Composing a Further Life

for it, with a new executive director and its own quarters, and established the San Francisco Education Fund, which she then headed for eleven years. By this time, with four children, the youngest still in his teens, she was also involved in helping other communities with similar projects and had “begun to sense that a career path was coming together.” She explained, “I had never imagined myself as a beggar or as what I call a plumber. A plumber is someone who manages to create a structure or a nonprofit that can go on and self-replicate. I had no idea I had skills in any of that.” It struck me that studying counseling had given Glady a start in understanding her own skills so that, beginning with matching high school students with summer jobs, recognizing the potentials of others became for her a central theme.
    “I didn’t make such a big decision getting married or having children, you know; things were going along and it just seemed natural to do. But when I really had to give up what I thought was my whole identity, the identity of being an artist—when I said, All right, I’m going to let life just happen—it was like going over a jump with a horse. You know, you steer the horse between the wings and then over you go, and then, if you’ve made a good decision, it just melts behind you, it doesn’t seem to be a barrier.”
    Glady went on to quote me back to myself. “I’m very struck by a passage that I read over and over, and it’s so eloquent and insightful, I don’t know how you’ve got all of it in one paragraph, but I just want to read it. You said, ‘This is a book about life as an improvisatory art, about the ways we combine familiar and unfamiliar components in response to new situations, following an underlying grammar and an evolving aesthetic.’ 6 I was struck by it because this whole idea of combining the familiar with adapting to and living in … with weaving in the unfamiliar was … When I look back at when I was starting these nonprofits, I realize that, after all, it’s like the snail that goes along and if it should look back, it could trace the curves in its tracks. When things began to come together, there was actually some kind of coherence, some kind of, I don’t know, you call it a kind of aesthetic something that is underneath it all. It is certainly not anything that one
tries
to do. That was a real relief, because I realized that when I made a good choice, which happened to be giving up painting, serendipity came in, and one step in a direction would open up opportunities. So the work I’ve been doing in the community by organizing nonprofits just became a kind of métier. I never had to think, Oh, now that I’ve done that, what am I going to do next?
    “I was privileged, because I had a husband who was making money and I had a little nest egg that had been left me, so I did have ‘a room of my own,’ chaotic as it was. I persevered because I found that somehow everything—different abilities, images, metaphors, ways of looking at the world—seems to be fully used when one is in a productive part of life. And then of course there were the transitions when you know (and you feel like throwing up), Uh-oh, you’re going to have to change. But I felt during those years that I was really—what I was doing was productive.”
    Between the Enterprise project and the beginning of the Education Fund, Glady had been asked to sit on the Smith College Alumnae Association Board, and there she had recognized the same phenomenon of people feeling disempowered, so she created in 1963 what we would today call a network. “I realized that the alumnae of the college were getting advanced degrees, going to graduate school, having equal education with men, and then in the instinctive kind of traditional way were throwing that all back into the family, usually with a high-achieving husband, and kind of helping him in his career.”
    So Glady created Smith Resources, which worked by “getting women to send in their bios—where they went, what they majored in, what they’d done since, and how they could help one another. They could then talk to one another and help one another over that gap to where women were accepted in managerial positions and valued for their abilities to write, to think, and to lead. After this little pilot, when I left the Smith Alumnae Board, I started another organization on the same line as Enterprise and Smith Resources in San Francisco, for women