MAN-10265 MAGAZINE.indd - Mansfield College - University of Oxford

An Interview with Dr Mary King
Fellow of the Rothermere American
Institute, member of Mansfi eld College SCR
To Mary, being a member of Mansfi eld means a great
deal personally, in terms of both enduring friendships
and collegial relations. The size of the College brings
people together, facilitating relationships, and its history is
unique. She cites the Wednesday Chapel service followed
by dinner as exemplifying an important part of the ethos
of the College, and thinks the Nonconformist origins and
history of the College are to be protected and preserved.
To Mary, an institution is defi ned by the individuals
associated with it, and Mansfi eld has provided her with
a special aperture on Oxford University. Given tensions
in the relationship between Britain and the United States
of the past few years, Mary feels that the proximity of the
neighbouring Rothermere American Institute (RAI), literally
next door to Mansfi eld, can be a focal point for formal and
informal exploration of major, topical issues that face both
countries – and the relationship between them that had
been trivialized and weakened in recent years. Now that
the RAI is well-established, it can fulfi l a broader role in
offering opportunities for engagement with ideas, and share
in the intellectual life of the College and University through
its frequent seminars and conferences. For Mary, the RAI
unlocked the riches of Oxford University, and ‘inside I
found the secret garden of Mansfi eld College’.
During the Carter Administration in the United States,
Mary was in charge of overseeing the US Peace Corps. She
has worked with President Jimmy Carter since 1971, when
he was still governor of Georgia. When he swore Mary
into offi ce in the White House Rose Garden in March
1977, he said that Mary ‘has a sensitivity and courage that
is absolutely superlative’. I asked her if she and Carter had
infl uenced each other’s views of world peace. ‘Jimmy Carter
is not a man given to baroque embellishment’, Mary states,
but by inference she thinks she can answer this question
affi rmatively. On a practical level, for nearly a decade of
his post-Presidency, she acted as his envoy with business
and political leaders in the Middle East. On a deeper level,
Mary says they share values, backgrounds, and worldviews.
The U.S. civil rights movement was signifi cant for both of
them, in different ways: Mary worked at the heart of the
movement for four years, handling the national news media
for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee;
Carter could not have been elected President until the
movement began to lift the stain of racial segregation from
the American South. In Carter’s introduction to Mary’s
2007 book, A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada
and Nonviolent Resistance (New York, Nation Books, 2007;
London, Perseus Books, 2008), he says the 1960s civil rights
movement ‘made it possible for white citizens to hold their
heads high, because white southerners could feel proud that
their region had resolved a predicament of centuries, with
relatively little bloodshed. . . . The long journey for civil
rights became . . . a national struggle for rights and reform,
and made it possible for me
as a white southerner to be
elected by the entire nation as
the thirty-ninth President of
the United States’. Moreover,
both Mary and Carter come
from southern Protestant
backgrounds – Mary’s father
was the eighth Methodist
minister in six generations in
Virginia. Their mothers were
each in the nursing profession.
This means a collegiality in
their philosophical and ethical
frameworks, Mary says, and
when they communicate the
conversation is not about
values, but on concrete steps Mary and Jimmy Carter,
and practical solutions.
during his visit to Mansfi eld
in 2007.
Carter – Mary tells me –
thinks deeply about the meaning of honour, justice, Truth,
standing up for what you believe, taking risks, making one’s
life count, and confronting injustice.
Mary is Professor of Peace and Confl ict Studies with the
University for Peace, an affi liate of the UN, which specializes
in Irenology (the study of peace). I asked her to delineate
her personal defi nitions of peace, and peace education.
Peace is one of the deepest yearnings of the human psyche,
Mary tells me, yet defi nitions differ according to cultural
traditions, and pressures such as food insuffi ciency,
environmental degradation, impoverishment, and injustice.
An exponential increase in knowledge on how to build
more peaceable societies has occurred since 1978, when
the concept of ‘peace-building’ was fi rst used, by the UN
in Namibia. Today, the fastest growing area of the social
sciences world-wide is peace and confl ict studies, which
is expanding both the generation of knowledge and its
dissemination. Africa has 26 centres for peace and confl ict
studies, and in the United States 400 centres or departments
for peace and confl ict studies are at work. Insights from
the fi eld are affecting many sectors of human society, from
international relations among nation-states to industrial
disputes to local matters. Peace education may involve
all segments of a society. It teaches in the broadest sense
of the word the prevention, management, and resolution
of confl icts, and thus may involve the media, mass
communications, and non-formal education.
An article entitled ‘Sex and Caste’, written by Mary King
and Casey Hayden in 1966, is credited by historians with
having sparked what is now called second-wave feminism.
Feminism has passed through three waves since the 1960s
(the bid for equality, the claim of difference, and the
search for less restricting defi nitions). I asked Mary where
feminism is now. ‘The question of whether women are
different or equal to men is still vexing, but probing the
question remains important, although it will become less
so in the future. Feminist work is centred on women and
FELLOWS’ ARTICLES 10
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