The Combahee River Collective,” McIntosh said. “They said they were very disappointed that white women took so little notice and interest in their lives, and that sunk in for me. I saw a parallel between male privilege and white privilege in the abstract but I couldn’t get any examples. I couldn’t get my mind to show me how to express this. I was very frustrated that my mind couldn’t come up with any examples. One night, I went to sleep shouting, ‘If I have anything I didn’t earn, that my black colleges don’t have, show me.’ I woke up in the middle of the night with one of 46 examples. Once I wrote the paper, the Working Papers Committee at the Wellesley Center for Women (WCW) refused to publish it. They said it had no footnotes. Footnotes are meant to show what scholarship you built on, and these examples weren’t built on scholarship, but they were built on my experience[s]. I was building on my accumulated knowledge of being let off by the authorities. ”

How did your article receive recognition if the Working Papers refused to publish it?

“College teachers began to spread the paper around to each other,” McIntosh said. “They began to want to have it as a required reading in their college class syllabus. I charged 50 cents per copy they made. The article was in the sciences: social sciences, humanities, and more. Professors were all over the place asking me to use the article in their curriculum. I got requests for 40,000 copies in the first year, so that meant I made $20,000. I took the article back to the Working Papers Committee and said, ‘I’m making a lot of money off this paper and why don’t you publish it as a part of our working paper series because you could charge $6. You could keep the money and use it for the whole Wellesley Centers for Women’. They said they’d take a second look at it, but at the next meeting they said they wouldn’t publish the article because it was merely anecdotal. Around three months after that second meeting, I asked to go to the next [committee] meeting, and I mentioned that Freud’s published works didn’t have footnotes, it was original work. The chair of the Working Papers Committee eventually agreed to publish my article because Freud is the founder of psychology in this hemisphere. The article immediately became our best seller.”

What advice did you give in your acceptance speech to the National Women’s Hall of Fame?

“I said that when I was young, above all else I wanted to be popular,” McIntosh said. “By the time I turned 35 years old, [I realized] I’d rather be useful than popular. Thanks to the energy and support from the Wellesley Centers for Women, I’ve been able to put some of my ideas to good use. For those here tonight who would rather be popular than useful, I have found that being useful made me more popular.’ That was the end of my talk. But that’s exactly the way my life has worked out. Being useful [has] turned out to be much more influential than being nice. Being useful means other people could use my work and my thoughts, because they are useful to other people and my ideas have the ability to change lives.”