“I felt it as almost a religious duty trying to stop being gay,” she says. “Not that I thought it was wrong in itself. But I thought it was wrong to choose to be ostracized and to bring someone else into a situation of ostracization.”

The couple had a daughter a year later, but five years after marrying they divorced.

And yet Watkins says her marriage was “happy some of the time” and does not regret it.

She says she views it as a good life experience and is thankful to have a daughter she is still close to.

The Misfit

Despite her marriage and new degree, Watkins never really fit in at Radcliffe and would continue to be an outsider throughout her life.

Just as during her childhood her family had shuffled from country to country, she began to move from professorship to professorship at universites in the East. Watkins says she chose to become a history professor because in her study of history and literature at Radcliffe, she found history more “honest.”

She taught and studied Russian history, the history of the Renaissance and the Reformation at Simmons College, Ithaca College, Smith College and eventually settled at UMass Boston.

In addition to writing about the Renaissance and Reformation, Watkins has also focused on historical figures who were considered outsiders. Among her scholarly works are a 1969 article on Virginia Woolf’s suicide and a 1971 article entitled “Observer New Haven: The Outsiders,” about Yale students protesting the New Haven police’s targetting of Black Panther Bobby Seal.

With the women’s and gay liberation movement in the 1970s, Watkins says she found a new group of friends that she finally felt comfortable with.

She says other women finally began to seek out careers for themselves—something she had prioritized since college.

Watkins stayed at UMass for 23 years until she retired, but even there she did not find the professional or social environment comfortable.

“My department was very conservative politically and I was definitely very not conservative,” she says. “It was hard for me to get along with the powers that be in the history department.”

While her inability to fit in with her colleagues was a liability for her as a professor, she says the intellectual divide between her and her students was an advantage to her as a teacher.

“[Radcliffe] made me a much better teacher because in some ways I seemed to come from Mars,” Watkins says. “I know a lot of things they didn’t know. So we communicated from two different countries and that’s actually not bad for teachers and students.”