Sylvia Rosen Baumgarten says of her decision to attend college: “My generation of women was relatively mindless; we did what we were told.” This opening sets the stage for much of Sylvia’s interview, and her struggle against these gender expectations before the women’s movement. In Part 1, Sylvia reflects on her freshman year at Pembroke, the dormitories, dating, and meeting her husband. In Part 2 she expands on the “thrilling” academic atmosphere at Brown, as well as her experience as one of the few Jewish students at Brown. In Part 3 Sylvia considers at length the perception of sexual activity on campus and the gendered expectations of sexual experience. She speaks on the rules about dating and the confusion around sex in a culture that never spoke of it. She also reflects on her life after college, including getting married and having children. She discusses the tension between her and her husband because of her domesticity, and the fact that her life, as many other women’s lives, revolved around her husband’s. In Part 4, Sylvia is in her 30s, threatening her husband with divorce if things didn’t change. Committed to changing her life, she became a freelance interior decorator, still prioritizing motherhood but finding valorization in paid work. In her 40s, once all of her children had left the house, Sylvia began to write novels. In Part 5, Sylvia speaks of her writing process, inspiration, and research. She discusses her own difficulty selling books that were not “love at first rape,” and considers the way in which literature was shaped by the gender and sexual norms of the time. In Part 6, Sylvia expands on the genre of the romance novel, ending by considering writing as a way to create men who are healthy to fall in love with.
Notes:
Class year: 1955
Biographical note: Sylvia Rosen was born in 1933 in Toronto, Canada and raised in a small mill town in Massachusetts. When she was 13 her family moved to Springfield, MA, where her father worked in textiles and her mother was a housewife. Neither of her parents attended college, and she was always expected to receive a formal college education. She attended Pembroke in 1951, where she studied art history and French literature, and graduated in 1955. Three weeks after graduating from Pembroke she married her fiancé and college sweetheart, Sid Baumgarten. Sylvia and Sid had four children. She worked as a freelance interior decorator, finding satisfaction in paid work, and published crossword puzzles in The New York Times. When Sylvia's youngest child left the house for college, she began writing romance novels. Sylvia has published 14 historical romance novels under the pen names of Ena Halliday, Sylvia Halliday, and Louisa Rawlings, and is now an award-winning author.
This collection contains oral history interviews with alumnae of Brown University, which admitted its first women students in 1891. The Women's College at Brown was renamed Pembroke College in 1928, and in 1971, Pembroke College merged with the Men's College …
