DEBRA ROSEThe basic developmental tasks of all transitional periods are termination, individuation, and initiation (see Chapters 2 and 5). The particular form taken by these tasks in a given transition is shaped by its place in the life cycle. The Early Adult Transition forms a boundary between childhood and early adulthood. In it we must terminate the Adolescent Life Structure and the relationships with all significant parts of the adolescent world. The task of individuation is to move toward an adult self that is more ready to undertake the responsibilities, burdens, and satisfactions of early adulthood. The task of initiation is to test out new choices and explore new relationships in the adult world, laying the basis for building an Entry Life Structure in the next period.
The Early Adult Transition began at 17 for half the career women, at 18 for the others. Its onset coincided roughly with the move to college. Several women who had strongly dependent ties to their family of origin started the period only after completing part or all of the freshman year. A few others began the Early Adult Transition during the senior year of high school as they chose a distant college and planned their escape from the parental home.
DEBRA ROSEYou had to get your driver’s license, had to learn to play bridge, and buy yourself some clothes so you could go off to college and get a man. Going to college wasn’t leading anywhere. It was just something you did to become an educated adult. It was not anticipated that you would use your education to earn a living. You were supposed to use it to be an interesting wife and raise your children and have a certain kind of home life. You should get a teaching certificate so you could earn a living if you had to because of catastrophe, like you didn’t get married or you got divorced or your husband died. Having a career was not viewed as positive then.
As we have seen in Chapter 10, the senior year of high school was a time of combined departure and arrival. The girls were aware that graduation would bring a departure from their childhood world. Most of them experienced the impending departure as a blessing—a welcomed opportunity to leave a difficult family situation and/or a relatively unsatisfying high school life. At the same time, the girls were imagining their arrival at college—a promising new world that would offer increased freedom and an opportunity to be oneself. But the young women had only the vaguest idea of what this world was like and how one might live within it. Only a quarter of them had a fairly positive experience of college life during their freshman year.
JULIA HARTGoing to college was a kind of liberation. It was sort of like getting out of prison in a way. I think it was the first time I was free to be myself and not have to be what anybody else wanted me to be or to be used as my mother’s handmaiden. Now I could really do what I wanted. I think what I wanted at the time was a chance to find out what I could be. I don’t think I had anything concrete in mind, but I wanted to be able to dictate to some extent the total events of my life and not be constrained. I had a feeling that this was a chance to show what I could do. I was determined to do well, and I did. It was like wiping the slate clean and starting over. As a child I had a passionate interest in dancing. It’s a very powerful experience for me that evokes a broad range of feelings. But my father would not allow it. In college I had an image of teaching dance. I knew it was too late to become a dancer, but it would be pleasing to be able to teach it. The college experience was broadening and constricting at the same time, though. The broadening was that I was really on my own at last. But it was constricting as well because it was an all-girls school in an isolated area.
HELEN KAPLANI chose a wonderful college. I got more socially and politically liberal and had great friendships. My parents wanted me to be a good student but never had any vocational aspirations for me. They just thought I’d marry some nice professional man like my father and live in the suburbs. My mother was happy if I had the right boyfriend and wore the right clothes. My father was happy if I was a good student and enjoying myself. I kind of felt that I was making everyone else happy—that that was my task in life—but I don’t remember having very strong feelings about any of it myself. In college no one pressured me to decide on an occupation or major, so I was free to wander around in various departments and see what I wanted. I made the dean’s list and developed a lot intellectually. I worked with some wonderful faculty members on their projects. But I never thought about going to graduate school and had little imagination about what I could do after college. Wanting a career was considered “ambitious” for a woman at that time. I didn’t want to be just a housewife, but I didn’t confront the dilemma. It took a few years after college, and a lot of moral support, for me to seriously consider graduate school.
Three quarters of the young women experienced a “transition shock” occasioned by the actual shift from the world of their origins into the college world. The process of combined departure and arrival continued in a new way. The work of departure from childhood went on throughout the freshman year. With few exceptions, the young woman experienced the satisfaction of being more distant from family but also found it unexpectedly difficult to disengage. The parents usually encouraged participation in family life; in addition, she often missed the benefits of the earlier home base and sought to remain connected to it.
It took time, too, to depart from high school, peer group, and community. Some college freshmen recalled high school with surprising fondness. Though often stressful or boring, it had provided great rewards for rather effortless achievement—in sharp contrast to college. The young women were also terminating relationships with significant friends and groups that, for various reasons, could no longer be a part of their lives.
The arrival at college brought its own complexities. Each young woman had a residence, ordinarily in a college dormitory, but it was only in the most limited sense a home base. The process of forming one’s own home base went on throughout the college years. It was only after graduation that the young woman had the sense of creating a true home base of her own, apart from the parental home. To some extent she lived in a kind of limbo between college residence and parental home; each served certain functions, but neither offered sufficient support in her journey toward adulthood.
The college was a strange new world full of opportunities and dangers. It offered much but was often demanding, lonely, and alien. In high school the young women had imagined college as a wonderful alternative to their current lives, but it turned out for most to be in many ways worse. In college the high school “small pond” became a turbulent, unfathomable ocean, populated by diverse species of larger fish, many of whom seemed indifferent,unfriendly, predatory. Most newcomers experienced themselves as “different” and “out of place” without realizing how widespread these feelings were.
JESSICA HALLMy parents didn’t know any college-educated people, didn’t know one college from another. On the advice of my adviser I picked the choicest school where people went from my region. It was full of social butterflies—the opposite of what I was. You had to be in a sorority, and you had to have references to get in. But my mother didn’t know any women who could give me some. I was scared shitless and could barely utter a peep and was not exactly the most desirable candidate. I did get in, thank God—I would have died if I hadn’t. It was a lower echelon sorority, of course. My first roommate was from a very wealthy family. Every night she and her sorority friends would come into my bedroom and slash apart other people whom they perceived to be lesser, including all of my friends. It was ugly, terribly cruel. I was miserable. The second year I got a room of my own.
RACHEL NASHCollege was a disaster. There were 3,000 students on the campus, and life was pretty rugged. You were basically on your own. The dorms were impersonal. It was difficult to make friends, I had few dates, and I was very lonely. There were lots of pregnancies, lots of abortions, and lots of drinking. At least half the girls I knew dropped out and never finished college. It was brutal, the anonymity and the fact that nobody cared what happened to you.
In most courses I got A’s without putting too much thought into it. But the pressures of being a woman were strong. If I had been a genius they would have recognized me and encouraged me—there’s really no discrimination against geniuses. The difference comes at the second level, where the men get pushed ahead. It was assumed that the boys could do better. I was ignored and not considered to be important. My relationship to my work was very equivocal, too. I wasn’t really sure what I was doing or what I wanted to do. The teaching was atrocious. There was no one who took me seriously. So I was nowhere.
But there is something in me that keeps me going; it never dawned on me to drop out. Something kept me going, fighting negatively rather than positively. I knew what I didn’t want: I was not going to be like my mother.
GRACE TOBINEntering college was a trauma. I was certainly not prepared to confront a lot of things that happened there. I wasn’t up to the level of academic work and just barely got through. It was a very isolated campus. There weren’t any women I could identify with. There was a strong pressure to lose your virginity as soon as you got to college. A lot of girls got really upset when they realized that there was no feeling involved from the guys. Young women all around me were falling apart. Almost 50 percent left and didn’t finish. Everyone was living on Valium. My roommate got pregnant and left junior year. My first sexual experience was a one-evening thing with an alumnus who was back for one of the games. I explained to him that I wasn’t very experienced, and he was very kind. I never saw him again. I was miserable the whole time there—I just wanted to graduate and get out.
The meanings of gender played a key part in each young woman’s Early Adult Transition. As we have seen in Chapter 10, the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure and the internal Anti-Traditional Figure were emerging in adolescence. These images became more articulated in the Early Adult Transition, and the conflict between them played a major part in the young woman’s academic and social life during the college years. The Traditional Homemaker was usually predominant and more directly represented in awareness, but the Anti-Traditional Figure often influenced the young woman’s plans and choices.
The Traditional Homemaker Figure had some clear-cut values and goals. She wanted to be a good student, but not too good a student. She sought to impress men with her attractiveness and general intelligence, but not to compete directly with men. She made strong (though usually implicit) distinctions between the traditional masculine and the traditional feminine, choosing the feminine and avoiding the masculine whenever possible. She hoped to be engaged or married by the end of college to a man of similar education and social class who would be a good partner in a Traditional Marriage Enterprise. She was not interested in high occupational achievements or a demanding career.
The Anti-Traditional Figure, in contrast, wanted to develop her own independence. She bridled at the thought of being controlled or taken for granted by a man. She sought to free herself from the traditional feminine/masculine divisions, be they in college major, occupation, family, or lifestyle. It was important to be feminine in certain basic respects, but not excessively so. She wanted to marry and have children, but not within the framework of a Traditional Marriage Enterprise. She knew what she wanted not to do but found it more difficult to determine what to do in a more positive sense, and there were few alternative models available to her. One compromise was a modified Traditional Marriage Enterprise. The young women who chose this route were by no means rebels who sought to overthrow or drastically change the traditional gender system. Each young woman wanted to become an independent, resourceful person who had an interesting life. She was prepared to accept the basic homemaker/provisioner split and to stay home when the children were small. More than half of the career women began forming an Anti-Traditional Dream during the Early Adult Transition. This was not an occupational dream for most. The young woman hoped to have some occupational skills but not a demanding, long-term career. She hoped to live on terms of greater equality with men, in work as well as family. She would, in short, be a homemaker with many “modern” advantages.
Although the Anti-Traditional Figure was seeking a reform of the existing gender system rather than a revolution, she nonetheless coexisted in basic conflict with the Traditional Homemaker Figure. Like Virginia Woolf’s Angel and Writer, they were engaged in a struggle to the death. From the Traditional Homemaker Figure’s point of view, the Anti-Traditional Figure represented a fundamental challenge to the Traditional Marriage Enterprise. The Anti-Traditional Figure wanted to form personal qualities—such as initiative, responsibility, ability to engage in a nonfemale occupation—traditionally regarded as masculine. To develop in this direction was to violate the basic rules of gender splitting and to stray into the masculine domain. The Traditional Homemaker Figure reminded the young woman that the world has its ways of punishing those who “try for too much.” The path she sought would jeopardize the traditional order and undermine the security of all women within it. She would be in danger of being destroyed by men (and women), of losing the feminine satisfactions of motherhood and family life. The conflicts between these internal figures generated new opportunities and problems in successive developmental periods as the career women attempted to have more equal relationships with men, a caring family life, and a satisfying career.
Forming the Anti-Traditional Figure and the Anti-Traditional Dream was a first step in moving away from the traditional ideal—but only a first step. While defining what they did not want, these young women did little to define a “new woman” with new goals and relationships, liberated from the old constraints of gender. Moreover, society provided a scarcity of images, role models, and concrete options that might guide their quest. The young woman had many unanswered questions: What kind of marital relationship and marriage enterprise do I want (if any)? What occupation do I prefer? What are my long-term goals? How will I balance my involvements in family and work?
Most young adults have trouble focusing on these questions, let alone answering them. The women in the homemaker sample generally managed to avoid or minimize the questioning by keeping the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure predominant. For the career-oriented women, the questions were problematic from adolescence on. What distinguishes these women is not that they had difficulty with the questions, but that they persisted in the struggle to find new answers to the questions and to deal with the opposing internal figures in their effort to seek fuller lives more on their own terms.
In high school most of the young women had been academic stars. Each girl had assumed that, although college would be more difficult, she would work harder and thus continue to excel. Being a highly intelligent, achieving student had been the foundation of her adolescent identity, her self-esteem, and her hopes for a good life as an adult. It had made her feel “special” in the eyes of important adults (notably parents and teachers). It had also provided a basic sense of competence, an assurance that she could attain whatever goals she might choose to pursue in adulthood. The problem of choice—of deciding more specifically what she wanted and how she would live—lay vaguely in the future.
In college this assumption of omnipotence came into question. The change was triggered in part by the young woman’s academic performance, which was often variable and below her expectations. For the first time, some got grades lower than A or B. After being big fish in high school, they now felt like little minnows or, even worse, like “a fish out of water.”
For the first time the young women had to make major choices and to clarify their priorities. Perhaps the most important problem academically was to choose a major field of study, which was closely tied to the question of future adult occupation. Most went through a series of two or three or more tentative choices of major before settling on one. Choosing a major was difficult primarily because it required self-exploration. It was necessary to sort out and clarify one’s abilities, which were reflected in the effort required and the grades received in various courses. It was also necessary, but more difficult, to clarify one’s interests: What subjects do I most enjoy learning about? What fields are especially important or valuable to me? Although many asked these questions, very few arrived at clear-cut answers. Most discovered that they had no special interests. Several fields were “interesting” in a general sense, but none excited an intense or passionate involvement, a feeling that “this is what I really want; this is right for me.”
The choice of major was strongly influenced by the masculine/feminine split. In choosing a college major (and a potential adult occupation), most of the career women carefully avoided narrowly “feminine” fields such as education, nursing, social work, and the like. At the same time, most could not bring themselves to enter strongly “masculine” fields such as the natural sciences, business administration, medicine, and law. It was clear, even in the women’s colleges, that literature and art history were female-appropriate majors, whereas economics was seen as marginal, and science was an option only for the foolhardy. The women in co-ed colleges had qualms about majoring in a field with only a few other women. They regarded the women who took such majors as “unattractive” and “not very feminine.”
Majoring in a predominantly male field carried a further danger for the young women: it placed them in direct competition with men. Even for those who had earlier missed the message, it became quite clear in college that a woman could be too smart for her own good. A certain degree of success was all right, but a woman who outdid most men at their own game ran the risk of being seen as unfeminine, of being rejected as a woman, and of being seriously hurt in the competitive struggle. It was the esteem of men that the young women sought most. The “attractiveness-intelligence” dilemma came into play here. They wanted men to find them attractive and worthy of respect as knowledgeable, interesting persons. They resented it if a man did not take them seriously. Yet they often hid their talents and skills out of a fear of being seen as too smart or too accomplished. Chapter 10 gave Molly Berger’s experience of this dilemma in high school. Here is her account of the college experience.
MOLLY BERGERIn college I led a double life. During the week I would go to classes and concentrate on my work. I’d be friendly with the more intellectual students who were unacceptable to the sorority and fraternity people I hung around with on weekends. The more intellectual men were my buddies; even if I was interested in dating them, I didn’t. I would quietly do my work and try to get A’s, but it was a real conflict, a high-anxiety situation. I figured that if I was too smart the men wouldn’t like me or date me, so I just played dumb. The sorority women who seemed to be successful with men didn’t work hard. I knew that the main objective of going to college was to get engaged; in my sorority, only two of us were not engaged at our final senior dinner.
I can picture myself walking down the campus around the fraternity area. I didn’t comment on things I knew about. I didn’t want to be conspicuous for my brains or my assertiveness. I couldn’t stand being the only woman in the economics class I took in my junior year. In my senior year I thought of going to business school at Harvard or Wharton but, my God, I didn’t want to be one of the few women with all those men.
ELLEN NAGYMy major was a purely vocational choice. My parents’ message was: once you are in a good college just be socially acceptable. I realized that my parents didn’t care about what grades I got, and the only person who was disappointed in me was me. I did as well as I could, which was fairly well. I commonly lied to the men I went out with about my grades; I told them I was doing terribly. But the men I spent the most time with valued women who were more intelligent. I experienced it as a split in my personality—to be intelligent or to be attractive. It took quite a few years for these two personalities to fuse, the smart one and the attractive one.
In choosing a major, most of the thirty career women selected a field that represented a middle or neutral ground between the traditional feminine and masculine extremes. Only a few majored in traditionally female fields such as home economics and education. Over half of the young women majored in the social sciences, arts, or humanities. A quarter chose more “masculine” fields such as economics or business administration, but most saw their major as academically interesting rather than as preparation for a professional career.
JESSICA HALLIn my sophomore year I started thinking seriously about what I wanted to do after college and what I should major in but had no idea of what I wanted to do. I really didn’t want a career and kept hoping to get engaged, but it didn’t happen. My family kept telling me I had to be able to do some kind of work after graduation. They thought I should become a teacher, but I knew I didn’t want that. I was miserable. I kept saying, “What do I want to do? What do I want to do?” I really liked economics and should have majored in that, but it seemed less appropriate for a woman, and there was no one to advise me.
KIM PRICEAt first I thought of becoming a teacher, but when I took a few courses in education I realized that I’d die of boredom. Three quarters of the students who came out of that women’s college were teachers. I was a great student and valedictorian at my small high school but fell flat on my face my first year in college. I was devastated but got through. In my sophomore year I took an anthropology course, and that was it: I had a major in a much smaller pond that fascinated me. I still struggled, but I started picking up right away. The head of the department was a very stern woman but very bright. We had a good student-teacher relationship; it wasn’t very personal, but she gave me a lot of guidance and encouragement.
Most freshmen had a difficult time in the social world of the college. Things improved in the second or third year as they made a place for themselves either in the mainstream or in a subgroup of like-minded peers. Most now look back on the college years as a time of more sociability, friendship, and fun than any other time in their lives. Their social world was populated mainly by other young women, and their personal relationships were almost entirely with young women. Yet, despite the abundance of casual friendly relationships, there was a dearth of more enduring, intimate friendships. About a quarter of the career sample spoke with great pleasure and nostalgia of such friendships, but the rest commented sadly about the lack of significant friendships.
GRACE TOBINI had a group of six or seven girlfriends, and we were rather close. But after graduation we just went our separate ways. I very often regret that I’ve never really established deep or long-term friendships with women. This whole question of friendships interests me. One or two of my friends from college are important to me; they still play an important role in my mind even though I haven’t seen them since graduation.
The relative absence of men in the career women’s lives is not surprising for those in women’s colleges. Men were more available to the women in co-ed colleges, but they got together chiefly in collective situations such as a dance, informal dorm party, formal date, classroom.
Some women spoke of a close, nonromantic friendship with a young man. This friendship had a “special” quality for the young woman. The two liked each other and felt very comfortable in a relationship not burdened by sexual tensions. They engaged in casual leisure activities and were free to discuss their more complicated relationships with others. Both enjoyed a moderately personal relationship based on mutual regard, without strong feelings, obligations, and demands.
ABBY MURPHYThe relationship I liked best was with Charles. We saw each other a lot, all through college, but he was not my boyfriend. He was always around if I needed someone to go out with, and I didn’t have to worry about sex with him. We’d talk about the girls he dated, or about my dates or my home or sorority. He was a good listener.
The largest number of adults in the students’ world were faculty members. One might suppose that the faculty would not only teach the young women in courses but would enter their personal lives in significant ways. Not so. With few exceptions, the teachers played a remarkably limited part in these life stories. Some women made no reference to individual faculty members, but it was clear from their accounts that the faculty remained a distant, shadowy group in the experienced reality of college life. Others stated explicitly that they had very little contact and no significant relationships with individual professors.
STACEY LANEMy first exposure to women role models at my Seven Sisters college was two professional women, but they had limitations in terms of being role models for me because they were single. I don’t think I had any female teacher who was married with children.
PAM KENNEYI had a lot of trouble deciding about a major and no idea what I would do after graduation. I had an adviser who was sort of there, in his office. If I ever wanted to ask his advice I could, but I never particularly did. There were lots of women teaching the lower level courses, but men were the full professors. I was not exposed to any female role models at all. The general feeling was that you got out of college and got married and raised a family.
Some career women mentioned an incident in which a faculty member gave special encouragement, offered advice about graduate school, or recommended them for an award. Only a few, however, described a relationship of some duration and personal significance.
TRISHA WALLIn college I majored in education. I had a couple of women teachers who were models for a well-rounded life: they worked and had families and were active in their communities. But neither had a real career. They were like family to me. They told me what would be best for me after college: teach high school for a few years, then get a master’s degree out of state so I could come back and teach there. I did what they suggested. I didn’t think about any other field, nothing.
EVA PITCHERI don’t think I ever had anybody who stood over me and was very influential. I have never had many friends, mainly acquaintances. I did have a series of people in college and after who were very supportive and encouraging—but no personal relationship. I never liked the word “mentor.” In college there was a young male faculty member who had to keep his distance from the female students but also encourage them. He’d write nice comments on my exams and tell me I should think about going to graduate school. A few others encouraged me in the same way, and they certainly influenced my decision to attend graduate school.
These relationships provided benefits that most of the other students received from no one. The helpful teachers gave support, advice, and sponsorship for graduate or professional school. Some of the good female teachers were “like family”: maternal figures who were caring but not emotionally imposing. Other female faculty and the male faculty were helpful in other ways. Each relationship served a few mentorial functions, enabling the student to realize specific goals, to feel appreciated, to cope with stressful situations. However, very few served the most crucial function of a mentorial relationship, namely, the development and articulation of the young woman’s Dream.
In its primordial form, a Dream is a vague sense of self-in-world, an imagined possibility of one’s adult life that generates excitement and vitality. Though its origins are in childhood, it is a distinctively adult phenomenon: it takes clearer shape and is gradually integrated within (or, often, excluded from) the adult life structure over the course of early adulthood. A Dream formed by the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure is likely to portray the woman in a Traditional Marriage Enterprise as a nurturing mother and/or someone supporting her husband’s achievements. The internal Anti-Traditional Figure, in contrast, is more likely to form an Anti-Traditional Dream of living in independence and equality, perhaps engaged in both work and family.
A life based upon a Dream has a special, vital quality; any other is at best a compromise and at worst a defeat. A Dream that does not develop, or that has no place in one’s life, may simply die. In some cases the Dream is pursued through early adulthood and then modified or given up in the forties. Pursuing a Dream is risky, since the outcome may be grievously disappointing, but life without it is less intense and exciting.
A major task of the Early Adult Transition is to begin crystallizing a Dream and forming a life structure around it. Unfortunately, the obstacles are usually formidable and the sources of support limited. In the simplest (though not most frequent) case, a Dream evolves and is articulated into specific, consciously planned goals. To achieve the goals is to realize the Dream. Some persons, however, pursue goals that do not stem from the private Dream. A young woman may have a clear Dream yet renounce it, temporarily or permanently, in order to pursue other, more pragmatic goals favored by her family and social world. She may have an inchoate Dream yet be unable, for various reasons, to give it conscious meaning and to translate it into concrete goals. She may never have felt free to ask, “What do I really want for myself?” A person cannot afford the luxury of a Dream if she is totally occupied with survival in a barren environment or with conformity to a life scenario that leaves no room for personal choice—a widespread experience of young women.
A full, complex, mentorial relationship supports the evolution of the Dream. A true mentor fosters the young adult’s development by nourishing the youthful Dream and giving it her or his blessing, believing in the young woman, helping her to define her newly emerging adult self in its newly discovered adult world, and creating a space in which she can move toward a reasonably satisfactory life structure that contains the Dream.
Mentoring cannot be understood in purely individual terms, as the activity of a single person. It is a relationship which the two participants conjointly initiate, form, sustain, exploit, benefit and suffer from, and, ultimately, terminate. The nouns “mentor” and “mentee” identify the participants. But the verb “to mentor” is essential in identifying the drama they are engaged in. The essence of the drama is the evolution of the mentorial relationship. The relationship is fostered and hindered in various ways by both parties; it is significantly colored by the social context in which it occurs. The relationships between the young women and their special teachers can usefully be examined from the perspective of mentoring and the Dream.
KIM PRICEDuring the college years Kim Price had a powerful though barely articulated Dream: to move out of the world of her origins and become a respected member of a more educated, affluent world. How she would live in this world was still a mystery. Education was the key. Her Dream, still quite vague, was to enter the educated middle class on terms of personal dignity and equality. Her relationship with a professor stimulated her academic involvement and achievement, provided student jobs, and supported her flagging self-esteem. The relationship helped much less in developing her Dream. At the end of college she sought a job in the business world but had no sense of career direction. Although the relationship with this teacher supported Kim’s entrance into the job market, it apparently did not help her to imagine and then plan an exciting adult life. We do not know enough to identify the major obstacles involved. Presumably they lay partly in the teacher’s limitations as a mentor, partly in Kim’s inner difficulties in forming a mentorial relationship of greater intensity and in pursuing a Dream, and partly in the state of society, which made it hard for any young woman, especially an African-American woman, to form and live out an occupational Dream.
Debra Rose was the only career woman who had an articulated occupational Dream in the Early Adult Transition.
DEBRA ROSEI always wanted to do something special with my life. I had a sense of destiny since I was very young. I had a sense that I was going to do something special, that I was not going to lead an ordinary life and be an ordinary housewife. I felt I was going to be a painter. My husband was very unhappy with that activity; he definitely did not like the idea of my becoming an artist and staying home and painting because I got moody and depressed; I don’t think that was an unreasonable action on his part. Painting was something that took me away from my husband. If I had become an artist I wouldn’t have stayed married to my husband. It would have been going away from my parents. It would have been a different life. I want to be free, but freedom is dangerous; I do not want to be alone.
For a long time as I went through life I had the idea that ultimately I was still going to become an artist, but I think it was too difficult for me to choose that path. I don’t think I was willing to face the consequences of becoming an artist. It would have been upsetting to my family, my parents, my husband. I think it’s connected to the struggle that I’ve always felt that I wanted to be free and independent. I think the occupation I chose as an adult kept me in society and in the family, whereas if I had become an artist I would have devoted much more of my life to myself. I’ve always been responsible. I felt it was too selfish to be able to do what I wanted to do.
TRISHA WALLBeing a good student was Trisha Wall’s primary source of self-esteem, and being financially self-sufficient through work was the essential groundwork of her planned life as an adult. During college, with the help of her major professors, she planned to become a teacher. Within the narrow confines of her childhood and college worlds, this occupation made perfect sense. It was secure work for which she had high aptitude. It would enable her to get a job right after graduation and thus to make a quick getaway from her father’s enveloping neediness. It was acceptable to both the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure and the internal Anti-Traditional Figure within herself. Her occupational plan unfolded with a kind of inevitability over the college years. It was jointly created by the eager student and her beneficent teachers.
Only later, in the Age 30 Transition, did Trisha realize that “nobody ever told me about possibilities for a real career connected to my special artistic interest.” The biggest problem was not that no one told her about external possibilities. It was, rather, that no one asked her about inner possibilities—about her private interests, fantasies, preferences. And Trisha could not ask herself, could not listen to the timid inner voice that wanted to tell her about artistic rather than purely practical interests. The college student could barely hear that voice. The teachers had no inkling of it and perhaps took for granted that they knew what was best for Trisha. And their social-institutional world placed no value on the secret work aspirations of its young women. Had she come to hear and at least partially embrace that inner voice, she might have been more able to explore the occupational options through which her interest could be lived out. As it was, the seeds of a Dream lay dormant throughout a developmental period in which, with a little nurture, Dreams may blossom.
During the Early Adult Transition, only a few women had mentorial relationships that contributed more directly to the formation of occupational goals. These women were among those who became faculty members, not businesswomen, and the mentoring relationships occurred in graduate school, not college.
During the Early Adult Transition all thirty career women went through some degree of psychological separation from parents. The young women were trying to establish a center for a new adult life. At the same time, the parental residence was still in a basic sense “home”—the one place to which they could return if all else failed. In many ways, they still felt like little girls in relation to powerful parents. They continued to experience their parents as important sources of emotional nurture and moral authority, even as they strove to gain greater emotional independence.
By the end of the Early Adult Transition, most career women were starting to form a new home base. It was important and satisfying to be on their own—yet the parental residence remained their symbolic home base for some years longer. Not until the Age 30 Transition, or later, did the career women struggle in a more conscious way to get beyond the inner sense of being the “good little girl” in relation to parents whom they endowed with powers of authority, benevolence, and malevolence. While seeking greater psychological (as well as social and geographical) distance from parents in the Early Adult Transition, they also sought to maintain emotional ties and to avoid any actions that might rupture the relationship. They struggled to become more separate and to remain attached.
In the Early Adult Transition each young woman began to experience herself more as an adult in her relationships with men. The key questions were: What do I want with men now, and in the future, with regard to sexuality, intimacy, friendship, work, marriage, family? The internal Traditional Home-maker Figure and the internal Anti-Traditional Figure took strong yet contradictory positions on these questions. The actual choices made by each young woman were sometimes closer to one extreme, sometimes the other, and they evolved over the college years. In their choice of boyfriends the young women were increasingly put off by young men who were highly “macho” or who made strong sexual or emotional demands. The young women did not want to be seen as dependent or as sex objects subject to male control, and these feelings were evident in their relationships with men.
Fourteen career women married in the Early Adult Transition, eleven from the faculty sample. Almost all of them married within a year before or after graduating from college. Twelve of these women completed college and went on to a job or graduate school, and the marriage was often in the service of the internal Anti-Traditional Figure. None had a child before age 25. The other two women became mothers as their Early Adult Transitions ended: Stacey Lane at 23, at the start of graduate school; and Holly Crane at 21, just after college graduation. Both of the mothers then formed an Entry Life Structure in which homemaking was the central component.
During the college years all but a few businesswomen wanted to marry and have a family. The internal Anti-Traditional Figure reminded them in the strongest terms, however, of the dangers of premature marriage and motherhood. The safest course, she advised, was to complete college and then spend several years proving oneself in work or graduate studies before starting a family: “Through work you will develop the ability to take care of yourself as an independent, competent adult. You can then have children with less risk of being consumed by domesticity. It is all right to marry earlier, provided you find a husband who—unlike most men—will give you space to work and become independent before having children.”
JULIA HARTIn those days most women had the idea of getting married. I just wanted something to do in the interim that wouldn’t be a chore. Having an occupation or career really didn’t mean much to me then. I wanted to get married and have children, but I wasn’t overly optimistic about my chances of getting married, that I’d meet someone whom I’d want to marry who would want to marry me. For some reason I never found any of the men I met particularly interesting. I kept thinking, “Is this all there is available?” A lot of my classmates were “rock gatherers”: They’d rush out and get engaged and flash their diamond rings. I had sort of contempt for them, for the fact that they were so keen on getting married that they’d do it at any cost.
I wanted to find a different kind of man. Somebody who would have some respect for my innate capabilities and treat me like an equal. He’d be fairly well directed and motivated, a doctor or lawyer. I wasn’t too specific. But we were not going to make the mistakes our parents had. I thought about what we wouldn’t do as opposed to what we would do. We would bring up children differently than our parents had. Less pressure on academic accomplishment and more on allowing the child to develop at his or her own pace. And certainly a much better relationship between mother and father: more talking, more sharing, less fighting. But I didn’t find that kind of man in college.
ABBY MURPHYI had two serious dating relationships in college. I went with Dennis for most of my freshman year. It was mainly social dating; I liked having someone around so that I could go out like the other girls and not be alone. Looking back, I don’t think I was ready to really get to know someone. I had strong sexual feelings toward him but they scared me. I was a good Catholic girl. If you had sex before marriage you were a bad girl. Even limited sex was frightening because there was the danger of loss of control. I was afraid of the demands of someone who would want sex. With my parents I felt that I gave so much and got so little in return. If I actually got something out of the relationship, what would the other person want from me? But with Dennis I could set limits—just petting. The thing he really did to end it was want to get married. When he proposed, I said no. That was it; I cut it right off, never saw him again.
I always felt I’d get married someday, but it was not my first priority. The main thing was to get through college and work awhile. I couldn’t even get on the wavelength of marriage. Being in love with someone was not the big issue. I just wasn’t ready for a permanent commitment. I didn’t want to be like most women I knew: a weak pretty thing who goes with the tide. That doesn’t fit my image of myself. Through my relationship with my father, I suppose, I see myself more as a man: strong and purposeful; someone who has to do what she has to do. I really didn’t like women very much for many years.
All through my junior year I was pinned to Kevin, a good-looking graduate student. I liked having a date every weekend. We did some heavy petting, but I was still afraid of sex and pregnancy. We didn’t really talk—all those relationships were pretty superficial. But then Kevin got very possessive and wanted my total attention. I went out once with another guy, and Kevin got furious. I couldn’t understand that, and I certainly wouldn’t tolerate it, so I just quit seeing Kevin.
Birth control was not readily available to this generation of young women. Of the twelve businesswomen who did not marry in the Early Adult Transition, only Amy York and Melissa Howard had sexual intercourse during this period. For both, the sex was not part of an intimate love relationship. It represented, rather, a futile effort to overcome the rigid emotional-social barriers that separated females from males. In some elemental way, each young woman was trying to form a relationship in which she could give more of herself and receive more from the other. The relationships in which sex occurred were not better than those without sex. (This phenomenon may be more common today, when premarital sex in the Early Adult Transition is more widespread but often not part of a more intimate relationship.)
AMY YORKI basically hate thinking about the college years. I had no sense of what I wanted as an adult. I knew I didn’t want to be married and have children. I wasn’t into studying and skipped classes a lot. I made some friends but always felt outside of the group. I made two girlfriends, boozing buddies. We would hang out and drink and smoke grass. In those days I’d never talk about myself to anyone because I didn’t know much about myself. It never occurred to me to discuss how I felt about anything.
I wanted a boyfriend but didn’t know how to go about getting one. I thought maybe if I went to bed with them then a relationship might follow. I decided to lose my virginity and hopefully gain a friend at the same time. I went out with a virtual stranger and went to bed with him. It was really awful. He just climbed on top and pumped away. I had a lot of one-night stands like that.
I don’t want to discuss it further because I just want to forget it, but Iwas raped walking home late one night. He came out of nowhere. I was so terrified I didn’t know what to do. It was horrible. I don’t want to discuss it further because I just want to forget about it. But getting raped taught me one thing: to fight back. It was one of the major decision points of my life. I would fight to the death if I had to, but nobody was ever going to get the better of me again.
MELISSA HOWARDI didn’t date much until senior year. Four of us shared an apartment. I wasn’t dating much, but then I had sex with the guy upstairs. I wouldn’t say the first sexual experience was bad; it was just stupid. We had spent most of the year exploring the petting scene. I’d been raised Catholic, and everything was no, no, no. So we were petting, and we really got down to it, and he said, “You just can’t stop now.” I said okay, but I wasn’t going to help it along. It hurt like hell and was very unpleasant. I just went downstairs and never talked to him again. So I had lost the dreaded or heavenly thing virginity without having any of the great excitement. I just said, “Oh, well, I got rid of the damn thing.” To be 21 was pretty old to be a virgin. But I think you do wish for a bit more. I said, “Is that all there is?” It was years after that before I really cared much about sex, and I’ve never been orgasmic.
Three businesswomen married in the Early Adult Transition. For all three young women, the marriage was in the service of the wish to become independent of parents and defer parenthood. The young women consciously chose men who supported their wish for autonomy and agreed not to have children until later.
DEBRA ROSEI met my husband at the beginning of my freshman year of college. We married when I was 20. I think I had just reached that stage in life where I was ready to meet someone, to fall in love, have romantic connections and sex. It was just a question of finding someone my age and my general socio-economic position.
Wallace has a lot of very special qualities, and there was certainly every reason for me to fall in love with him and marry him. He was exactly the kind of young man who fit into what my parents’ ideas were about who I should marry. It wasn’t a terribly exciting romance, but it was fine. We didn’t have a sexual relationship until after we were married.
The marriage was never very good for me sexually. I have always had strong sexual feelings but rarely had an orgasm. I remember on my wedding night, getting undressed and having this feeling of total panic. “What am I doing in a hotel room with a stranger? I married this man, and I don’t even know him!” Which was true.
The marriage has always lacked passion on my part. I have never been fulfilled in my marriage. I have a collection of personal needs that I don’t think my husband is capable of meeting or maybe I’m not willing to let him try. There is definitely a holding back on my part as well as lack of sensitivity and interest on his part.
Being married at that age in my generation was really very liberating. Getting married was a way to get out from under your parents, your dorm and do what you wanted to do. The thing I value most in life is independence. I was not looking for a man who was going to be my boss. I was looking for equality.
ELLEN NAGYDuring my sophomore year I would have said that I was not going to marry for quite a while. I was going to get the career stuff settled. I wanted more freedom. I did expect fully to get married and have children after a while, but I needed to be somewhat independent first.
I met Carl, my first husband, the summer before my junior year. He was one year older and went to college in another state. We had this lengthy correspondence that got more passionate and more involved over a several-week period. Carl was drawn keenly to me precisely because I was intelligent and had ability. He was the first man I ever met who valued those qualities and who saw a woman not as a possession or a housewife but as a partner. His mother worked, and he wanted a woman who would have a career. I would not get married until I found someone who liked a wife that had a career. I also fell in love with Carl (I behaved irrationally twice in my life, and I married both of them). Carl proposed in the fall of my junior year, when I was 18, and I said yes. I had a very busy senior year at college, very social, and I did well academically. Carl and I spent my senior year, the year before we got married, largely apart; we only saw each other one week at Christmas and one week at Easter.
In June at 20 I graduated and got married. I felt that getting married was not very important. At the same time, it was important to get married so I could go out and have a career. I wasn’t conscious of all that, especially the contradiction. I didn’t have the internal self-confidence to be on my own, and I didn’t have the social self-confidence to believe that there would always be other men out there for me. Sexuality was a real problem. I didn’t know what to do with my sexual drive; it was trying to burst out all the time. I thought nice girls don’t. Also, I was afraid of getting pregnant. So I did the obvious thing: I got married.
In looking for a marriage partner, I was companionship-oriented and willing to scrap a lot of other things for a person who would be a good friend, which Carl clearly was. What I left out in that rational equation was sex. Ultimately that was a pretty serious mistake because sex never really clicked between us. The whole relationship was founded on companionship. I thought of Carl as protective, strong, and capable. I had found someone, instead of my father, who would look after me, protect me, and let me do my own thing. That’s what I needed most at the time.
The sexual part was not overly passionate. If the person you share your life with is a good steady friend and companion, I figured, then sex will work out reasonably well. It’s not the most important thing in the world. But sex never did work out reasonably well for us. It was tolerable for a brief time. We had not been totally intimate before marriage, and it was a total disaster when we started. It took a long time to recover from that.
The bondage part of the marriage hit me at the beginning of the ceremony, and I had great difficulty going through with the wedding. I stood there thinking, “My God, what have you done with your life? You’re locking yourself up!” And that feeling persisted. I remember waking up the next morning with a sense of emptiness, thinking that my whole life was over. “Well, what do I do now? I’m the good little girl who does all the things I’m supposed to do. I do them better than anybody else and get A’s and get married and that’s it.” Getting married was the pinnacle of success for a woman, but what were you supposed to do after that? I was 20 years old. What was I going to do with the rest of my life? It was obvious that I was going to graduate school and to work. We agreed that we would postpone starting a family for several years while my husband finished medical school. Later when he was established I would work part time while I raised three children.
Even though I’m divorced now I refuse to look at that marriage as a mistake. It helped me get some physical and psychological distance from my family, which enabled me to become more independent. It was very much what I needed at the time, but I grew a great deal, and Carl grew in another direction.
Most faculty women were more “academic” in orientation and values than the businesswomen. Being a good student and having an adult life in an intellectual world became essential aspects of their identity. They felt more at home in the academic environment and received more encouragement from teachers and peers. By the senior year of college they could think seriously about going to graduate school, even though they had little sense of a long-term career.
This strong academic orientation was also reflected in marital choice: almost every faculty woman married a faculty member or a graduate student. Eleven faculty women married in the Early Adult Transition, the rest by 28. The courting and early marital relationship usually had some mentorial qualities: he believed in her potential and helped her form an Entry Life Structure in which education-work was a central component. However, the mentorial aspects created pitfalls as well as strengths. Although the relationship initially nurtured her occupational aspirations, in the long run the inequality was hard to outgrow and became a source of painful tension.
KRISTIN WESTAs I look back on the college years, I was amazingly divided in my plans for work and family. My strongest sense was that I wanted to be free of my family and become as independent as possible.
I met my husband-to-be in my senior year, and right away I told myself, “Jack is someone I can give myself to completely, and he will make something of me.” He had graduated four years earlier and was teaching high school while deciding what to do next. He was the first man I had ever talked to who talked back. For some reason I just started talking to him, and we discussed existentialism. A month later he asked me to marry him. Well, he didn’t actually ask me to marry him. He said, “You can marry me and become or you can marry someone else and become.” He was putting it like I had the potential to become his idea of what I should become. I’m so mad about this now, but at the time that idea was attractive to me, just what I wanted to hear. I thought about it and said, “Yes, I really do want this.” We got married that summer, as I graduated and turned 22.
Jack was entirely right when he said I could become what he wanted me to become. I had done as much with myself as I knew how to do, and I was looking for someone who could help me do more. I was getting into a more artistic and intellectual world but had no sense of direction. No woman I knew had ever done anything. Jack was offering me something beyond my previous experience—opening up a whole new world for me. My father was the first person in my family to get even a high school education. When I finished college he said, “We’re really proud of you, but you’re not going to do any more of this education stuff, are you?” I said, “No, of course not.” It didn’t matter what grades I got; in my parents’ view, I was successful when I had dates.
The first thing Jack and I wanted to do was go abroad, discover more of the world, and get more perspective about ourselves. It was a very romantic idea: we would go to France, where I would draw and paint, and Jack would write.
Going abroad was really a big leap for us. We had never thought of it before, and we didn’t have any money. So we taught high school for two years, and I got a master’s degree in education. I didn’t want to be a teacher in the long run, but it was the most remunerative kind of work I could get then. My mother had taught, and she was not what I wanted to be. Teaching was a way to save money for Europe. During the first year [22–23] we worked out our plans and settled into our marriage. We agreed not to have children for several years in order to have this great adventure.
I wasn’t in love with Jack until we decided to go to Europe, and then I was definitely in love with him. I put myself entirely in his control, I wanted to behave the way he wanted; I wanted him to be pleased with me. Here’s an example: soon after we married I spent a lot of time at a party having a friendly talk with another guy. After the party Jack completely withdrew his affection for three days. I was a complete nervous wreck. I knew I had done something wrong but didn’t know what. Finally Jack said that I had spent too much time with this man at the party. The man was a fool, and my talking to a fool was a bad reflection on my husband. Through incidents like that I came not to do anything Jack wouldn’t like. Before we married he supported my painting and sculpture, but I gradually cut down because he couldn’t stand the mess I made around the apartment.
Since our marriage ended I have thought a lot about what happened in it. The way I see it now is that he was very controlling—but I put myself completely in his control, willingly, stupidly. Actually, it wasn’t so stupid because he did direct me to a point so that in my early thirties I was doing what I really wanted to do and starting an academic career. Jack really educated me. He was the first person I had ever known who saw outside the local community. The odd thing is that by now, at 43, I have accomplished much more than he has.
HOLLY CRANEI went to a co-ed college that had a good dance department. Then I discovered that I couldn’t dance; my body just wasn’t right for it. That was very hard for me; I was mourning psychologically for my lost dance during my freshman and sophomore years. But I liked school and got hooked on history. That’s when I began to feel that there might be something in my head instead of my body, and I got very involved in school.
I’d been very interested in boys and sex since high school. The clear message from my family was that you don’t have sex before marriage. It was such a charged area: full of guilt, full of excitement. I petted and kissed and fooled around, but I wouldn’t have intercourse. I managed to stay a virgin technically.
The summer after high school graduation I met Eric. He had an apartment, and we had intercourse. The first time was weird. I had thought bells would go off because it was so terrific petting. But intercourse was such a disappointment. I didn’t really feel anything, and I certainly didn’t have an orgasm. I thought, “Is this all it is?” But I kept thinking this is what you’re supposed to do, and maybe it will get better. After having intercourse you can’t go back to just petting, so the next four or five guys I went out with before my husband I went to bed with. They were not very good experiences. Sophomore year of college I got pregnant! I wasn’t using birth control; somehow I never thought it would happen to me. I had an illegal abortion. It was very painful. I went in alone, came out alone. Then I went back to school. I was so mixed up and unsure at that point.
Then I met Ralph, who was separated from his first wife. He was a professor at the college and a very high status figure. I never took courses with him, but I knew who he was and thought he was wonderful. We had a good sexual relationship. I saw that I could learn a lot from him. It was so ridiculous! Here I had this professional mother, all these models of independent living. Why did I want to get engaged and married my senior year of college? But that’s what I did. I felt an urgency to get married. I was looking for a man for some of the things that I’d wanted from my mother. I wanted someone to take care of me. The thought of graduating was very threatening because I didn’t know what the hell to do with my life. I knew I didn’t want to go to graduate school. I’d tried a stint during summer vacation in publishing to decide if I wanted to do that. But I discovered that in publishing women become secretaries, the men become editors. All I could do with a B.A. in history was become a secretary! It was jolting to me.
At that point my relationship with my mother was very strained, and getting married was a way of getting away from her. I didn’t feel I could live by myself at that point. So there were no options other than to get married. I wanted to nail down security, and marriage was a way of doing that. I wanted what my family should have been and wasn’t. I would create with Ralph the family I never had. I was coming to the end of my college career and didn’t really know what I wanted to do. Ralph was very supportive, and he got me out of a very difficult family situation. So it was like I could attach to this strong academic man and be his good little wife and live in an interesting academic world.
We married during my senior year when I was 21. My father disowned me for marrying a non-Protestant. My mother did not like Ralph at all. When he and my mother were together in a room there was a lot of tension: two narcissists sitting in a room and not liking each other.
The Early Adult Transition usually ended at age 22, occasionally at 21 or 23. It lasted four or five years for the great majority, six years for a few. Graduation from college served as a powerful marker event for the completion of this period, a reminder that life was about to begin in earnest. Most career women needed some additional time, however, before they could conclude the transition and start building an Entry Life Structure. The world of childhood was slipping away, and the world of adulthood lay just beyond the next bend in the road—inevitable, not quite visible, attractive yet frightening. As graduation approached, each young woman was under some external pressure to begin a new life on a more independent basis, outside the parental orbit. She also felt some internal pressure and desire to “grow up,” to decide what she wanted with her life and to start living it. At the same time, there were many external and inner pressures to delay her entry into the adult world. She found herself on the threshold of adulthood—yet often separated from it by an “abyss.” She was often not clear how to get there from here, or whether it was even possible in her case.
AMY YORKAt graduation I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was kind of surprised that a mantle of adulthood didn’t just drop over my shoulders at graduation. I never thought you actually had to work at a lot of things to get to a certain point. No one had ever advised me on anything. I just assumed that there would be a line of college graduates and a line of management representatives who would grab you off the production line. So I sat there. And it didn’t happen.
SALLY WOLFORDAt graduation I thought, “What am I supposed to do with my life? Someone tell me what to do!” It was like looking over the edge of a vast precipice. I didn’t know where to start. I felt the world was coming to an end because I wasn’t getting married like the other girls.
In the senior year of college each young woman was faced increasingly with the question of how to live after graduation. Once again, the voice of the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure relentlessly urged her to marry, start a family, and limit her occupational interests. The internal Anti-Traditional Figure, in contrast, insisted upon deferring family until she became an independent, competent adult. Each young woman worked out her own initial compromise between the two internal figures. There appeared to be a bewildering array of concrete choices. In actuality, the young woman had only a few basic options. Some of these were intolerable to her; others were possible but not unequivocally attractive; and even the one or two options she could consider were not clearly defined in her mind. The conscious sense of confusion often covered a more elemental sense of having no truly satisfactory or viable choices.
Since the external circumstances and internal motivations were so different for the two samples of women, I’ll consider them in turn.
Most of the future faculty members had strong intellectual interests and felt at home in the academic world. Some were encouraged by college faculty to go on for higher degrees. Their self-esteem was rooted in the identity of “excellent student.” Going to graduate school was the most obvious, attractive, and feasible next step after college, and this was indeed their choice. Most became graduate students without having long-term career goals. Half entered master’s degree programs that gave modest training and credentials, while ignoring or leaving open the possibility of continuing for a doctorate. Even those who entered a doctoral program were often uncertain about the desirability and the feasibility of a long-term academic career.
The faculty members usually needed a year or two after college graduation to complete the Early Adult Transition and make the choices around which an Entry Life Structure could be built. They graduated at age 20 to 22 and ended the Early Adult Transition at 22 or 23. During the interim phase they tentatively made and modified major life choices, especially those relating to love/marriage/family, education, and work, and tried to form the basis for a first adult life structure. This was an especially difficult time for many, and for some a rock bottom time in which it often seemed impossible to find a satisfactory way to live as an adult.
As the Early Adult Transition ended, eleven of the academic women were married but only two had children. In almost every case the husband was a graduate student or faculty member. There was often a mentorial aspect to their relationship: he was three to fifteen years older, further along occupationally, and supportive of her interests in graduate work and deferment of motherhood. She often experienced him as a “special man” with whom she could have a relationship that would enable her to develop more fully. Many had a sexual relationship before marriage, but the relationship was not very passionate. The qualities of the relationship that seemed most important to the young woman were the mutual appreciation and the vision of a future life in which both could realize their fondest hopes.
In most cases the woman came to realize later that she initially had an idealized view of her husband and of the relationship. His feelings for her were more ambiguous, and in some respects more negative and controlling, than she had recognized. He wanted an interesting, educated, accomplished wife who would have some involvement in intellectual work, but he also assumed that she, rather than himself, would take primary responsibility for the home. They agreed that she would do outside work but colluded in avoiding the question of her “career.” Some women were later surprised to learn that their husbands preferred not to have children or would agree to having children only if she would be totally responsible for their care. Ten of the eleven Early Adult Transition marriages ended in divorce, usually at the woman’s initiative.
NINA DALTONIn my senior year, turning 22, I applied to all the best graduate schools and was accepted by all. I chose a university, not because it was necessarily the best, but because my boyfriend Jay had decided to go to a school near there. Both of my parents were professionals. I always assumed that I would do as my mother had—find a supportive husband and combine family and career.
My graduate school was highly unstructured, and for the first time I was living by myself in an unsafe neighborhood. I kept having anxiety attacks—it was like the whole environment was closing in on me. At midyear I left school and returned home to live with my parents. I was depressed and slept all the time; it was a really bad year. My whole idea of what I had wanted to be came crashing in on me. Until then my life had been smooth. I had always been very successful at everything. It was my first run-in with the real world.
That spring I decided to apply to a different graduate school. At about the same time Jay proposed marriage. I didn’t feel especially happy about marrying him. Our relationship was not passionate. It certainly wasn’t the optimal circumstances under which to make that kind of commitment; it was really a way of being safe again. Marrying Jay seemed like the right thing to do, but it wasn’t as joyful as it should have been, and I certainly recognized that at the time. On the day I got married I did not feel especially happy.
We married that summer, when I was 23. We had applied to the same universities, and in the fall we both went to the same one but in different departments. Once again, I made a choice on the basis of his preference. That was the beginning of a relatively stable but not exciting time. We had our own separate worlds and friends. We didn’t fight, but we didn’t have much of a relationship either. Though I enjoyed graduate school and did well enough, I still didn’t know where it was leading.
At 23, a year after college graduation, Nina Dalton settled on her initial adult choices and began forming an Entry Life Structure as a married childless graduate student, still unclear about the place of family and career in her future life.
HELEN KAPLANWhen I was 20, my boyfriend Tim graduated and was going off to the service, so we decided to get married. It was crazy, looking back on it now. I think I felt insecure about his going so far away, and a lot of people were marrying early at that time. I think I was in love with Tim, although I certainly have been much more in love subsequently. We had known each other for so long. It didn’t turn out very well. We didn’t have a sexual relationship at all premarriage. It was a kind of security relationship above everything else, but it wasn’t a passionate physical relationship. It seemed that our lives would fit together very well because we came from the same kind of family, went to the same kind of school. I wasn’t questioning too much at that point.
I graduated in January at 21 and joined Tim in the Midwest. I lived on the base there, which was the first time I’d lived by myself. Tim lived at officers’ school, and I only saw him once a week. So it wasn’t much of a relationship at all at that time. I was not emotionally involved with Tim. It was a very difficult life for me, and I was very lonely. The upper-classmen picked on the lowerclassmen, and the wives mimicked that. We were supposed to be very competitive with each other over who could serve the most elaborate teas. When my husband’s group became upper-classmen I invited all the wives together for a tea. I opened a box of Hydrox cookies and said, “I think it’s time we changed things around here.” It was a real revolution [laughs]!
After a few months we moved to a different base and got an apartment off-base. I decided I was not going to sit there and be a lieutenant’s wife. I was not going to serve tea and cookies. I got a job three days a week and took graduate courses two days a week. When I was 22 Tim left the service.
Although I’d been an honor student in college and learned a great deal from some wonderful women teachers, they did not particularly encourage me to have an academic career. I had no career plans and assumed that after working a few years I would settle down and start a family. During that first year after college, however, I learned that life among the housewives was not for me. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I got very clear about what I didn’t want: I would not be an unemployed housewife, nor would I spend my life in a routine, intellectually dead job.
By chance I got a job in an academic department at a nearby university at 22. I went through a tremendous change and got clearer about my life goals. I really loved the work. After a few months I was contributing enough so they made me a co-author of articles. Two of the senior faculty treated me with considerable respect and made me feel I was very promising. They enthusiastically urged me to go to graduate school. The wife of one of them was a graduate student and mother, and her example was a big help. That’s when I really decided to establish some kind of career for myself.
I started graduate school at 23, and my husband started graduate school, too. My record was so good that I was offered scholarships at several top schools. In the application process I got a real education in sexism. Several male interviewers interrogated me about my career plans. One professor, politically very liberal, told me what a problem women graduate students were: “They never do what the men do; 75 percent of them don’t finish the doctorate, and those that do might as well not have.” I said, “I assure you, if I come here I intend to finish.” He answered, “That’s what they all say.” In graduate school one of my advisers told me, “Look, you’re married, why don’t you go home and have babies?” They thought it was okay for a female to be a good liberal arts student because that would make you a better mother, but this professional stuff didn’t make any sense to them.
So age 22–23 was a really important time for me. My first job brought me into an academic world. Some of the senior people there taught me a lot and helped me get a clearer sense of what I wanted. I still wanted a family, but it became essential to try for both family and career, which I have in fact done. When I went to graduate school at 23 I was starting a whole new life.
Helen Kaplan’s story reflects several themes of wider importance. Her relationships with the two male faculty members and the wife/mother/graduate student were mentorial in several respects: they provided guidance, moral support, sponsorship, an example of a woman attempting to combine career and family, and a work situation that fostered her intellectual development. Few young career women received mentoring to this degree. At the same time, we should note that these were partial mentoring relationships and that certain crucial qualities were minimal or absent. One ingredient missing in Helen’s account was love. I am not referring here to sexual love, which I believe is usually more a hindrance than a help in the evolution of a mentoring relationship. I am referring to the personal character of the relationship, the experience of emotional attachment, involvement, identification. The mentors were helpful primarily in an instrumental sense. They did a lot to foster the mentee’s interest in and admission to graduate school, but the relationships seem not to have a highly personal quality.
A second missing ingredient has to do with the Dream. Although the mentors helped her in setting occupational goals, they appear not to have helped her in forming a Dream and in giving their blessing—something much more powerful than support—to the pursuit of it. Moreover, her account of applying to graduate school gives clear evidence of the antimentorial, sexist qualities of many male faculty members who do not truly welcome a woman as a full participant in the academic world.
Only two faculty members got pregnant during the Early Adult Transition.
HOLLY CRANEWe married during my senior year, when I was 21. I had my first child nine months after we got married. I had wanted a family, but not quite that fast. I was pregnant when I graduated. So I moved right away into a comfortable niche—or I thought it was comfortable at the time. I was just wanting to crawl into somebody’s arms and have somebody take care of me. I was willing to do whatever a woman was supposed to do to get that. It’s pathetic to look back on now. I was a product of my culture; that’s what women did when I went to college. All my friends were getting married.
I had three children in four years—21, 24, and 25! I loved being pregnant.The first baby was very responsive, and I really enjoyed nursing her and cuddling her and caring for her. But it was very demanding, very draining. There is no harder job in the world physically than being a mother. It’s too many hours of unrelieved time. It’s just impossible. And Ralph didn’t give me any relief; he just would not help. He distanced himself emotionally. He was never around. He was off giving speeches and writing books. He had a lot of trouble with the baby except as a toy. When it cried he would get angry, and I felt caught in the middle. I didn’t know any better. I thought this is what marriage was. It seemed like what most of my friends were doing. I tried very hard during that first year to be a good faculty wife and mother. I had had all these fantasies of being different from my mother—staying home and giving myself full-time to a baby and a house and cooking, and I did that with real gusto.
Ralph was writing his first book that year. I began to read, critique, and rewrite it. An important part of our early marriage was that I in effect was Ralph’s research assistant. There was a lot of me in his work. I certainly did a lot of work that would be recognized as co-authoring. I began to feel I had intellectual power which came via Ralph. I was learning intellectually from him as a student does from a teacher, but it never changed and became equal. It was a real exploitation. Graduate students do the same thing and get a Ph.D. for it, but what do wives get? I really feel I got ripped off. I was responsible for getting Ralph’s career started, and he has acknowledged that.
Ralph really wanted to leave the college. He was beginning to become very ambitious, and I shared his ambition. A year after we married he got an appointment at another school, so we moved. We had had a nice life at the school. It was a community, and there was an intellectual/cultural life, and I took courses. But I went where my husband went. Leaving was a big transition for me. It was a very different life in a small apartment in a strange city.
Four future faculty members remained single throughout the period of the Early Adult Transition.
GRACE TOBINI decided to go to graduate school. I didn’t know quite what else to do. I decided on a master’s program because I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this at all. I never thought I would go all the way for a Ph.D. I knew very few women who went on beyond college. I imagined I would teach at some college, but not as a scholar at the university level. Perhaps a small college. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t work or marry and have a family. I had a lot of friends in college who desperately wanted to get married and start families. I didn’t have either of those urges. I assumed that sometime down the road I would find someone I wanted to marry and have some kids.
I got my master’s degree in three semesters. Academically I was very successful, but personally I was kind of flopping around, trying to find direction socially and personally, trying to figure out which way I was going and what I really wanted. I was involved in a bunch of one-night stands, just running around being rather promiscuous and not really liking it but not finding anybody that I could get interested in. I met a gay guy whom I decided didn’t have to be that way—I could change him with love, kindness, and understanding. Only after several months, with no success, did I realize that it wasn’t as I thought. It was the most frustrating, upsetting relationship I have ever had. I was in agony, a total wreck. It was so destructive that I finally broke up with him.
After getting the master’s degree I put all that stuff behind me and started a new life in England, where I got a job teaching American soldiers for a year. I immersed myself totally in the little community there, which was a lot of fun. There was a lot of partying and having meals together and socializing. I learned a lot about myself, and I learned I could teach.
Going to graduate or professional school was a possibility for virtually all of the businesswomen. Further education offered the opportunity of developing a clear-cut occupational career and, for the unmarried, of finding an appropriate husband. A few took this course but the great majority decided against it. In college they had typically been good but not outstanding students. In most cases the young woman saw herself as a “solid but not brilliant” student, oriented toward practical work rather than academic work. MBA programs were just beginning to admit women, and several young women considered going on for an MBA but quickly rejected the idea. It seemed unappealing to be one of a few “token” women in the highly competitive masculine business world. While wanting greater freedom, they were not prepared to storm the Establishment bastions. (Some women got an MBA or similar degree later, when they had a more secure base of operations and knew better what they wanted.)
The option actually taken by the great majority of these women was an entry-level job in the business world. For a variety of reasons they were drawn to New York City, the center of the corporate-financial world, even though their colleges and parental homes were usually some distance away. A few obtained an entry technical-professional job in a field such as accounting or finance. Most got a job that was held by women only—computer programmer, research or editorial assistant, general office factotum and gofer. They were clearly overqualified. In filling these necessary but minor positions, corporations gave special preference to Ivy League and Seven Sisters college women applicants. Men with similar education would not have taken the jobs or even been offered them.
As she graduated from college, each young woman urgently wanted an opportunity to prove that she was entitled to a place in the work world. Her first job (and often her second and third) was by no means the first rung of any career ladder. Rather, it gave her the only available starting point from which she might in time get to the bottom rung of a ladder leading upward in the organizational hierarchy. At that point, she hardly knew what a career was or whether she wanted one, let alone how to get it. Through an admixture of chance and motivation, she found this starting point and diligently used it to gain greater competence and advancement. A career path came later, typically in the Age 30 Transition.
A few businesswomen concluded the Early Adult Transition a few months after graduation and then devoted themselves to building an Entry Life Structure. The great majority needed an interim phase of six months to two years to complete the Early Adult Transition. During this phase the young women explored the possibilities for a more independent adult life while maintaining the ties to parents and the structured life of the college student. For some 25 percent of the women, the initial year or two after graduation was primarily a time of hopefulness and adventure in an exciting new world. For others, it was a time of both excitement and difficulty as they tried to make their way along a rocky path. For more than half, however, it was a rock bottom time that offered few immediate satisfactions and no clear basis for a better future. Here are a few examples of life in the senior year and the interim phase after graduation:
JESSICA HALLAt graduation I was miserable. Only five or six women in my class didn’t get married within six months of graduation. Secretary, social worker—they all had ditsy little jobs, not a career. Leaving college, thinking about what I was going to do next, I was in terror. In my senior year the head of the Placement Office invited us to a meeting. For the first time the reality began to set in that I couldn’t do anything I wanted. She told us that females had to type or teach; no other jobs were available. She was a frustrated spinster who fully believed that if you did anything other than type or teach you would not get a man, and your prime aim in life was to get a man. I said, “Screw that!” I’d interviewed with a foundation and learned that they had erased my name from the list because I was female. I made a scene and went to the head of my department, but they had never seen one of these creatures like me. They were afraid the companies would stop recruiting there.
I wanted to go to New York City. The only job title I’d ever heard about was analyst, so I decided that’s what I would be [laughs]. I sent out sixty letters to companies and got four appointments for interviews. It turned out they didn’t hire women as analysts. A few wanted to make me a computer programmer, but I knew that didn’t lead anywhere. My aunt knew a man who got me an interview at a brokerage firm, and I ended up there.
My parents wouldn’t let me loose in New York City, so they got me into a residence for women. The residence ran a tight ship, with curfews, but I liked it. I didn’t mind the restrictions and enjoyed the group of ready-made friends. I got there as I turned 22 and stayed almost a year. I loved New York City, though I had a terrible time adjusting to it and becoming part of it. I got there never having had a taste of wine, never any cheese other than American, bread other than white, steak other than well-done.
The job itself was terrible. I worked for a nice 60-year-old man who couldn’t function very well. As a “kindness,” the firm had made him head of this small department. I was finished with my week’s work by noon Monday and had nothing to do the rest of the week. My boss and his secretary spent all their time crying about their troubles. It was very depressing for a young woman.
I wanted to advance, but I didn’t fit in with the crowd there. The people who did best had both brains and money. I mean, this was the most handsome set of Ivy League types you ever laid eyes on. Preppie, real preppie. Whereas I was real cornpone, a fish out of water. There was a big difference between this 22-year-old thing from the Midwest, who barely knows how to wear shoes, and a 26-year-old woman who was educated in the East and has lived in a sophisticated milieu all her life. I was terrified of the women there, couldn’t integrate with them, didn’t have any friends. I was too intimidated even to phone these people for lunch. And I certainly didn’t know how to function in New York cafe society.
Things improved slightly after six or eight months. I made friends with Bev, who helped me learn the ropes. She is still my best friend though I don’t see her very much. I asked for a job as an analyst, and they said they’d give me a try. My parents put great pressure on me to keep the first job, bad as it was, but I finally took a stand. I began to blossom a little with men, too, became somewhat interesting to them. I was not popular, but I went out with some singularly interesting and intelligent men. Finally, after nearly a year [almost 23], I became an analyst, moved into my own apartment, got my life in some kind of order, and began to have a sense of the future.
PAM KENNEYI graduated at 21 and had no idea what I would do. At that time, you got out of college and worked, but you didn’t have a long-term career. I had no models of what women did after college beyond secretary and teacher. My parents said, “Wouldn’t you like to go to graduate school?” and I said,“No, thank you.” So I decided I might as well come to New York City and try it. I didn’t have anybody I was going to marry. Going back home wasn’t an option. So I decided that I really wanted to work. The standard question at job interviews was, “Can you type?” At the time women were secretaries and men were other things, so I went to secretarial school to get job skills. I lived at a hotel for women. It wasn’t exactly a college dorm but it was very protective, like an extension of college.
KIM PRICEI wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I graduated from college. I didn’t want to become a teacher; it just seemed too dull and traditional. After graduating I moved away from home immediately and got my own small apartment. It was an exciting time! I was free, on my own, independent, making my own decisions. I was ambitious and wanted to get ahead. I wanted to be taken seriously for my intelligence, competence, and abilities.
I went out searching for a trainee job and ran right into prejudice. Many doors I walked in just offered typing jobs, clerical jobs. Because I was black they used the excuse, “You’ve got too much education; you’re overqualified.” But all the women then were overqualified. An employment agency got me a job as a typist. I worked my way up to administrative assistant and went back to school nights to work towards my master’s degree.
I had my first sexual adult-type relationship. It was with an older man. That lasted for a while. It was an important experience because I had finally made that big step, and it was with somebody I trusted and liked. I was in love with him. Sex is giving of myself. That is a side that is very private to me, and I don’t treat it very lightly. I don’t feel that it should be available to just anybody because I have an urge or they have an urge. It’s a need, but a more controlled need. It’s connected to my feeling of being independent, of being able to take care of myself.
ABBY MURPHYI moved to New York City right after graduation and moved into an apartment with three other young women who had been at my college. That was comfortable. By the fall I started making friends at work and really started to enjoy it.
The company I went with was not large, but it was the only offer I had, and it was in New York City. That was probably the best thing that ever happened to me because I did make that break from home. It was a difficult year because I realized the total lack of support from my family. Just none, zero. How difficult it is to make a transition without that. My father’s reaction to my job was, “What kind of an idiot would pay you that kind of money?”
I got wonderful experience, and it worked out very well. My job was actually very good: two years later I went to a Fortune 500 company, which is what I wanted to do in the first place.
ELLEN NAGYI went to an all-women’s college. It was very supportive reinforcement, very protective. They taught you to be a first-class citizen, to develop your maximum potential, to be supremely capable. The message was that there’s no reason why you can’t do anything. But the men who went to equivalent colleges were aiming for the top jobs, every one. They would be the best and the brightest in their professions. By rights we women should have been the privileged too, but we were not.
In the fall after graduation I went to graduate school. I didn’t have any money, and my parents would not pay for anything; on college graduation day I was on my own. Going to graduate school was job-motivated. I knew I couldn’t get a good job unless I had a graduate degree.
Career was just a vague thing for me then. I had selected my major because I thought I could get a high-paying job. It was not a dream, this career; it was an idea to do something interesting. I was sure that work was going to be boring, and I was trying to get myself an interesting job. More than that, I wanted to earn money, and I wanted it to be my money.
I got half a fellowship because they said I would waste a full fellowship that could be used by a man. The faculty was very explicit about their discrimination against women, and so were the students; I was the only woman. The idea that I would go into the business world rather than academia made me a double leper. I did a two-year program in nine months and got the master’s degree. It was just sheer hell, that’s the only word for it. My husband, Carl, was getting out of the service in June, and we would move to wherever he could get into medical school, so I had to hurry. Carl and I did a lot of entertaining, and we had tons of people over all the time, which was very nice. That went on through Carl’s medical school, too. I did a lot of the traditional things—cooked, kept the house reasonably neat and clean, did all the housework stuff myself.
I did not have a clear sense of what I would do after graduate school, just that I would get a job in the business world. The business world was where you could make money, and I figured that they would be willing to hire a woman in my field because they needed that. I had enough sense not to become a programmer, which was the standard career choice at the time for a woman.
I was very career-oriented and motivated, but I think a career represents an underlying conflict for women. Men know that they are going to have a career; it is a given. They don’t contemplate a career of raising children or being a spouse. Women who believe men will do that are swimming against the current. And most women who were trying to do just the career were probably swimming against their own current and probably questioning what they were doing on some level. I think there’s an underlying conflict about having a career for women. For most women, jobs were what you did until you did the real thing of getting married and having children. You might go back and work later if you wished, but that’s not a career.
Carl got into medical school in NYC, and we moved there just as I turned 21. My sense of where I was going was extremely confused. I knew nothing about the business world, got no encouragement from anyone about going into it, and ended up there for negative motivating reasons: money. I was pressured to get a job right away because our economic survival depended on it. I wrote to all the companies in NYC who hired women, about fifty of them, and I got a fair number of replies. I started calling and banging on doors. Everywhere I went people thought it was a very, very strange thing for a woman to be applying for those jobs. I got three job offers. I was very well suited to my field from my education and abilities, and it turned out to be a very good job and a stepping stone to increasingly responsible jobs. I was ignorant but not dumb. I actively sought more responsibility. I had help along the way from men who liked having a capable, hardworking person work for them and would champion the cause for you.
A constant toll was exacted from women, a general putting-down, not taking them seriously, treating you like a sex object, downgrading your work role and not expecting you to stay. Until I came back after my baby was born at 29, they never expected me to stay—sooner or later I would get pregnant and leave. People would say to me a lot, “Aren’t you going to have children?” There were two other women in professional positions. One left and got married, and the other woman, very capable, is now a senior person at that company. She’s very traditional but not married. If your aspirations outpace your progress, then you’re still reaching and probably dissatisfied. If your progress exceeds your aspirations, you’re always rather pleased; you’ve come further than you expected. She was in the latter category, and I was in the former. Initially I had no thought of advancement; I just figured that if I could have an interesting job at a relatively decent salary for the rest of my life, I’d be pretty happy. My concerns with advancement came later.
My husband was very proud and supportive and tolerant when he was in medical school; he took an active interest in my work, and I took an active interest in his work. Here I was working with all these men, so I thought it was a good idea to make sure they met my husband. Carl would come down to the office and meet everyone as my husband, confirming me as a married and unavailable women. That was very helpful, allowing me to form work bonds with male colleagues.
Without knowing it, both groups of career women were pioneers: they were part of the first generation in American history in which a significant number (though still a small minority) of women were attempting to move beyond the bounds of the Traditional Marriage Enterprise. With few predecessors, they had to find their own paths. In the academic world, women had been on college faculties but largely in small colleges and in “women’s” subjects. Few women held senior positions in most fields at the major colleges and universities. In the corporate-financial world, very few women had been employed in positions above the entry level. The corporate world was more gender-segregated than the academic, but both presented severe obstacles to the hiring, daily work satisfaction, training, and promoting of women. As the Early Adult Transition ended, most of these young women were groping their way, not at all clear what career path (if any) they might eventually come to.