Equal Rights for Women
ME: You started out in the kind of late 1950s era, which has actually been—it’s the topic of this show Mad Men on TV and moved into something quite different based on the Women’s Rights Movement. How did that kind of affect you as a mother and what you want for us as kids?
MOM: I realize that between the time I started being a mother and when—by the time you guys were grown, my whole way of being a woman and certainly way of being a mother went through a huge transformation. I started out with the assumption that Jim wanted to earn the money and I would be at home. Not that that was really at a conscious, conscious level, but when we went to England for Jim to be a student, I was going to find a job mostly to sort of amuse myself. It wasn’t necessary financially, actually. It was helpful, but he had a full scholarship, a Fulbright, and we could live on that. So in retrospect, when I realized the kind of burden that inflicted on Jim, the presumption that he was going to provide for whatever needed providing for and I was free to do and be what I wanted to be.
My first job, as I said, was having kids, and we did, and I was busy and involved in that. What I hadn’t anticipated, as what I mentioned before, was the isolation and the loss that was involved in that for me. I had been a serious student at Bryn Mawr, and I was very involved and alive intellectual life, and suddenly, that was all over, which I was not greatly upset but relieved to have it over, but on the other hand, as time went on, I was bored. I was missing the kind of stimulation that I had had previously.
So I remember there was a book called Man’s World, Woman’s Place by a sociologist. I read that book and it really described my experience in a way that was startling. So when the women’s movement came along, it really hit me hard. It was like this wake up call. I was an apple ready to be picked. And so gradually, over a period of really several years, I tentatively walked into the possibility of combining having a life in the world in some way and being a mother. First I had a part-time job in Ithaca, and then when we came to Amherst, I, again after a pause, began graduate school.
I have to say, the whole process of doing those two things at the same time was always difficult and always provoked anxiety in me. I never felt really comfortable, and I often felt as if I was worried that I was doing harm to you kids by not being there all the time. And I wasn’t certainly secure that I was going to be able to pull off what I was going to do in the world either. So it was a very tentative balancing act, always. And it felt like I was going against the grain. There weren’t easy childcare arrangements available. It was often trying to create something, and often sometimes that worked out well and sometimes it worked out not well. So it was difficult, and yet it felt like the road I somehow felt propelled to follow.
Mom Writing Her Dissertation
ME: Why was that? What was so important to you about trying to work?
MOM: I’m not sure I know the answer to that, Tom. Really. It felt necessary. I really was battling depression, and being at home with no external connection with the world beyond the family was the place where I dropped into depression. There were clearly issues between Jim and me that were unsettled in those years, and I think I also wanted another venue in my life that wasn’t charged in that way. I think probably it was also a sense that I wanted to be a player in that game, that feminist world that was very exciting and interesting to me. Very early on, I attended a feminist counseling collective. I went to that every week for years and years and years. Those were women with whom I, in a sense, had to have a ticket of membership with. I had to have something going on career-wise. That was your ticket of entrance. Those relationships were very important to me, and I wanted to belong. And many of them were struggling with the same kind of balancing act, so that was a place where I could talk about that. That’s the best I can do. It was complex.
Photo Credit:Â http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/
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A nice article. We are the same age, Tom. My mother did not join the feminist movement and revolutions of the 60s. My father was dean of a law school and very establishment-oriented, and she devoted herself to support of his career. Instead she subconsciously channeled her objections to the patriarchal system through me – and my father made me his intellectual ally and friend because my mother could not – or would not – relate to him on that level. So I see some parallels in growing up in revolutionary times, which in some sense continue today. I too… Read more »
I loved this interview. My mother’s parents were Presbyterian missionaries to Cuba. When I was 9, my family lived In Mexico and I remember my mother putting Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth in my hand and telling me how much she identified with her, for the love of adventure, the giving to others, the religious background, and the fact that both were adoptive mothers.
And about your mother–she sounds like a fascinating woman and it’s remarkable what she accomplished given the fact that she often felt depressed and isolated. Thanks for sharing her with us.
Very cool Pauline. Thanks for reading. Glad we have that Presbyterian missionarie blood in common…