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.