“I have been a member of the Columbia University community for thirty-five years, and I can only consider myself to be speaking as what Lionel Trilling called an opposing self, opposed to culture, in this case, the culture of the university.”
CAROLYN HEILBRUN
“To finally recognize our own invisibility is to finally be on the path toward visibility.”
MITSUYE YAMADA
“I was a modest, good-humored boy; it is Oxford that has made me insufferable.”
MAX BEERBOHM
ONCE WE ARE OLD enough to have had an education, the first step toward self-esteem for most of us is not to learn but to unlearn. We need to demystify the forces that have told us what we should be before we can value what we are.
That’s difficult enough when we have been misvalued by an upbringing or social bias that is clearly wrong. But what happens when this wrongness is taught as objective truth? When the most respected sources of information make some groups invisible and others invincible? When we are encouraged to choose between “bettering” ourselves and becoming ourselves?
I never asked any of these questions during my various years of schooling. To get an education was an end in itself; its content was beyond questioning. Not until decades after I had left all formal education behind did its impact on me—and its purpose in general—seem open to challenge. Perhaps “real wisdom,” as author Joan Erikson said, only comes from “life experience, well-digested.”1 I know that my own questioning was fueled by two chance experiences that occurred within weeks of each other several years ago.
First, I went back to Toledo, where my mother and I had lived when I was in junior high and high school. The occasion for this trip was a women’s conference at the university on the “good” side of town, but I couldn’t resist wandering around the streets of East Toledo and our old neighborhood the night before. There were the same small houses, the same bars and churches in equal numbers, the same Polish and Hungarian social clubs. A few more black families had moved in, and Puerto Rican workers were bringing a new layer of ethnicity, but what looked like the same tricycles were rusting in the front yards, the same wash was flapping on the lines, and the same big TV antenna dwarfed each roof, as though life here could only be bearable if lived elsewhere in the imagination.
Certainly, my teenage self had been totally consumed with escaping. If I had written any book then, it would have been titled Getting Out—and most of my friends felt the same. Our dreams of escape from the neighborhood kept us from focusing on our probable fates as lifetime factory workers who rebelled only on weekends, or homemakers who played pinochle, went bowling, and sometimes got a beating on Saturday nights. Our imaginations rarely went beyond the two escape routes we knew: sports (if we were boys) and show business (if we were girls). In fact, we could point to two local celebrities to show that we also had a chance: a guy who had gone to a university for a year or two on a football scholarship before coming back to the neighborhood as a factory foreman, and singer Teresa Brewer, who had won the Ted Mack Amateur Hour while still in high school and never came back. Mostly, though, we were responding to the media. Sports and show business were the only places we saw people like us who seemed to be enjoying life and not worrying about next week’s paycheck.
I always felt both odd and lucky because I had the possibility of an additional way out: getting a college education. It was a path first to an interesting job and ultimately to a better class of husband (or if the husband should lose his job or die, it was “something to fall back on,” as my mother always said)—and that was enough. Getting out of our drab, hardworking neighborhood and into the beautiful, carefree suburbs that we saw on television was all we had in mind.
I had this encouragement because my mother was the only parent in our group who had graduated from college. She had even spent a little time in graduate school. Of course, she ended up much poorer than the factory workers in this neighborhood where she grew up, and living in her family house, which was by then a ramshackle structure teetering over a major highway; a place so depressing that it was hard to rent out the first floor so the two of us could survive on the second. Yet this daily reality never changed my dream of how “college people” lived, and it certainly never interfered with my mother’s faith in the redemptive powers of an education. Just as her own mother had instilled this faith in her, she handed it down to me. When our house was condemned and the land beneath it sold to the church next door, my mother used this windfall to pay my tuition at a “good” college, and I left what I thought were my less fortunate friends behind.
The day after this visit to my old neighborhood, however, I saw some of my East Toledo contemporaries at the women’s conference where I was speaking. A few faces I remembered, but as we talked, we realized many of us had lived the same lives and gone to the same schools, whether or not we knew each other then. But they entered adulthood early by marrying right after graduation, or before if they “had to” (our neighborhood counted the months from wedding to birth), raising their families, and perhaps helping to support them with a part-time “pink-collar” job for the phone or gas company. But by the feminist 1970s, when new opportunities for women were being publicized on TV talk shows, their children were self-sufficient, and they were ready to seize on these new possibilities with their whole hearts.
At a time when the housewives of the “feminine mystique” were still getting out of the suburbs and into the labor force—and when I and other white-collar women workers were still trying to “deserve” the unequally paid professional jobs we thought we were so lucky to get—these women had begun to demand equal treatment with men, and by the time I encountered them again, they were getting some of those opportunities. The few women who had been able to get comparatively well paid jobs in local factories could see that the guys standing next to them on the assembly line were doing exactly the same tasks for fatter pay envelopes, so they had brought one of the earliest sex-discrimination suits. By organizing with more traditional family-planning groups, some of the others had just won a citywide referendum against an anti-abortion measure disguised as a “maternal health ordinance,” and defeated it two-to-one in their mostly Catholic, blue-collar precincts. Still others were starting their own small businesses, planning the campaign of a woman mayor (who was to win and become a first in Toledo history), and organizing battered-women’s programs instead of assuming that Saturday night beatings were inevitable. A few were running for the school board and other local political offices, and almost all had gone back to school for a degree or professional training as what the University of Toledo referred to as “nontraditional students,” and what the women themselves called “retreads.”
But what most separated all these women from the girls I remembered and their own younger selves was their spirit. They were full of rebellion, humor, energy, and a certain earthy wisdom that seemed to say, “I’m myself now—take it or leave it.” One of them summed up her reasons for going back to school after forty by posting this motto on her refrigerator door: “Free your mind—so your ass can follow.”
Of course, there were also many casualties. They told me about one of my best friends in high school whose children had been born so close together that her small body had run out of calcium. She lost her teeth and her hopes, and settled into the life of an old woman. Another classmate had been so shamed by her family for being “an old maid” at twenty-five that she married a man who was younger, concealed his violence toward her out of gratitude that he had married her at all, and finally became so depressed that she was institutionalized. Yet another had spent so much of her life inside one of the tiny row houses in our neighborhood that she became terrified to leave it. A doctor prescribed tranquilizers, not freedom.
But by the time we finished the conference and went to a local television station to do an interview about it, I was feeling great pride in the women who had stayed in this neighborhood that I once lived, dreamed, and breathed of escaping. They were self-confident, productive, bawdy, and very much themselves. When an angry male viewer phoned after the show to denounce the conference as “anti-family,” and me in particular as “a slut from East Toledo,” I suddenly remembered how devastating those words would have been to my teenage self. But all these years later, they caused less pain than laughter: he didn’t have the power to define me or any of us anymore. We were defining ourselves.
As we toasted each other as “the sluts from East Toledo” with coffee and beer after the interview, I thought: Not a bad thing to be. Maybe I’ll put it on my tombstone.
But the full meaning of what my classmates had achieved wasn’t clear until I saw the difference between them and the college graduates I had been so eager to join. Because my twenty-fifth college reunion came only a few weeks later, the contrast was inescapable.
On the New England campus of Smith College, I realized again the great distance between this idyllic scene and my old neighborhood. Green lawns, landmark buildings, new graduates carrying long-stemmed roses, and smiling alumnae in summer dresses—all seemed evidence of assurance and good fortune. But underneath, there were doubts and tensions. And underneath was where we had been trained to keep them.
For instance: A classmate who had tried unsuccessfully to create panel discussions on aging, violence against women, equal rights legislation, and the like concluded that topics were chosen for safety and obscurity. (My personal favorite was “Tropism or Refraction?”) As she said, “What do you expect? We were taught to revere Aristotle, who said females were mutilated men and could tarnish a mirror.”
For instance: At our class dinner, the first woman president of Smith College addressed the problems of women combining career and family—yet never suggested that men might play an equal part at home. Indeed, she implied that she had been able to have a successful career because she didn’t have children.
For instance: Of those who responded to our class reunion questionnaire, 98 percent had supported legal abortion. Having grown up in the era of illegal abortion, many of us had experienced this danger firsthand. Nonetheless, when a group of us showed up for the Alumnae Day Parade with pro-choice signs, we were told we couldn’t march with our class. Why? Because there might be even one person who disagreed. Instead, our class carried committee-approved signs that made jokes about our age, eyesight, and waistlines, as if self-denigration and silliness were things with which no one could disagree.
For instance: Even among the new graduates, the most rebellious were still debating whether to display a banner protesting U.S. policy in Central America, with the same ladylike worry that a few people might disagree. The idea that it was okay to disagree, that people would carry whatever signs they wanted to, hadn’t been part of the either/or discussion. Moreover, issues of special importance to women were clearly less serious, even to the rebellious, than foreign policy issues seen as important to men.
I’d forgotten the seductive power of niceness and unanimity. Our courses had not been dedicated to “freeing our asses.” As a result, we had a hard time assuming our own centrality. Would graduates of a black college forbid civil rights signs at a reunion because one person might disagree? Would Jewish graduates take foreign policy toward Latin America more seriously than policy toward Jews?
It seemed that for women of all races and classes, education had separated what we studied from how we lived. It had broken the link between mind and emotion, between what we learned intellectually and what we experienced as women.
Of course, there were Smith women who were spirited, self-confident, and active in everything from politics and business to education and the arts. Individually, many were doing brave and remarkable things. But as a group, they seemed less strong, funny, joyful, and free than their East Toledo sisters; more apologetic and self-blaming; more distant from themselves. If divorced, they were more likely to have lost their identity along with their husbands. If married, they seemed more identified by their husbands’ careers. The difference was not only in what they said, but in how they said it. “I want … I know … I hope …” was how East Toledo women started their sentences. “They say … It may be true that … It’s probably only me, but …” was how Smith women were more likely to preface their thoughts.
When I mentioned this contrast in writing about the reunion at the time,2 I assumed the difference was economics. Since more East Toledo women had to work to help support their families, they also were forced to discover their strength and independence. Since Smith women were more likely to have husbands who could afford a dependent wife, on the other hand, many had been deprived of the self-confidence that comes from knowing you can support yourself. And, of course, neither group had been encouraged to value and give an economic worth to their work of maintaining a home and socializing the next generation. That was a patriarchal rule that crossed class boundaries.
Now, I still believe class often works in reverse for women. There’s a bigger power difference between a tycoon and his wife (or wives) than between an average husband and wife, and even a male professional is likely to have a job that’s the main chance, unlike a blue-collar man, and thus to have a wife whose work is secondary (a “jobette,” as one of them described it ironically). But economics doesn’t explain the whole difference between my two very different groups of contemporaries. After all, some of those Smith women had come from poor and working-class backgrounds, others were single and supporting themselves, and a few had high-powered careers. By that twenty-fifth reunion, about 40 percent of respondents to the questionnaire were doing paid, full-time work.
No, I think the deeper explanation lies in the kind of education we college women had absorbed. Its content—and our lack of the reality checks those East Toledo women had by virtue of taking courses later in life for pragmatic reasons—had made us more vulnerable to lethal underminings like these:
Of course, men are also separated from their less well educated brothers by elitist educations—which is part of the same problem—but men are not an insurgent group. For women, the tragedy is closer to that of Latin, African-American, or just plain poor students who get separated from their communities and families. Women go to college and learn about economics in which the work that our mothers do at home (which is worth about 25 percent of the U.S. gross national product) isn’t counted at all, and human rights that include protections against group hatred based on everything except sex. The fact that we may love college and feel grateful for being there—as I certainly did—only means we internalize these messages more eagerly.
Fortunately, all of us can unlearn. Thanks to the good luck of living in an era when women are questioning lifetimes and even millennia of lessons, I have faith in that possibility. I’ve also noticed that self-taught people who didn’t learn the system in the first place are often our best teachers. Without time-consuming detours through this or that theory, terms-of-art that only the initiated can understand, and intellectual jousting with the ghosts of ancient authorities, they go to the heart of what they need to know.
In the 1970s, for instance, at the first feminist conference ever held by, for, and about women in Appalachia, I met women from West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee who came out of the hills and hollows in buses and pickup trucks, in shared cars or on foot, to gather on the campus of Marshall University. In the course of discussions, a craft fair, and workshops, I noticed that many of these women had a head start on things that it had taken me years to figure out:
Perhaps it’s an exaggeration, but in retrospect, I felt I had learned more that was of use in that one long weekend than in a year of college. More about nature, art, justice, power, and fairness. Certainly more about my own strength.