Composing a Life

to orchestrate her own life.
    “I still to this day have continuing conflict about work and my kids, but I’ve set it up in such a way that I can kind of ride with the conflict and play it out on a daily basis. If Danny or Sarah are having a rough month, I can spend more time with them and put things off a bit. The name of the game for me now is to ensure flexibility in my daily schedule. That seems to be very important. If you’ve got patients, it eliminates a degree of flexibility, because they own those hours. You know, I’d be with a patient in my upstairs office, and I’d hear Danny cry downstairs, and it really bothered me. I’m ambivalent about cutting way back on my clinical practice, and I may go back to it—not immediately, with Sarah still so little, but later. But, in the practical mechanics of my day-to-day life, it works out well not to have absolutely fixed hours, because things change every week.”
    Alice looks at the question of how women combine their various commitments from the point of view of an employer. “We’ve had several cases of women who have had children while working for us. One brings the baby to work, but there’s also a very good day-care center nearby. There’s one woman engineer who has plenty of money, but she can’t not work, because she’s a creative person who likes the things we’re doing on image processing—the sort of work you can’t do on your own, requiring equipment and contributions from other people. She’s excellent and always finishes on time, so I don’t care if she’s in the office or working on a terminal at home, unless I need her for a meeting. It does mean it’s harder for her to be a leader at the moment. When she was pregnant, she volunteered to be on a TV show about working mothers and was turned down as unsuitable.”
    “She wasn’t sufficiently oppressed,” I commented.
    “Correct. She had the money for childcare, the company was giving her flex arrangements to work at home, and we have a maternal-leave policy. Too easy.” A very different situation from that of thousands of women whose employers offer no flexibility, who are caught in a model that assumes that work shaped in response to multiple commitments must be inferior work.
    Alice has often hired women for engineering jobs because she has found them more flexible than the available men, about ideas as well as hours. “When I had to do something perceived as not doable, I would opt to have someone to help me who did not have the impediments that the men had with regard to schedules and so on. At Harvard in 1968, when minicomputers were just becoming available and I wanted to switch over, most of the men were used to having grad students as slave labor rather than using computers, and they were just shaking their heads, saying that it couldn’t be done. I couldn’t afford a doubting Thomas. I needed someone who I knew had the competency level and the energy level, and we just needed to do it. There were two women I could think of—the one I asked had a baby. She was very fast and very competent and if we needed to work all night we just did it. One of the things I experienced about the men was they had these concepts of regular time—you thought between such and such hours—and that’s a concept that I’ve never had. Subsequently, I got to know the head of the programming group at Harvard, and she was extremely competent too, with this ability to say how long it would take to get a job done and then just do it. I always went with people like that—some of them were excellent cooks, too—all of my strong friends like to eat. At Polaroid I didn’t come across really strong women at my level, but Jack had given me a lecturing about mentoring, so I started to do it and spent time with young women engineers, and they did very well. They were smart, but they had to be pointed in the right direction. And they had to be given responsibility—that’s the main issue.” We are used to seeing a woman with a baby as handicapped by her need for flexibility; we’re startled to find that given the freedom to shape her own hours, she may be more productive than someone whose effort is defined by fixed schedules.
    Like Ellen, Johnnetta pursues many simultaneous activities, yet she too has recently rearranged her commitments, in order to concentrate on the presidency of Spelman. It doesn’t make her any less busy. In fact, we all talk about our time as if it were a flower bed