Composing a Life

be used and even used up by the community. Many women at Amherst ended up investing vast amounts of time in needed public-service activities, committee work, and teaching nondepartmental courses. Since these activities were not weighed significantly in promotion decisions, they were self-destructive.
    The second kind of vulnerability trained into women is a readiness to believe messages of disdain and derogation. Even women who arrived at Amherst full of confidence gradually became vulnerable to distorted visions of themselves, no longer secure that their sense of who they were matched the perceptions of others. When a new president, appointed in 1983, told me before coming and without previous discussion with me that he had heard I was “consistently confrontational,” that I had made Amherst “a tense, unhappy place,” and that he would want to select a new dean, I should have reacted to his picture of me as bizarre, and indeed confronted its inaccuracy, but instead I was shattered. It took me a year to understand that he was simply accepting the semantics of senior men who expected a female dean to be easily disparaged and bullied, like so many of the young women they had managed to dislodge. It took me a year to recover a sense of myself as worth defending and to learn to be angry both for myself and for the college as I watched a tranquil campus turned into one that was truly tense and unhappy.
    The problem, as I came to understand it when I had had time to follow the development of individuals over several years, was not only to ensure the hiring of women and minority members. This was hard enough to do from the dean’s office, but what was even harder was to turn Amherst College into a place where all young men and women hired to teach (as well as all students) could thrive, whether they were promoted and asked to stay on or not, a place where whatever talents and strengths they brought from childhood could be fostered and they could go from strength to strength. Such a place would have to be challenging as well as supportive, like Joan’s Activities Program at Austen Riggs, providing room for criticism and discipline as well as indulgence. But it could not be belittling.
    The need to sustain human growth should be a matter of concern for the entire society, even more fundamental than the problem of sustaining productivity. This, surely, is the deepest sense of homemaking, whether in a factory or a college or a household. For all of us, continuing development depends on nurture and guidance long after the years of formal education, just as it depends on seeing others ahead on the road with whom it is possible to identify. A special effort is needed when doubts have been deeply implanted during the years of growing up or when some fact of difference raises barriers or undermines those identifications, but all of us are at risk, not only through childhood but through all the unfolding experiences of life that present new problems and require new learning. Education, whether for success or failure, is never finished. Building and sustaining the settings in which individuals can grow and unfold, not “kept in their place” but empowered to become all they can be, is not only the task of parents and teachers, but the basis of management and political leadership—and simple friendship.

FOUR
OPENING TO THE WORLD

    H UMAN BEINGS TEND to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred. One of the great steps forward in history was learning to regard those who spoke odd-sounding languages and had different smells and habits as fully human, as similar to oneself. The next step from this realization, the step which we have still not fully made, is the willingness to question and purposefully alter one’s own conditions and habits, to learn by observing others. If a particular arrangement is not necessary, it might be possible to choose to change it. Still, aristocratic Chinese ladies of the old regime, crippled for life by the binding of their feet, looked down on peasant women with unbound feet. Exposure to other ways of doing things is insufficient if it is not combined with empathy and respect.
    I grew up a beneficiary of openness to alternatives of belief and custom. All four of my grandparents were atheists, which meant that they had dissented from beliefs taken for granted by those around them, living lives of conscious choice. For my mother and later for me, taking an interest