Composing a Life

you got women in that household with you and that’s why at the very beginning you are reproducing that stuff. A perfect example is what happens in Cuba now on the gender question. These young junior-high-school kids go off to the schools in the countryside, and there is a great deal of equality. The girls, if anything, are outshining the boys academically, and the boys have to clean the school just like the girls do. And then they go back home at the end of two weeks, and they are right back in that household with Daddy waiting to be served his
cafecito
and Momma doin’ all the double-shift work. So unless the state is gonna extend its arm into that household, it’s just a lot harder to deal with all that stuff.”
    In trying to think about the strengths with which we began, I was struck by the advantages that some of us had, mothers who had achieved as much or more than our fathers without having given up the chance to marry and have children. We also did most of our growing up without competing brothers on the scene who might have been put in an implicit position of superiority.
    Alice was an only child until she was ten, when her younger brother was born. Her mother was a teacher of mathematics and her father a physicist, getting a second doctorate in mathematics. Although her mother was not her primary intellectual model, Alice did grow up with a love for math, and she never acquired the expectation of being unable to do math that seems to be critical in keeping girls out of science. The family was in Rumania during the war, and then they lived in Paris for five years. When Alice came to the United States, the family went through long periods of poverty when her father was unemployed. Still, she had the immediate experience of being better schooled and culturally more sophisticated than her agemates, which may have protected her against the tug of conformity. No one seems to have instructed her to fail until the end of high school. She had won the highest regional scores in a Grumman Aircraft competition for a scholarship to engineering school. After an interview in which she admitted to an interest in art and music as well as engineering, she was told kindly that she would not get the scholarship because she was a girl and she had too many other interests. By that time, Alice had enough confidence in her own direction to be angry rather than discouraged. “I was a bit bullshit. I thought, I wouldn’t want to work for your company anyway. But I was still going to do aeronautics, because I thought airplanes were wonderful. I spent a summer doing flutter analysis, but what was really exciting to me was not the offices, but the factory floor where the airplanes were assembled.” Alice went on to MIT and left after getting her degree because she wanted practical experience.
    There is a sense in which my story echoes Alice’s, for I too was an only child with a partial experience of siblings: half siblings born later and perennial playmates. From the public and contemporary point of view, my mother was far more successful than my father, whose career was filled with frustrations. Today, the value of his work is still being discovered, and more of my time goes to a continuing dialogue with his ideas. I grew up admiring him and worrying about him, as Alice worried about her father when his career faltered after he came to the United States.
    It was critical for me that both my parents treated me with respect, giving me real tasks and sitting down and having serious conversations. Alice remembers feeling very clearly that she should take charge when she and her mother were fleeing to Paris before the Russian advance into Rumania. “Even though she was the grownup, I felt I understood things much better. And then in Paris, our friends were wonderful, scientists and writers and painters, and the most wonderful thing was that I was invited to all of the soirees, and I was not babied. All the grownups liked me and would talk about anything. In France, when you start to read you don’t read Dick and Jane, you start with excerpts from Molière, Racine, Corneille, excerpts from all the great writers, so you feel comfortable participating in any conversation about serious literature. And my mother was a wonderful mother. She took me to plays and operas and parks and made sure I had a wonderful experience and talked to me seriously.” Because women are so often treated like children, it is important that memories of