Composing a Life

childhood be memories of respect and confidence.
    Time was another resource that some of us garnered early on. When I interviewed Ellen, I was intrigued to hear that she had finished medical school when she was twenty-three, since I have always been aware of my good fortune in having gotten my Ph.D. at the same age. Johnnetta started college at fifteen as a result of a special talent search among black teenagers. Each of us then has had a hidden chronological resource, an edge of two or three years to draw on when the facts of being female pulled us back. I used that edge, created by rushing through my education, when my husband’s choices meant I had to make repeated fresh starts on my career; Johnnetta used hers on long delays in finishing the writing of a doctoral thesis while she had two young children on her hands, born after the research was done; Ellen became professionally established before her age group, so that she was able at a later date to reduce her professional commitments for motherhood without dropping out.
    Each of us was once ahead of the game. Although we aren’t allowed to keep our lead in this particular handicap race, no one would be able to say our educations were wasted. Still, one of the ironies in all these lives is that the things traditionally said to girls when they spoke of career aspirations—you will just get married and have a baby—do have a degree of validity. None of these women abandoned work entirely, but the issues of intimacy and nurturance are woven into their achievements, which thus become harder to recognize.
    Joan realized quite early that she was more interested in dance as education than as performance and that she would work with children instead of young adults. “Their posture was so bad and their shoes were awful and they wore bloomers still, the way I did. You were all fretted up with stuff that kept you from moving freely. I didn’t want to spend my time doing remedial gymnastics. I knew what those bodies looked like and how terrible their whole feeling was. So I had decided I would work with children and keep them from being deformed, and they might be able to maintain that when they grew older.”
    As a result, Joan decided to do a dissertation on the teaching of dance in Europe and tried to find research funding. “I remember going to one guy at Columbia who was kind of a friend and advisor, and saying I wanted to do this, and he just laughed and said, ‘You know, you girls that go off and want to do these things, it’s just a joke. You’ll get married and then you’ll never come back. We can’t waste money on you!’ I said, ‘No such thing! I’ll go on with this whatever I do.’”
    She didn’t get a grant, even in that field that was already in many ways led by women. But she went to Europe anyway, did her research, and wrote a first draft of a dissertation. She did get married and did not return to Columbia or finish the doctorate. And yet the clarity of her commitment to dance and dance education was never abandoned and has been woven into emerging understandings of how children develop and how the sick are healed, and today even that research may be recycled.
    We all married quite early, either as students or soon after, in ways that fit with our other interests. None of us expected to give up our other work and involvements completely, but we had rather limited understandings of the puzzle this posed. We all put the puzzle together differently. Two of us, Joan and Johnnetta, had children early, setting our work aside; Ellen and I deferred childbearing until we were professionally established. Alice has been in many ways the least domestic of us all and has never had children. After finishing at MIT, she took a job in R&D at General Electric in Utica, which gave her a chance to develop real, practical competence in engineering; she expected that she would eventually return to school for a doctorate in theory. “Coming out of MIT I didn’t have the sense of hardware I learned later. But I did learn how to think theoretically there, not just plugging in formulae.” She did a theoretical senior thesis in hydrodynamics and electromagnetism, looking at the energy not accounted for in the rotation of the earth due to the movement of fluids inside. It concerned issues of shortening relative distance and changing the frame of reference, so she used the example of an infinite rake in a garden and asked how fast a caterpillar would have to move