In brisk Boston Octobers, the Charles River teems with thousands of boats—rhythmic water striders that skim the surface, moving only through plunging oars and grit. For two days, the water remains disturbed by the coming and going of rowing singles, doubles, fours, and eights. Four hundred thousand people line the river and crowd its bridges to catch a glimpse of the largest rowing competition in the world—the Head of the Charles Regatta. 

Jennie Kiesling first won the Head of the Charles in 1975, as a sophomore in a Yale Women’s four—joined by Chris Ernst, Anne Warner, and Lynn Baker. The third year in which women were invited to compete marked one year that Kiesling had rowed herself. In the following summer, half of their boat competed in the Olympics. But before their oars could touch the waters of Montreal, Yale Women’s Crew sent ripples across the country. 

Kiesling was one of nineteen rowers to participate in a now-famed Title IX protest. The team captured the scene in words and photographs—searing their stand into the archives of the New York Times. Even now, a shot of Kiesling’s shoulders blazes the cover of a film that was made about the women, twenty-five years later.   “I loved rowing because it was so terrifyingly hard. Every practice, I hoped I would survive,” Kiesling described the physical experience of rowing a 2000 meter race to me, a stranger to boathouses before arriving in New England. Only time in an eight-oar shell could help you understand its oppressive art. “Imagine someone has put a vacuum cleaner hose down your throat and is sucking out your lungs while somebody else pours sulfuric acid on your legs.” 

Professor Kiesling, alternating from rowing to revolving book pages, knows the ravages of war—both in historical text and the physiological impact of crew. Discipline rules her life. A voracious, life-long student of military history and West Point professor of military theory for twenty-eight years, the principles of soldiering combat do not stray far from those that push one to sit in a rowing shell each day. And for the Yale women rowers, daily battles against the limits of one’s own physicality also came with struggle on the Housatonic River shoreline. 

Despite the enactment of Title IX, after completing the same training course as the men, the Women’s Crew team was denied access to the boathouse locker rooms and restrooms—requiring them to sit cold and water-soaked until after dinner. It was from these frigid bus-seat puddles that something began to emerge. 

In March 1976, Yale Women’s rowers entered the athletic director’s office before removing their school sweatsuits to reveal their bodies beneath—naked, their backs and chests adorned with the words “Title IX”. The literal exposure backset a speech delivered by the team captain, expressing the exploitation of the bodies in the room. 

Reparations to the women’s “Declaration of Accountability” ensued, and universities in every crevice of the country followed—scrambling to cover systemic infractions. 

This moment, documented in print and film, was just that—a moment in each of their lives. When I sat down at my dining room table, checking my Zoom background to ensure that you could not see my still-unpacked suitcases, I was not sure of much beyond the archival articles I had read. Of course, I had questions catered to the persistent presence of the 1976 protest within Kiesling’s life. With over two million search results, Google had to agree with me—the hour that proceeded rather brought me to a different place. 

As each woman graduated, continued to study, row, or move beyond both, they maintained a connection that transcended their boat shells. In adulthood, they host “pajama parties”, spending weekends in each other’s homes to “just talk”. Though the dozen women that rotate between houses did not all row with Kiesling, they share a thread. 

“We bond easily, because we have a certain trust, and—I want to say—seriousness about the world. We don’t talk about the past a lot, although it’s not irrelevant. But we’re not fixated on the past, and we don’t just talk about our families. It’s just a little bit more–a little bit deeper. And I have that feeling with the people I rowed with and the people I didn’t, but who came up through the same program. And I think that’s incredibly special.” 

Intensity grips every part of Kiesling’s life—rowing, coaching, learning, teaching. There is even weight to the pauses in her sentences, as she methodically contemplates and reconstructs six decades of life with words. Her earnest framing of the world was apparent long before she spoke to a shared “seriousness”. Through her time at Oxford, where she met her husband of over four decades—between rowing and studying the classics—and Stanford—where a knee injury forced her to trade her aspirations to row in the Olympics for competitive cycling—she carried a sense of momentum. 

It landed her at the University of Alabama, where her battle for tenure was limited by those who couldn’t see her utter gravity about the world—beyond her blue jeans, sweat suits, and the bright red Mazda Miata that so frequently found her at the university boathouse. 

But her ceaseless exploration and experience of the world began long before she touched an oar, rather starting with a book. Professor Kiesling was only eight years old when she began to study military history, with second-grade hands grabbing volumes from the “big kid” shelf—The Monitor and the Merrimack, The Battle of Gettysburg, D-Day. She was only nine years old when she decided that she wanted to be an officer in the Army—an infantryman and a West Point graduate. For her, war was easier to romanticize when it lived in the past—when it wasn’t an immediate threat to her younger brothers. With the rest of the country, she spent highschool with thoughts hitting the ground in Vietnam. 

“Part of being a woman studying war in the 1970s was not being a woman; it was, I can do this just like the men, and I am not going to have any feminine thoughts. And if somebody asked me about the role of women in war, I’d say, ‘That’s women’s history’. I’m a military historian, I do tactics. I don’t study the Women’s Army Corps. They’re not in combat; I’m not interested. I’m tough. I row and I don’t talk about women.”

There is a sternness in Professor Kiesling’s face, laying just beyond her ponytail and fringe bangs, that somehow kept this statement from entirely surprising me. 

Until—within the same breath—she did. 

Professor Kiesling coached Army rowing and taught at West Point for fifteen years before she first began to study the role of women in combat, prompted by a request to give a conference lecture. Her first reaction was to question why she should be asked to speak beyond her field; then, she reconsidered why she hadn’t studied the topic before. 

“I started thinking about all the times that I had said, ‘Well, women aren’t in combat.’ Well, women are killed in combat — women are killed all the time.”

And with time, her exploration of stray combat violence against women became a broader consideration of military services in the United States.

“America is basically a nation of ostriches, who aren’t interested in war at all. There are some hawks, there are some doves and I define these as people who have visceral feelings about war.”

This, perhaps, was the last metaphor I expected Professor Kiesling to draw out for me. Our conversation became something more of storytelling: an experience worthy of a velvet-curtain stage. She was a historian sharing her craft—what she understands now as an art, not a scientific process of data collection.

Her art is to reconcile humanity with physical brutality—forty-eight years after she stood naked in the Yale athletic director’s office. Her stories now feature the cadets that fill her classroom and boathouse with the United States Army–what she calls the “final line of constitutional sanity”. 

Her art of thought exists on cycling trails, ski slopes, rock-climbing walls—and rowing shells.  

Six months ago, in a familiar October chill, Kiesling climbed back into a Women’s Four shell. The three women who joined her had been reaching for blue ribbons, placing second and fourth for the past four years. They wanted to win, and they needed a final rower; Kiesling—who just wanted to have a “good row” —found them rather in a record-breaking win. With four hundred thousand people watching the Head of Charles, they clocked in at twenty minutes and seven seconds. 

“The consistency in my life is rowing—the belief in teamwork and integrity. But the great transformation is the recognition that the hawkish attraction to war tends to have a lot more to do with some personal gratification. I have moved away from that to finding personal gratification in the thought that cooperation—which is a rowing virtue—hard work, and teamwork should be used for peaceful purposes.”