Letters to the Editor

Volume CXI, Number 4 (USPS 349-900) Summer 2022

Elizabeth L. Hillman

Nikole Hilgeman Adams

Allison Rost

Nancy Siller Wilson

Tri-an Cao ’21, MFA ’22

Lila Goehring ’21 Moya Stone, MFA ’03

The Mills Quarterly (USPS 349-900) is published quarterly by Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland, CA 94613. Periodicals postage paid at Oakland, California, and at additional mailing office(s). Postmaster: Send address changes to the Office of Institutional Advancement, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland, CA 94613. Copyright © 2022, Mills College Address correspondence to Mills Quarterly, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland, CA 94613. Email: quarterly@mills.edu Phone: 510.430.3312

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Oakland, CA 94613 The Quarterly reserves the right to edit letters for length and clarity.

I am writing in response to Marie Muirhead Escher’s comments on my article on remembering Dr. Pope. I am so pleased she enjoyed it.

There is a towering problem with the claim that the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays: He died in 1604, before Shakespeare wrote King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII, and possibly Measure for Measure, Othello, and All’s Well that Ends Well.

The question of Shakespeare’s authorship never arose at all until 1848, and it came from the Victorian assertion that no low-born son of a glover could have had the genius to write those plays. The idea that you can’t be a genius if you are from the “lower” classes is unacceptable today. It is curious that it is still being applied to Shakespeare.

There are innumerable primary sources directly supporting Shakespeare’s authorship. For me, the clincher is the letter that his friends Henry Condell and John Hemmings wrote when they published his plays at their own expense. You can find it by googling “To the great variety of readers.”

For a thorough explanation of why Edward de Vere (a drunkard, a wastrel, a brawler, a pedophile, and an incompetent) is in no way qualified to be Shakespeare, you can find my blog post at CarolWolf.net –Carol Holtzman Wolf ’80, O’Neals, California

I noted on page 20 of the spring 2022 issue that George Hedley was identified as a “professor of economics” when he was at Mills. I recall him as head of sociology and anthropology, my major when I graduated in 1963.

I still remember him, a gnome-like figure with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, sitting cross-legged on top of the desk during the Intro to Sociology class, talking about his experience organizing unions on farms in the San Joaquin Valley in the 1930s. Having been raised by Methodist missionaries in China, he was fluent in reading, writing, and speaking Mandarin... if I remember correctly.

Social justice, respect for diversity, and a commitment to global citizenship are not recent arrivals at Mills. Thank you so much for reminding us of Aurelia Henry Reinhardt’s place in this history. –Linda Hollander Page ’63, Guelph, Ontario

If the Quarterly is truly the voice of the AAMC—that is to say, the alumnae—why has there not been a single article that states the position against the acquisition of Mills by Northeastern? There is a huge community of alums that is very angered by the way they have been treated, the way the students are being treated, and the way the faculty has been treated by the administration. –Nan Roche ’75, College Park, Maryland

Since 2007, publishing Mills Quarterly has been a function of the College’s Office of Institutional Advancement, not the AAMC. Per the 2017 Memorandum of Understanding, there are three pages in each issue reserved for the AAMC, and Quarterly staff provides logistical (though not editorial) support for that content. We look forward to continuing that relationship with the AAMC well into the future. The areas in the magazine that are open for submissions—such as this Letters to the Editor page and Class Notes—have featured a wide variety of opinions about the Mills transition and merger. By the numbers, we calculate that we were able to publish 90.1% of the many submissions we’ve received since the announcement about the College’s transition was made on March 17, 2021. –Ed.