Composing a Life

was really good in the area of hardware, but it didn’t work in software at all, you don’t get a system at the end, just tons and tons of wonderful working pieces that can’t be put together. In hardware, pieces can be put together, but in software there has to be top-down design. So our weakest point was software. At the time when that had to be done properly, I was so involved with litigation and raising money that I couldn’t pay attention, so we lost a huge amount of time.”
    One of the striking facts about the women whose lives I have been examining is that the struggle to combine commitments is really a search for ways to make the combinations mutually enhancing. Joan carried her first baby, Kai, with her in a laundry basket to the school where she was teaching in Vienna, to the delight of the children; Johnnetta gave birth in Liberia, learning more about the culture as she interacted with other mothers. When Vanni was born, I joined a research project at MIT analyzing films of mother-infant interaction, knowing that new motherhood would give me a resource of attention and sensitivity. My mother used my early childhood as an opportunity for observation and for testing some of the convictions about childrearing she had developed through her fieldwork. When I wrote about my mother drawing on her experience with me to increase her anthropological understanding, some reviewers were appalled, as if this necessarily entailed a theft of love or its replacement by cold and sterile intellect. In fact, there was a synergy there. Both of us have been better mothers for the inclusion of trained observation in our caring.
    Women’s lives offer valuable models because of the very pressures that make them seem more difficult. Women have not been permitted to focus on single goals but have tended to live with ambiguity and multiplicity. It’s not easy. But the rejection of ambiguity may be a rejection of the complexity of the real world in favor of some dangerously simple competitive model. When a nation goes to war, it no longer has to seek a balance between guns and butter but must give a clear priority to guns; this is why war often comes as such a simplifying relief. Any analytical tool that seems to provide a comparable simplification of the multitude of choices in the real world is embraced—the bottom line, the GNP. Any technique for smoothing diverse values into a single scale, such as the conversion of human lives or clean air into dollars, models this simplification. Women, torn between their own creative energies and concern for each member of their families, are reminded daily that role stereotypes and balance sheets are equally inadequate tools for seeking long-term well-being. These lessons in the arithmetic of caring are available for men as well.
    You can’t “have it all”—nature doesn’t work that way, and finally there are only so many hours in the day. It is, however, almost always possible to have more; having less often means producing less. For Medieval Christians, scholarship and spirituality were considered almost inaccessible without celibacy, but in the Jewish tradition scholarship was associated with virility and sexual potency. The two activities were seen as mutually enhancing rather than competitive. When Alice was denied the engineering scholarship she had earned on test scores, two reasons were given: that she was interested in art and music and literature as well as engineering, and that she was a woman. Both of these facts meant the same thing: that she was insufficiently narrow and would not devote her full capacity to engineering.
    My great-grandfather is credited with being one of those who shifted Cambridge University out of its monastic mode so that the fellows of Saint John’s College would be permitted to marry, and yet we are struggling still with the notion of competing choices. Perhaps, we worry, men who become truly involved in fatherhood will never produce great achievements in the marketplace. We occasionally honor the possibility that a range of interests might be more fertile than narrow concentration by speaking of Renaissance men of endless vitality and appetite who combine interests in art and science and the increase of wealth with active love lives and large families. But perhaps men and women who are allowed to address multiple commitments in flexible contexts will achieve in new ways. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the kind of synergy we associate