Meg Eileenchild O’Hara

Meg O’Hara started life in 1944 on a farm in Wisconsin. Greatly affected by the early death of her father, she and an older sister helped keep the family together by taking care of two younger sisters and doing farm chores while their mother went out to work. Meg always said she received a good education in the Catholic school system, though she did rebel against its constraints. The year she went off to the University of Wisconsin she had the highest SAT score in the state. Meg wanted to major in pre-med but was discouraged from doing so because she was a girl. Funneled into the more traditional female role, she married and followed her husband to California where she reveled in the political ferment of the times, bore a son, and earned a liberal arts degree from University of California–Berkeley. Meg, who was a “returning woman student” before that term was widely used, drew upon her experience to guide students in their own struggles to combine academics and family when she became PSU’s first paid women’s studies coordinator in 1976. By then she was the single mother of two and had completed work on a master’s degree in Educational Foundations at the University of New Mexico.

Many PSU students, faculty, and community members knew her as Meg Eileenchild. After her divorce she renamed herself as her mother’s child. (Tired of the questions and confusions she later changed her name to the more professional-sounding O’Hara.)

Meg was the driving force behind all of the women in the program. From the beginning she insisted that childcare be provided at all women’s studies events and turned the second floor of Harder House into combination office, art gallery, meeting place, with space for celebrations, as well as quiet moments of reflection away from the world.

A gifted administrator and teacher who quickly earned the respect of students, faculty, and administrators alike, Meg possessed a rare combination of Midwestern work ethic, amazing intellect, deep respect for learning, a vision of gender equity and social justice, pragmatism, and a wonderful sense of humor. She needed all these qualities to begin the transition from the informal, collectively run program she inherited to the Department of Women’s Studies it is today.

Meg left PSU in 1978 when she received full scholarship to a joint doctoral program in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy offered by the Harvard School of Education and the John F. Kennedy School of Government. She thrived in the intellectual atmosphere of the program but Boston proved to be an alienating environment for her children and she returned to the Northwest where she was hired first as director of Career Planning and Placement then as Dean of Students at Lewis and Clark College and later as Director of the YWCA in Spokane where she set up a school for homeless children and established a program to deal with domestic violence. Meg returned to Oregon in 1989 as Dean of Students and Vice President for Student Affairs at Pacific University. After five years she moved to Seattle, married University of Washington scientist diplomat Ed Miles, and became the Director of the Office of Student Affairs, overseeing a multi-million dollar budget, on the Bethel Campus of the University of Washington.

Meg O’Hara died in August 1998 at age 53, after living for two years in intractable and untreatable pain from a bungled hysterectomy. Her death left her family and many friends bereft. Of the manifold achievements in her life, the role of which she was the most proud was that of being her children’s mother.