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.