Chapter Sixteen—
Research on Relationships

Pepper Schwartz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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