Ambler Susan Growing Up 2

Susan Ambler was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1947. She attended the University of Oklahoma for college, where she met her husband who participated in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) there and served in the Vietnam War. Ambler then attended graduate school at Ohio State University, where she witnessed student demonstrations. As a student and later a professor, Ambler became acquainted with the Women’s movement through the feminist press. She taught at Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, where she was refused tenure and took her case to the American Association of University Professors at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. During the 1980s, Ambler helped to organize a college program for Mountain Women’s Exchange in Jellico, Tennessee, which she discusses in this interview. She also discusses poor and working-class Women’s involvement in the organization and, accordingly, how she began to see the Women’s movement in broader terms.