Composing a Life

to escape.
    “I was looking for that person who was a brilliant scientist who could also listen to music or look at a painting,” Alice remembers, “so the world of people I could be involved with was rather small—I guess I just didn’t think much about sexual drives because my head drive was so strong that it dominated everything. But then a French woman I had been very close to at MIT who had moved to New York was killed in a fatal car accident, and I went into total shock. All at once I realized I would never see this woman whom I loved again, and I had never taken the time to go and see her. And then I suddenly got involved with a lot of men, and it was all very exciting and very draining. I really can’t figure out how I survived except that when I worked on technical things I worked as if nothing else was going on—but the rest was chaos.” That period ended in exhausted collapse combined with a toxic reaction to an over-the-counter sleeping pill.
    After that, Alice spent a few weeks with her parents and went back to Utica to marry Paul, an artist and industrial designer. Even many years after their divorce, he continued to be a steadying and supportive friend. “He was extraordinarily original, one of the few artists I’ve known who could talk and who really loved technology. Theoretical science came more easily to me—I could see how to put things together and make them work as easily as he could pick up a paintbrush and out comes this beautiful thing, and I’d say, what difference does it make if I do it with a differential equation and you don’t? Don’t get bent out of shape.”
    The couple soon moved back to the Boston area. Except for a brief period of attempted collaboration with her father, Alice went through the early years of her scientific and engineering career working under the umbrella of large institutions and avoiding leadership roles, motivated by the sheer pleasure of the technical work. It was only as an expression of caring for her lover Jack and, after his death, for the continuity of their engineering work together, and for the people who had depended on it, that she eventually accepted leadership responsibility. “There I was,” she said, “a person who had previously been used to doing technology, where the only condition of doing interesting work was proving I could do it. I had never asked for anything other people wanted, money, power, all I wanted to do was solve problems and then find another problem.”
    No one acts entirely out of self-interest, just as no one acts entirely out of altruism, but the assumption of self-interest is a common simplification in attempts to understand the behavior of others, particularly for those whose good sense has been diluted by reading too much economics. Women often err in the opposite direction. Because they were traditionally taught to emphasize service, their choices may be unintelligible and therefore deeply suspect. Yet although their motives don’t match the expectations of those around them, I have been struck by how terribly hard this group of women worked as students and later on in their careers, and how often work is unappreciated when the motive behind it is not understood.
    It is not only in childhood that people of high potential can be encouraged or held back and their promise subverted or sustained. The year before I went to Amherst, a group of women had declined to stand for tenure. One of them simply said that after six years she was used up, too weary and too eroded by constant belittlement to accept tenure if it were offered to her. Women were worn down or burnt out. During the three years I spent as dean of the faculty, as I watched some young faculty members flourish and others falter, I gradually realized that the principal instrument of sexism was not the refusal to appoint women or even the refusal to promote (though both occurred, for minorities as well as women), but the habit of hiring women and then dealing with them in such a way that when the time came for promotion it would be reasonable to deny it. It was not hard to show that a particular individual who was a star in graduate school had somehow belied her promise, had proved unable to achieve up to her potential.
    This subversion was accomplished by taking advantage of two kinds of vulnerability that women raised in our society tend to have. The first is the quality of self-sacrifice, a learned willingness to set their own interests aside and