Composing a Life

whether she has been able to dance or not. She was in New Jersey, studying to be an instructor in physical education. “I always had wished to be a dancer, I mean I thought that would be it, that would be the thing that would be wonderful. But I never thought of myself as a dancer. I was an athlete, and
husky
. “Joan laughed warmly and lightly as she often did when our conversations touched on something that must have been painful long ago. “In those days, dancers were teensy, and petite, and appropriately light and little and all of that, which I wasn’t; at least I thought that compared to them I was an elephant. It just was like those visions of something fine that seems entirely inappropriate, like wishing you were an opera star or something. Then this dance teacher from Barnard came over to the normal school where I was, and she was quite a husky babe, you know, she was no little delicate spring flower. She was very light on her feet, but she was at least as tall as I was, and I was always tremendously tall. And I watched her move around, and I thought, well, you’re no bigger than she is, maybe you’ve got what it takes. Her name was Mary O’Donnell. I’ll never forget. So I began really taking my dancing seriously, and after a while I began to be commended, I mean I was doing good. I think it was toward the end of that year when I really latched on and I said, Boy! That’s it. That’s what I am. I’m a dancer. I just knew it like that. And after that everything was just sheer bliss that I had to do.”
    All five of us were fortunate in our beginnings, yet all of us have had experiences that undermined confidence and aspiration. The assumptions made about women and girls when we were children, which still linger today, are bound to leave wounds. Prosperity is not sufficient to remove these problems. The daughters of successful fathers may indeed incorporate that achievement into their image of themselves, but they may equally well receive the message that achievement is not for girls. Devoted care is also not sufficient. Most women today have grown up with mothers who, for all their care and labor, were regarded as having achieved little. Women with a deep desire to be like their mothers are often faced with the choice between accepting a beloved image that carries connotations of inferiority and dependency or rejecting it and thereby losing an important sense of closeness.
    I believe the issue of female inferiority still arises for virtually every woman growing up in this society. I grew up in an environment where no one told me females were inferior or that significant achievement would necessarily be beyond my reach, but the belief was all around me. The departures of both my parents for long periods of war work when I was very little must have made me question my value and importance—their work came first. Somehow I merged that idiosyncratic experience with the culturally supported attitude toward women. As a young woman, I never questioned the assumption that when I married what I could do would take second place to what my husband could do. Twenty-five years later, I have slighted my own value so often that it is hard to learn to take it seriously. Instead, I get things done by finding rationales for valuing the task and then sacrificing myself for it. And all of this is available as a bad model for the next generation.
    These attitudes show up again and again in the texture of everyday life. For at least twenty years, whenever I interrupted my husband when he was busy, he finished what he was doing before he responded. When he interrupted me, I would drop what I was doing to respond to him, automatically giving his concerns priority. As time passed, I learned occasionally to say please let me finish here first, but usually this has made me so uncomfortable that my concentration has been lost. By now, Barkev has learned that both of us need to be on guard against my willingness to sacrifice my time and my space, as if my goals were automatically less important than those of other members of the family. Yet we have all benefited from my peripheral vision.
    If women were brought up to be more centered on themselves, many of the conflicts and discontinuities that disrupt their lives would be irrelevant, peripheral to the central definition of self. They could move from context to context without a painful sense of contingency, but to do so might involve a loss of awareness, a narrowing of