Composing a Life

united in the same ardent search and supported each other in a single historical task, yet who had complementary ways of working. Joan and I started talking about using such pairs to study the differences between men’s and women’s forms of religious expression, and Joan undertook to write about Saint Francis of Assisi in relation to Saint Clare, the woman around whom he established a women’s order similar to the Franciscans in its commitment to poverty, but enclosed in convents while the male Franciscans became mendicant friars scattered across the countryside. Francis and Clare perfectly exemplified much of what Erik was saying in those days about gender differences in relation to inner and outer space. Teresa and John developed a different complementarity; both contemplative, John was the more intensely introspective, while Teresa proved to be an effective organizer and institution builder. As I read the writings of the Carmelite saints, I could see a certain echo of the complementarity between my parents.
    Joan wrote up her research in a book called
Saint Francis and His Four Ladies
, which marked the beginning of her interest in the relationship between the role of real women, like Saint Clare, and symbolic women, like the Lady Poverty. I presented my research in the seminar but never published it, for that spring my husband and I packed up and left for the Philippines. As Joan and I talked and compared notes, it became clear that although complementarity was a central ingredient in the kind of creativity we were looking at, important enough to override the strong bias of the age, there was more than one way to develop it.
    During the late sixties and early seventies, many women changed their ways of thinking about themselves by joining consciousness-raising groups. Here, women gave one another mutual support and pooled their experiences, adding an analytical process of mutual comparison to move toward insight. At its best, this technique tolerates and values differences, but for many women, the greatest discovery of these groups was that other women could be companions rather than rivals. They learned the value of shared experiences and the benefits of solidarity, becoming friends. In the years since, cooperative and egalitarian relationships—ordinary friendships—have become increasingly important between women and men as well.
    Consciousness raising was significant for approximately a decade. By the end of that time, although many problems remained unsolved, large numbers of women embodied the new ways of thinking, which had also been institutionalized in organizations and built into the training of great numbers of professionals. As the sense of discovery was reduced, such groups inevitably became less exciting. Today, members of that generation are often concerned that younger women take their options for granted and, more seriously, that they have lost the vision of what full participation by women might bring to society.
    I participated in a consciousness-raising group for about a year during the early seventies. Although I learned a great deal, it was an uncomfortable experience because, as the oldest member of the group, I had coped too well for too many years with the multiple demands of my different roles not to be suspected of being that unpopular creature, the “superwoman,” who makes life difficult for other women by bearing burdens that no one should be asked to bear. And I was insufficiently angry. It was not until I had been an object of discrimination myself and been frustrated in my efforts as a dean to achieve fairness for the sake of others that I became angry. Working on this project has been a form of consciousness raising for me, carrying me beyond the discovery of anger; the interwoven stories of these different women may provide something of the same experience for others.
    Today, I believe that we will not learn to live responsibly on this planet without basic changes in the ways we organize human relationships, particularly inside the family, for family life provides the metaphors with which we think about broader ethical relations. We need to sustain creativity with a new and richer sense of complementarity and interdependence, and we need to draw on images of collaborative caring by both men and women as a model of responsibility. We must free these images from the connotations of servitude by making and keeping them truly elective.
    Increasing numbers of women work now