PART IV—
THREE GENERATIONS OF WOMEN SOCIOLOGISTS

Chapter Thirteen—
Seasons of a Woman's Life

Alice S. Rossi

Dedicated to S. W. S. with admiration and affection

An autobiographical essay provides an opportunity to link an early love of mine for writing and biography with contemporary intellectual concern for adult development. My years as a graduate student at Columbia University overlapped with the tenure of C. Wright Mills, and from exposure to his thinking I carried forward the view that sociology is properly located at the intersection of biography and history. Mills's views, however, were little more than a perspective on the discipline, not a theoretical framework. It has only been with the emergence of life-span development theory in psychology and age stratification and the life-course perspective in sociology that a more rigorous framework has become available within which to sift out the relative contributions of cohort membership, historical or period effects, and maturational change to an understanding of individual lives and the process of social change. Hence it is to both sharing a personal biography and demonstrating a theoretical perspective that this essay is dedicated.

The phrase love and work is commonly taken to refer to personal family life and public occupational life. This was clearly Freud's meaning when he referred to lieben und arbeiten as the chief ingredients of a full life. Sociological tradition has similarly distinguished between the family and the economy as major social institutions serving the core functions of reproduction and production to assure species and societal maintenance and survival.

To link love to family, and work to the economy, is to reinforce the conception common to the social sciences that family life is the expres-

sive setting for deep feelings and strong emotions, while work life is the instrumental setting for rational thought or physical labor. In this essay I will depart from such traditional usage to share a hard-earned insight from personal experience and intellectual efforts to understand adult development: how much work there is in loving, and how much love there is in working. In contemporary society it is in the family setting that we engage in hard physical labor, long hours of work, and considerable rational thought about how best to spend time and money, rear children, and relate to spouses. And for many people it is their work setting that triggers their most intense positive and negative feelings and commitments. I will use love, then, as a metaphor for caring, including the pain, joy, anger, and lust that motivate us, however skillful we are at disguising these limbic components of our behavior. And I will speak of work as a metaphor for efforts toward goal attainment in any sphere of life.

This is also a self-reflective essay, meaning that I will use my own life as a data base to demonstrate a sociological analysis of self in time and place. The theoretical framework is that of life-span development, and the goal is to demonstrate its utility in distinguishing the relative contributions of cohort membership and historical or period effects from the influences rooted in biosocial processes of maturation and aging.

To provide the biographic data for such an analysis, I will use the technique of life-stage vignettes, five developmental phases for the six decades of my life: birth and childhood, puberty and adolescence, early adulthood, the middle years, and a preview of old age. Following the vignettes I will go back over the biographic data to discuss the specific respects in which my experience and values have been shaped by cohort membership, historical events, and the experiences of growing up and growing old.

Birth and Childhood

I was born where I was conceived, in my parents' bed in a top-floor apartment of a brownstone town house on a one-block-long street, Alice Court. The place was Brooklyn; the time, 1922. Those four floors housed three layers of maternal kin who peopled my early childhood: a German-Lutheran immigrant grandfather and one aunt on the street floor, two unmarried aunts on the second floor, my parents and me and an unmarried uncle on the third floor. The Schaerrs and the Winklers shared the big kitchen and dining room on the half-submerged

first floor for communal evening meals prepared by my mother and aunts.

I was made to feel special in that household as the first child, first grandchild, and first niece. There was little communication between the sexes or the two older generations, however, and the only warm alliance was among the four sisters. Whatever merriment or exchange of intimacy took place was within that foursome or between me and one of the adults when they, each in turn, took me into their separate, secret worlds. Let me sketch my people for you:

My grandfather was a quiet, somber man, a socialist of a homespun variety who spent most of his life as a stonemason and carpenter on the construction of an Episcopal church in Manhattan, which to this day has not been completed. Stern with his daughters and son, he was easy and loving with me, sharing German folklore, his love of craft, and his dream of the cathedral-to-be. Like many socialists in Europe, and unlike their American counterparts, he happily blended his political and religious visions of the good society.

My Uncle Ted, gassed in World War I, was the wheezing, asthmatic occupant of a tiny bedroom across the hall from mine. A telephone lineman by day and a violinist in the Brooklyn Symphony by night, he let me peep beneath his silent persona to share his love of sound on strings and his love of the sea.

My Aunt Minna was no longer considered marriageable by herself or the family once she passed her twenty-eighth birthday. She kept the books and supervised a factory floor in a bookbindery and devoured gothic novels. She read me passages, taught me to read, and assured me a library card was a magical key to worlds beyond my imagining. She was even capable of fibbing to my mother, taking me off to see not a children's movie but a sexy one—Red Dust, with Jean Harlow—and then telling my mother she got the dates mixed up.

My Aunt Martha was lively and gay, in love with a garage mechanic from New Jersey. I loved to watch her primp before her mirror on nights she saw her Charlie. On rare occasions I was permitted to go with them on daytime dates. No delight exceeded those excursions. I sat in the rumble seat of Charlie's Ford watching them exchange glances and listening to their high-pitched laughter, or accompanied them on walks on the boardwalk at Coney Island or Jones Beach, feeling the current

running between them through me as each held one of my hands; they gave pleasure squeezes I happily passed on from one to the other when something struck them as funny, which seemed to happen with great regularity.

The oldest of the sisters, my Aunt Anna, was scrappy and bossy, with a precarious hold on the affections of her sisters and myself. She was the chief housekeeper and cook until her marriage. In that household, headed by my widowed maternal grandfather, it was the daughers who took over the duties of their mother after her early death at forty, whereas in the household headed by my widowed paternal grandmother she herself assumed the breadwinner role by taking in four boarders, doing their laundry, and cooking meals for them as well as the three sons and a daughter still at home.

My father was quiet, strong, and moody, an experimental machinist inordinately proud of his machines and his skill in creating equipment for scientists at the Rockefeller Institute in Manhattan. His great gift to me was a belief that I could do or be anything I set my mind to, and he defended me against family scoffing when at six I wished to be a chemist, at fourteen a poet, and at twenty-two a sociologist.

My shy and yielding mother, the hub of my world, was in perpetual fear of displeasing either her father or her husband, but for me she radiated warmth and the pleasure she took in food, fabric, and flowers, a triad of cooking, sewing, and gardening that has been a common ground between us for more than fifty years.

Except through me as a go-between, my people had little to do with our neighbors, of whom more were Catholic than Protestant, more Irish and Italian than German. My first playmates were Irish Catholic girls. We screamed in terror when our fathers had a fist fight during the Al Smith presidential campaign in 1928, then followed suit the next day with a fight of our own for reasons we could not fathom. School was an ancient, overcrowded, red brick building, most of whose students came either from a black ghetto or an enormous orphan asylum a block from the school, a frightening place with jagged glass in the cement top of its brick walls. My first friend at school was a black girl I was made to share a seat and desk with as punishment for misbehavior in first grade. (If blacks misbehaved they were made to stand in a corner, whereas whites were made to sit with blacks.) We both knew neither of us would be welcome in the home of the other, but we walked to the corner of

each other's block many times to glimpse the place that held the good friend and to prolong our endless talk.

I did not know it for a long time, but I have drawn deeply from that early world of kin and the ethnic and racial diversity of my neighborhood. And I learned early how different men and women were when alone or in mixed company. By day my aunts and my mother seemed lighthearted and merry, lingering over lunch, laughing with the canaries in the sunlight, sharing their hopes and woes. By night they turned into shadowy figures serving the food and giving silent assent to all that the men said. My grandfather and father ruled the big table under its apples-and-pears Tiffany lamp, snapped commands, showed no pleasure, and gave no thanks. Yet these were the men who shared, when alone with me, their love of texture—of wood, marble, metal, pansies. When I carried an observation from one side of the gender barrier to the other, the grown-ups stared at me in disbelief: "Your grandfather couldn't have said that!" my aunt would pronounce firmly; "Your mother really didn't say that!" said my grandfather equally firmly. They all concluded, with sad shakes of the head, "Alice has a vivid imagination." So in time I learned to keep things to myself.

But that world did not last. In 1930 it collapsed around us. My best friend's father committed suicide, my uncle was laid off, and my father could hardly make his payroll. The men scowled and withdrew into silence and drink. The women frowned and cried. The grim decade of the Depression had begun. We moved away to where no canaries sang, no aunts or grandfather brightened my days, and my childhood ended—at eight.

Puberty and Adolescence

The deeper the family slipped into hard times, the more my father drank and the less we had to eat. My mother skipped lunches and became a janitor in a four-family building, shoveling coal into a greedy furnace and lugging a dozen cans of ashes up treacherous stone steps twice a week. She sewed lovely things for a rich doctor's wife and her friends. Men did not have enough work, and women had too much work. As a girl and an oldest child (by now with a younger brother and sister) I was swept into my mother's work. When not in school, hours were given to scrubbing clothes and floors, ironing, and doing household shopping. Shopping meant a five-mile walk each week to scattered stores with low prices: the butcher, the dairy, the German pork store, the bakery for

day-old bread, and, once in a while, the Nabisco factory for broken crackers at bargain prices.

The one advantage of our numerous household moves was the schools I attended. Declining neighborhoods from which many had fled even before the Depression meant lower rent for our apartments but also schools with small classes, and teachers who poured their talents and hopes into fewer students. In another era some of my grade-school and high-school teachers would have been college teachers, so I was the beneficiary of their considerable knowledge and fallen hopes. As a proud possessor of that magic key, a library card, a highlight of my week was a two-mile skate to the nearest library. I devoured my weekly ration of five books as my aunt had done before me, in hours stolen from the night. In my case a book, my head, and a night lamp were huddled under a heavy flannel bathrobe to hide my reading from the disapproving eyes of my mother. It was years before I understood the fear of losing her daughter that lurked beneath my mother's suspicion of what she called my "reading and scribbling."

I reached my present height at twelve, towering over my classmates, the last in line marching into gym or auditorium, defensively tough, secretly tender. My dream of public stardom was doomed by a tendency to blush, so I was the behind-the-scenes producer and director of plays, and later the playwright as well. My sixth-grade triumph was a production of Alice in Wonderland, complete with crepe-paper costumes I made for all fifteen characters. My only terror when the play was put on in half a dozen schools in the borough was having to come on stage to take a bow after the performance. But beneath all that local limelight I was frustrated, a never-to-be star of the show, like Lewis Carroll's Alice.

In high school I found wider scope and at least some souls who shared my passions. I edited the newspaper, served in the student senate, was president of the poetry club, and dared to dream of college. Summers were spent in my aunt's bookbindery at a wage of twelve dollars for a forty-eight-hour week. Innocent dreamer that he was, my father assured me I could attend any college of my choice. "What's the best one?" he asked. Not knowing, but remembering a novel with a college setting, I promptly said "Vassar College." It took very little inquiry about cost to land me in tuition-free Brooklyn College, not Vassar.

I entered college a literature major but quickly shifted to sociology after one semester with Louis Schneider as my teacher. An incipient rationalist, I checked out this shift in major by taking the Strong Interest Inventory Test. The college counselor told me I scored exceptionally

well on both art and science. In some puzzlement he concluded, "Well, maybe a social science is a good middle-of-the-road compromise!" And so it has been, though if the truth be known, I hungered to be an artist and a scientist. As well as a sociologist, of course.

My late development provided a psychosexual moratorium in adolescence, during which studies, athletics, and same-sex friendships filled my days. But when it came, the moist fire of sex threatened to overturn my intellectual interests and would have done so had I not moved in a radical student subculture that espoused some measure of equality between the sexes. Even so, I made fearful mistakes. After a tragic first affair that ended with my lover's death in a car accident, I remet and married a former economics teacher twelve years my senior. Adolescence ended with a premature marriage at nineteen.

Early Adulthood

War was declared against Japan and Germany a few weeks before the marriage, and by the spring of 1942 I withdrew from college and spent several years as an army wife largely in southern towns—Anniston, Columbia, Raleigh, Jackson—and then in Washington, D.C., and Trenton, New Jersey. My first trip South was to Anniston, Alabama, where, with my head full of antebellum novels, I expected to find women in dainty dimity and white gloves and carrying ruffled parasols. It was a culture shock to find my first landlady in black satin, highly rouged, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, on her way to her job as an "entertainer," as she put it. I was a civilian replacement first at an airbase and then at a prisoner-of-war camp, and a child tender in a municipal day-care center for factory women's children in Jackson, Mississippi. I sold fabric by the yard to poor whites in Alabama and worked for Soviet engineers in Washington, processing lend-lease shipments of petroleum products to the Soviet front. I even delivered a black baby in South Carolina, when I volunteered to find out why my landlady's "girl" did not show up for work and found her alone in advanced labor.

After the war I returned to finish college and moved on to graduate study at Columbia University. Though I did not define it as work at the time, I also spent two painful years trying to salvage a marriage and then adjust to its failure. After several foolish affairs I finally grew up secure enough to form a new and good marriage, at twenty-nine, to a man my own age. This has been a lasting love, with sparks in the mind, shared tastes of palate and politics, a spicy difference in intellectual flair,

a mutual love of hard physical work—a heady brew still potent after thirty-five years. With a degree behind me, I also tasted the pleasure of being paid for what I wanted to do anyway—work with books and ideas and typewriter. Still under the influence of the manual-work ethic from my Lutheran kin, I was dismayed while on a first professional job to calculate what I cost my employer by dividing the number of pages I wrote in a year (600) into my annual salary. The cost per page was so high, in my judgment then, for doing something that yielded so much intrinsic reward that I was convinced my boss Alex Inkeles must have considered me a poor investment.

But the joy of that work paled beside the miracle of birth and the powerful bond of flesh and heart that came with parenthood. Always greedy for experience, I had three births in four years in my middle to late thirties. With the love came the work of parenting, the unrelenting hours that squeezed out thought and spirit, all made particularly taxing because of the superwoman standards I imposed on myself: perfect wife, mother, hostess, gardener, and college teacher, all held together by a fragile scaffold of nursery schools, housekeeper, luck, and physical strength. The price I paid was insomnia and neuritis misdiagnosed as arthritis, and the cure was giving up part-time teaching and taking on a full-time research appointment.

The Middle Years

At forty we fell in love with a house in Kenwood, a neighborhood just north of the University of Chicago. It was huge, ugly, Victorian, but beautiful in our eyes: a dream of grace and space come true. It prompted the purchase of a floating blue chiffon gown for a housewarming party and dreams of children's weddings within its spacious rooms. But that Victorian shell held five complex, changing creatures within it: an anxious, overextended research administrator; a harassed, torn, and puzzled woman; and three small people struggling for room in our lives while flexing and testing who they were.

I also underwent the painful experience of being fired by an anthropologist when he saw a good thing in a study I had designed and fielded. Since his title under the grant was as principal investigator and I only a research associate on the payroll, the dean told me the anthropologist was "valuable university property," whereas I was expendable. It was my first consciously defined experience with sex discrimination, and it began a slow burn that gathered momentum and was gradually trans-

muted into my first feminist publication (Rossi 1964). I spent a year on that essay, with blisters on my mind from the struggle to unlearn the functionalist theory I had swallowed whole during my graduate training in sociology and to distill and transcend my personal experiences. The six-draft germination of that essay was a far more painful birthing than the three natural childbirths that preceded it, and its publication in 1964 was a turning point in my personal, political, and professional life.

I withstood the pressure against political activity from my academic colleagues by plunging into abortion law reform in Illinois in the early 1960s and helping to found the National Organization for Women (NOW) and Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) in 1970. I took special pleasure in following in John Dewey's footsteps as national chair of the reactivated American Association of University Professors (AAUP) committee on the status of women in academe. Professionally I shifted from such topics as voting behavior, intergroup relations, the sociology of occupations, and the Soviet social system to the study of gender roles, family structure, academic women, and social movements. I indulged my love of biography and history for two years while working on The Feminist Papers (Rossi 1973). Politics and research were also a stimulating combination in editing the Russell Sage Foundation volume on Academic Women on the Move (Rossi and Calderwood 1973) and writing Feminists in Politics (Rossi 1982), a quantitative panel analysis of the first national women's conference.

Along the way, following a wrenching move from the Kenwood home we loved to a Baltimore home I disliked, I shifted from the uncertainty of research appointments on soft money at Johns Hopkins University to the challenge and security of teaching women at Goucher College. I look back now with a mixture of self-admiration and horror at the pace of those years in the early 1970s: teaching seven courses a year while chairing a department; lectures and political obligations that had me in a plane thirty-two times one year; and two books in process. In addition to these political and professional commitments, we were coping with pubescent and adolescent children, then experimenting with vegetarianism, hippie culture, sex, and an alternative school, and I was trying to cope with the erratic mood swings of an early menopause. Winding-up adolescents and winding-down parents make for domestic sparks. It was this personal insight that led to a study of parenting and aging in the middle years, in which I tried to explore what difference a mother's age made for her relationship to an adolescent child (Rossi 1980a, 1980b).

I learned a bitter lesson in those years: it is far easier for a woman to add to her level of participation in parenting and domestic management than to reduce the level of participation that has been in place for a long time. In retrospect it seems a miracle that the children and the marriage survived those years intact. Had we still been riding the crest of youthful narcissism, that fragile family might have collapsed and fragmented. At twenty-five we are immortal, and impulses are apt to burst their containment. At forty-five caring is more likely to mean a restraint on impulse, and a hard working-through of an impasse in a relationship of long standing.

So it was, and so it is. In the calmer waters of one's sixties, time is telescoped and life in and for itself more precious than ever before: each day to be savored, from work at a desk or lectern, to time snatched for gardening or sewing, to pasta and Soave at day's end. For city-bred people like me, living in a small town in western Massachusetts is a source of daily wonder: after fifteen years, I am still startled to see a setting sun slip below a mountain ridge from my study window.

Looking Ahead

Now, well past the meridian of life even with greatly extended life spans, I feel no impulse to rest or retire. I have an image of a retired self that is outrageously eccentric: a figure in a purple cape with a walking cane. But at the moment I continue to struggle with the question, How have I managed to come this far on life's path and still be so far from the achievements I dreamed possible at thirty? There are half a dozen studies I wish to do and at least three books I want to write.

But I also want to have time and space to indulge two other passions, one new and one old. The new one is watercolor painting, begun in 1980. I want to capture the essence of New England rocks, shells, and flowers as Georgia O'Keeffe caught the essence of the desert Southwest in bones. The old passion is clothes design and sewing: for the past several years I have made children's clothes, tailored silk blouses, and placemat sets under my own label for sale in a local boutique.

My dream of the good life after retirement is not stopping work but letting the day structure what the work will be: separating an iris clump, drafting a paper, exploring an image in watercolors, discussing a new idea with Peter, testing it on the computer terminal, making a crème caramelle. To borrow a lovely phrase from May Sarton, I shall strive for a life in which "the day shapes the work, and not my work, the day."

This ends the five vignettes. Much has been left out, of course: my paternal kin, my brother and sister, my friends in adolescence and adulthood, teachers and peers who were important mentors. But I think I have touched on the central facts of early family, marriage, and parenting and the broad contours of career and political involvement, and I have tried to be honest in communicating the passion and pain along the way.

But enough of biographic profiles. What can we do with these data from a sociological perspective? What elements of this life reflect the time and place in which it was lived? What are its unique, what its common, features? A life-span perspective will help us distinguish between the effects of maturation, cohort, and historical period (Baltes and Schaie 1973; Bengston and Troll 1978; Neugarten and Hagestad 1976). It also moves away from the psychological premise that humans are essentially formed by the time they reach the age of ten or so. Instead it makes two important assumptions: (1) social structural characteristics of early family life are more predictive of adult personality and values than the psychodynamics within the triad of mother, father, and child; and (2) development is a continuous process at all stages of life, subject to change from the impact of historical events and the institutions that hold us in their grip during our adult years (Brim and Kagan 1980; Riley 1979). I will try now to tease out the major elements of cohort, period, and maturational effects from the descriptive biographic vignettes.

Cohort Characteristics

A great deal is known about the cohort I belong to—the birth cohort of the 1920s—as a consequence of several longitudinal studies begun with child subjects during that decade. Best known in sociological circles is Glen Elder's Children of the Great Depression (1974). Other cross-sectional studies on middle-aged adults in the 1970s are also based on research subjects from my cohort (Gould 1978; Levinson 1978; Lowenthal et al. 1975; Rubin 1979; Sheehy 1977; Rossi 1980a, 1980b). Such studies, however, were either of subjects living on the West Coast (Elder, Gould, Lowenthal et al., Rubin) or of men (Levinson). None were conducted on East Coast families like the one I grew up in. Hence there is no hint in most of these studies of grandparents, aunts, and uncles of the subjects who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s. The chances are that these relatives were somewhere in the Midwest or East rather than the West.

Yet the fact of having spent the first eight years of my life in an extended-family household had important consequences. I was a third-generation child in a lineage that emigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles were colorful, important figures in my life, as they were in the lives of others of my cohort in eastern cities; if not living together, they were often close by in ethnic neighborhoods. As Hansen noted long ago (Hansen 1952), grandchildren often wish to know what their parents want to forget about their ethnic and national origins. Neither of my parents could understand my fascination with stories my grandparents told about their childhood in Germany and the adventure of emigrating to the United States. At my urging, my grandmother told the story of her crossing the Atlantic several dozen times, until the image of her red-cheeked, blonde-braided, seventeen-year-old self, organizing dances for sailors and young girls in steerage (ever the managerial type!), became as sharply etched in memory as any childhood experience of my own.

A household of three adult men and four adult women for a first child, grandchild, and niece also had important consequences: my affection was diffused among them, not concentrated just on two parents. Predictably I was a very adult-oriented child, but my image of the adult I could become had an openness to it because of the sharp differences among the women and men who provided daily models: my mother's disapproval of reading was countered by my aunt's love of books; my grandfather's objection to his son's "fiddling" was countered by his unique emotional accessibility to me. With all those loving adults around me, I felt no rivalry when my brother was born when I was three, though I did when my sister was born when I was eight, for by the time of her birth the number of adults in my daily world had shrunk from seven to two.

A child in an isolated nuclear household cannot observe male-female relationships in the courting and honeymoon stage of a marriage, whereas I had exposure to the very positive image of my aunt's courtship. I also saw meaning in the lives of unmarried adults, and I had the opportunity to observe same-sex adult relationships at close range. Of special importance was the daily exposure to the four sisters' alliance, the key solidary force in the household. A superficial observer of my extended family might see a patriarchy with repressed and exploited women, but I knew in my bones the power of sisterhood as a kinship, not a political, phenomenon. There was no doubt some repressed anger in the women, and indeed my mother has been happier as a widow for

the past twenty years than she was for most of her life as a wife, but I am speaking here of a child's experience. I also knew the tender underside of patriarchal males, the passion and pride in craft, and the love for a girl child beneath their barked commands to wife, daughters, and sisters. Clearly I was the recipient of a superdose of love and trust during those early stages of life.

There is also an androgynous quality to the manner in which a firstborn child is treated, perhaps particularly a firstborn girl. Few limits were imposed on me because of my sex, as they were on my younger brother and sister. No one said I could not learn to use tools or play a violin or move out into the world beyond the house and neighborhood. I was sent to shop at a neighborhood store at three, clutching a penciled note over the coin to give the grocer. At five I was taught to use a saw and hammer by my grandfather, along with a knife and needle by my aunts and mother.

The most lasting influence of that early household, and a mark perhaps of my cohort, was the work ethic it lived and breathed. If it is worth doing at all, it is worth doing well; If you start something, you finish it—those sayings were drilled into me as family homilies. Mine was a secular family that attended church only for marriages, christenings, and funerals, and the household god was labor. To learn to sew at the age of four, my mother gave me a square yard of muslin with two dozen rows of different sewing and embroidery stitches down one side, each two inches long, rows I was required to complete over the remaining thirty-four inches to master the stitches. Praise was given only for a job done with exceptional skill, not for any ordinary performance, and never if it was not done in the expected time, for dawdling was taboo. I still have difficulty giving praise to my students except under similar circumstances of exceptional performance in a reasonable period of time.

Another value I internalized was the importance of women's work. Few of the homes in my kin network would have survived without the labor of the women. One simply could not afford to waste or spoil food, scorch a shirt, or discard a torn sheet. It was my mother's strength and capacity for hard work that kept my own family intact through the Depression, as my widowed grandmother had kept her sons away from poolrooms and saloons, while the older men in the family and neighborhood were apt to crumble under economic pressure into quarrels and drink. Years later it was with a shock of recognition that I read Harriet Martineau's 1837 judgment that American women were soft under

affluence but showed their strength under adversity (Martineau 1837). This observation was clearly applicable to the Depression, as it is today to so many impoverished black communities. It did not take a feminist awakening for me to acquire pride in women's strength and abilities.

Period Effects

Three major historical events were of profound influence in my life: the Depression of the 1930s, World War II, and the renascence of the feminist movement in the 1960s.

Much has been written on the impact of the Depression on families and individuals. Indeed, there is renewed interest in the topic because of the structural unemployment facing the nation in the 1980s and the financial stress that is growing in the international economy. Reference-group theory applied to intergenerational relations is of particular help in illuminating this impact. My immigrant grandparents had little sympathy for the dashed hopes their children experienced under the weight of the Depression, for they had known far harsher poverty in Europe, compared to which any American experience seemed very mild.

In addition, immigrants are self-selected from their national stock and families, spunky enough to leave a known world for an unknown one. Their children were more diverse, including the timid along with the bold. My second-generation parents never fully recovered either economically or psychologically from the Depression years, and their achievements fell far short of their youthful dreams. By comparison, my generation came to adulthood with more education and entered an expanding, affluent economy, so we could more easily fulfill our aspirations and exceed those held for us by our parents. I worry that my students in the 1980s may face the dashed hopes that marked my parents' generation.

The concept of relative expectations also illuminates my father's confidence that I could become anything I wished to be. In fact, I did not gain this insight until writing this essay: what I experienced as great confidence in me as a young person requires the qualification that my father's message reflected the narrow horizon of choice he could even imagine for me. He harbored no hopes of my becoming a senator or a professor. His conception of a chemist was a laboratory technician or bench chemist; of a poet, someone who scribbles in her spare time; of a sociologist, someone who belabors the obvious. Under the influence of my teachers and mentors my range of choice exceeded anything in my

father's imagining. Had I become a white-collar bookkeeper, his paternal expectations would have been well confirmed.

The impact of growing up in the Depression is a continuing mark on my generation. We are survivors who delight in possessions, gluttonous consumers of mail-order catalogs. I still find the best device to cope with anxiety and depression is a shopping spree—hats in my twenties, plants in my sixties. By contrast, my own adult children travel light and rely on jogging, sleep, and loud rock to cope with stress.

The second historical event of great influence was Wold War II, which shook me out of a New Yorker's parochialism, deepened my appreciation for regional differences, and provided a range of job experiences more profound in their impact than any reading of the sociological literature on occupations and social class. Living in rented rooms in a dozen southern homes gave me intimate access to family and race relations. I was astonished by the extent to which a gracious life-style penetrated down to lower class levels more than was possible in the North, facilitated by an underclass of poorly paid blacks. I was amazed that the husband who returned home for lunch served on linen and china, with a tinkling silver bell to summon the next course, was a hat salesman in a local department store. In other homes I was witness to the same female alliance I knew from my aunts, only in interracial, mixed-age sets of women and children. Stories and shared intimacies flew back and forth in one Mississippi household, where my landlady insisted that all the women and children, black and white, gather on a big bed in an inner room, where she assured us we were protected against lightning bolts that might otherwise strike us. The rainy season reinforced female and, to some degree, interracial solidarity and furthered the oral transmission of legends.

Years before any murmur of a civil-rights movement, I was impressed by the quality and content of interracial relationships among women. One upper-class woman I befriended in South Carolina, for example, used her wealth to run a summer school on an island off the coast for promising black youth secretly referred to her by black teachers in her county. I left the South chastened by my human encounters there, freed of many northern stereotypes of the South and southerners.

I have almost left out one important additional impact of World War II, perhaps because it involved such pain: the replacement of pride in my German heritage with shame. Just before the war, I had battled, to the point of leaving home, my father's views toward Hitler's Germany. And it was thirty-five years before I felt up to crossing the border into Ger-

many on European trips. Ethnic orphan that I was, I adopted my husband's ethnicity as my own. This was no hardship, for Italy is one of the loveliest lands in the world, and I have never had complaints from guests about my basically north Italian cuisine.

The third historical event of great impact was the renascence of feminism in the 1960s. In retrospect I think some of the androgynous roots of my childhood, hidden behind a facade of traditional patriarchy, influenced many choices I made in early adulthood. Combined with involvement in a radical student culture during college years, my choice of profession and my persistence in working at it while rearing children made me a marginal person in the cohort of women to which I belonged. I was what Vern Bengtson calls a forerunner in my generation. My unmarried aunts, women teachers, and the women writers I loved were important models supporting my own marginal choices. My experience of sex discrimination at the University of Chicago pointed up a long predisposition to feminism.

Historical or period effects differ in their impact depending on the age at which they are experienced. That the feminist renascence was begun by employed middle-aged women like myself reflects our experience as women with permanent attachments to the labor force who found barriers to promotion or who received lower pay than men doing comparable work. Hence our political efforts were on improving the educational and occupational opportunities for women. Our personal lives had jelled by that point, so it was left for younger feminists to call for change in private, sexual, and family life.

This point was first brought home to me by the different reactions of older and younger women to my early feminist publications in the mid-1960s. The bitter, angry letters I received were from women over fifty, whose response centered on their lost chances. As one woman put it, "Had anyone written as you do when I was twenty, I would have had two, not six children, and I would not have given up my desire to be a lawyer." By contrast, women in their twenties and thirties said such things as "I've decided to postpone getting married, and will finish college first"; "I'm going back to school instead of having another child"; and "I think I have the courage now to face the fact that my marriage has been dead for years."

Later I found this same age difference in an analysis of the political issues on which delegates to the first national women's conference had been active (Rossi 1982). Younger delegates seemed to leave gender issues of educational and job opportunities to the by now older branch

of feminist organizations. The younger delegates' energies were invested in sex issues like women's health care, rape, and spouse abuse. The unifying commitment of both young and old delegates was to increase representation of women in politics so that they can make the laws, not court the votes of men. Their joint efforts have contributed to the growing gender gap in voting behavior and position on political issues in the 1980s. In the coming decade I predict a great increase in the proportion of women holding public office (Rossi 1983).

Maturational Effects

I have left for last a cluster of changes that may be true maturational effects. These changes are an inherent function of the process of growing up and growing old that can speak equally to people of all ages—hopefully with an echo of recognition for readers my age, and with a note of prescience for those younger.

One key maturational change is an altered perspective on time. In youth and early adulthood one rarely thinks of time running out. Psychologically time feels limitless, so if you take one option rather than another, you can expect one day to also experience the postponed option if you still wish it. With age, one begins to rely on a time calculus: if I do X, will I ever get to do Y? If I write a book on kinship, will I ever get to do one on the sibling relationship? Will this be the last time I see Venice or Taormina? As Neugarten suggests, a shift in time perspective occurs when one passes the meridian of life, from viewing life as years since birth to viewing it as years left to live (Neugarten 1968).

Closely related to this shift in time perspective is an altered sense of one's body. Health and stamina are no longer taken for granted; they become things to work at. The sociological concepts of achievement and ascription apply here, at least in a figurative sense. In youth, one's body is an ascribed fact, a healthy instrument one does not hesitate to challenge, push to extremity, and overindulge without fear of the consequences. From middle age that body becomes an achieved fact—an instrument to listen to, tune up, pamper, and, if need be, transcend. An unusual ache or stiff back may be a harbinger of some chronic disability rather than something that will surely pass. These experiences trigger a more cautious use of energy and a reduction of the excesses of food, drink, and exercise that characterized youth. In a sense they are small rehearsals for the acceptance of the loss of close intimates—parents, spouse, and friends—and of our own death.

Overview

The stress on cohort membership and the influence of historical events is congenial to most sociologists since they illustrate both the potential for change in adulthood and the influence of social factors on personal values and personality. We sociologists like to think that we are what we do, that is, that we are molded by social situations and the institutional webs that enmesh us (or at least that enmesh our respondents, if not the free-agent, rational beings that sociologists consider themselves to be). There is certainly ample evidence of the marks left on me as a member of the 1920s birth cohort and of the particular historical events that impinged on my life at certain critical stages.

By contrast, before the mid-1970s most psychologists were committed to the view that early childhood is a critical period of development that leaves indelible marks on people for the rest of their lives. Clearly parents exert influence over their children in the years from birth well into adolescence. As key socializers of the child, parents are central transmitters of values, skills, and expectations. The picture becomes murky when parental influence is traced in the adult years of the children. An extensive review of parent-child pairs by Lilian Troll and Vern Bengtson (1979), covering a wide range of studies including political opinions, voting behavior, religious beliefs, and life-style preferences, showed only modest correlations between parents and adult children. But affective solidarity between parents and adult children was not impaired by discrepancies between them in politics, religion, or life-style. Such findings refute most of the theories that have been brought to bear on child socialization (whether psychoanalytic theory, symbolic-interaction theory, learning theory, balance theory, or exchange theory), all of which assume that the stronger, closer, and more attractive the bond of a child to a parent, the more similar the behavior, attitudes, and values of the child will be to the parent. It may well be the case that in all social relations except the parent-child relationship such discrepancies would lead to an attenuation of affectionate bonds. The uniqueness of the parent-child bond may lie precisely in the simple fact of genetic relatedness: my son the criminal may be embraced along with my son the doctor , and parents remain salient to our sense of ourselves even after their deaths. Despite the considerable social mobility from my family of origin, and wide differences in politics and religion between myself and either of my parents as a consequence of cohort and historical influences, they have remained central to my affective and social life.

As I have grown older, my relationship to my mother has, if anything, intensified further. I suspect one reason for this change is coming to grips in more direct terms with mortality. Our ties to parents may weaken during adolescence and early adulthood, but toward the end of life, these bonds take on a renewed emotional salience similar in intensity to the attachment we experienced at the beginning of life.

Such thinking does not sit well with sociologists since they tend to prefer upbeat perspectives on life rather than a bittersweet one with hints of deeper levels of human relationships rooted in genetic linkages between people. In recent years developmental psychologists have also come to stress a self-generating conception of adulthood—the self as an active agent determining the direction a life will take (Brim and Kagan 1980)—much as the majority of youthful feminists do. Developmental change is the "in" concept, whereas stability has become a concept on the wane. This view is certainly supported by sociological work on occupational success among subjects under forty-five years of age. The consistent finding from status attainment research is that parental class and parental encouragement affect the final educational attainment of the child but do not extend to the occupational success of children by the time they are in their thirties. Dennis Hogan (1981) has been critical of status attainment studies on precisely the grounds that they neglect contemporary pressures that replace or supplement early family and school influences, pressures like those rooted in different labor markets, occupations, or firms with different promotion rates, or variation in family size and economic circumstances impinging on adults in the families they form.

For most people the decades of their twenties and thirties are marked by several simultaneous, powerful transitions that seem to produce changes from earlier periods of life in one's family of origin. But one publication from the Oakland and Berkeley, California, growth studies poses a serious challenge to the assumption that change is the constant in adulthood and that there are radical and irrevocable breaks from earlier years. Dorothy Eichorn and her associates (1981) report a sleeper effect when adolescent characteristics are related to early versus middle adulthood. That is, there were very low or insignificant correlations between adolescent and early-adult personality characteristics, but adolescent characteristics did correlate significantly with characteristics in late middle age. It is tempting to interpret this to mean that, all other things equal, from mid-life on, we become more like we were in our youthful years than we were through the years of

early adulthood, when the press of job and family often required us to act "out of character."

For men in early adulthood, role obligations involve the suppression of their tender, feminine side, and for women, their agentic, masculine side. Consistent with the Eichorn findings on middle age, a number of studies suggest a reversal in sex-role characteristics in later life (Gutmann 1968, 1969, 1975; Lowenthal et al. 1975; Neugarten and Gutmann 1968). With increasing age, older men become more nurturing and older women become more assertive. Perhaps that is why I experienced a different man in my grandfather than his children had known, and why many mothers-in-law are often considered intrusive and opinionated. Years ago I thought this contrast between a parent-child relationship and a grandparent-grandchild relationship reflected the fact that parents must exercise discipline and authority over children, whereas grandparents are released from this role demand and are free to indulge pure pleasure in, and affection for, their grandchildren. But it could also have to do with maturational change since grandparents are typically over fifty, whereas parents are in their twenties and thirties. Moreover, I have observed the beginning of this sex role reversal in my husband and myself. Years ago he was a dominant, assertive man who suppressed the tender side of himself, but that tender side is revealed more each year, while I feel much more freedom to be dominant and assertive than ever before in my life. This interesting shift shows itself in all our social roles, as parents, spouses, teachers, and organizational officers.

And so at sixty-seven I feel closer to the Alice of thirteen than to the Alice of Twenty or thirty. I like this new-old Alice better too. Does anyone know of a play calling for a woman character with a purple cape and a walking cane? I feel old enough, and young enough, finally to take center stage.

References

Baltes, P. B., and K. W. Schaie. 1973. Life-span developmental psychology: Personality and socialization. New York: Academic Press.

Bengtson, V., and L. Troll. 1978. Youth and their parents: Feedback and inter-

generational influence in socialization. In R. M. Lerner and G. B. Spanier, eds., Child influences on marital and family interaction . New York: Academic Press.

Brim, O. G., Jr., and J. Kagan, eds. 1980. Constancy and change in human development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Eichorn, D. H., J. A. Clausen, N. Haan, M. P. Honzik, and P. H. Mussen, eds. 1981. Present and past in middle life. New York: Academic Press.

Elder, G. 1974. Children of the Great Depression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gould, R. L. 1978. Transformations: Growth and change in adult life. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Gutmann, D. 1968. An exploration of ego configurations in middle and later life. In B. L. Neugarten, ed., Middle age and aging . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 1969. The country of old men: Cross-cultural studies in the psychology of later life. Occasional Papers in Gerontology, no. 5. University of Michigan: Institute of Gerontology.

———. 1975. Parenthood: A key to the comparative study of the life cycle. In N. Datan and L. H. Ginsberg, eds., Life-span development and behavior: Normative life crises . New York: Academic Press.

Hansen, M. O. 1952. The third generation in America. Commentary 14 (5): 492-500.

Hogan, D. P. 1981. Transitions and social change: The early lives of American men. New York: Academic Press.

Levinson, D. J. 1978. The seasons of a man's life. New York: Knopf.

Lowenthal, M. F., M. Thurnher, and D. Chiriboga. 1975. Four stages of life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Martineau, H. 1837. Society in America. London: Saunders and Otley.

Neugarten, B. L. 1968. The awareness of middle age. In B. L. Neugarten, ed., Middle age and aging . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Neugarten, B. L., and D. Gutmann. 1968. Age-sex roles and personality in middle age: A thematic apperception study. In B. L. Neugarten, ed., Middle age and aging . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Neugarten, B. L., and G. O. Hagestad. 1976. Age and the life course. In R. H. Binstock and E. Shanas, eds., Handbook of aging and the social sciences . New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Riley, M. W., ed. 1979. Aging from birth to death: Interdisciplinary perspectives. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

Rossi, A. S. 1964. Equality between the sexes: An immodest proposal. Daedalus 93(2): 607-652.

———. 1973. The feminist papers: From Adams to de Beavoir. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 1980a. Aging and parenthood in the middle years. In P. B. Baltes and O. G. Brim, Jr., eds., Life-span development and behavior , vol. 3. New York: Academic Press.

———. 1980b. Life-span theories and women's lives. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 6 (1):4-32.

———. 1982. Feminists in politics: A panel analysis of the first national women's conference. New York: Academic Press.

———. 1983. Beyond the gender gap: Women's bid for political power. Social Science Quarterly 64(4):718-773.

Rossi, A. S., and A. Calderwood, eds. 1973. Academic women on the move. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Rubin, L. B. 1979. Women of a certain age: The midlife search for self. New York: Harper and Row.

Sheehy, G. 1977. Passages: Predictable crises of adult life. New York: Dutton.

Troll, L., and V. Bengtson. 1979. Generations in the family. In W. R. Burr, R. Hill, F. I. Nye, and I. L. Reiss, eds., Contemporary theories about the family . Vol. 1, Research-based theories . New York: Free Press.

Chapter Fourteen—
A Woman's Twentieth Century

Jessie Bernard

I am a born writer. I began my writing career more than seventy-five years ago when I was in the third grade at Horace Mann School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The novel I began that year was never finished. I didn't have enough time. So I didn't become a published author until the next year when one of the weekly pieces schoolchildren throughout the city wrote for the Journal Junior —part of the Sunday edition of the Minneapolis Journal —appeared over my name. The best pieces won prizes—beautiful framed pictures—for their authors' schools. All told, in addition to publishing numerous pieces, I won two such accolades and, with my chum Mona Emslie, carried them around the school from room to room to receive the recognition due such achievement.^[1] My one and only dramatic success was the script for a playlet based on Beowulf for tenth-grade English at Central High.

But I kept on writing. At the University of Minnesota I majored in English and wrote stories, essays, and novels on assignment. It was not until I was a junior, though, that I discovered my true genre. One of my English professors suggested that I take a course or two with Professor Bernard in the sociology department. I did. I didn't realize until later that I was going to get hooked, that sociology was to be my genre. In fact, I was still writing novels a decade later in a seminar at Washington University.^[2] But my fate was sealed. There was no way I could escape it. I was doomed to a life at the typewriter—even worse, a compulsory life at the typewriter.^[3] And the words were to be not literature but sociology. I am not discounting the part played in this switch by an engaging

teacher. But neither can I deny the fascination of the subject matter itself.

It was, of course, a long time before I recognized why sociology was so fascinating to me, how much history I was myself a product of and participant in. I had lived all my life in the swirls and eddies of numerous historical currents. The paternal grandfather of my three children—born in 1941, 1945, and 1950—fought in the Civil War. He and his family were part of one of the great treks in United States history in the 1880s, from Kentucky and Tennessee to Texas. Their maternal grandparents, my parents, were part of a different kind of trek in the 1880s, from Romania—either Moldavia or Transylvania, I'm not sure which—to the United States. The 1890 U.S. Census books have been destroyed, so the first official recognition of their existence in this country is in the 1900 volume. And there they are, Bettsey, my own grandmother; Bessie, my mother; and David, my father.

Historians tell us that the twentieth century did not really begin until World War I. That means, for all intents and purposes, that I was reared in the nineteenth century, that I was enveloped in its optimism, its belief in progress, its can-do mind-set, its unquestioning belief in science and scientists, its confidence in human ability to solve societal problems, its innocence. It was a time of getting used to the idea that the old Western frontier was passing. It was the Progressive Era.

I was reared in Republican territory. The first newspaper story I ever read was about Teddy Roosevelt, a hero of mythic stature. I was born only thirteen years after Frederick Turner had told us that the era of the frontier was over, in a city not too far from what had been authentic frontier only a few years earlier. My mother's cousin Mendel and his wife had homesteaded there, in North Dakota, for several years. Mendel: student, scholar, gentleman with pince-nez glasses. How come, I now wonder, he hadn't known about drought and locusts and grasshoppers? He learned soon enough and returned to Minneapolis.^[4]

It was a time when immigration was a major issue, a time of belief in the melting pot, and of learning how to deal with the great tides inundating—or, as some said, hordes invading—our shores.^[5] In Minneapolis many of them were Scandinavian. My neighbors had names like Johnson, Peterson, Olson, Hanson. But there were Wasp names among them too: Waite, Emslie, Strand, Cormier. The woman with the long gray curls hanging down her back who came every week to clean our house was Mrs. Proven, and she took our laundry home to be done by her mother, Mrs. Brandon. Both were New Englanders and members of

the most elite church in town. There were two black families in my neighborhood, and in both of them the mother was white. In my class at Horace Mann School there were two black girls: Frances, who was sweet and quiet, and Lucy, who was angry and resentful. There was an old man, Mr. Peebles, born a little more than half a century earlier, who sat in the sun at the carpenter's shop down the street.

The city was run by the New Englanders who had come in the nineteenth century to establish the flour mills, operate the banks, manage the wheat market, and run the railroads—and the public schools. I sometimes say, in fact, that I went to a New England academy. In my high school you could take four years of Latin and, if you wanted, Greek too. You could take four years of science and three of mathematics, as well as French and Spanish—though not, I must add, German during the years I was there. At that time, every trace of German history or culture was eliminated from the curriculum.^[6]

In addition to the classic New England curriculum was the cadre of teachers, most of them women, and women of a special kind, stamped with a New England brand. The great American poets and novelists were naturally the New England writers. In United States history the preeminent figure was Alexander Hamilton. It was years before I realized that Thomas Jefferson was much the greater man of the two, and that George Washington was, of course, even greater. And that midwesterner, Abraham Lincoln, towered over all of them.

My great women teachers in high school were suffragists. They transmitted the feminist message. One of them, Mrs. Gray, my English teacher, told the story of the gentle lady who invited a gentleman to have tea with her. In the course of the afternoon the conversation turned to the suffrage movement. "How absurd," the gentleman said. "Think of your cook voting." To which she replied sweetly, "Yes, I often do. You see, he does." I had great women teachers in college, too. There was Anna Helmholtz Phelan, a statuesque Athene, who overwhelmed by her presence as much as by her learning. And Marjorie Nicholson, whom we lost to Columbia University. And Alice Felt Tylor, who taught sections in United States history but could never secure a regular appointment, despite her published work, because of the nepotism rule that precluded it for her as the wife of a professor in the department. And then there was Dr. Martin, who left for Smith College because as a woman she had achieved as much as she could professionally. It is not surprising to me now that a young woman with a background like mine would, with a little encouragement, become a sociologist.

The class position of my family was equivocal. My father had been a butter-and-eggs man who worked for his brother, the first in the "immigration chain," delivering—literally—butter and eggs to his brother's customers.^[7] By the time I was born a decade or so later, he was running a haberdashery on Washington Avenue and hiring another brother, the last in the immigration chain. A few years later he was buying up bankrupt stores in small towns in Wisconsin, Montana, and the Dakotas, running sales to dispose of their inventories. If he had such a sale going on in the summer we children sometimes joined him for vacations. The pleasantest places were in Wisconsin. I suppose by definition he was a middle-class entrepreneur, a risk taker who knew how to asses an inventory of goods and make a suitable bid for it. Sometimes he made mistakes—bid too much or misjudged the town's taste—and lost money. But overall he seemed fairly successful. It was strenuous, though, and it meant separation from us; as soon as he felt he could afford to, he gave it up and invested in Minneapolis real estate instead.

As soon as my mother, who had been brought to this country by her mother, had completed what education she was to have, she went to work in the garment industry in New York City. She remembered those years with considerable pleasure, sometimes singing to herself the songs that were popular at the time. Her mother had willingly allowed her to march in the suffrage parades of the day but never, never, to take part in any union-organizing activity that might threaten her job. And she was an obedient daughter.

I don't think my own class attitudes were influenced by either my father's "capitalist" background or my mother's experience as part of the "toiling masses." They were, however, influenced by the radical friends my older sister brought home from the University of Minnesota from time to time. Hidden in a corner, I listened and became caught up in their lively political discussions. They were ardent socialists. The name Eugene V. Debs came up often. They were persuasive—there was no one opposing them in those discussions—and I never doubted the validity of their arguments. One of them, the brother of one of my sister's best friends who was studying law, became a national labor leader; another of the young men became an international award-winning medical researcher; another a run-of-the-mine lawyer. The women became teachers. To this day my automatic response to, say, a labor-management issue tends to be a management one; my considered response is usually a labor one.

No one in my childhood or girlhood seemed to fear socialism. I don't

think I ever made a connection between my father's small-business capitalism and the bogey of my sister's friends. As an undergraduate I sometimes attended meetings of the Seekers, a communist group on campus whose faculty mentor was a sociologist named L. L. Bernard.^[8] The city itself was more concerned about the Farmer-Labor party.

I entered college at sixteen in January 1920. By that time World War I had been over a little more than a year, and the twentieth century was well on its way. Women had already been making themselves felt by doing important work like establishing government agencies, running the Children's Bureau and the Women's Bureau, transforming the Poor Laws, exploring new kinds of services for new urbanites, and designing a modern welfare state for the New Deal a decade later. They were to achieve suffrage that year. Now young women were demanding even more—the right to smoke, drink, wear short skirts, dance sexy dances, even appropriate Freud, and in general thumb their noses at the now-jettisoned nineteenth-century standards of ladylike behavior.

Women's clothes had changed—not only outer garments but underclothes as well. The year before I came to campus there had been a "corsetless coed" movement, and women were now wearing garter belts to keep their stockings up or just rolling them below the knee. Brassieres had already replaced beribboned camisoles or corset covers. Women were freer in their behavior. They walked differently.

The men returning from the war did not know what to make of all this. They did not understand this postwar generation. They misread our bobbed hair, rolled stockings, short skirts, and uncorseted bodies. They had gone to war at the tail end of the nineteenth century and returned in the twentieth. They had never known twentieth-century women before the war. They were not ready for them after the war.^[9]

My generation is remembered as a Charleston-dancing, Prohibitiondefying, sex-indulging young people roaring through the twenties in reaction to the end of the trauma of war. I do not remember the 1920s that way. True, we did go to private rooms at hotel parties for wine. But we were quiet, well behaved, low-key. The men wanted us to be safe, and they protected us. If anyone had annoyed us by unwelcome advances he would have been stopped. When I had to be on campus especially early for a college event, I sometimes spent the night in my date Mark's bed in an apartment he shared with a classmate and his wife. Mark never once so much as hinted at the possibility of sharing the bed with me. I never went to a "blind pig."^[10] I did not dance the Charleston, though I did dance cheek to cheek, but so innocently that

my brother and I were once asked to leave the floor of a dance hall for such impropriety.

Sociology had just barely achieved academic respectability and legitimacy as a member of the community of science when I was introduced to it in the early 1920s. At Yale, W. G. Sumner, ostensibly an economist, was teaching Republican doctrine to undergraduates but also assembling a great store of historical and anthropological materials for his course on the science of society, published in a book, Folkways, still fascinating almost eighty years later. Race was attracting a lot of attention. It was all that Franz Boas at Columbia could do to defuse the racism that tainted immigration policy. At the University of Chicago Robert Park was turning the city of Chicago into a laboratory for the study of urban life. Theories of progress were still being taught at my alma mater, Minnesota. There was a lot for this discipline to tend to, and I soon wanted to be part of it.

Professor Bernard always had a lot of groupies around him as well as radicals. Incredible as it seems in the 1980s, communist groups were not forbidden or negatively sanctioned on that midwestern campus in the 1920s. When the Seekers asked Professor Bernard to be their faculty adviser, he accepted. It seemed a matter of course. He took social criticism seriously, holding it to be an important part of his function as a sociologist.^[11]

Mate selection was once a major research interest among family sociologists, and they produced a sizable store of data. But there remain a lot of subtleties that might well fall between the cracks of all the variables. I was courted by the most eligible man in the social circles I moved in. It was precisely his social eligibility that made it ultimately impossible for me to marry him. When I heard about his family's life-style, their comings and goings, I drooped. I was intimidated by the homes his family and relatives lived in, by the kind of social life they engaged in, by the clothes they wore and how they wore them, by the style they entertained in. His wife would have a kind of life I could never successfully, or at least happily, live. She would have to run a certain kind of household, with elegance, dress a certain kind of way, with flair,^[12] entertain in a certain mode, with sophistication. I had no stomach for that way of living, no talents or skills for it. Just as Jo in Little Women knew that she could not marry Laurie, I knew I could not marry him. I ended up by marrying my professor, L. L. Bernard.

I was twenty-two years old. I had my second degree and was working toward my third. I had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi. I

had presented my master's thesis, which had already won a local prize, to the American Sociological Society. I had lived in a warm, safe world, free to roam but protected on all sides. I had read a lot of books and taken a lot of courses. I was massively ignorant. I was vulnerable. What I had seen ahead of me was a pleasant career as Professor Bernard's research assistant. He was an enchanting man to work with and for. As my mentor he had shaped my mentality. I saw the world through his eyes. But I had not seen marriage to him in the cards. I had not been looking closely enough.

The marriage lasted till death did us part, just over twenty-four years—if it could be called the same marriage over all that time. It was at first an apprentice-master relationship. It was to end as a collegial one.^[13]

A few years ago I was introduced to an audience as the venerable Jessie Bernard. My reply was so witty that I repeat it every chance I get. "I suppose," I said, "that when one ceases to be venereal she becomes venerable." Not too long after that I was introduced by a former student to another audience. He said I was childlike, no offense intended. I had no witty answer this time. I agreed. I am childlike, no offense taken.

I can only account for my being childlike by the kind of atmosphere I grew up in, was, in fact, born into. Eric Erikson—of whom I am not a disciple—tells us that infancy is a time when trust is established in the child. I never had any occasion to mistrust anyone or anything. I assumed, took for granted, accepted without question, that I would always be taken care of, that the world was a friendly place. When I lost my rubber in the mud coming home from kindergarten, I knew my mother would fetch it when I told her where it was. When, at five, I got all but buried in the snow on my way home from school, I knew I would be found; no cause for alarm. There were close calls from time to time, to be sure. I sat on the front steps evening after evening waiting for my father to bring home the doll I wanted so much, and when the doll never showed up there I began to have doubts. I broke into tears. When he learned about the doll, of course it appeared. I had taken it for granted that because I wanted it so much surely he could see that I did. Although my relations with my indulgent father were wonderful, those with my mother were more profound. Many years later when I had occasions to cry into my pillow it was my mother I called for, not my adoring father.

There were occasionally other crises of trust. There was the one when the house was filled with excitement as my older brother and sister were

preparing for a visit to Mendel's farm in North Dakota. I assumed that I would be going too. I was four. At train departure time all nonpassengers were told to leave the coach. Not until my father gathered me in his arms to take me off did it dawn on me—much to my dismay—that I was not to go. An ice-cream cone hardly provided enough balm that time. There were other such occasions but never any serious enough to pierce the cocoon of absolute faith. That kind of faith is a kind of grace—a gift. But it also had its cost. A great many useful skills—"street smarts"—were unattainable. Still, without trust, one of those game-theory prisoners loses his life.

Perhaps such childlike trust should be classified in adults not as a gift but as a kind of deficit, like, for example, lack of musical pitch, or inability to repeat a dance step after simply being told how to do it, or to follow a who-done-it and understand its resolution. When my children and I used to watch Perry Mason on television they had to explain Mason's last-minute solutions, how he had used the clue. They did not have my childlike trust. They were products of a different historical moment and a different family experience.^[14]

In 1958 we were told that "women scholars are not taken seriously and cannot look forward to a normal professional career" (Caplow and McGee 1958, 226). Fifteen years later, in 1973, Eleanor Sheldon told us that in those years "activist women . . . succeeded in putting the disabilities suffered by women in academia as a class high on the national list of social injustices in need of rectification" (Rossi and Calderwood 1973, ix).

I entered academia professionally in 1940, fairly well along in my career. Family had not been a major sociological interest of mine; the department at Minnesota had not played it up. Broken families, homeless men, and illegitimacy were dealt with in courses in the social work curriculum under Mrs. Mudgett at one end of the corridor; "the" family, on a quite different wavelength, came under sociology at the other. Robert Merton said in 1972 that "the handful of women sociologists were expected to study problems of women, principally as these related to marriage and the family" (1972, 13). I was a little late in recognizing this expectation. But, sure enough, just as Merton had said, when I became a college teacher—at Lindenwood College—the family became my beat. It was taken for granted that it would. My earlier work on success in marriage had been part of my absorption in measurement, not a leaning toward the study of marriage qua marriage. Not that I objected in any way. I began at once to delve into the literature and two

years later published American Family Behavior (1942).^[15] It was well received but, alas, became a casualty of World War II. The plates were melted down for war material, and the book was not reissued until some thirty years later.

Although a dedicated sociologist, I proved to be an undisciplined one. I did not take easily to the restriction of discipline boundaries. I enjoyed excursions into outside territory. I have been the prototypical marginal man. Although I became identified with the sociology of marriage and family, I have been equally concerned with the sociology of knowledge, especially of science, and of course with its history. Outside of my discipline I have enjoyed community with psychologists, historians, anthropologists, home economists, even—at some remove—mathematicians.

As a Comtean positivist, I believed, as the positive philosophy taught, that mathematics was the queen of all the sciences, including sociology. True, the only practicable way of using it was in the form of statistics, a subject not yet wholly at home in sociology departments when I was a graduate student. F. S. Chapin had been reduced to assigning a textbook in biostatistics in his graduate course on social trends.

World War I had enormously stimulated growth in measuring instruments.^[16] I was in the audience when L. L. Thurstone told us that even attitudes could be measured (1929). Years later there were instruments for measuring anything one could think of. In the early 1930s at Washington University I came in contact with a "measurement freak" in the psychology department. He was a compulsive measurer and I caught the fever. I wanted to measure everything. It became a mania. Just point me to it and I was off and running to measure it,^[17] at least to count until measuring instruments became available.

At midcentury I was enormously attracted to the game theorists. They seemed to be the wittiest among all the social science communities. They wrote with a sense of humor. The games they concocted for their players were fascinating. They were mean people. They were always trying to do one another in. And sometimes, as among those notorious prisoners, they were deadlocked, even with their fate depending on trust in one another. I was, nevertheless, attracted to the theory and tried to apply it to marriage and family, first in a chapter of the Harold Christiansen Handbook on Marriage and Family and then to the relations between the sexes in The Sex Game . I was invited to participate in a conference of game theorists—they turned out to be kind, friendly, hospitable even to this untutored outsider who so obviously did not know what they were talking about. I carried on a minor correspondence with

several of their stars and audited a faculty seminar on my own campus on the subject, but I knew I was far beyond my depth. There was no way I could ever begin to keep up in that fast lane.^[18]

In the early 1970s I was invited to participate in a conference entitled Successful Women in the Sciences . I replied that I would be glad to participate but not under the title then planned; it was too elitist. "I find myself," I wrote, "somehow or other turned off by the aura of elitism." It was too much like the then-current cliché of Queen Bees: "I made it. Why can't you?" The conference changed the title to Women and Success, but still I did not participate. When the book of conference proceedings was published I was charged, along with others, with being a pathetic example of women's fear of success.

Several women who were invited to participate objected to the idea of having a conference dedicated totally to the subject of "successful women." "The idea of 'success' was objectionable to some women. . . . The reluctance of these women to be considered successful was a pathetic revelation. As Matina Horner points out . . . women are basically afraid of success. In a woman . . . success is considered deviant behavior" (Kundsin 1973, 11). That comment stimulated a lot of questions in my mind. "Pathetic" was, like beauty, in the eyes of the beholder, and there was nothing I could do about that.^[19] But "fear of success"?

What was success? How did one measure it? Kundsin herself defined success in the context of her conference as "the ability to function in a chosen profession with some measure of peer recognition" (9). I think I passed that test.^[20] Jo Ann Gardner, an outstanding feminist, defined success in terms of "whether or not people get to do what they perceive as their work." I know I passed that test.^[21] My Oxford Dictionary was not very helpful. The first two of five definitions are archaic, and the third, dating from 1586, is "the prosperous achievement of something attempted; the attainment of an object according to one's desire, now often with particular reference to the attainment of wealth or position." I think I passed. I am hesitant because of the use of the words attempted and according to one's desire . They imply that I set up objectives or goals—wealth or position—and then hewed to the line. I am well aware that I may be fooling myself, that the "me" others see is not the person "I" see. But it seems to me that what really drove me was the need to write, to research, to report, to tell myself what I saw, felt, and lived. A great many of the accoutrements of success were bestowed on me.^[22] If they had not been, would I still have been so driven? I don't know.

If I had not been so pathetically fearful of success how much more

successful would I have been? What fear prevented me from doing what would have made me successful? It was, I finally concluded, not fear of success but fear—like Lord Acton's—of power that kept me from (the dictionary-defined) fear of success—power in my own or in anyone's hands. I did not want to be powerful. I didn't even want to be in charge. I didn't want to be boss-woman. I didn't want to be top banana. Leadership, OK. It did not imply coercion. Accolades like Eminence Grise I devour. Doyenne is fine. Elder Stateswoman, great. This was the kind of success I lapped up. All these honorific tributes were bestowed on me even before I achieved venerability. Only good sense and a sense of humor have saved me from being reduced to a cult figure, for which I am grateful.

In a less academic context the expression "use it or lose it" has more general application. It holds also for status. Unless one hews to the line of prescribed high-status behavior one falls back. One has not only to look the part—which I never did—but also to act the part. At one time or another, for example, I have served as mentor to a number of men and women; all were properly appreciative, rewarding me with kudos for my—relative to them at the time—higher professional status. Then their own careers flourished, and soon they were patronizing me. I neither looked nor acted the part of a high-status professional. (I had, I was once told, a "gee whiz" aura about me.) One woman, commenting on my insistence on running with the pack instead of at least playing the part of star, once said, in effect: "Go sit down and be a matriarch." Why did I insist on continuing to do sociology? If this was fear of success, I have been guilty of harboring it.

I have experienced a number of epiphanies in my life. Only two are relevant to my career as a sociologist. Both had to do with the sociology of knowledge, one related to the Nazi degradation of science and the other to the feminist augmentation of it.

In the 1940s half a dozen articles—on power, science, conflict—issued from my typewriter. They did not add up to an integrated treatise, but they did cohere; they elaborated a consistent theme. From one perspective or another they portrayed a mind if not in anguish at least in a state of serious malaise. If I had waited to write them all together they might have constituted a book on the nature of science and of scientists and on the uses to which science is put—or, rather, on the loss of my nineteenth-century heritage of faith in science. It was a troubled time in which, almost day by day, I was learning about the underside of science

and the vulnerability of scientists. It was a decade of growing disillusionment with science, scientists, and the uses to which science can be put.^[23]

In my part of Origins of American Sociology (1942) I had traced the burgeoning belief in science as the means, in effect, of social salvation, as exhibited in the American Social Science Movement, which was characterized by a worship of science. I had paid tribute to the "monumental dream" of a society based on science. I had been dazzled by the idea of a science in the service of human betterment. I "believed" in it. I had organized my intellectual life around it. It served as a sort of religion, an integrating force, in my life. I had a great deal invested in it.

In the first decades of this century it had been easy, as part of the nineteenth-century optimism, to accept that century's idea of scientists as ethical men, as, in fact, the heroes they were depicted as being in biographies and fiction. True, there did surface, from time to time, examples of the fragility of the ideals of science. There were researchers who violated its canons, who manipulated their data, falsified results. But the sanctions imposed by peers were so severe in such cases that at least in one, that of Paul Kammerer, exposure precipitated suicide.

The first world-class example of the contamination of science by ideology that I knew about was the notorious case in the USSR in which Lysenko had to design his research to prove the ascendancy of environment over genes in plant and animal experiments. The disastrous results in time supplied a corrective.^[24]

A decade after I had paid tribute to the nineteenth-century's "monumental dream" of science in the service of humankind, disillusioned, I was writing: "The scientist is the key man in control of the greatest power in the world today, the power of science. Men who want to control that power are not going to permit the scientist to remain aloof. Nor are scientists in a position to withstand them." What happened in those ten years? It is hard to trace one's intellectual tracks. But, for one thing, we had by then begun, little by little, to learn the story of science in Germany in the 1930s and of the behavior of scientists. In my parochial naïveté I had not known that my nineteenth-century image of the scientist was, in effect, a parody—or rather a burlesque—of what had actually been going on there. I hadn't noticed the scientists' feet of clay.

It was to take us a long time to learn what had been going on in the scientific community in Germany in the 1930s.^[25] There even the cynosure of all the sciences, the science in the most strategic position to protect its mores—physics itself—was being politicized. Some, including two Nobel laureates, had—horrible dicta—propounded proper

"Aryan" physics, which was based on observation and experimentation, and fought "Jewish" physics, which was too mathematical and theoretical. The Nazi "dismissal policy" in the universities was soon to correct the overrepresentation of such non-Aryan "deviationism." Why had their fellow Aryan scientists permitted this drain on their talent resources? Why had they not resisted the dismissal of these "non-Aryan" scientists? Why had so many of them chosen "prudential acquiescence," "inner emigration"?^[26] "The foremost concern of the physics community during the Nazi years was the protection of their autonomy against political encroachment." Why did they not see that acceptance of the dismissal policy was, actually, acceptance of such political encroachment? Why did "the ethically correct course of action . . . [seem to be to] learn to be silent without exploding?" (Beyerchen 1981, 207). Beyerchen comments that it was "not that scientists were political cowards, but that they did not know how to be political heroes."^[27]

There may have been extenuating circumstances. The dismissal policy was implemented by way of what conflict theorists have called "salami tactics," small incremental steps.^[28] There seemed to be no point big enough to take a stand on. There seemed to be no moment to say, no more. If we accepted the dismissal last week, why fight this new one now?

Would the ideal-typical scientists whose roles had evolved in the nineteenth century have known how to be political heroes? Would I have? The question has troubled me. How, I have sometimes asked myself, would I have acted in Hitler's Germany? This is a hard question to wrestle with. As a scientist would I have gone along with the other physicists on the dismissal policy? Would I have seen such a policy primarily as a denial of the autonomy of my community or as an injustice to my colleagues? Would I have been solicitous of the "non-Aryan" physicists and helped them, or would I have been glad to get rid of their competition? Would I have warned mainly on the grounds of the impact on the prized reputation of German science, or would I have argued on the basis of principles of human justice? As a run-of-the-mill German, would I, in mortal fear, have turned away from my "non-Aryan" colleagues, as some did, even denounced them, or would I have protected them? Would I have actively dissented from Nazi policies, joined the underground? As a Jew would I have groveled and tried to prove myself more Nazi than Hitler himself, or insisted that it was all just a transitory aberration and would soon be over? Or would I have been somebody's "pet" or "exception" Jew, protected from danger? Would I have ac-

cepted such protection, with all the psychic and ethical costs involved? I am never comfortable with any answer, nor at all sure that I could have passed on my own standards of ethical behavior.^[29]

It was not, of course, these "Aryan" physicists themselves who were to perpetrate the Holocaust of the 1940s. That could not be laid at their door. But the mentality that could accept the dismissal policy—as drastic for their scientific colleagues as the expropriation of more material treasures was among less distinguished "non-Aryans"—thus stamping it with an anti-Jewish ideology, cannot be held wholly innocent of complicity either.

The violation of the canons of science, the imposition of the Star of David on Jews, the discriminatory laws—these we were just beginning to learn about in the 1930s. We began to hear also about the Nazi use of human subjects in medical and pharmaceutical research, of race tests based on skin and hair and eye color in an effort to "Germanize" their population. There were also reports of breeding retreats where unmarried Nordic women were invited to come to have their Nordic babies. The old nineteenth-century chimera of eugenics was once more becoming visible. There were stories of euthanasia of the old and unfit. But not yet about the Final Solution.

Our ignorance was not fortuitous. It was, in fact, performing well the intended function of ignorance. The Nazis had been understandably secretive about their policy of extermination. They had gone to great lengths to keep it as hidden as possible or at least as inconspicuous as possible, even to the prospective victims themselves. If the function of ignorance was so well performed, it is understandable that the rest of the world knew so little.

Information about the crematoria percolated only slowly by way of the mass media.^[30] It came in bits and pieces, an item here, an item there, often in formal reports not easy to understand without context. My own writing had not been influenced by it at all. Until now it had been only the intellectual significance of Nazism for science that had had an impact on me. But subliminally it all must have been adding up in my mind. For, suddenly, it began to fall into place. I remember the very moment when it happened. I was in the university library reading an article on the psychology of the extermination camp. I had in my own professional training read countless books on prisons, prisoners, war. But nothing prepared me for this. Was it scientific? real? accurate? I was competely at sea. I could not handle it. There was nothing in my experience or reading that gave me an intellectual preparation for it.

There have been other holocausts in human history. The destruction of whole cities was not uncommon in Old Testament times. The Armenians still remember the massacre more than half a century ago, ad do the Ukrainians the starvation visited on them by Stalin's agricultural policies. But there has never been, as here, a demonstration, coldly and scientifically carried out by civilian bureaucrats, that reduced the human being to less than zero.

By the end of the decade the intrinsic ethics in science had become indisputably clear to me. The argument of its value-free nature was untenable. It was still strongly urged by some, including George Lundberg, an outstanding representative of the positivist position in sociology. He had been a fellow graduate student at Minnesota. He retained his firm belief in the value-free position. In 1949 I published a letter to the American Sociological Review in which I noted my misgivings that he was overselling science in his book Can Science Save Us? (1947). It seemed to me he had oversimplified many of the ethical implications inherent in the application of science to social life. He hoped for the time when science would be used for what the "masses of men" wanted as determined by polling. These "masses" were to articulate the ends to the achievement of which science would be applied. I did not complicate the point I was trying to make by challenging the value of polling the masses of men as a way of determining the values to use as guides for the application of science. Our Constitution had the basic function of protecting us from guidelines so susceptible to antisocial ends. And, fortunately, such protection was safely beyond Lundberg's suggested polling of the public, which—several studies had already shown—did not always accept some of the ends, like freedom of speech or press, that the Constitution protected.

Science was, of course, indispensable; in that I concurred. But more was needed. Lundberg had said that "any scientific statement ('if the spark, etc. . . . then the explosion') contains no . . . implicit ethical conclusion because the culture (or other conditions) to which scientific statements are relative are always explicitly and conditionally stated." In my letter, I replied:

The ethical implications are present because the conditions necessary to produce the given result constitute, in effect, a prescription which may become an imperative for action. "If the spark, etc. . . . then the explosion" can also be stated technically: "to set off the explosion, apply a spark." The implicitly ethical formulation would be: "If you want to set off the explosion, apply a spark." The sequence is thus: a pure-science statement of

antecedents and consequences; a technical or engineering statement of the necessary antecedents to produce the given consequences; an ethical statement ordering the antecedent behavior in order to achieve the consequences. When the element of will is introduced, "if you want to get such and such a result, do thus and so," the pure-science contingency statement has become transformed into an ethical statement.

As I have sat here reviewing the intellectual trauma of that difficult time I am struck with its relevance some forty years later. In the 1940s the great scientific ogre was the atomic bomb. And as some of the scientists who had thought it through and solved the theoretical problems came to be filled with guilt, they organized to prevent its ever being used again. And later, with the discovery of the double helix and the burgeoning advances in medical knowledge and technologies, all the old ethical problems vis-à-vis the uses of science multiplied almost endlessly. The term algeny was invented as the biological counterpart to alchemy . Like the alchemists, the algenists were urged to be careful in the uses made of their knowledge of genes and their skills in applying it. And I am still, personally, struggling, like many others, with both the politics and the ethics of science, including my own.

Not the least of the traumas I experienced regarding my own disillusionment with science and scientists was having to recognize the painful traumas LLB was also experiencing. There was no way, as he himself had recognized, that science could be prevented from being used perversely. I never discussed the matter with him. And by the end of the 1940s he was already a spent man, too ill to care. This brilliant man, this galvanizing teacher, this idealist, was dying.

After the dark night of the 1940s and 1950s the renaissance of feminism in the 1960s was like a burst of beautiful lights that illuminated the scene and brought with it a spreading warmth. The turbulent 1960s reached me first through my daughter—a freshman at Sarah Lawrence—who, along with her peers across the country, was becoming angry at the anticommunist activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) while researching it for a college term paper. For all intents and purposes she might herself have been one of those protesting Berkeley students. To me it seemed quite far away. And anyway California students seemed always to be involved in something or other avant garde. But this time I had to catch up. The movement was spreading beyond civil rights. There was all this talk about drop-outs, hippies, and, most ominously, drugs. Presently it was necessary for me to face the issues in my own household.

Thus at the same time that I was tangling with the military to prove the authenticity of my son's conscientious-objector status, my living room floor was sometimes lined wall to wall with youngsters from school he had brought to Washington for antiwar demonstrations. The issues of peace and civil rights were bringing conflict and challenge to our very doorsteps. Nor was I exempted. I was myself participating in the early activities of the Women-Strike-for-Peace movement. It seemed little enough.

Toward the end of that tumultuous decade I became aware of an amazing underground network press, of articles and papers mimeographed, stenciled, sometimes printed—from Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago, Memphis, Berkeley—which were circulating among women and carrying astounding contents: reports of feminist meetings, of feminist ideologies, of feminist arguments.^[31] This was obviously something that as a sociologist I had to know more about. It wasn't going to be easy. The women I approached were not hospitable. I finally managed to get an invitation to a meeting. This is how I later reported on my first lesson:

Early in 1968 I became exposed to the Women's Liberation Movement in the underground press. My first reaction was purely academic; I saw it primarily as something interesting to study, as something I had a professional obligation to observe. When, after considerable effort on my part, I received an invitation to a consciousness-raising session, one of the young women there said that I "threatened" her. Sitting quietly on the floor in their midst, showing, so far as I knew, no disapproval at all, my academic objectivity, my lack of involvement, my impersonality, was giving off bad vibrations. This incident gave me something to think about, including my stance vis-à-vis research and also my discipline.

A few years later all the excitement generated by this movement began to surface in the established press, and the cauldron of ideas, theories, and insights bubbled throughout our society. The power of sisterhood was beginning to emerge.

Although I had intended originally to watch the new movement primarily as a research concern, like so many others who came to scoff I remained if not to pray at least to ponder. It proved to be the first rumbling of a resurgence of feminism. It gave us the concept of sexism that rendered a whole sociological universe visible. Like the term "racism," which we had not felt a need for until the 1960s, when it first got into the dictionaries—because until then such concepts as prejudice and race hatred had seemed adequate for the analytic job—so also with

sexism: we now needed it to help us first to see and then to analyze sociological phenomena we had not bothered to analyze before.

The feminism I had been reared in had subsided after 1920 and been all but wiped out by the feminine mystique in the 1950s. I was myself among the mothers of the baby-boom babies associated with that mystique.^[32] My initial response to this renaissance of feminism was not, however, as a member of that cohort, but as a sociologist.

"Your feminism is too cerebral," I was once told. I could see what my accuser meant. For although I was, to borrow from the Friends' vocabulary, a "convinced" sociologist, I was also, to use the conservative Christian terminology, a "born-again" feminist. Not, that is, a knee-jerk or gut feminist. I was—I believe—convinced by its logic and persuaded by its ethos. It made sense to me even on the basis of male criteria. That it conformed to the values I believed in was icing on the cake. I had been so far from being a born feminist that I had to be alerted to sexism. I had to be told when I had been insulted.^[33] I learned even to laugh about it.

What passion I came to invest in feminism was aimed at its relevance for the sociology of knowledge. I could understand how it had happened that practically all human knowledge had been achieved by men, that it dealt with problems they were interested in, that it was from their perspective. I had to accept that. But the male bias did not have to be perpetuated. I wanted the discipline of sociology to be as good as it could be by any standard. Ignorance or rejection of the growing corpus of feminist research relevant for sociological analyses was detrimental to the discipline. I became dedicated to the incorporation into the corpus of human knowledge of the insights and data contributed by this scholarship.

Not that I eschewed activism to achieve a wide gamut of specific, practical, immediate changes that justice called for (from potable water, to occupational training, to simple industrial technologies, to health care in the third world, to affirmative action, to equal pay for work of equivalent value, and to women's control over their own bodies in the developed countries) but that I thought the most useful form of activism for me was investment in the spreading of the feminist message—in writing.

My feminist activist writing has taken the form not only of sociological writing but also of letters on behalf of women in academic jeopardy, on behalf of promotion and tenure. And, of course, in writing checks. There have also been marches, demonstrations, meetings, and fundraising events.

I am as undisciplined a feminist as I am a sociologist. I mind being restricted to any one ideological position. I have been called Marxist by dedicated feminists, and it has been intended as a compliment. By others I have been called non- or even anti-Marxist, and it too has been intended as a compliment. Or, sometimes, in either case, a hostile criticism. If either charge is true, it is coincidental. My preferred stance is non- or multi- or omni-ideological. I find it oppressive to hew too consistently to only one line. I seem to be unable to catch the delicate nuances that require one to reject all of any particular canon in order to accept any part of another—even opposite—canon. I find myself comfortably accommodative of parts of many ideologies.^[34] If one accepts the assumptions on which the premises are based, most ideologies can make a good case. So, although I have learned a great deal from feminists of many stripes I am not a member in good standing of any of the groups that have been distinguished—radical, Marxist, socialist, psychoanalytic, whatever. Most seem fruitful, some sterile.

Whatever form feminist activism takes, it seeks structural changes in the institutions of a society—laws, court decisions, contracts, guidelines, regulations, administrative orders, and the like. Some forms seek change in the "minds and hearts" as expressed in the manners and morals of a society, in the sexist humor that puts women down, in the insulting expressions, in the ignorance of female sexuality, in the refusal to take the ideas of women seriously, in the implication of male superiority, and the like. Blatant discrimination, exploitation, and oppression can be dealt with by formal political means. Subtler forms call for additional and different remedies.

I am finding, in brief, that although my professional feminism tends to be cerebral as charged—dedicated to the improvement of my discipline—my personal feminism is more than merely an intellectual preoccupation. Like a great and increasing number of men, I believe that the contribution of the female world to the making of policy everywhere is long overdue. I find myself "believing" in feminism as I once did in the nature of science—and hoping that it will not suffer the same fate. I find myself hurt when the female world falls short of what I conceive of as its potential. I find I have a vested interest that it find its own way and not become merely a reflection of the male world.

In the last few years my interests have turned in the direction of the female world seen from a global perspective. As a participant in an increasing number of international meetings of women from all over the world and as a member of international feminist networks and as an

eager acolyte in a burgeoning cadre of women researchers learning and teaching about the lives of women everywhere, I continue to find myself—at eighty-six—doing sociology with sustained excitement and verve. Everyone should be so lucky.

References

Bernard, Jessie. American Family Behavior. New York: Harper, 1942.

———. "Biculturality: A Study in Social Schizophrenia." In Jews in a Gentile World, edited by Isacque Graeber and Steuart Henderson Britt. New York: Macmillan, 1942.

———. "Can Science Transcend Culture?" Scientific Monthly 61 (October 1950): 268-73.

———. "Citizenship Bias in Scholarly and Scientific Work." Alpha Kappa Deltan (University of Pittsburgh), February 18, 1959, pp. 7-13.

———. The Future of Marriage. New York: World, 1972.

———. "The Power of Science and the Science of Power." American Sociological Review 14 (October 1949): 575-84.

———. "Reply to Lundberg's Comments." American Sociological Review 14 (December 1949): 798-801.

———. Self-Portrait of a Family. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.

———. The Sex Game. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968.

———. Women and the Public Interest. Chicago: Aldine, 1971.

———. Women, Wives, Mothers. Chicago: Aldine, 1975.

Bernard, Luther Lee, and Jessie Bernard. Origins of American Sociology. New York: Crowell, 1942.

Beyerchen, Alan D. Scientists under Hitler. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.

Caplow, Theodore, and Reece J. McGee. The Academic Marketplace. New York: Basic Books, 1958.

Christensen, Harold T., ed. Handbook of Marriage and the Family. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964.

Hartmann, Edward George. The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948.

Kephart, William M. The Family, Society, and the Individual. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

Kundsin, Ruth B. Women and Success: The Anatomy of Achievement. New York: Morrow, 1974.

Lundberg, George. Can Science Save Us? New York: Longmans, Green, 1947.

———. "Comments on Jessie Bernard's 'The Power of Science.'" American Sociological Review 14 (December 1949): 796-98.

Rossi, Alice S., and Ann Calderwood, eds. Women on the Move. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1973.

Chapter Fifteen—
Personal Reflections with a Sociological Eye

Cynthia Fuchs Epstein

Memories are selective, but so are our current visions of who we are and how we think others perceive us. The invitation to reveal a bit of the personal—the backdrop to our sociological work—is seductive, an excuse to reflect and make sense out of our lives. Of course, there is always the danger that one will not make sense but make nonsense (to paraphrase Clifford Geertz's evaluation of common sense). Nevertheless, our versions are probably as good as, and as true as, those of any other observer. For most of us, there will not be too much interest in the story of our lives anyway. But if we will not be noted individually, we might consider that our personal cases will add up to a data reservoir about the people who created the sociology of this period.

There is also the seduction of writing an essay that does not require extensive research and footnotes. A good friend, well known as a television personality who has written about her life experiences, quipped that she always writes about herself because she hates to do research. I do not hate to do research, but it is a joy to write from experience and without reference to the work of others.

Ten years ago I attempted some autobiographical writing for a small book that included the stories of six women who had made contributions to scholarship and the arts. That account forms the basis for parts of this essay and stands up to a decade of questioning what is true and what is illusion. But because I was somewhat more careful then about being personal, I thought I might expand a little here to include references to events that seemed unwise to mention in the past. My relation-

ship with my parents, my husband, and others who were important to me is, of course, personal. But the events we shared, the choices we made, and the situations in which we found ourselves were not untypical; other women I know who went on to achieve some notice in academic life and other spheres of work had experiences that matched mine in some combination or another. In one way, then, this is meant as a personal memoir, and in another as an account of a woman coming of age personally and professionally in a remarkable time in our history. Scholars of my mother's age lived a different story, and the women students I meet today will live yet another. So what follows is a contribution to the record of that moment in between. I hope I have struck a proper balance between discretion and revelation in this essay.

For once, I can start at the beginning:

I was born at the Bronx Maternity Hospital on the Grand Concourse, a place I was told, also operated as an abortion center in the days when abortions were illegal, but routinely performed and seldom talked about. As the first child of a middle-class couple I was clearly a wanted child, and my early years were well documented by hundreds of photographs, notations of accomplishment, and the warm care of devoted household workers as well as my parents and maternal grandparents. Aside from being traumatized at age four by a mock initiation into Neptune's kingdom on crossing the equator with my parents en route to Argentina, where my father had a branch of his business, few memories stand out, and I gather all was well until my status as an only child was destroyed by the birth of my brother when I was seven years old. As the first boy in my father's family to carry the Fuchs name, he was doted on, to my considerable chagrin and unhappiness. I did not know what it meant to carry on a name, but I did know it was important, and I also learned that a boy was held in special regard. My mother observed then that I changed from a pleasant and "good" child into a moody, brooding, and at times selfish child. She pointed out that my brother was now the good one, exceptional in intellect as well as in character, and although I did not think much of her judgment, I was distressed to be no longer in favor. But coalitions were set in our family around this time over issues of good and bad, and if my mother was aligning with my brother (infant though he was), I aligned with my father, a clearly more interesting and loving person who encouraged my preference. My mother had made me understand that in her priority system love for husband came before love for children, a priority curious to me since I, as much a consumer of the common culture as anyone, believed in

mother love as uncontested. Rather than experiencing the mother love that I knew to be normative, mine was to be unrequited until middle age. I have often wondered how much feelings of rejection by my mother affected me later in my relationships with men and in my distancing from a strictly conventional sex-role syndrome. Hindsight can foist causality on related experience. But if I felt somewhat unconventional in my pattern of life as a child, there were also forces that moved me onto a conventional path. In turning her back on the mythologies of motherhood, my mother was unconventional. She was also unconventional in the middle-class neighborhood in which I grew up because she was unconcerned about glamour and acquisitions, disdaining materialistic values and things in favor of moderation and limited acquisitions. As a result I had dreamed of material comfort and longed for the day when I could have the matching sweater sets and matching socks my classmates wore. Yet I also respected the priority my mother and father gave to intellectual values over material values, and they too played a part in my visions of the life I hoped to have.

In my family there was a general orientation toward service and doing good. Both parents were active members of charitable and political organizations. My father had been a socialist in his youth, became an active reform Democrat, and worked as a leader in the Jewish community to achieve statehood for Israel. My childhood world was sprinkled with activities tied to causes. My Jewish parents embodied the Protestant ethic. No money was spared for personal improvement, but little was spent on frivolity; hard work was prized. But my parents presented different perspectives on other pleasures. My mother seemed to deny the sexual component of life, whereas my father was a sensual man whom many women found attractive. I learned early in my teenage years that although my father's family was fiercely loyal to each other (and to their spouses), fidelity was not characteristic. Hence, as I grew up I developed an appreciation and tolerance for the complexity of loving.

I certainly had more dreams of loving than I did of intellectual achievement. As a girl I do not remember any fantasies of traveling to other countries and seeing my books on the shelves of scholars there and discussing my research with them, all recent experiences of mine. In fact I never imagined myself a writer of books at all. I kept my interests restricted to the political and the historical. Actually my fantasies ran mostly to achieving the heights of vicarious pleasures as a contemporary Madame de Staël. I imagined I could marry some articulate and poetic

rich man and maintain a salon to which I would invite the brilliant minds of the era, providing good food and a good ear.

That was the dominant fantasy. Flights of fancy at various times revealed me as Wonder Woman (my comic-book hero) or an abandoned princess who had been left at the doorstep of my unappreciative parents. In fact my mother caught on to this last fantasy and taunted me for many years by calling me Cinderella, mocking my dream of being discovered as a true princess. My fantasies were all passive ones, appropriate to the sex-role designation of my generation: to be revealed, to be discovered, or to revel in the brilliance of others. I never imagined that by my own mind or hands I could achieve the exalted position to which I aspired, in spite of the fact that my father liberally bestowed on me books containing the biographies of great women, particularly great Jewish women: Deborah in the Bible; the poet Emma Lazarus, whose words are engraved on the Statue of Liberty; and the socialist Rosa Luxemburg. I suppose these had impact, however, because they exposed me to the idea that women could be doers and movers, although I was terribly insecure about my own competence to move or do anything.

Many people today insist that role models provide a framework that creates identification, and that early conditioning sets aspirations and motivation. I had some of those role models. One was an outstanding teacher in the third grade, a woman by the name of Ruth Berken, who until recently designed curricula for New York City public schools. Berken gave us research projects to do, visited our homes to learn about the environment from which we came, and argued that we stand straight and not depend on the artificial constraints of girdles and bras. She was the first teacher I had in an experimental program for intellectually gifted children (IGC). This was a rather exciting but also quite intimidating program in which one was immersed in a sea of precocity; large ideas were stuffed into small bodies. I suppose that what I came away with from this program was a set of intellectual standards and tastes, a real nose for the person who could generate and defend ideas best, and a good dose of humility. (I never had the experience that many of my colleagues in college or graduate school had of being at the top of their class. From third grade on, most of my contemporaries were intellectual strivers, and many were brilliant.) I, like many others in my classes (although I was sure it was only I), was made to realize that intellectual activity often did not provide closure and that there were a lot of smart people around who were always set to challenge. I ended up with a feeling of enormous insecurity along with strains of megalomania—an impossible combina-

tion that made me view the future with some trepidation. I never expected to achieve the kinds of success that Matina Horner tested for when she identified the syndrome she called fear of success, found in such endeavors as trying to become a doctor or a writer. But I did have a fear of failure, of not performing well in my studies or in other of my youthful activities such as ballet dancing, painting, or flute playing. That fear often stood in the way of putting myself in competitive situations or even striving hard. Not trying for first chair in the orchestra, for example, meant that I could not be turned down. The fear-of-failure part of this syndrome is probably not any more characteristic of women than it is of men, for I see it in certain of my male colleagues whose constant striving appears to be motivated not so much by a need to achieve more fame but to remain well regarded by their peers.

Perhaps Ruth Berken was a role model for me, as were my IGC classmates, many of whom have gone on to fame in the arts and sciences and world of letters. But they also seemed so impressive that I do not think I ever identified with them in any classic way. Rather, they made me afraid to fall behind. My mother, in truth or in the selective recall I offer in this essay, was not a positive role model in this strange process. She was a housewife who downgraded her own capabilities, whose own fears prevented her from pursuing her talents, and who because of her social and economic situation retreated into the worlds of domesticity and the local community. She was not forced to confront her own fears and lived with feelings of inadequacy—a classic female pattern. But her feeling of inadequacy also made her push the argument that women should become competent, not necessarily in an actual career but in a steady occupation just in case things should go wrong. I somehow got the message from my mother (a child of the Depression) that, as likely as not, things would go wrong, and therefore I came to believe it was important to have an occupation and not to depend on a husband, parents, or anyone else. So in a sense it was not positive identification that pressed me but negative role models and negative messages. They made me convinced in my later sociological thinking that perhaps motivation is created by a more complex web than we acknowledge, and that fears as well as rewards act to orient people to good things as well as bad.

I mention some of the various themes, strains, and contradictions in my early years because I am distressed at the somewhat linear view many psychologists have offered us of human development. My experiences were not consistent; my choices were not necessarily rational; unanticipated consequences flowed from chance events.

Later experiences were also certainly as important to me as those earlier orientations and fears. The choice of Antioch College turned out to be a good one, not only because I found a lot of intellectually kindred souls there but also because I became attached to a group of students in political science who were studying with Professor Heinz Eulau. Eulau frightened a lot of people because he was so demanding and uncompromising as a teacher, but I was used to being frightened, and it did not occur to me to buck authority, at least not the authority of a person I respected. I was exulted by this brilliant man who made each class an experiment and who assigned us weekly essays on our readings, including a wide range of thinkers such as George Herbert Mead, Robert K. Merton, Paul Kecskemeti, Harold Lasswell, Freud, Marx, and Darwin. Eulau had attracted a group of students who took pleasure in the constant intellectual interaction and interchange his classes offered and who with him explored theory to find new explanations for what caused the varieties and clusterings of human behavior. In fact, of that group of about ten or twelve, a good portion became professors in the social sciences with outstanding reputations. Others went on to become dynamic lawyers in public-interest law. Eulau was one of those facilitators of excellence Merton has written about.

It was also through Eulau that I was able to get a scholarship to the University of Chicago Law School—an abortive experience, as it turned out, since I found law to be incompatible with my humanistic-behavioral orientation and since my husband (whom I had married the summer before my senior year in college) and I both had unrealistic views of how we could manage on small savings and no income; by then he, a former newspaperman, had decided to go back to graduate school. My parents thought that as a married woman I ought to be cut off from financial help. I might note that I chose law school through no great motivation but because the scholarship was there, because I had not thought about graduate education in my field of political science, and because I did not know what I wanted to do or could do. I, like many of my sisters today, thought of law as a field of learning that turned one into a real professional, that is to say, a lawyer, a person with a marketable skill. I felt I could then make a living should I need to, reflecting back on my mother's suggestion that one should "know how to do something."

I carried the burden of guilt heavily on my shoulders as I left law school after only six months. I felt that I had let all women down by my decision. I cannot remember anymore why my husband and I were so discouraged, he in his field and I in mine. But I do know that there were not many

channels of communication, support, or guidance available that we knew about. I was also uncomfortable being married. I was away from what I imagined to be a rich and interactive dormitory life, and I found marriage itself a constraining structure—different in feel from the surge of romantic passion that led me into it. The Chicago experience certainly raised my consciousness regarding information, how tracking is accomplished, what it means to be an insider and an outsider, and how people themselves come to make the self-exclusionary moves to water down their dreams and make unfulfilling compromises.

Tails between our legs, my husband and I both came back to New York, where we grew up, and took the kinds of jobs liberal-arts college graduates take. He, who aspired to become a reporter for the New York Times, got a job for the house organ of the taxicab industry. I found work as a secretary for Science Research Associates, a psychological testing firm, work made more boring than expected because my immediate supervisor was being cooled out by the organization. From there I worked at a series of jobs I held in organizations with social purpose. I spent three years as a writer and research assistant for the program director of Hadassah, the women's Zionist organization, which raised millions of dollars a year for hospitals and training programs. I learned a great deal about myth and reality there. The women at the top were high-powered executive types. They came in early in the morning and left late at night; they vied for power and control of the organization; they had strong ambitions not only for the organization but for themselves as well. Although they were described by the Census Bureau and themselves as housewives since they did not work for money, they were as involved and active as any IBM executive.

I suppose I had been asking questions about the place of women in society since childhood because my own searching led me to consider what being a woman meant in society and what options there were for a woman to develop as a person. The experience in Hadassah showed me clearly that while there were ongoing myths about women's nature and their abilities to control, dominate, and seek notice, women's performance simply did not match the myth.

During three years of working in this organization for low pay and with little autonomy I also went to the New School for Social Research at night for a master's degree in sociology. Afterward I decided to go to Columbia University for a Ph.D., encouraged by my most provocative teacher, Henry Lennard. His work on communication patterns and systemic analysis was the most exciting intellectual stimulation I had had

since Antioch. I decided to go to Columbia after a lot of self-searching and guilt; I did not want to give up the autonomy of making money or to put a burden on my husband, who was also starting a new career. At that point I asked my parents for financial help, and they agreed.

I chose Columbia because it was the best school in New York. I did not know it had one of the finest sociology departments in the country. One of my first courses was with William J. Goode, who excited my imagination with his cross-national, cross-historical approach to family sociology and with his theoretical interpretation, which made sense of the diversity of practices people exhibited in this context. The chance to work for him came a bit later, and I helped do the research for books on changes in family structure and on a propositional inventory of the family.

From Robert K. Merton I became entranced by the ways in which role theory and systematic analysis opened explanation into other perplexing areas. I remember now thinking about the situation of women while making notes (which I later used in my book Woman's Place ) as he discussed the articulation of roles, the problems of cross-cutting status sets, and sex-role stereotyping. I suppose that for years I carried in my head pieces of the book I was later to write, and I plugged the situation of women into whatever theoretical framework or methodology was offered as part of the Columbia curriculum. With each application I could see more.

I went to Columbia in 1960. I remained a student for a long time because I took on various teaching and research jobs in between and because I was afraid of taking my comprehensive exams. In the meantime I also had a baby, a consuming love affair (which I shall report on later in this essay), and four years of psychotherapy. In 1966 I was working on a dissertation about women lawyers—I had become interested in what happened to women in a male-dominated profession—when Betty Friedan started the National Organization for Women (NOW). Added to my other role obligations as teacher, student, research assistant, and mother, I also became an activist. I rode the bus to Albany with Friedan, Kate Millet, Ti-Grace Atkinson, and Flo Kennedy to picket the state legislature, and I wrote testimony to support new guidelines for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission interpretation of the antidiscrimination laws.

My activism became intermittent after that. It soon became clear to me that my larger contribution would be on the scholarly side. But it has been through interchanges between the scholarly and activist worlds, as well

as by keeping an eye on what has been happening to women's position, that I think my work has developed. I have translated my sociological work into social-policy directives, appeared before members of the United States Senate, and been on a committee advisory to the Council of Economic Advisors. I even managed to appeal for affirmative-action policy in the White House to President Ford. These excursions into the public realm gave me an appreciation for the impact of ideology on social action, and I noted how ideas competed for attention.

My own history as much as anything has made me dubious about the reasoning offered in recent times about why women have not gone far in careers. Of course I am generally wary about explanations that neglect discriminatory practices by gatekeepers and the institutionalized components of sexism. My own history indicated that with some help and luck, women could engage in work, social activism, and family life. I was one of a number of women who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s who managed to do a respectable amount of work while juggling not only family responsibilities but also other relationships and dealing with their emotional turmoil. Thus I, like many women graduate students I have known, became involved with one of my professors (who I shall now refer to as my friend since that is what he was and remains). Our relationship was for a time a synthesis of love and work and also of torment and guilt. We spent a lot of time together, and I spent a lot of time brooding; somehow time was found for all of this. I cannot say I was productive during this period—although he was very productive—but I certainly thought a great deal about sociological issues, and I learned a lot from him. He was a highflier in matters of mind and also in sports, arts, and food. He encouraged me to do more and suggested I could be more than I had ever expected. Of course there were other consequences of that association. Being in the shadow of an established person created many problems, as quite a few emerging professional women of my generation had good reason to know. There were many reasons why this relationship ended, and each of us remembers and explains it differently, although we both acknowledge the value it had.

I cannot say what it would have been like if we had made a life together. In retrospect, from the point of view of self-esteem and career, it was a good thing that we parted. Certainly I learned later how my private emotional attachment was seen by others as part of a more general pattern—the relationship between an older man and a younger woman, between a professor and a student. I do not mean to discredit the strength of the feelings that characterized such relationships by

making a statistic of them and thereby depersonalizing them. Most were between people looking for intellectual as well as emotional excitement; many endured permanently. As for me, I believe separation enabled me to grow more professionally and develop an independent career, and it eliminated the question others might have had about whose mind it was that produced the work. The benefits of separation did not have to do with the attitude of my friend, who was always supportive of my work and generous with praise. It had to do with my own need to become independent and with the academic climate, which, I fear, still supposes that the contributions of younger women who associate with established men are usually reflections of the senior person's ideas.

When that relationship ended, my husband and I decided to try to work out a new life together, and we did so with new understanding and renewed love. He had always been a devoted partner, supportive of my work, and he continued to be so in his care for our child and as editor and intellectual companion. I suppose that I have come to believe that the combination of love and work is one of the most heady experiences possible, but I have come to accept the wisdom offered by my colleague Rose Laub Coser that in academia it is best accomplished with partners who are at the same tenure level.

The ways in which women are urged to look for men who are older and wiser than they are have become grist for my sociological analysis of the place of women in society. I became increasingly aware that the second ranking of women was not just an accident of fate, limited to the fact that many women had babies and thus were not available for other jobs, or that combining the jobs was too difficult; there seemed to be a systematic patterning to the ways in which women were suppressed. The mechanisms of domination that abounded in male-dominated occupations also worked in female-populated occupations. They were also operating in the family and in cultural life. Even in the microinteractions of everyday encounters that Erving Goffman and others have written about and that constitute one of the new and exciting subspecialties of sociology today, women faced controls that placed them, and kept them, in subordinate positions. Whether it was the insistence of the culture that ideally they be shorter, show less knowledge, and make less money than the men they chose to speak with or live with, or the argument that they were nobler, more tender, or more emotional than the men in their lives and therefore ought to segregate themselves from much of their daytime life, women were made agents in their own exclusion and domination. Women wanted the men in their work life or

love life to be better than they were. They wanted, and they were instructed, to look up to them. Let me stress here that I am talking about not only early socialization experience but also the ongoing social process. Even in encounters with strangers women learned an etiquette of submissiveness and were subject to microcontrols of the lifted eyebrow and the put-down.

Why, I asked, was this true? I have decided that because women constitute the largest threat to male domination, intertwined as they are with the lives of men, gatekeepers of society invest much in keeping them down. In fact, as I learned through observing and studying the lives of women in the professions, the reinforcing or punishing experiences in adult life often act to change substantially the self-image and aspirations of women. I knew that the reinforcing events in my life had done more to change my own image of self and create aspiration than any amount of early socialization (although I did have some help in therapy). Among those events was an opportunity to teach at the college level early in my graduate-student career. Herbert Hyman, one of my professors at Columbia, offered to help me get a job at Finch College teaching cultural and physical anthropology, an assignment I took on with some bravado since I had little preparation in physical anthropology. Thus I had to immerse myself most intensively in the field to keep several steps ahead of my students. The experience was very successful: I brought excitement to the students over this new material I was only just learning myself and also discovered that I had the capacity to teach and influence students. I had never thought much about a career in college teaching, but the experience reinforced my sense of self and gave me direction. It seems odd now that what is commonplace to graduate students today should have been a revelation to me. I think we are all more aware of process now and stress the occupational facts of life to our students. The process was more haphazard then, and women students got less attention devoted to their career trajectories in these matters, although certainly many male students (I learned later) shared similar complaints.

The other major reinforcing event was the publication of my book Woman's Place in 1970. The book had a first life as a research report to the Institute of Life Insurance, which had given me a small grant to review literature on women in the professions, a virtually nonexistent topic in the 1960s. I presented a section of the report at a meeting of the American Sociological Association attended by Grant Barnes, then the social-science editor at the University of California Press. Barnes asked

me about my work, and I sent him my report, never dreaming it could become a book. It was Barnes who redefined what I was doing, and his encouragement led me to revise my work, which was published just as the moment the women's movement seemed to be taking off. Woman's Place was the first sociology book analyzing women's exclusion from the male-dominated professions, and it was read widely. Many of the issues it raised became the agenda for other people's research as well, and it certainly became the base for my own further specialization in the realm of women and work—on black women, women in the legal profession, and the larger issues of the invidious distinctions created and maintained about men and women.

Although my work was programmatically about the issue of gender, I felt I was also forging some theoretical ground, first in applying Merton's framework on the dynamics of status sets in the analysis of women's place in society, and later in focusing on the impact of structure on creating differences in such attributes as capacity, aspiration, talent, and rank. The more research I did, the more I was finding that the sex differences identified by psychologists and sociologists could be explained by bias in method or perspective or by the revelations of research, which showed that more purported sex differences could be accounted for by differences in education or opportunity. My latest book, Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender and the Social Order (1988), reviews and assesses some of my past work and that of others in identifying the skewed knowledge that dichotomous thinking both in the sciences and in the world of "common sense" has produced. Unlike some other feminist scholars, who claim that differences between the sexes exist but that women's perspective is distinct and contributes to a different and better understanding of the world, I believe such differences are few. Norms specify more humanitarian concerns for women, but there is no evidence that women are any more caring and noble than men. Women do benefit from having the sensitivity some outsiders and subordinates develop, but as I have stated in Women in Law (1981), it would be wrong to say that being humanitarian or alert to injustice is generically woman's work.

Women's work is, however, part of my work, and I believe myself to be enormously fortunate to have work that is intellectually gratifying as well as socially useful in revealing knowledge and debunking myths that limit people's lives. I have enjoyed teaching for this reason, as well as the opportunity to travel widely and meet hundreds of people interested in the work and the mission. Travel and its attendant notice have also

made me a different person—stronger, more forceful, and always eager for new experience and opportunity. I am less easily satisfied now, more critical, but grateful for accomplishment and recognition. I am also more angry that work on women is seen as less global and less theoretical than work on other subjects. I have always considered my work theoretically interesting and indeed thought of my first book primarily as a work of theory that used the framework of status dynamics to explain exclusion of a status group from the high-prestige sectors of the professions. Later work focused on other aspects of status-set theory: for example, an article, "The Positive Effects of the Multiple Negative" (statuses) used black women as a case in point. Invariably, however, my work was seen for its substantive contributions to the analysis of women and not as an analysis of the stratification system, the dynamics of status acquisition, or the impact of structural variables in general on such characteristics as self-image, aspiration, and choice. In fact I believe the emphasis on gender that has come into focus in the last decade ought to have been on every sociologist's mind who is at all concerned with the social order. To that end, Deceptive Distinctions is a study in the sociology of knowledge, although no doubt it will be categorized as a book in women's studies. The intellectual ghettoization that relegates women as a subject matter to fields labeled women's studies (do we have class studies? ) remains an intellectual disgrace. But the inattention to the theoretical dimensions of my work (because it was seen primarily as substantively interesting) helped me toward a better understanding of the political and ideological underpinning of the development of knowledge. In this too I am not alone: two major conferences on theory in sociology in 1986 and 1989 did not include any works on theory by scholars who have examined issues of gender.

In any event, these reflections are set down at what I consider to be a good time in my life. From 1981 to 1988 I had the opportunity to spend six years at the Russell Sage Foundation, a kind of miniature Institute for Advanced Study, where I wrote Deceptive Distinctions and began a new study of the workplace. I am based at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a bubbling intellectual center with a diverse student body. I am also in touch with many people in the publishing and writing world, partly through my husband, who has become a publisher, and partly through my own books and a large network of sociologists and feminist scholars.

Some of my satisfactions are quite conventional. I have a loving marriage and an interesting and attractive son who has grown to be an

accomplished writer and poet and who has turned his considerable writing and technical skills to film making. In addition, I have many friends on whom I can depend for good discussion of intellectual matters, personal comfort, the exchange of warm hospitality with excellent food and wine, and the gift of optimism about human perfectibility.

That about sums up the pieces of life that come to mind at the moment and about which I can write at this time. It leaves out many of the warts in my soul, my behavior, yearnings, and strivings, and much of the minutiae of everyday life that fill most of my time but are not worth mentioning. It leaves out my life as a writer, a teacher, an active member in professional associations, a wife, a mother, and an administrator. There was a time when I poured out my soul in volumes of letters, in poetry, and in endless discussions about the meaning of it all with close friends. I have less time and patience for that now; I find it less interesting but also miss it. Drama in my personal life has caused me intense pleasure and pain, and although I am glad to be free of the pain, I am not content with the self that has become more careful and protective. Maturity has its advantages; it is helpful in producing more and better work, makes one feel wise, and is even amusing, but it precludes drama. I will try to settle for its benefits. Perhaps there is yet a new form of drama to be experienced around the corner.

Chapter Sixteen—
Research on Relationships

Pepper Schwartz

There are different kinds of career patterns. Some involve a moment of pure chance, a choice made, a new path taken. Others are channeled from the beginning by a parent's ambition or a mentor's vision. Still others are ordained by necessity—a job is available, and the need to survive is paramount. My own history takes none of these routes.

My story—and my good fortune—is that my career, though not ordained or automatic and perhaps not even the best choice, was foreseeable from my earliest childhood interests and personality. In short, I have been studying intimate relationships all my life, but before it was a formal course of study it seemed just the stuff of life: being fascinated by my friends' and family's lives, being unduly intrigued with the topics of sex, love, and commitment, and being voyeuristic about the life-styles of others whether or not I felt I could, or should, share them. Even if I were to quit my work tomorrow, I would still chat with my friends about their relationships, endlessly analyze mine, and ponder what I consider to be the most important interpersonal questions that exist: what makes people bond together, what causes them to break apart, how do they create continuities in their lives, how do they operate in the face of unpredictability, sorrow, and loss, what makes them happy and fulfilled, and how does all this relate to their family of orientation, procreation, their gender, their sexuality, their life-style, and their life chances?

How early did these interests start? I will avoid loathsome psychoanalytic insights and begin with behavioral data. As a child I was gregarious with contemporaries and adults. I liked having knowledge because

among my parents and their friends information was highly valued. In my family a child could not be too precocious, and I was determined to win my parents' approval by exhibiting intellectual ability. When I discovered that my parents found big words adorable, I became a veritable fountain of them. When I found I could use the same tricks with my friends and at school, I continued enhancing my vocabulary and academic achievements.

My parents were liberal, Jewish, upper middle-class people who wanted their children to have a social conscience, a work ethic, and high expectations for their own behavior. My mother was more intellectual than my father, and when she was younger, she was more antiestablishment than he. My father is more the day-to-day achiever who respects the recognition of others "of substance" and who thus insists on more worldly success than my mother finds necessary. My father demanded excellence (trying, for him, was not enough), and from my mother the message was that achievement in the world could be a shallow and unfulfilling thing. She insisted on a trained and critical mind. She had a no-holds-barred opinion of what is good and what is bad, and there was no favoritism in her judgment. On occasion, she refused to finish reading articles of mine that were not up to her standards or that she considered boring. She died in July 1988, and I lost my most treasured friend, critic, audience, and moral guide.

When I was growing up my parents kept a progressive library. My dad was born in 1903, and my mother in 1911, so progressive in this instance included new works of enlightened living by, among others, Havelock Ellis and Alfred Kinsey and associates. I poured over all of it. I loved the beautiful bindings, the discussion of intimate and secret stuff, and most of all the feeling that I was being trusted with adult material. That feeling intensified when I realized my friends did not have access to such treasures.

I also found out that my friends did not have access to my parents' freethinking. My mother, a serious student of art history and a bit of a collector, had a large drawing hung in our hallway of a sculptor's rendering of a woman naked from the waist up. It dominated the middle of a long stairway and was visible to anyone who entered the house from the front door. My mother loved the quality of the drawing; my friends fixed on the size of the subject's breasts. Both girlfriends and boyfriends found the picture endlessly entertaining. Amid the giggles I would announce in a serious tone that this drawing was art and that they should shape up. I found that this gave me great authority. I derived even more

status from the sex books that my mom gave me when I was about ten. These might seem tame today—the usual egg-and-sperm chases and drawings of denuded vulvas and penises—but they were hot stuff to my peer group. I would hold educational sessions where these books were presented and explained.

Two incidents stand out in my memory. The first happened one afternoon when my girlfriend Sally came running over to my house in tears. In shame and fear she told me that her mother had caught her masturbating and had yelled at her that it was wrong and that she was going to go crazy. I was angry: I knew her mother had not read Ellis or Kinsey and that she was needlessly torturing my friend. I dragged out my scholarly sex tomes and showed her an alternate perspective. She was comforted—especially when I told her that my mom said it was okay as long as you did not do it in class.

The second incident was related to the first. I began to think there was a singular lack of sex information among my group, and sometime in my eleventh year I organized a sex information club. Each week about eight girls would meet in my knotty-pine basement and each time a new subject would be discussed. I remember one day we discussed sanitary belts and napkins and passed around products that my mother had provided. Another time we discussed french kissing, but we decided that it did not really happen because it was too yucky. The name of our group was the Change of Life Club, and though my mother tried to argue that this expression was usually applied to another phase of life, I resolutely maintained that our lives were changing and that the name fit. So we kept it.

And our lives were changing. The years between ten and eighteen contained the mundane things of life that create writers, feminists, and analysands. Although I was an excellent student, no one, least of all my demanding parents, took my aptitude for scholarship seriously, I suppose because I was other-directed and therefore inappropriate in their minds for a scholarly career. That honor was bestowed on my eldest brother Gary, who at sixteen entered the University of Chicago. My other brother also went to Chicago, but despite my high grades I seemed destined for a less lofty destination.

In high school I was, to put it in its most sympathetic light, possessed by my peer group, obsessed with my hormones, and seeking acceptance by everyone in every sphere of life. I worked like a steam engine to be all things to all people. I wore a lot of makeup, which disgusted my mother. I was definitely in heat, which worried and enraged my father. I became

a cheerleader, and that revolted my brothers. Nonetheless, I also tried to please them all. I read voraciously for my mother, I held political office for my father, and I went to civil-rights demonstrations and meetings with my brother Herb. I tried to demonstrate to my family that I had a brain and a soul, even if the latter was hidden under a letter sweater. I lived in two worlds, and I found both entirely satisfactory in that I wanted to achieve in both, the contradictions be damned.

My eldest brother Gary, now a cultural anthropologist, probably understands this more today than he did at the time, for in recent years he has studied adolescent peer groups and the formation of adolescent identity. At the time, however, my mother and brothers saw me as somewhat aberrant. But I learned a lot about human relationships by trying to reconcile my various worlds.

I think that finally it was my sexuality, rather than my intellectual pursuits, that made me ditch most of my high-school compulsions. I wanted sexual independence—and respectability—which was basically impossible to achieve during that period in American history. I changed my reference groups. I switched from my social club to a nonequity theater group and became more interested in my English class than in the Girls' Athletic Association. I let my new theatrical friends become my peers. At sixteen I was rehearsing almost every night, doing shows on the weekends, staying up late, having a relationship with the tallest guy in my class (I was the shortest girl), and re-sorting my values. I was, however, still cocaptain of the cheerleading squad.

Cheerleading notwithstanding, the theater and my theater group in high school changed the way I looked at the world. Front stage and back stage were literal as well as analytically useful terms to me. I started to do some independent thinking about who I was and who I wanted to be. I did not come to any conclusions—they were several years away—but I knew I liked my motley world of actors, homosexual men, musical and literary types, and ambitious women.

Sometime in this period I decided I wanted to be either an actress, a writer, or a sociologist. I do not know how sociologist got in there; I do know, however, that it stayed because it survived a process of elimination.

I went to college at Washington University in St. Louis, which was my second choice after the University of Pennsylvania, which did not accept me. I applied to both because they were supposed to have excellent sociology departments. I remember my interview with the representative of the University of Pennsylvania. He was extremely wealthy, and

he received me in the paneled study of his home on Lake Shore Drive along Chicago's gold coast. He radiated old money (to which new money has a profound attraction and repulsion), and I suddenly felt very Jewish, very nouveau riche, too made up, and generally unworthy. He evidently thought so too. And I felt discounted and shut out during the entire interview. I wanted to confront him or do something dramatic; but I did not, which I regret.

I went to Washington University and was placed in a variety of honors programs including those in English, history, and sociology. I tried out and acted in plays; I joined a sorority and eventually became its president; I ran for office on the student council and won. In other words, I repeated in most ways my high-school pattern: I was also a cheerleader.

But there was some change. Even though I knew my extracurricular activities encouraged my mother and brothers to think I might conform and follow a traditional route, to expect me to be rather ordinary (i.e., settle down with a doctor from Scarsdale and raise three lovely children), I began to be as ambitious for myself as fantasy would permit. This ambition helped me decide my future.

The first decision matured in my special English class. In high school I had taken an advanced-placement test, which if passed allowed the candidate to skip introductory courses in college. I had shocked my school (but myself only a little) by not only doing well on the test but getting one of the highest evaluations in the city of Chicago. In an inspired moment following a discussion with my English teacher, Mrs. Hurd, I had written the test essay on insight, using Lord Jim and Oedipus Rex as my material. When the evaluations were announced and I received special mention, there was quite a hubbub in my school because, given my bobbysoxer persona, I was not expected to achieve at that level. I remember that week of recognition vividly because it meant to me that I could be more complex than people perceived me to be and that I did not need everyone's ratification to have talent or get ahead.

At Washington University the test placed me in a class peopled by other achievers who were supposed to be gifted writers. There were eight of us; the professor bored us all into a stupor, and it was hard to keep my head off the desk. I got only one A on a paper the entire session. I decided I did not have the talent to be a writer.

I gave up on acting as well. I felt I didn't have the guts or requisite amount of narcissism to be successful. Everyone I knew who wanted to act was willing to kill for a part. I lacked, or was frightened by, that kind

of ambition and also, upon reflection, I decided that living for applause was not going to help build character.

That left sociology and a new love, history. (I had correctly assessed that even modest writing skills would be adequate in those disciplines.) I loved almost every class I had in both subjects. I concentrated on medieval Japanese history and became—and have remained—fascinated with the politics and sociology of that period. I might be writing about samurai today if Helen Gouldner had not taken me under her wing.

Dr. Gouldner decided I was worth spending time on. She submitted a paper of mine (on my theater experiences) to Erving Goffman, who thrilled me by commenting on it favorably. She encouraged me to deliver a paper at an undergraduate sociology conference. She signed me up for a master class with her ex-husband Alvin Gouldner (I am not sure if they were divorced at the time), and soon, at her urging, I was interacting with graduate students and taking graduate classes. All this was in my freshman year. She helped me apply for (and win) a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in my senior year. Her efforts are the real reason I am a sociologist by training as well as by inclination.

However, it was not clear at the time what my area of specialization would be. I took my Wilson Fellowship at Washington University because my boyfriend of four years was going to law school there, and I did a master's thesis on the socialization of law students. Since my father and one of my brothers were lawyers—and I thought I should consider law school—I decided to specialize in the sociology of law. After completing my M.A. and being released from Saint Louis at the end of my love affair, I applied to an East Coast graduate school with a good program in the sociology of law. It was important to me to go to an elite, eastern university I think because, obsessively, I was still smarting from the University of Pennsylvania interview.

I went to Yale University. That educational experience eclipsed all others and decided my future intellectual directions, but not because of the courses I took. Yale was virtually all male at the time; there were no undergraduate women and relatively few women graduate students or faculty. At first it was exhilarating to be one of the only women on the street. That experience became less sweet, however, when it became clear that a woman had to fight to be a first-class citizen of the university. While most of my own professors seemed unbiased, the rest of the university was solidly uninterested in women. There were numerous petty insults, like looking for a women's bathroom in Linsey Chittendon Hall and being told to go to some other building. A visiting woman

professor, Jackie Wiseman, told me that the maids in the graduate hall in which she was staying would make male faculty beds but not hers.

Such incidents accumulated until ugly patterns of sexism became apparent and consciousness-raising. One incident was particularly shocking. I became an acquaintance of Elga Wasserman, who was appointed a sort of dean of women, although it was not called that. A distinguished chemist, and an elegant woman, she was kind to me and other women students but found our burgeoning feminism a bit overblown. She would listen to us complain about this or that insult while all the time giving us the feeling that she did not believe that it applied to her. She never doubted that she would be a full member of the Yale administrative elite—or so she thought at first.

Shortly after Elga began her job, she found out that the administration's meetings took place at Mory's, a drinking club that had been on the Yale campus for a long time and was a male-only retreat. A goodly amount of female outrage had been vented against the place, all of it to no avail. (Years later the club finally got nailed and had to admit women or lose its liquor license; but it did not accept women until its most sacred, and lucrative, function was endangered.) I do not know what Elga thought was going to happen, but I suppose she thought the administration was going to change the meeting place when she joined the staff. It did not. Instead she was asked to discreetly use the back steps to an upstairs room and help preserve the old traditions, despite the loss of dignity to herself. She did so for a time, but much as she wanted to be a good old boy, she could not keep humiliating herself. When she asked them not to continue putting her in this situation, they said the equivalent of "don't be a bitch," and she was left without further polite recourse. So she did what the rest of us were learning to do: she took impolite recourse. As a course of last resort, she wrote an open letter to the faculty telling them what was going on and asking their support. That was the end of Elga at Yale. I believe she went on to law school.

My postgraduate education in sexism was changing me and other women at Yale. Many of us had been successful in high school and at life by playing traditional roles well. We had learned to be pursued, have power in conventional ways, and shine in some great man's glory. I was never strong enough to totally reject that traditional route in high school or college. Until Yale, I had never understood the nexus between sex, sex-role, power, and privilege.

Yale taught me about systems, as well as values that are created by systems. I was not ready to give up all the accoutrements of peer

certification—anyone who has tasted acceptance knows that you have to be extremely strong and self-confident to have had it, be willing to lose it, and really not give a damn about it—but I was beginning to understand what discrimination, crassness, and disregard could do and how they could be applied to a whole class of people. Because Yale was built for the privileged, or those who sought privilege, it had more than the usual population of men who had inherited sources of self-esteem by coming from wealthy or powerful families. The subtle (and unsubtle) intersections of class, sex, and status at Yale helped give me insight into the distinctions that were made between men and women.

Thus when my gender became a liability in terms of fair evaluation and equal opportunity, the allure of being a princess diminished, and the privileges of traditional feminity were no longer enough compensation. I do not think anyone ever entirely loses the desire to charm, using traditional gender skills to advantage; but when those traditions exclude some of the most important parts of identity—intelligence, ambition, honor, and dignity—the old bargains cannot be kept.

I remember a lunch where the caste implications of gender became clearer to me. At the time I was taking classes in the law school, partly because law interested me and partly because I thought the law school had the brightest students, and it was against those people that I wanted to be tested. God would strike me dead if I did not also admit that I thought it was the best place to find a worthy husband: I wanted to be free, but not forever.

I was sitting in the law-school lunchroom with some of the people I thought most challenging. They were having a debate—there were always debates—and I thought I had some sharp points to contribute. I made them, but no one seemed to notice. Each time, a few moments after I had spoken, a man at the table said the same thing, to everyone's admiration and applause. This happened about three or four times. I was crushed. Either I was not articulate about my opinions and had to relearn how to communicate, or my opinions were not worth hearing for some reason. Confused about what I had, or had not, said, I took a male friend aside and asked him if I had not said the same thing as others. I wondered if perhaps what I said sounded different from what they said. His answer both reassured and infuriated me. He said he had heard me make my points, but he thought he might have been the only one at the table who had. As far as he could tell, at that table, in that group of men, only men were certified as worth listening to. Certification also came from serving on the law review or as clerk to a Supreme

Court justice. He thought my points were correct and well made, but he did not think I was going to get much recognition from male law students and advised me to forget trying.

Reacting to major league dismissal and discounting, many of us women at Yale carried a chip on a shoulder and employed an attack-first strategy. This attitude was not the best way to win over the old guard, but we were so mad at them it was difficult to be politic. We annoyed a great many old blues, but we created a bond with one another. It was a time of sisterhood, not only at Yale but also across universities and across disciplines. Our new understanding of our experience prompted us to search for and support female friendship and colleagues, although I must admit we were elitist about which other women we sought out. (We were, after all, pretty snotty ourselves—we were not doing much organizing among women from Albertus Magnus, a local Catholic college—and it took a while longer for my friends and me to think about the women's movement in something more than self-interested, professional terms.)

I did make some of my closest friendships at that time. Participating in a social movement together certainly promoted emotional solidarity. The sociology women I grew close to during those years are still some of my dearest friends. Among many great friendships the closest was with Janet Lever.

I was drawn to Janet for a number of reasons, not least because she seemed to have an independence of spirit that exceeded my own. In addition, she was an excellent student, had better quantitative skills than I did (and was a generous and patient tutor), and shared some of my interests. We hung out a lot together—so much that people at Yale named us the Bobsey twins and continually called us by each other's names. We did not look alike, but at Yale, unlike almost any other place on the East Coast, two short, energetic, and irreverent Jewish girls were easily mistaken for each other.

The year 1969 found Janet and me challenged by our social life but not particularly by our academic curricula. We debated doing something on the side (opening an ice-cream shop was a serious contender), but a more academic pursuit caught our imagination. Yale's undergraduate college decided to go co-ed (five hundred missionaries were to be selected), and we thought studying the transition would be a great way of looking at the gender wars from above instead of from our position in the trenches. Yale was so consciously and unconsciously male that we felt that the first year of women on campus would provide a natural

experiment since it would reveal male and female territories, show where gender traditions were most passionately conserved, and uncover what changes in intimacy and colleagueship might occur with gender integration.

For research purposes—and for fun—we entered Yale undergraduate life as participant observers. From this experience we produced a book, Women at Yale , and our first paper delivered at a national meeting, where Erving Goffman, the discussant (was this not fated?), took us apart. We also wrote our first journal article on courtship at mixers. It had the appropriately sophomoric title "Masculin et Féminine: Fear and Loathing on a College Campus."

We found studying undergraduate men and women unexpectedly unsettling and absorbing. We were not so far from our own undergraduate days that the research was without emotional impact. Further, it served to transfer some of our own need to know about gender, both politically and personally, into a framework where we could apply sociological tools to the discovery process. We could go to a mixer, get involved in the choosing and rejecting sequence, feel it with all the immediacy and insecurity that the undergraduates did, yet still have enough distance to interview both the men and the women and see each perspective. By being slightly older—and not really in the undergraduate market—we could also take experimental license we could never have taken as real undergraduates, such as seeing what happened when a woman asked a man to dance or when some other norm was violated.

Another interest got professionalized through this project. As part of our involvement in the undergraduate experience we led discussion groups for Philip and Lorna Sarrel, who were starting up one of the first undergraduate sexuality courses in the country. They were counselors and researchers, and they wanted to know more about the students' needs and feelings. After reading the materials available at that time, I decided there was almost no good information about female sexuality and that the literature in general was opinionated rather than researched. Some books, like Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask (a best-seller then), struck me as so outrageous that I became zealously committed to producing alternative information and viewpoints. My first effort was a collaborative book with Philip Sarrel and the rest of the discussion group leaders called Sex at Yale , which later was taken over by a commercial publisher and republished as A Student's Guide to Sex on Campus .

Yale's greatest gift to me was an unstructured graduate program that gave me the time to focus my sociological interests. The school asked little more of me than to be smart and productive; it was an age of intellectual ambition rather than professional training. The conceit of the place was that the gifted would rise to the top, the disciplined would be productive and ultimately distinguished, and one should sample from campus life to be able to encourage the best in oneself and others. The program did not prepare me—or almost anyone else in my cohort—for a job. Although some people had mentors (I was not so lucky here; I had great friends among the faculty, but I did not replicate my undergraduate situation), few people were produced as so-and-so's student. It was a collectivity of individual accomplishment.

It was also a time of political awakening and individual conscience, of anti—Vietnam War activity and demands for social justice. New Haven has a large, poor black population, and town-and-gown problems, always present, increased in intensity when Bobby Seale was arrested and, as the Crosby, Stills, and Nash song immortalized, tied to a chair during his trial. Student and town activists called for "days of rage," and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin came to campus to demonstrate. Enormous numbers of Yale undergraduates and graduate students dropped whatever else was in our lives and attended meeting after meeting to address "the issues" and let out our adrenalin-enhanced emotions. Although then the protest seemed like a time-out from school, it was actually a graduate education in racism, sexism, and social movements. It remains one of the few times in my life where I was involved in trying to accomplish collective action within a truly diverse population. The war between the sexes, however, continued. Politically liberal men proved little more enlightened than the Yale old guard. Bringing coffee to the head of the Black Panthers had a lot in common with bringing coffee to a member of the Yale Corporation.

The Yale experience was, in equal parts, personally, politically, and intellectually challenging. By the end of my years there I had left the sociology of law and become committed to the study of gender, family, and sexuality. However, there was no one on the faculty seriously committed to those areas. I was pretty much on my own, though Stanton Wheeler, Burton Clark, and Louis Goodman were generous with time and suggestions. I more or less created myself.

I left Yale a year earlier than I should have because I became engaged to John Strait, a man I met in the law school. He was fighting for conscientious-objector status and had to do it from the West Coast (a

long and interesting story—he won a 5–4 decision in the United States Supreme Court). Separated while I remained on the East Coast to write my first book with Janet, we got together for a few days to get married in Chicago and then went back to our separate coasts to our separate commitments the day after the wedding. He won a fellowship in poverty law, which sent him to Portland, and it was a year before I followed.

I arrived with my dissertation to finish and a severe sense of displacement. For the first time in my life I was on somebody else's turf. I was not there as Pepper Schwartz; I was there as John's wife. I did not enjoy being John's wife. I had no mission of my own, other than my dissertation, and my identity was obviously shakier than I thought it was. I snarled at folks when they introduced me as Mrs. Strait. I meant to keep my name, and my own life's trajectory, and I did not want to be second banana. I found a group of women who felt the same way and got involved in Portland's feminist and political scene. I was in no shape to keep a marriage together—or for that matter even start one. It was for both of us still a time of experimentation. We smashed a number of marital traditions. I wrote a few articles on alternative family structures. The marriage ended about two years later by a mutual understanding that we had never really begun it. We remain good friends to this day, probably because we chalk up the experience to the times and the obvious fact that neither of us was ready to make an emotional commitment or partnership.

After a year or so in Portland I applied for jobs. John loved the West and loathed the East, and I had become accustomed to both; so I applied almost entirely on the West Coast to keep some semblance of commitment to my relationship. It was a lush time in the job market, and my personal luck held up. Schools had just admitted that they had had no tenure-line women and decided they should listen to government admonitions about affirmative action. I received numerous job feelers, as did everyone in my cohort. Our group got paid for all the women who had been denied jobs before us.

I do not know if we were aware of the uniqueness of that period when we were going through it. I received an offer from the University of Washington in December 1971. I had never visited there and knew no one in the sociology department. All I knew was that the department was very quantitative and that my work up to that point was 99 percent qualitative. I thought myself an odd choice for them, but I visited Seattle, found it unexpectedly beautiful, and thought I would give living there a try. That's how privileged we were; we could not imagine a lack

of opportunity; we had no reason to worry about money or life-style. It was a golden age.

I came to Washington during the summer, and a farewell luncheon for Otto Larsen was in progress. There was a certain amount of good-natured sexism going on (Otto was presented with a poster of a nude female torso as a going-away gift before he left for a three-year stint as executive officer of the American Sociological Association), but everyone was extremely nice to me, and I immediately hit it off with another assistant professor, Philip Blumstein. This association resulted in the most profound friendship, colleagueship, and partnership that I could ever have wished for. In the early years he was my guide to professional life. As our partnership matured, it resulted in more and more demanding research collaborations. It was, and is, one of the luckiest things that has ever happened to me. We have now been working together for more than fifteen years. Philip has given me a short course in quantitative sociology; and I reintroduced him to qualitative methods and encouraged his then dormant, but now very much alive, interest in gender, sexuality, and relationships. We have taken on challenges together that we might never have considered as independent researchers.

The association with Philip changed both our work. At the time we met, he was doing fairly orthodox experimental social psychology on personal accounts and identity formation. Although we have recently done a paper (with Peter Kollock) coding interactional data, I weaned him away from that tradition for a long time and got him engaged first in a small study of the transmission of affection and later in a somewhat larger interview study on the acquisition of sexual identity. As Philip got further and further away from his roots, he began to feel a need to return to experimental studies. But I intervened with an idea that kept us busy for the next decade studying relationships and gender by comparing heterosexual and homosexual couples. Philip was excited about the heuristic possibilities of the research design, and through our endless discussions (we normally spent full days together, parts of weekends, and occasionally vacations) helped develop it into a more sophisticated inquiry into the nature of marriage as an institution and the impact of gender on couple satisfaction, durability, and day-to-day life. He wanted to do the study "someday"; I wanted to do it right away and announced I was going ahead without him. About ten minutes later he came barging into my office and agitatedly declared that the study was too important for me to do without him, that I needed him, and that he was coming along. He was right on all counts, and I was delighted we were partners again. That

was in 1975, and he and I and our students and colleagues are still writing up data gathered from that study.

Our research proposal was called "Role Differentiation in Conjugal and Quasi-Conjugal Dyads." The title was changed by the funding agency to "Family Role Differentiation" so as not to draw fire from an increasingly conservative Congress. At that time Senator William Proxmire was having fun denouncing various research projects, and some members of Congress were looking to scuttle projects they felt offended public morality. Still other politicians were generally opposed to anything that peered into the private and sacred spheres of family life. Since our study compared heterosexual and homosexual couples, funding organizations worried that we would attract such government opposition. In fact we did get denounced (on the floor of Congress by Jesse Helms) for studying homosexuality, but Proxmire never really did battle with us, perhaps because we organized strong support from the American Sociological Association, the National Science Foundation, and the two powerful senators from Washington at the time, Henry Jackson and Warren Magnuson.

We got through that period and entered on the most demanding regime I have ever experienced. To accomplish our research we had to create and run our own small survey research center. We were over-whelmed by the volume of responses to the study and by the size of the staff we had to assemble to handle the questionnaires and interviews. We had more than twelve thousand questionnaires come in over a period of several weeks, swamping the university mail service. We hired interviewers in other cities and traveled ourselves to ask people to participate. We elicited participation from organizations and special-interest groups, leafleted neighborhoods, went on television and radio, and utilized the national, local, and syndicated media to get people interested in cooperating with us. This last activity was a bit of an innovation in sociological research, and it not only drew the interest of our subjects but also attracted commercial publishers and book agents.

The entry of mass circulation publishing houses turned out to be very fortunate. We had drastically underestimated how expensive the research was going to be because we had underestimated how large a population we would need to get the diversity of cohabitors, gay men, lesbians, and married couples needed to complete the study design. By increasing our sample size we inflated other costs way beyond our original grant budget, and when publishers started inquiring about the possibility of a book written for a large lay audience—and dangled

sizeable money up front—the idea of a new funding source became not only welcome but necessary. We had already reached the stage of using our salaries for expenses and building up a debt with the university.

The interest on the part of commercial publishers was another major event in my life. I had changed in the course of the research. It had become important to me to speak to both lay and academic audiences. Both Philip and I desired to write up the couples' study in a format and a prose style that was accessible to anyone with a high-school education. We wanted our work to be useful to both colleagues and our subjects. We were committed to a book that could be read both in a bedroom and a classroom.

We did not find out until we tried writing up our data how terribly difficult that task would be. Although our first book out of the project, American Couples (1983), did get noticed and utilized in both the trade-book and academic markets, it did not fit either one perfectly. On the one hand, mass-market reviewers found our book "readable" but still academic. The public, it seemed, was not comfortable with charts and footnotes. On the other hand, academic reviewers were distressed that certain conventions, such as an extensive literature review and page notes, were omitted. We engaged both the lay and professional reader—and pleased the majority of our reviewers—but did not fully meet each group's expectations.

When we decided to address a mass audience, we knew very little about the world of trade publishing. After some unsolicited calls from agents, we decided to get an agent to handle the transition from publisher's interest to publisher's contract. Most authors get an agent at a cocktail party, have one recommended by another author, or submit a proposal to an agent and are contacted by the agent if he or she thinks the project and the author(s) are worthy, or at least commercial. Philip and I were ignorant of the rules of the game, so we pursued a researcher's strategy. I got a list of ten "good agents" from Barbara Nellis, an editor friend at Playboy . We wrote them about our project and the kind of book we would like to write. Eight responded with interest, so when we were in New York to collect data, we also stopped in their offices and started interviewing them. This created a miniscandal in agent circles: competitive interviewing was simply not done. We did it anyhow and found many people who impressed us, but we ended up with someone not on our original list. Lynn Nesbit, one of the top agents in New York, heard about the project and tracked us down. We were too green to know how lucky we were to have her but fortunately

not so dumb as to miss the opportunity. We met with her and signed with her on the spot.

Our agent held an auction to determine which publishing house would demonstrate its enthusiasm for our project by offering a substantial advance. (An auction, by the way, is not an ordinary way to sell a book; it is usually reserved for very famous authors or, as in our case, a situation where the agent or publicity has created a sense of urgent demand and competition for a book.) On the strength of two long outlines (two books were proposed), publishers offered us more money than purely academic books received. With the help of our agent we ended up with an excellent company (William Morrow) and a ferociously involved editor (Maria Guarnaschelli). Maria and the two of us embarked on a relationship that transcended the ordinary editorial relationship and more resembled the kind of intellectual intimacy, care, and friendship that the fabled Maxwell Perkins offered his authors.

Maria came to Seattle, lived with Philip and me for weeks at a time, once at a weekend farm my husband and I own, another time sharing our houses in the city. A driven and driving person, she would work us all day and then into the morning hours. She would not let us up from the table until we were reduced to pleading fatigue screaming in exasperation. She would question us about our assumptions and the assumptions of the discipline, our language, our analysis, and our organization. We would dissect a sentence for an hour, then come back and do it for two more hours. We learned an enormous amount from her.

In the meantime gossip made its way back to our profession, letting colleagues know that we had signed a lucrative commercial publishing contract. Collegial reaction ranged from being thrilled for us to meanspirited envy and criticism. I knew we were in trouble when a close friend heard a rather prominent sociologist criticizing our book at an American Sociological Association meeting. She listened to his critique and then pointed out to him that the book was not yet written and had merely been sold as an outline. We gave up any hope of the book being received fairly by sociologists.

It turned out we were too pessimistic. Most of our colleagues were more gracious than the overheard critic. When the book came out, it garnered more approval and generosity than envy or dismissal. In fact, these days I periodically get phone calls from colleagues asking for the names of good agents.

I hope that more sociologists will write for the general public. And I hope they will bring back to the discipline the conventions of popular

nonfiction. Trade publishers are loath to allow unclear technical language, and readability is among an editor's chief concerns. Most people who write for a lay audience clean up their style (as do, I think, most textbook writers), and it would be nice to see engaging prose filter into ethnographies, monographs, and, yes, even journal articles.

When a sociologist writes a book that aspires to interest a general audience, that person is reaching out to readers who are free to put down the book without even a twinge of conscience. I think solving the "free reader" problem is a good challenge for any writer. Even professional writing should woo and recommit the reader over the course of the book or article.

Obviously, the experience of writing American Couples has changed the way I feel about communicating research. I like cooperating with the media and talking to the public about what I think are compelling issues in family life and intimate relationships. I have developed some facility for interpreting my research interests in a format the media and audiences find accessible. As a result I find that I get asked by organizations like NBC or the New York Times to comment on everything, from demographic trends to why Ann Landers got letters from her women readers saying they preferred cuddling to sex.

Although some of this involvement with the media and general public merely provides entertainment, I have also found that there are times when a reasonably well-informed voice is a contribution. We sociologists relinquished social commentary almost entirely to the psychological professionals, who have had a field day attributing everything in society to states of mind and little to social forces. I think it is unconscionable for us to believe in our point of view and then fastidiously decline to present it to the public. Not that the public wants it right now: they have become addicted to psychological explanations of the most banal and simplistic sort. But I think they can be weaned if anyone wants to make the effort. I have found it rewarding to try, and I hope more colleagues will enter this arena.

To this end I have accepted such opportunities as serving on President Reagan's ad hoc advisory committee on the family and on the board of Jewish Family Services, and working with family-planning groups and gay-rights and women's groups. I regularly appear on national television shows and have had my own show on the local NBC affiliate, KING-TV. For the last two years I have done news analysis at least once a week for the Seattle CBS affiliate, KIRO-TV. My commentaries have covered such diverse topics as interpreting the appeal of Oliver North

and trying to explain surveys on prochoice and antiabortion positions. From time to time I write articles on love, sex, marriage, or sex roles for magazines like Ladies' Home Journal, New Woman, or Redbook .

I know that mine is a strange career for a professor, but why should it be? Not all of us have either the ability or the desire to translate our work for more than one audience, but those of us who are attracted should be encouraged. Personally, I like a little creative schizophrenia. The danger, of course, is getting spread too thin and not doing the job right in any one area, and I admit to having succumbed to that pitfall on occasion. But more often having both academic and nonacademic goals just means working intensely on one project for a long time and then going on and working intensely on something different.

For me, this has been a fulfilling career pattern. I am happy with most of my choices. I listened to what I was writing about love and marriage and in 1982 got married again. My husband, Arthur Skolnik, and I had a commuting marriage for two years that was logistically difficult but necessary for us both to pursue our careers. Now we are back in the same city, exquisitely aware of what it takes to pull off an egalitarian dual-career marriage. We have two young children, Cooper and Ryder, and they have opened up a new set of preoccupations that are influencing my research interests. Not surprising, the book I am working on now, A More Perfect Union , is about egalitarian couples, how they handle everything from communication to child raising, and the benefits and costs to such couples' experiences. Between my friends, family, and general curiosity, I do not expect to run out of material in the foreseeable future.