Composing a Life

the woman’s goals are not automatically reduced to second rank, even if her contribution often is. A commitment to work shared with a man becomes indistinguishable from commitment to that man, but collaboration may make the woman’s contribution invisible, like the non-work done within the household, or the clerical and managerial work that Jack’s wife, Jean, did for years at Orion Research, as deeply invested in those early years as he. Historically, many of the lesbian relationships we know about were between women who gave each other the impetus to enter new careers, opening them up for all women. Women are often stimulated to more ambitious and creative work when they see that work supporting someone they love. In Alice’s case, it was clear that she was the more effective of the two as far as technology was concerned, while Jack provided the demonic discontent.
    There are many forms of collaboration. To me, Joan Erikson reflects a creative option available to a previous generation. She has always given first priority to the traditional roles of homemaking and childcare, while Erik has always remained rather aloof from them. But she has also contributed directly to his work, working ideas through with him and editing all of his writing. In the interstices, she has taken up projects that are hers alone; these Erik supports and encourages, but again with a certain aloofness. When Joan is working on a book, she reads it aloud to Erik, who applauds but makes little comment. “He’s very appreciative and accepting, but he doesn’t offer much. It’s as if he can’t get into my language, or it’s a different piece of music from his. But I can get into his language because I’ve been doing it so long that it’s like another voice of mine.” When Erik is working on a book, she goes over the text word by word, as she has done since he first started writing in English. Part of her role has been to defend his stylistic idiosyncrasies, insisting that they are part of his voice, not linguistic errors to be corrected and standardized. For me, the working relationship between Joan and Erik evokes memories of the times when I worked with my father.
    Johnnetta and her husband Robert began their professional lives in passionate collaboration, falling into love and into political commitment together. After they were married, they went in 1962 to Liberia, where they were to work as members of a research team that was to provide each with dissertation material on the economics of changing patterns of labor from traditional forms to modern industry. This required fieldwork in the villages and within households, so Johnnetta’s anthropological work, one day interviewing cab drivers in Monrovia, another day studying household economies in rural areas, made an important contribution to the whole. But more important to Johnnetta’s sense of that period as a time of equal contributions and mutual stimulation was the fact that Robert was white and Johnnetta black; being in Africa moved them beyond the asymmetries of black-white relationships in the United States.
    “I feel so strongly how important that was for our relationship, because the ‘majority culture,’ as we say here in Atlanta, looked more like mine in color terms than Robert’s, and it was a really important period for solidifying our relationship. Robert was really good in that setting. It was really important to both of us to have someone in an intimate relationship with whom we could work through some of what we were seeing, doing a lightning running analysis, pillow to pillow. We were a dynamite team. Robert is very methodical, so sometimes I wanted to say, Robert, just spit it out; but he works slowly with everything carefully thought out. My mind is much quicker, more erratic, more creative, but the combination was dynamite.”
    Barkev and I started out thinking of ourselves as having entirely different interests: he was studying mechanical engineering when we met, while I was studying Arabic poetry. But the years we spent in other countries meant that each of us became very much involved in learning the local cultures. I tended to emphasize language and the beliefs and customs of ordinary people, while he was concerned with the relationship between local tradition and industrial and business development, both of us were involved in institution building and feeling the need to communicate effectively with students and colleagues. We have complemented