Composing a Life

time it works, most of the time I am not unnecessarily whipping myself with some form of guilt, but some of the time I am. I’ve come up with an arrangement for Che to stay in New York that’s a little unorthodox, but as soon as there’s a problem it says, what’s going on here? why aren’t you there twenty-four hours a day to be mommy? and the question is raised again.”
    Society defines what demands may be made on women, and they are expected to give way, even when the demands conflict. Before the availability of contraception, many women died as a direct or indirect result of multiple pregnancies, and the fear of conceiving yet another baby was one of the factors that limited women’s enjoyment of sex. Men reached out, knowing what they wanted, and women gave way. In the film
High Noon
, the hero is applauded for refusing to be distracted from his duty as a marshal by his love for his new bride, but she abandons her commitment to nonviolence for love of him. Women have been regarded as unreliable because they are torn by multiple commitments; men become capable of true dedication when they are either celibate, in the old religious model, with no family to distract them, or have families organized to provide support but not distraction, the little woman behind the great man.
    But what if we were to recognize the capacity for distraction, the divided will, as representing a higher wisdom? Perhaps Kierkegaard was wrong when he said that “purity is to will one thing.” Perhaps the issue is not a fixed knowledge of the good, the single focus that millennia of monotheism have made us idealize, but rather a kind of attention that is open, not focused on a single point. Instead of concentration on a transcendent ideal, sustained attention to diversity and interdependence may offer a different clarity of vision, one that is sensitive to ecological complexity, to the multiple rather than the singular. Perhaps we can discern in women honoring multiple commitments a new level of productivity and new possibilities of learning.
    Running a household is not a full-time task nowadays, but then neither are most jobs. The forty-hour work week means that no one with a regular job needs to be consumed by making a living, even as it allows for a range of consuming increments. It is possible with flexible hours to have two “full-time” jobs, say by working one job nine to five on weekdays and then driving a cab for four or five hours afterwards and all day on Saturday and Sunday. So although such a schedule is very demanding, it is not surprising that many women manage it, because they have no other choice. One of their jobs is called “work,” and one is called “home.” People without domestic responsibilities may spend comparably long hours on some other second activity, a hobby or a sport, politics or religion, or may waste them in traffic or on long commutes.
    But these are jobs, not careers. No one who is passionately engaged in his or her work limits it for long to forty hours a week. Positions carrying the greatest challenge or responsibility are predicated on this assumption. It is often in the second shift or late at night at the office that the really creative work is done. People of talent and ambition do enough work for two and are unlikely to invest vast amounts of time in other activities. Anybody can live two lives—few can live three at once. You may be able to work secretly on a novel or plan a revolution after working one job, but you can hardly do so after two. And not after a job that demands double time.
    The fact that many women work a second shift while their husbands work only one is deeply unfair. Our indignation obscures the fact that the difference between men and women is not that men work one shift and women two, but that women with jobs usually do not have the flexibility to decide what to do with that second shift, which is already committed. Women fortunate enough to have challenging careers or creative ambitions can put in ten or twelve hours a day and still have difficulty meeting the macho hours of their colleagues. If they must then go home to an additional shift, they find themselves struggling to live three lives of effort and striving, scanting each.
    The five women in this book have always worked, but our work has had different meanings. Although most of us have been employed throughout our adult lives, the shape of our outside working day has varied, and we have few hobbies. We