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.