Composing a Life

for rapid learning and problem solving is impressive—it is just that the adult carries around a fund of learned solutions. Children might be better off if parents were more aware of themselves as learning from them, rejuvenated by them, and ultimately perhaps dependent on them. The experience of symmetrical relationships with peers and siblings is normally learned later, and yet it is this secondary comradeship with peers that we have valued as an ethical model, especially for men.
    When any relationship is characterized by difference, particularly a disparity in power, there remains a tendency to model it on the parent-child relationship. Even protectiveness and benevolence toward the poor, toward minorities, and especially toward women have involved equating them with children. Within this algebra of comparison, women are like children—and women are most likely to be protected and valued when the equation holds, when they are younger and vulnerable. Most men seem to be relatively comfortable with women in subordinate or junior positions, so pretty young coeds are more acceptable than mature women executives. Even when organizations become integrated, there is still the phenomenon called the glass ceiling: women rise as long as there is a layer of more powerful men above them, whose sense of appropriate relationships is not threatened by the women’s aspirations. Men may indeed appear to be supporters of women while still holding tightly to superiority.
    I knew a senior college professor who, when his institution started to appoint women to the faculty, acquired the reputation of being especially supportive of women by offering to share his office with first one young woman colleague and then another. He repeated this gesture four or five times (the attrition rate for women was notably high), even offering to share his library study with a young woman in another department. Although private offices were standard in the institution, the women were expected to be grateful. When the department finally appointed a woman to a senior position, she too was asked to share, because this curious handsoff variant of droit du seigneur had become a department tradition. “This poor child,” he called a woman in her thirties in a tenure discussion. Kindness like this, which is premised on dominance, is doubtfully preferable to simple misogyny. The misogynist works to exclude women; the friendly father figure works to keep them infantile. As women mature and acquire a certain authority based on experience, they encounter increasing resistance and forfeit the illusory good will that goes with being young and respectful. Sexism slides into a version of agism.
    Tokenism works in a similar way. Just as a few women with limited authority may be admitted to all-male communities, the presence of one or two lone women as the youngest members of a governing committee provides an analogous form of dependency. Women of my generation have experienced the still-incomplete transition from a period of token integration, when a tiny number of women were admitted to the club, to a period when women are asking for full participation. Suddenly, there is a sharp change in the relatively benevolent attitudes of those willing to tolerate, even be elaborately kind to, a few women in marginal positions.
    Women in our society are encouraged to explore complementary relationships, to both trust and nurture. They are permitted to remain closer to their mothers than men and are given primary responsibility for rearing children. Traditionally, women expected inequality in marriage, looking for husbands who were older, taller, richer, and more intelligent than themselves. Not surprisingly, these same husbands continue to earn more and expect their careers to take precedence. We used to be taught to avoid even the appearance of equality lest it threaten the marriage and lead to competition and conflict. Today, women seek equality, but the male game of “Anything you can do, I can do better” makes for a dull world. The most important reason for valuing differences is that they are productive of creativity.
    Over a four-year period after Jack’s death, Alice was involved in business negotiations with Canon on behalf of Demonics, renamed Rise Technology. I was concerned when I first heard this, because I think of Japan, especially Japanese business, as a very difficult setting for a woman. But for Alice, it worked well. Instead of trying to function