Composing a Life

And yet these very conflicting claims are affirmations of value. It would be easier to live with a greater clarity of ambition, to follow goals that beckon toward a single upward progression. But perhaps what women have to offer in the world today, in which men and women both must learn to deal with new orders of complexity and rapid change, lies in the very rejection of forced choices: work or home, strength or vulnerability, caring or competition, trust or questioning. Truth may not be so simple. The stories in this book are the stories of women who have struggled and improvised to combine different values, paying the price of criticism or rejection by those who expected them to conform to other and older visions. Their purity lies in their embrace of multiplicity.
    Many years ago, when my father began to write about ecology, he speculated that conscious purpose might be a fatal characteristic of the human species, leading human beings to pursue narrowly conceived purposes without an understanding of their destructive effects. At that time, I became convinced that the way to address the problem was by learning new and more inclusive forms of attention or mindfulness. Today, more than twenty years later, I see the next step in the concept of response. It is interesting that, in spite of the different emphasis, the word
response
provides the etymology of
responsibility
, whose central place in women’s ethical sensitivities Carol Gilligan has so eloquently investigated. *
    The women in this book are deeply concerned with effectiveness, far from the old stereotypes of female passivity, and yet their mode of action is responsive rather than purposive: it is based on looking and listening and touching rather than the pursuit of abstractions. If it is true that the unit of survival is the organism plus its environment, a sensitivity to the environment is the highest of survival skills and not a dangerous distraction. We must live in a wider space and a longer stretch of time. In thinking about survival, we must think of sustaining life across generations rather than accepting the short-term purposes of politicians and accountants.
    Each of these women has cared for children and shared intimacy with lovers, but instead of investing their whole lives in these relationships, they have learned modes of effectiveness that make them caretakers and homemakers beyond their own families, creating environments for growth or learning, healing or moving toward creative fulfillment, seeking authority as a means rather than as an end. For them, caretaking and homemaking are not alternatives to success and productivity in the male professional or business worlds; they are styles of action in that world based on the recognition that ideas and organizations and imaginative visions also require fostering. Five years ago, Ellen was sharply aware of conflicts between these different roles and saw motherhood as a radical interruption of her professional life; now, with family life reshaped around two children and the last intrusive formalities of Sarah’s adoption completed, she is constructing a new version of professional life that affirms something all of us have learned—that our productivity depends on the discovery of new forms of flexibility.
    All of these women are conservers, holding onto skills and relationships that may be recycled at a later date. After a long period of grieving for Jack, Alice began to see other men, first a lover she had known just before Jack, then a man of whom she had spoken nostalgically from her years in graduate school. When I finish this manuscript, my next research project will be in Israel, where I will try to revive my knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic, barely used for decades, and pick up old friendships. I will try to understand why some visions are sustained while others fade, much as my mother did when she returned after twenty-five years to re-study a village in New Guinea. Johnnetta, back in the South where she grew up, riding a wave of triumph at Spelman that will affect all the traditionally black colleges, announced her engagement to a man who was a playmate when she was eight years old. Art hopes to work in Atlanta and to explore what it will mean to be the first “first man” of Spelman, to find a model for a new kind of partnership. Joan and Erik have begun to edit the journal Erik kept as a young
Wandervogel
and artist, roving around Europe before he came to rest in Vienna. Joan has