MICHELE PROTOThe primary tasks of the Entry Life Structure are to form and maintain a first adult life structure and to establish a place for oneself within the generation of young adults (see Chapter 6). For the career women it began at 22 or 23 and ended at 28 or 29. Its onset was usually six months to two years after graduation from college. As it began, fourteen of the thirty career women were married, and two had a child. For the nonmothers, the love/marriage/family component of the life structure was of subjective importance in the early twenties but was overshadowed by the concern with work. A few career women had a broadly defined occupational direction such as accountant, analyst, academic scientist, or economist, but most had no clear vision of a long-term career. The great majority of young women were simply seeking a foothold in graduate school or the work world, a place from which to start. The Dream was not highly formed in the early twenties. The internal Traditional Homemaker Figure played an important part in setting family goals and in limiting occupational horizons but did not generate an animating Dream for any of these women. For most career women the rudimentary Dream was carried by the internal Anti-Traditional Figure. The key image of the Anti-Traditional Dream was that of an independent, competent woman who was taken seriously by herself and others, who was not mindless or selfless, and who would have a reasonable balance of work and love/marriage/family in her life.
Since I have already discussed the evolution of the Entry Life Structure in Chapter 6, a brief summary here will suffice. The first phase of this period, from about 22 to 25, is devoted to building, testing, and consolidating an Entry Life Structure. Even if the main components of the structure are well defined at the start of the period, a few years are needed to create a more integrated structure. For many young women the life structure at 22 or 23 is rather fragmented, incomplete, or unstable. They are just beginning to explore the possibilities for living as relatively independent young adults. A few years are needed to learn a little about what the world offers, and what they want, with regard to work, love/marriage/family, home base, and other components of the life structure.
In the Age 25 Shift a young woman attempts to correct the major limitations in the Entry Life Structure as she experiences them. It is not a shift from one life structure to another. Rather, it is an attempt to improve the structure formed during the first phase. It may take various forms: setting clearer priorities around work and love/marriage/family, filling a major unfilled component (by getting married or starting a family or entering a new occupation), becoming more independent of parents, firming up the existing structure. There are wide variations in the relative success of this effort and in the nature of the resulting life structure. The shift ordinarily begins at 25—rarely before late 24 or after early 26.
The Age 25 Shift begins the second and concluding phase within the period of the Entry Life Structure. If a relatively stable structure was formed in the first phase, a young woman tries now to enrich this structure and to protect it from major change. If the initial structure was fragmented, she tries now to fill an unfilled central component and to form a more stable, secure structure. The shift is often dramatized by one or more marker events such as a job change, a geographical move, getting married or divorced, having a child. An event is part of the Age 25 Shift to the extent that it serves to stabilize the life structure and to instigate the second phase, which lasts until the period ends.
Whether they were married or single, work was the central component of the Entry Life Structure for most career women. Love/marriage/family was usually an important but partially filled or unfilled component for much or all of this period. The career women’s engagement in both components was, however, deeply compromised by the conflict between the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure and the internal Anti-Traditional Figure. The women were pulled in various directions by their own inner aims and by external social pressures. They were eager to work but often reluctant to get heavily involved in a career, which might keep them from having a family. Most of the single women wanted to marry, but not too soon nor to a too-traditional man. Motherhood was important, but again not too soon, lest one become overwhelmed by a Traditional Marriage Enterprise.
None of the career women was able to establish an Entry Life Structure containing occupation and love/marriage/family on terms that were very satisfactory to her. All of them spent much or all of the second phase trying to fill an unfilled component or to make improvements in a component that had somehow gone awry. Let’s look now at the evolution of various components during this period.
During the period of the Entry Life Structure the career women became more distanced, financially and psychologically, from parents. All but two young women lived away from the parental home, usually in another city, and took primary responsibility for their own life decisions and sustenance. Parents came to play a less central part in their lives, with occasional moments of pleasant contact or great tension. The greater emotional and social distance was important to the young women. It is generally not feasible or desirable for adult offspring to make the relationship with parents a central component of their lives; at best it is a highly valued and satisfying peripheral component.
The growing separation was usually brought about by parents as well as daughter. The parents generally supported daughter’s decision to work and live elsewhere. At the same time, they wanted her to live at a higher level of comfort and social class than her initial income permitted. Most parents partially subsidized their daughters by providing a regular allowance or specific gifts for rent, furniture, visits home. The parental help was usually a mixed blessing and burden to the novice adult struggling to find her own way. The parents of an unmarried daughter offered help intended primarily to improve her chances for appropriate matrimony. They wanted her to have an apartment, neighborhood, job, social circle, and lifestyle that would enable her to meet a prospective husband with a good career potential. They were investing in their daughter’s future. The daughter often felt that her parents were offering help with too many strings attached, or for their own purposes rather than hers. For these and other reasons, she moved with deliberate speed toward reducing (though not eliminating) her dependence upon them. Her move toward separation was usually more active and more conflicted in the second phase of this period. Mother was often more involved in her matrimonial progress, father in her work. Father regarded her work as a source of independence, a bulwark against a bad marriage or a lack of marriage, but not as an achieving career that might interfere with her primary career as homemaker. He was thus both a support and an impediment to her budding occupational aspirations.
Over 75 percent of the career sample had little contact with siblings during the Entry Life Structure and beyond. Few had formed a good enough relationship with a sibling to want to continue the relationship into adulthood.
For almost all of the career women, work was the central component of the Entry Life Structure and the primary basis upon which the other components were formed. The work of most businesswomen was an entry-level job in a corporate firm. The work of most academic women was to attend graduate school to earn a master’s degree or doctorate, in preparation for a future academic profession. Being a graduate student is very different from being a college student: the primary aim of graduate school is to transform a novice into a skilled professional capable of doing mature work in a particular discipline. Graduate school is the first step in a professional career; “graduate student” is an entry-level position within the academic career. In this context, then, the term “work” includes not only a paying job but also graduate studies and any other activities through which we form an academic occupation.
As the period began, each young woman found herself lacking in occupational skills and in her sense of who she was and what she wanted with occupation. Most of those who were married had chosen a husband who was in no hurry to have children and who generally supported his wife’s interest in occupation. Those who were single had usually terminated one or more potentially matrimonial relationships out of the fear that the man would insist upon a Traditional Marriage Enterprise and/or that she was overly susceptible to becoming a traditional homemaker. It felt essential to the young woman to form an occupational identity and, through the medium of work, to develop a competent self who could have both family and occupation in the future. Work was seen as a vehicle to a modified Traditional Marriage Enterprise in which the young woman would give first priority to family while still having some serious outside involvements.
How did the thirty career women progress occupationally in the first phase of the Entry Life Structure?
Roughly a third of the career women were at 25 on a well-defined path leading to an academic or professional-managerial career. The future faculty members in this group were graduate students making substantial progress toward the Ph.D. degree. They obtained the doctorate at ages 26 to 29 and began an academic or professional career. Examples among the businesswomen include: analyst at a major firm, accountant in a medium-size accounting firm, technical job in a corporate finance department with good credentials and prospects for promotion. In the Age 25 Shift these career women strengthened their commitment to occupation, though their long-term goals were still vague.
Another third of the career women, most of them faculty members, were at 25 on an occupational path other than business or academe. They were usually teaching high school and/or obtaining a master’s degree that had limited career potential. Only after age 25 did the young women enter a doctoral program or corporate job with some prospects for career development.
A final third of the career women had jobs that led nowhere in particular and had no sense of an occupational future. Most of these were in the business sample. Their primary aims were much more immediate: to make a first niche for themselves as competent members of the work world and to get clearer about their occupational and matrimonial interests. They generally expected to start a family in a few years and then have interesting work but not a career. They had job titles such as editorial assistant, research assistant, administrative assistant. In the corporate world these jobs were given primarily to female graduates of excellent colleges who were educated, middle class in background and orientation. The women were bright, hard-working, and had few expectations. They had the skills to perform specific office functions such as typing and editing. They had the literacy, culture, and decorum to carry out other responsibilities such as talking to clients, going on field trips, reviewing technical literature, and assisting the work of a highly professional team. The young women were often overqualified for the job as officially defined but well qualified for the work actually required. They were also underrewarded in terms of job title, pay, and prospects for advancement.
These jobs were “women’s work.” Men were rarely offered them and would generally not accept them. They were usually jobs held by transient workers: young women who would work for a few years, get married, and become homemakers. The young women often made a limited investment of self in the work, and the organization invested little in them. This scenario probably held for the majority of young women who held such jobs. The women studied here exemplify the minority who remained in this world beyond their early thirties and later entered a more professional career path.
Whatever her job and occupational orientation, every young woman became a member of a work world: a work organization contained within a larger network of academic or financial-corporate institutions. She was for the first time an adult member of an adult world. To some extent, both the academic and the business world invited her to demonstrate that she was a competent, interesting adult, able to function on equal terms with other adults. To a greater extent, both worlds (especially that of the corporation) also did the opposite: they treated her as a girl, limited her to women’s work,kept her in a subordinate position, and denied her the opportunities available to men of equal or lesser qualifications. The same contradiction existed within the young woman. While seeking the freedom to develop her skills and pursue her goals, she was also constrained by the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure who kept reminding her of the dangers of getting too involved in career.
The work world also played a major part in shaping the young woman’s social world: the people she came to know at work and elsewhere; the social circles within which she participated; the social circles she could not join because they were above or below or simply outside of the ones accessible to her. At its worst the work world rebuffed her attempts at affirmation and made her feel like an alien being in male territory. At its best (which sometimes coexisted with the worst) it made available an exciting social and cultural milieu that broadened her horizons, stimulated her intellectual and artistic sensibilities, gave her strong affirmation as person and worker, and encouraged her to develop her skills. She often experienced the corporation/university not as an impersonal bureaucracy but as an integrated, caring community in which she was a valued member. People saw each other for meals, celebrations, dates, recreation. Work thus provided a positive quasi-family for many young women: a context for personal/social/occupational development that facilitated her separation from the community and family of her origins.
MICHELE PROTOMy first good job (at 23) was as a computer programmer in New York City. That was one of the happiest periods of my life. It was a very exciting place to work. I felt a part of the company and identified with the people in my section, who were bright and hardworking and fun-loving, mostly in our twenties. We worked sixty hours a week and loved it. Everybody’s social life revolved around the people in the company. There was a lot of spirit, camaraderie. I was project leader and the only woman on my team, and they made me feel good to be there. I was exposed to sales, proposal writing, a lot of customer interface. It was a five-year period of self-development for me; I learned a lot and contributed a lot, and I felt competent. But after five years I had no way to progress further in that company.
In this period about a third of the career women had mentorial relationships, almost entirely with men. These relationships existed within the work world and were concerned primarily with occupational development. They were somewhat more frequent in the academic than the business sample. Most mentors provided moral support, helped the newcomer get oriented to the work and the work world, took her seriously, recommended her for minor promotions. They “brought her along” to become a more competent and valued group member. She was clearly better off with them than she would have been without them. But the degree of mutuality in the relationship was often limited. Although he liked her and enjoyed being helpful, the male mentor usually found it difficult to regard a woman as becoming like him and perhaps surpassing him in the future. He usually did not have an intuitive sense of the novice’s Dream, however articulated or inchoate it might be. He had difficulty giving his blessing to her highest aspirations and making her feel truly welcome within his broader occupational world. Most women, in turn, found it difficult to entertain such ambitions. The barriers to empathy and identification often prevented the development of a fuller mentoring relationship.
ELLEN NAGYI was working and supporting my husband and myself financially while he attended medical school. I was advancing steadily at my company. By 22 I began to feel more grounded in my work and could begin to think more clearly about having a career. Lou, one of the managers above me, was promoted. He thought I was promising and got me promoted to his group. The promotion occurred when I was 23, after a year’s preparation. With Lou’s encouragement and support, I was able to think more ambitiously and to look for lines of advancement. I started to figure out that I wanted this job, and then that job, and then—I was always about three jobs ahead of where I was, and I began to shoot for places beyond my grasp. Lou was a good mentor. He took a “push people off cliffs, and they’ll learn to fly” approach. I always felt I was operating on the edge of my abilities, and that’s an exciting way to grow. He took risks in promoting me in the first place; he sponsored me, went to bat on salary and job level, sent me on business trips overseas. Of course, this proved to everyone that we were sleeping together, which we were not. He had to be very self-confident to deal with that.
At 23–24 I began to do more international travel; I’d be out of the country for a week at a time. I loved traveling and still do, although business travel is very hard. It was very unconventional for a woman to be traveling at that time. Everyone said, “You can’t send a woman to France; the Frenchmen won’t put up with it.” That was totally untrue. But there were inherent sexual difficulties in being the only woman in groups of men—the oddball, reserved and distant. I was often the youngest in situations where I was naive and ill-at-ease. I’d never been to Europe before, and I didn’t know anything about anything. Your typical male business stuff would happen: sitting around a table of men, and they lapse into telling jokes. And, of course, they apologize to you for telling them, but they keep right on because they really don’t want you to be there. A lot of male bonding stuff. But people do listen. If you’re representing an American company you could be pink with purple feathers, and they’d listen. They realize you’re intelligent and making a contribution; the fact that you’re a woman is not a big deal. Also, you’re not competing directly with them. But you are a woman in a man’s world. They made the rules, and it’s their club, and you are the odd person out. That is very formative for women in the business world.
The lack of female mentors was mainly due to the scarcity of women in more senior positions. An entry-level woman generally worked for a male boss or faculty member, or on a team containing few or no other women. When she had a relationship with a senior woman it was, however, often quite negative. She experienced her female boss or supervisor, rightly or wrongly, as “a poor role model”: a woman who had been promoted but was not very professional; an ambitious career woman who was no help to younger women; a manager who seemed harder on female than male subordinates. The problems were more severe in the corporation than the university, but they existed in both.
In every relationship between a junior person (apprentice, beginner, student) and someone more senior (boss, supervisor, teacher), there is the potential for a relationship that serves some mentorial functions. Very often, however, the potential is not realized. Instead, the two develop an antimentorial relationship: they are not simply indifferent to each other but are in some basic sense oppositional. The senior person finds the junior inept, unmotivated, ungrateful, rebellious. The junior, in turn, finds the senior indifferent, exploitive, overly critical, or imposing.
JESSICA HALLAt 23 I got a seemingly attractive job as an analyst. My boss firmly believed that a woman’s place was doing statistics. You can’t be a real analyst until you call on companies. The men started doing that the first week, and I just sat there. I worked really hard and learned a great deal about the company, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. After two years I told the department head I wanted my group changed. Six months later, when I was 25, they put me in a new group with a new boss. He wasn’t terrific, but he was a lot better, and I had a chance to call on companies and do the whole analyst thing. They tried to do more for women, but it didn’t go very far. At first there was one woman in each group, and later there were two. They call that “a gain of 100 percent” [laughs]. We were paid less than men in the same job and were hired only in research, not in investment,which was the key organizational function. It’s hard to describe my feelings at that time in my life: the mixture of excitement about becoming part of a whole new world and frustration over the obstacles to be overcome for women.
The second phase of the Entry Life Structure was a time of personal development and growing occupational commitment for most career women. They had been responsible workers for several years and had gained a sense of independence and competence, and they wanted to establish occupation as a major part of their lives. They became more intolerant of dull, demeaning, or unrewarding work and took greater initiative in seeking advancement within the current workplace or elsewhere. As the period ended at age 28 or 29, most of the young women had taken at least a modest step forward. We can distinguish three broad levels of occupational advancement.
Almost half of the thirty career women—six businesswomen, eight academics—were at this highest occupational level. Each woman had made significant progress in pursuing the Dream of her Anti-Traditional Figure. She was forming an identity as a professional woman capable of living independently and making her way in the work world. While knowing that she had the ability and the desire to advance further along this path, she was still unsure of how far she wanted to go and how far the world would allow her to go. The occupational progress made it seem safer to the young woman to have a family without excessive danger of becoming a traditional homemaker. The danger was by no means gone, but she felt strong enough to take the risk.
The six businesswomen had by 28 advanced far enough along in the corporate-financial world to set longer-term goals, although most did not yet envision a long-term career.
The eight faculty women in this group were on the threshold of an academic career as the Entry Life Structure ended. At age 26 to 29 they earned doctorates in fields such as literature, philosophy, the social sciences, and economics. A few went directly from graduate school to a full-time faculty appointment in another university. Others, following a common practice for new Ph.D.’s in their discipline, took a postdoctoral fellowship for a year or two and then became faculty members. Still others took one or more transitional jobs before getting on the academic ladder. The factors contributing to this “in between” time were varied: accommodation to the husband’s career, which had first priority in her mind as well as his; institutional discrimination, through which women are more likely to be offered part-time instructor or “adjunct” positions; and the young woman’s inner concerns about trying for an academic career and finding a balance between work and family. For all eight young women, the end of the Entry Life Structure brought with it the search for a new structure in which she was a more mature professional, usually with a husband and children.
DEBRA ROSEAfter graduate school I went to work. By 25 I got strongly involved in my work because my marriage was less satisfying to me. My first job was such an important part of my life and my development. It was an opportunity not usually given to a woman, and I was really good at it. I formed close friendships with my colleagues and supervisors. It was like a family. It was exciting work and had great spirit, and I was pleased being a leader of a group of thirty whose collective work was really better than the work that each of us would have produced individually. We had a terrific esprit de corps.
One of the reasons why I got to a position of leadership there was that I was competent and exercised authority well. The manager thought of me as a favorite. I was always very ambitious; I wanted to go as far as I could go. It was a six-year period there, and I was promoted several times. I had always been very used to being at the top of my class in school, and I was always very good at what I did, and that was acknowledged right away. I felt admired and felt that people liked and cared about me. During that period of time I had two children, my first at age 26, so I was pregnant and out having children, and people were just very nice to me, very protective and caring.
Eight career women were at this middle level—three businesswomen, five academics.
The businesswomen were all single and had worked in nonbusiness jobs (usually teaching) for five or six years before entering master’s degree programs that led them into the business world. While recognizing that their late start was a handicap to further progress, these women were excited by the new turn in the road. The Dream of the Anti-Traditional Figure was taking clearer shape and holding greater promise of realization.
During their late twenties, many of the married faculty women became involved in the Women’s Movement. The young woman’s experience in the Movement became a consciousness-raising experience for the internal Anti-Traditional Figure. The young woman met and formed friendships with other, like-minded women who were also questioning the traditional way. The Women’s Movement provided badly needed role models for a different path and supported the young woman’s movement out of a too-traditional life and into the world of graduate school.
JULIA HARTI was 26 or 27, teaching high school and dating a man attending business school. We had a sexual relationship. He was the person who suggested that I go for my MBA. I always had a strong sense of independence, a need for equal respect. I felt there was something wrong with all the relationships I had in that in one way or another I always ended up being someone’s handmaiden; it wasn’t a partnership of equals. The relationship with this fellow ended, and he moved away. I think we both realized that the foundation just wasn’t there for having any longer-term relationship.
I began to realize that I probably wouldn’t marry, and my main thoughts were to get work that would be sustaining over the long term, both intellectually and economically. At 27 I applied to business school and began at 28. I started business school with no clear idea of where it might lead. I was not “liberated” and wasn’t aware of the Women’s Movement until I got to business school. Then it hit you like a sledgehammer, the need for a Women’s Movement. I’d never been particularly aware of discrimination, but there were 28 women in my class of 500, and you really felt a minority. Where I had been teaching I might have been paid $3,000 less than my male counterpart, but I didn’t know it, and at least there were quite a few women around. But at the business school I got derogatory remarks about taking a man’s place, that I’d come for my MRS. degree as well as my MBA. The most blatant example was the marketing professors. They made their resistance to women quite obvious. They’d always call on me to give comments on the “consumer’s point of view”! So I went from being totally unaware to being militant in about three months [laughs].
The five faculty members in this group were also delayed in getting started on an academic career. Stacey Lane exemplifies several common themes.
STACEY LANEI graduated from a Seven Sisters college and went on full time to an elite graduate school. I don’t think I had a sense of a career as a college teacher, although that would be the only thing to do with a graduate degree in my field. I felt one goes to college to pursue interests, and graduate school was an extension of that.
I met my husband, Tyler, at 22. I was in love with him. We were graduate students in different fields, working for our doctorates. I was very serious about graduate school, but I got pregnant, and we got married. It really was a screwing up of the works. If abortion had been available there would have been no question. I think Tyler felt trapped. It was a painful time for me. I became a mother at 23; I liked the mothering part but never loved it. In my mind—and everyone else’s then—women were separated into those who would have families and those who would have careers. It never felt all put together into one happy package. I decided to get a master’s degree and run. I finished my thesis at 24, I don’t know how; there wasn’t much joy in the writing. I did it to get the credential but had no plans to do anything with the degree except a little part-time teaching.
The first three years of marriage were a very hectic, isolated time for me. I organized my life around my husband’s career. He and I were very separate; he was totally involved in his work and not interested in intimacy. I always had the feeling that if the house was burning down he’d grab his work first before the children and me. My idea of marriage was that it was supposed to be on an even keel at all times and at all costs. I thought that fighting would open up all sorts of irreparable damages, so I stored all my bad feelings underground. I had my hands full with three children and no help. I was totally exhausted. I thought about going back to graduate school for my doctorate … some day … if …
We lived in this ghetto faculty housing. The women identified themselves as, “My husband teaches in the Math Department.” I was floundering. I became a part-time instructor at the local university, but I couldn’t feel part of the academic community in any real sense. It was a community of scholars, and no one saw me as a scholar. I was being exploited by the department, too. Their attitude was, “Give her the work we don’t want, pay her as little as possible, and don’t put her name in the catalog!”
At 27 I began to have a constituency of women who were trying new directions for themselves. We met once a month. Many were faculty wives. They were the most interesting women: vigorous and intellectually stimulating and wonderful people. I began to think that maybe it was possible to strike out and do these things, do everything. Through the group experience I started to think about going back for the doctorate, although it took me a year to get myself ready to try to apply to graduate school.
At 28 I became a doctoral student and started a new life. It was very hard for me to believe I could really do it. Going back was one of the few big decisions I ever made in my life—that and getting divorced later on. It meant that I was making a long-range commitment and not just going year by year. I wanted my own identity and a life outside my home community. The decision had a lot to do with the Women’s Movement, which was just coming into my life. My husband, Tyler, was very supportive of my wish to return to graduate school. He was the most liberated man I knew. He also saw me needing less from him and leaning on him less because I got support elsewhere.
Going back was a great reclaiming of a community I had left behind years before. My graduate school department was very helpful to me all the way along. They gave me the confidence—which I didn’t have on my own—to apply for a fellowship. My aim was to become a college teacher, but my specific goals were unclear. I knew that it would take three years of commuting to complete the courses, one or two a semester, before I could start my dissertation, and that’s what I did. I finished the coursework at 31 and the Ph.D. at 37.
Eight career women were in this group—six businesswomen and two academics.
The businesswomen were still working in entry-level jobs such as bookkeeper, computer programmer, editorial assistant. They were feeling acutely the limitations of their current work and the need to enter a field of greater interest and potential for advancement. Despite their relative lack of external success, they had made significant progress with the Anti-Traditional Dream by demonstrating that they could take care of themselves without a male provisioner. Few were married and none had children. All wanted work to be a major component of their lives, even if they had a family. They were, however, just beginning to form an occupational identity and did not yet know what they wanted to give and to receive through their work. They were also faced with massive obstacles in their specific circumstances and in themselves.
The two academic women in this group were on the fringes of the academic world throughout their twenties.
ERICA WARRENThe crunch came in the marriage when I got the master’s at 25. I was exhausted—working full-time and doing all the domestic things with no help from my husband. I felt a lot of guilt and anxiety. I decided, “Maybe I should stop trying to be Superwoman and just stay home.” We tried to get pregnant for two years and finally had a baby when I was 27. Our daughter was a real delight, but my husband would not help at all with the child care and housework, and he was very resentful when I occasionally left the child with him. I stayed home full-time the first year and found it very tedious. I loved my child, but I didn’t want to be home all the time. I had a real conflict about whether I wanted a career or a family. There were a lot of problems in the marriage, and I blamed everything on myself.
The love/marriage/family component of the Entry Life Structure was problematic for virtually all thirty career women, but the problems were somewhat different for the married and the unmarried. I’ll discuss the two groups separately.
At the start of this period fourteen career women were married and two of these were mothers. The two mothers built a Traditional Marriage Enterprise, and the other twelve married childless women attempted to build a modified Traditional Marriage Enterprise of the young, professionally oriented, dual-working, childless couple. (I use the term “dual-working,” rather than “dual-career,” because it was not at all clear whether the women would go on to a long-term career.) The chief function of the modified Traditional Marriage Enterprise was to provide a vehicle for both spouses to pursue their separate occupational goals while enjoying the benefits of marriage without children. For these young women legal marriage had a number of advantages. It made their relationship more legitimate in the eyes of parents as well as work organizations. It took them out of the competitive struggles of the single dating game and reduced the sexual pressures faced by many single young women in a predominantly male work world. Life is simpler for a married than a single woman in these circumstances. The marital relationship, and the apparent assurance that it would later evolve into a stable family, allowed the young woman to devote herself more fully to work.
In most cases, however, the promise of this scenario was largely unfulfilled. The spouses generally did not know each other well as they married, and the level of intimacy rarely increased much in the next few years. Like the traditional homemaking couples, though on different terms, most of these couples lived parallel unconnected lives. The partners were primarily involved in their separate occupational enterprises. They had a joint home base (for which she took entire or major domestic responsibility) and usually gave each other some moral support, but they had little or no joint involvement around which the personal relationship might develop.
During the first phase of the Entry Life Structure, most early marrying career women had a difficult, often rock bottom time. They came to realize that their marriages were in jeopardy. Very few women were initially “in love” with their spouses. The relationship had much more to do with affection and mutual support than with passion or strong sexual interest. In the first years of marriage, many young women found their sex lives increasingly unsatisfactory. Also, her husband was more traditional and less supportive than she had earlier imagined. In most cases, he assumed that, once the children arrived, the wife would be primarily responsible for child-rearing and housekeeping. Though appreciative of his wife’s talent as student or novice worker, he often had difficulty in accommodating to the demands of her career.
Within this general pattern, there were some notable differences between the two samples of career women. I’ll start with the businesswomen.
Only three businesswomen, as compared to eleven academics, were married as the Entry Life Structure began. The married businesswomen generally came from more conservative, restrictive backgrounds than the married faculty members. They were emotionally and sexually more constrained in their relationships with men and more concerned that marriage/family would be engulfing, and their Anti-Traditional Figure was more anxious about her survival in adulthood. In college the businesswomen became part of a more conventional social world and associated with more traditional men. The men and women in this world took it for granted that the husband would ultimately be the main provisioner for the family. However competent and enterprising the wife might be, she was not “going anywhere” in her work and could not be his equal occupationally or financially. Even though they were currently equal in many ways, the imagined future placed a stamp of inequality on the relationship. Perhaps the strongest tie between them lay in the value both placed on being emotionally separate; they had chosen partners who would neither demand nor offer great intimacy and involvement.
The married faculty members usually had a more intellectual, liberal background than the businesswomen. They were part of a more scholarly world in college and especially in graduate school. As students the young women could participate more freely in this world and gain greater affirmation for their knowledge and creativity, and some male students and faculty in the academic community supported their aspirations. These young women thus had available a larger number of men with whom it felt safe to have potentially matrimonial relationships, and more of them had enduring premarital affairs and early marriages.
The Anti-Traditional Dream of virtually all the academic women had evolved into the Dream of a modified Traditional Marriage Enterprise within the academic world. Her place in this world would be assured by a husband who had an academic career. Even if she did not have a full-fledged career herself, the young woman assumed she could still be part of academe and have an intellectually stimulating life. It was also important for her to obtain some form of graduate education. The publicly stated purpose of this education was to have an academic career. Her chief aim in the Entry Life Structure was, however, to be a graduate student and to develop a competent self, so that in time she could be a homemaker with a less traditional marriage and an opportunity to do interesting work. Usually she did not envision an achieving career as professor/scholar in an institution of the caliber she was currently attending.
The eleven early marrying faculty members believed that their marriage would, indeed, serve these functions; however, all but one experienced severe disappointments in the first phase of the Entry Life Structure. The husband was more absorbed in his own work, and less interested in her, than she had originally supposed. The limitations in their sex life weighed more heavily upon her. Ten of the eleven early marriages ended in divorce.
Sixteen career women were single throughout the first phase of the Entry Life Structure. Four businesswomen and four faculty members hoped to marry (though not to start a family) within a few years of college graduation, if Mr. Right came along, though they were cautious in their relationships with men and gave high priority to becoming self-sufficient adults.
The four businesswomen had a difficult time establishing an initial Entry Life Structure. Most of the single businesswomen, whether they sought or avoided marriage, lived in an apartment with one or more female roommates. A roommate provided company and shared domestic costs and responsibilities, and she was often part of a common social circle that was a medium for dating and recreation. She was usually a friendly acquaintance who quietly passed into and out of the others’ lives. The home base was thus a stable domicile for transient “revolving roommates.” The domicile might continue indefinitely, but the cast of characters changed every year or two. The most desired and most frequent scenario was that a woman lived there briefly and then left to marry. Failing that, she left for a better job, a more independent living arrangement, or in search of new options. The succession of roommates was a constant reminder to each of our subjects that her current life was transient, that its main purpose was matrimony.
PAM KENNEYI graduated from secretarial school at 22 and chose a secretarial job. It wasn’t a career, and nobody there was particularly interested in saying, “You graduated from a Seven Sisters college; why don’t you do something serious?” That summer I got an apartment with two girlfriends who were also secretaries. There were a lot of parties, and we knew various men in the business world. Soon one of my roommates got married and then the other, but there were always others to move in during the four years I was in that apartment. It was like revolving roommates.
At 22 Pam Kenney began forming an Entry Life Structure as a single, working, marriage-seeking woman. She was a member of a readily identifiable category: well-educated women, overqualified for their jobs, yet glad to live independently and to have an opportunity to meet eligible men of appropriate background, education, and prospects.
Sally Wolford and Molly Berger were the only businesswomen who lived in the parental home after finishing college. They suffered many problems of the single adult daughter vis-à-vis a traditional mother who wanted the matrimonial best for her:
SALLY WOLFORDAge 23 was a really low time in my life. I had been living at home with my widowed mother for the two years since finishing college. I took care of her and did volunteer work as she had done, not getting into any serious paid job. I was dating but nothing much was happening that way either. Then this fellow came along. My friends seemed to like him, and he was pleasant. I was bored with my volunteer job. I figured, “I’ve been too fussy. There isn’t anything to do in life except get married anyway; then everything will fall into place, and I’ll have children and be busy with family life, and that will be it.” So we got engaged.
Then a friend got me a job at a bank. I was so excited about that job! Meanwhile, my mother and fiancé kept charging ahead with the wedding plans. I kept digging my heels in further, saying, “I know that I just never seem to want to get married, but this time I really don’t.” Three weeks before the wedding I broke it off (age 24). My mother was at her wits’ end. I thought, “What kind of mess am I getting myself into? Here I am breaking off this engagement for a job!” I felt very guilty, but I really got into my work.
At 25 I moved out of my mother’s house. I’d never been away from home except for college. It was frightening to leave and hard to break with my mother, but it was clear to me that I wanted to be single for a while—to work and travel and have fun and be independent.
The single matrimony-oriented businesswomen exemplify one version of the basic conflict between the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure and the internal Anti-Traditional Figure. The voice of the Traditional Home-maker Figure predominated in the first phase of the Entry Life Structure. The young women told themselves that they were working only because, as it happened, they had not yet married. They tried earnestly to get on the matrimonial track and to avoid a deep engagement in work. The Anti-Traditional Figure, though not strong enough to win the battle, could nonetheless force a stalemate. As a result, the women were partially involved in both work and dating yet deeply involved in neither. The Anti-Traditional Figure was terrified at the possibility of being swept off her feet by a man who would then enslave her in domesticity. In the Age 25 Shift the Anti-Traditional Figure came more into her own.
The four single, matrimony-seeking academic women gave first priority to education/work but had at least one significant love relationship in the first phase. Eva Pitcher and Alice Abel each formed a matrimonial relationship with academic men, and both married at 25. Both husbands had similar values and took their wives seriously as persons and professionals. The initial modified Traditional Marriage Enterprise supported the academic pursuits of wife and husband, while deferring parenthood. Megan Bennett and Grace Tobin, on the other hand, more fully acknowledged their interest in occupation at 25 and gave themselves permission to defer marriage.
Eight single women, all in the business sample, were not very oriented toward matrimony in the first phase. Most expected to marry, perhaps in the late twenties, but not soon. Their immediate goals were to establish themselves in work and to create an inner basis for later marriage and family life. In this group the internal Anti-Traditional Figure predominated, and the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure operated surreptitiously to gain limited objectives—the mirror image of the matrimonial women above. But there was also a common theme that held for the career women as a whole: neither internal figure was truly in command; partial victory, compromise, and stalemate were the most common results of any conflict between them. Only three of these eight young women had sexual relationships with men during the first phase of the Entry Life Structure.
ABBY MURPHYI met Nick at 22. The relationship was warm and pleasant while it lasted. I was impressed: he was very good-looking, a young star in the company, and he noticed me. I liked having someone to go out with. I never thought of the relationship as long-term; I didn’t love him but I liked him. Marriage never entered my mind at that point. It was my first sexual relationship. I really didn’t enjoy that part of it at all, and I never had orgasms. I felt that at some point I am going to have intercourse, and it might as well be now. He used condoms. I was physically attracted to him and wanted to do it, but it was scary, not enjoyable. Afterwards I felt, “Why did I do that? It’s sinful.” That’s my Catholic background, which I still had to work through. It didn’t stop me from having sex, but it kept me from enjoying it. Six months later, out of the blue, Nick married someone else! That really hurt me because I wasn’t ready to let him go. That was the first time anyone had ended a relationship on me. I was angry at him but more angry at myself for getting so vulnerable and not being aware of how it would end.
The second relationship, from 23 to 25, was with Larry. He was a confirmed bachelor, clearly unattainable, and that was fine with me for a while. We were both out for a good time. We’d go to dinner, drive in his Corvette, go to the beach, have parties with his friends. We had a sexual relationship, but it was no better than the one with Nick. I could do it as long as I didn’t enjoy it. I did like the cuddling part very much; it would have been enough for me, but he wanted more. After sex I felt lousy, let down, deprived. I never consciously dealt with the meaning of being a single, sexually active woman. I didn’t even deal with the issue of contraception; I’d been on birth control pills because I had an ovarian cyst. At 25 I started wanting a more permanent relationship, a promise of commitment, but Larry didn’t. He had been up-front about that all along. The difference in commitment created tensions between us, and the relationship just fizzled out. In the process I got clear that marriage was a top priority for me.
The other five single, anti-matrimonial businesswomen had no sexual experience and very limited relationships with men during the first phase of the Entry Life Structure. They did little dating and came nowhere near forming a relationship that might lead to marriage. All of them were “late bloomers” in social-sexual development. Although they enjoyed working with congenial male colleagues and being part of a mixed social group, they were ill at ease in situations that had a more erotic-sexual potential. For some the inhibition and confusion stemmed in part from sexual taboos rooted in familial morality and religion. But these women had come to reject much of their parents’ moral-religious outlook and were forming lives very different from those of their parents. I believe the barriers in their relationships with men derived in large part from their internal Anti-Traditional Figure’s anxiety about getting embroiled in a Traditional Marriage Enterprise. They were especially afraid of pregnancy and of getting emotionally entangled with a man—conditions that they expected would lead to a failure to develop an independent self, and would lead to a life of domestic subjugation.
JESSICA HALLThe four years at the firm (age 21–25) were absolutely devastating socially. Gradually I began to blossom a little and become more interesting to men. I dated but was not popular. At 22 I got my first real boyfriend. He was tall, exceedingly handsome, and worked in marketing. Very cafe society. He thought I was wonderful. We went to plays and drove about in his Mustang. He dressed in the latest mode and did the latest things. He had this exquisitely furnished apartment; it was fantastic.
That romance ended when he invited me to visit his parents’ place in Boston, and I said no. His parents were away, and I just didn’t want to go—I didn’t even know why. I figured out two years later that he wanted me to go to bed with him! I only knew about kissing and necking, and a lot of boyfriends bit the dust for that reason. I didn’t know what they were looking for. Until I was 26 years old I had no idea; it did not occur to me. I was scared to death about sex because I was afraid of getting pregnant. I had a terror of withering away like my mother and aunts, yet it seemed inevitable. Well, I didn’t wither away, but I didn’t have much fun either. After stopping with that first boyfriend at 23 I did some casual dating but nothing serious for several years. My leisure life had mainly to do with the ballet and museums and the NYC art world.
As the second phase of the Entry Life Structure began, sixteen career women (twelve businesswomen and four academics) were single-never-married. During the second phase nine young women married for the first time; and seven, all in the businesswomen sample, remained single-never-married.
The second phase was the career women’s favorite time for starting a family: twelve career women, five businesswomen and seven academics, had their first child in it. Although the faculty members typically married much earlier, both groups most often had their first child at age 27 to 29. The pregnancy and birth were marker events of great magnitude: they filled the previously unfilled family component of the Entry Life Structure and brought this period to its end. The subsequent process of forming a family—and moving toward a new life structure containing both family and career—was part of the Age 30 Transition for these women. For the career women generally, the internal Anti-Traditional Figure had been predominant in the first phase, during which there were no new marriages and no first children. The internal Traditional Homemaker Figure began to assert herself in the Age 25 Shift. She could not tolerate the prospect of getting so involved with a career that her maternal prospects would be destroyed. Most single women got more interested in matrimony and motherhood, and most married-childless women began thinking more seriously about starting a family. (Conversely, the two who married and started a family in the Early Adult Transition, and who spent the first phase largely as homemakers, got more involved in career during the second phase.)
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Let us now look more closely at the evolution of individual lives during the second phase of the Entry Life Structure. While focusing on love/marriage/family, I will also demonstrate the interweaving of this component with others, especially occupation.
At the start of the Age 25 Shift, twelve businesswomen were single-never-married and three were married without children. Most of the single women had previously been emotionally guarded and anti-matrimonial in their relationships with men. Marriage now had a much higher priority in their lives. They were less interested in casual dating and in men who were poor matrimonial prospects. Instead, they wanted a serious, marriage-oriented relationship based upon mutual respect and equality. At 25 or 26 almost all of the single businesswomen had their first romantic relationship of some duration, affection, and potential commitment, and it increased their emotional/sexual freedom with men. The path was often rocky and the outcome uncertain, but this relationship had from its onset a matrimonial potential that they had not formerly been ready to allow. In most cases the relationship ended, and the young women recognized that they were probably not ready to marry. Seven businesswomen remained single throughout the Entry Life Structure.
MELISSA HOWARDAt 25 I lived with Blaine for several months. What appealed to me was that his friends liked me, and we were acceptable as a couple. For the first time I learned to sleep in close proximity to someone; he always wanted to sleep holding on to me. For a few weeks I felt I couldn’t breathe; it was awful. But after he left I missed it and had trouble sleeping alone. He was enamored with me and got too serious too fast. On the fourth date he was saying what kind of kids we’d have. He said, “Of course you’d have to give up your job.” And I said, “Oh, and why is that?!” He wanted me to play the traditional wife role, and that I was not prepared to do. No way. For the first time I had somebody devoted to me whom I could enjoy and fool around with. But he wasn’t my ideal dream; he didn’t quite fit the picture. Then he suddenly got transferred to another country. That was the closest I ever came to getting married. I felt quite bereft for a few weeks, and then gradually it got to be spring. Actually, I missed him for a year or two but the point is, we were going to come to a conflict of wills, and I was not ready to go his way, so …
PAM KENNEYFor a few years after college I dated a fair amount but not one main person, mostly guys on Wall Street. I met Mark when I was almost 25, and we went together for two years. It was a big romance. He was 30, a really “older” man. We enjoyed things like bridge and small dinner parties. I was attracted to him because he was somewhat of a churchgoer like me, fairly ambitious, a hard worker, conservative, very smart. We didn’t particularly talk about anything, but we got along really well.
After about a year we were very serious, and for six months we discussed getting married. That was a real emotional upheaval—were we or weren’t we? Then all of a sudden, without saying anything, he got engaged to another girl and was transferred to London! I was pretty hurt at the time, but with hindsight I can see that it would have been a disaster. It would have been a disaster. I was very immature at that age. I think I was having a good time in NYC: the living arrangements were fine; I was earning my own living and wasn’t ready to settle down and give up my independence. I was used to spending my money the way I liked, seeing people I liked, traveling some. I don’t remember that we particularly talked about it, but it was understood that if you’re 25 and get married, you’re going to work another year or so and have a family and live in the suburbs. I wasn’t ready to do that, and he really was. I knew that’s what it meant to get married: being a housewife and staying home and taking care of the children. That just wasn’t interesting to me at all. I don’t know whether that was part of the breakup, but now I think it was there even if neither of us realized it.
Certainly I wasn’t thinking about a career. It was sort of floating around in my mind, but I didn’t mention it. I’m sure Mark would not have accepted having a career wife; nobody really did then. He was very definitely the kind of person who would take care of you, the way my father had. He would have been a really super husband and father. Home and children meant a lot to him. That’s part of what attracted me to him. But I think maybe that also kind of scared me off. He was just too traditional, confining, for my life. That was never ever articulated at the time. We never talked about sex; it was simply understood that we would not sleep together until we got married. The sexual interest wasn’t strong; I would say medium. I’m not a very demonstrative person and I don’t remember that he was. I think if I had suggested such a thing, he would have been horrified—you don’t do that with the woman you’ll marry!
When Mark left a lot of other things kind of fell apart. I was getting tired of my job, which wasn’t going anywhere. So I quit, not knowing what to do next. Then I went home for a few months, and my parents suggested that I go to graduate school. But I didn’t want that either; I had no serious thoughts about a career.
When I returned to NYC I was still at loose ends and did temporary work for two months. Finally I got an administrative assistant job on Wall Street. I thought, “Aha, I’m going down to Wall Street, like those guys I’ve known.” It sounded glamorous and fun, though I actually knew nothing about the companies or the work. It turned out there was no glamour and little fun. I worked in the back office as an assistant—a dead-end job. Actually it was okay for about two years. I wasn’t really that serious about where it was leading; I was just enjoying life at the moment.
At 28 I started getting tired of living that way. I realized in a vague way that I had no future there. If I continued to work as an assistant, I would have no opportunity to move up or make more money or do more interesting things. I’d be stuck. My chances of getting married didn’t seem too good, so I’d probably have to work. Besides, I enjoy working and prefer to have a job in any case, but I wasn’t willing to sit behind a desk and type for the next thirty or forty years. I began to think that another field would offer more in terms of a career: opportunities to get out of secretarial work, move around, do different things. But I didn’t make a change until a year later, at 29.
The Age 25 Shift led to a strengthening of the Anti-Traditional Figure within Pam Kenney. She made a greater investment of self in work and entered the financial world of the men she so admired, but she was not ready to start a career. The job she took was primarily secretarial yet she remained for two years, “enjoying life at the moment” and not being serious about advancement. Despite the stirrings of change Pam maintained the fragmented Entry Life Structure in which neither marriage nor work was a central component.
At 28 Pam first began seriously to question the Entry Life Structure and to enter her Age 30 Transition. She realized again—and more deeply—that working as an assistant would not provide the kind of future she wanted. She understood for the first time that work would probably be a permanent part of her life. She could no longer take it for granted that she would ever marry, even though marriage was still a goal. She still hoped to marry and form a modified Traditional Marriage Enterprise in which her husband would be the primary provisioner, and she would have a job. If she could not find an appropriate husband, however, occupation would be central in her life, and it became imperative to seek more interesting work with greater potential for advancement. At 29 Pam made the leap and got a staff position in a major corporation—her first overt step toward a new life. The Age 30 Transition began a year earlier, however, when she went through the preparatory inner changes.
Five businesswomen married in the second phase at 27 or 28, and two of the young women had a child as the period ended. In most cases, this was the young woman’s first serious matrimonial relationship; it began within, or emerged directly out of, the Age 25 Shift. The young woman felt that it was now “time for matrimony” and that waiting longer might result in being permanently single. She did not idealize her husband as a remarkable or special person; his chief virtues were that he was part of her world and that he supported (or did not object to) her holding a job. Most of these young women had moderate or severe doubts about their potential for becoming a good wife and mother. They also had doubts, at the time of marriage or soon thereafter, about their husbands.
Finally, the three businesswomen who had married in the Early Adult Transition became mothers in the second phase. In the second phase they established a modified Traditional Marriage Enterprise, working full-time, limiting their ambitions, and taking primary responsibility for family. Their efforts to create a more equal balance of family and occupation began in the Age 30 Transition.
EMMA BEECHWOODEmma Beechwood married in the Early Adult Transition. Her husband was in the service, and she found a job in a bank. In the first phase of her Entry Life Structure she made a series of residential changes based upon her husband’s work. Each move involved a considerable change in job, home base, and social life. The only constant was a very limited marital relationship and much time for work. Emma was, it appeared, a compliant, hardworking wife who followed where her husband led. The marriage was often rocky in the first phase: “Those first few years were terrible for me. Half the time my husband was gone, and when he was home he was very unhappy.” She did, however, find an initial niche for herself in the corporate work world. Her Age 25 Shift started first in her work and then in her life generally:
When I was almost 25 my husband was stationed in the South, so I moved there from NYC. My bank had just opened an operation in the South, and the head of it was looking for a jack-of-all-trades assistant who could type, take shorthand, and do some backup research on macroeconomic modeling [laughs]. Getting that job was one of the lucky breaks of the world for me. Most people would need five or six years of experience before they could do it. It was extremely challenging.
After a few months my boss got fired and was not replaced, and I inherited everything he had been doing. I did the job but didn’t quite know what I was doing. I felt completely overwhelmed. I was really scrambling, although in retrospect I see how valuable it was for my development. In my earlier jobs I was just marking time. That job was really interesting and fun and was a heck of a lot better than being a schoolteacher someplace. It started me toward a career, though I didn’t think of it that way at the time. I was just working until my husband got more settled and we could start a family.
Then my husband unexpectedly got discharged from the military and decided that we were going back to New York City. My boss wanted me to stay and offered a very major raise, but I said no. It was very difficult leaving a job that I loved, where I could move up. I loved it in the South, but my husband hated it. It was just a mess—the worst time in our relationship I can remember. I was unhappy about leaving, but I knew it wouldn’t work the other way either.
My company transferred me back to their New York office. When we first came here [age 25], we did start the life we were supposed to start three years earlier when we married. For the first time we got an apartment and bought furniture and started doing all those housekeeping things that get you established as a young married couple.
The move to New York was not very good for my career. The Southern office was small and unstructured; though I often felt way over my depth, I had great freedom. The New York office had more potential opportunities but was heavily supervised. Even after a year there I wasn’t given a chance to do things I was capable of doing. I worked with two men, and we got along very well, but the woman we worked for was a terrible supervisor. She spent most of her time second-guessing the three of us. We spent a lot of time figuring out how to protect ourselves from her onslaughts. She was very temperamental; you could tell what time of the month it was. That was the most difficult working relationship I have ever had. It was hard for the men but worse for me. I really think it was a woman-woman problem. I was a rousing 26-year-old and had my own opinions of the world. She was about 40 and found it difficult to supervise a young woman with any opinions of her own. I still remember some big arguments—insofar as one was allowed to argue with her—about recommendations for investments. I just felt stifled.
When I was 27 a former colleague offered me a job on his staff at another company. It was a big adventure, a chance to go out on my own and to work with someone whose approach I liked. I wasn’t thinking about a long-term career so the risk of failure didn’t particularly bother me. It would be fun and interesting, so why not? I worked very hard at that job. We got to the point where my husband was also working hard; earlier I had often worked harder than he did. He worked three or four nights a week and weekends, and that was fine because I did the same thing and traveled a great deal.
Soon after starting the new job, I called a conference one night with my husband, and we decided it was time to start thinking about having kids. There hadn’t been a sense of enough stability before that. Also, I was afraid I’d have a girl—and very afraid my husband wouldn’t like a girl. He would make comments whenever our friends had girls. He obviously thought that it was bad to have a girl and good to have a boy; a lot of men seem to feel that way; I don’t know why. But I very much wanted a child. After several months we decided—or I decided, not that he ever said it—that he was game to have a child even if it was a girl.
I got pregnant at 28 and had a little girl just after turning 29. In the pregnancy I made another big decision: after becoming a mother, I would keep working full-time for as long as I felt like it. I remember telling myself, “Well, if you change your mind you can always decide to stay home”—though I didn’t really expect to. Work and motherhood were closely connected for me in two ways. First, the people at work really wanted me to come back after having the baby. I was a key member of the organization and part of a closely knit team. It was clear to me that of all the people in the department, I was the one that the boss most liked and had confidence in. It was extremely important to him that I continue. When the baby was due I packed up my files, took them home, went to the doctor, and had the baby that night. My boss wanted me to call clients from the hospital room, but I insisted on waiting until after I got home. Second, work was important for financial reasons. If my salary was lower, it would have been very difficult to work after the baby was born. But in fact I was making enough money so that it was very attractive to keep working. If you work full-time you want a private housekeeper, and that’s very expensive. Also, we figured that my income was the second income that takes the brunt of the tax bite, even though I earned more than my husband. If you include taxes, other deductions, and the cost of the housekeeper, I earned only 60 percent of my salary. Fortunately, I have always ended up net ahead by working.
For Emma Beechwood the second phase was a time of increasing satisfaction and progress in her work. In her marriage she made uneven progress toward greater equality. It took her until 27 to propose having a child and to deal, even if only obliquely, with her husband’s antipathy toward girls. In getting pregnant she was filling the unfilled family component of the Entry Life Structure and ensuring that her engagement in occupation would not get so strong as to jeopardize her responsibility for family.
A crucial change occurred at 28, during the pregnancy, when Emma made a clear decision to be both a mother and a full-time professional worker (although she was not yet ready to see herself as having a long-term career). This was a first step in terminating the Entry Life Structure and marked the start of her Age 30 Transition. It had become essential to continue full-time work after having a child. Unable to justify this choice on the grounds of her own needs and self-fulfillment, she rationalized it on external grounds: she was really needed by her occupational family (boss, work team, and organization); and she was earning enough so that she could afford to work without burdening her domestic family.
ELLEN NAGYThe marriage worked very well on most levels for quite a long time and provided a backdrop within which I could grow. I needed to have the security of saying, “Look, I’m a normal woman because I’m married.” But more than that I needed a person who was always gonna be there, whom I could count on, my haven. I needed that on an emotional level, and I got it. The marriage was not about intimacy or passionate love, and I started thinking fairly consciously in these terms in my twenties. I started traveling. I could venture out—literally, geographically, sexually, emotionally, or in job-related ways—knowing that I could always go home. Marriage provided the emotional stability that I needed in order to take some risks. I need one hand on the guide rope while the other hand reaches out for the next ledge. Starting at about 25 I had some brief nonintimate affairs; they enabled me to do more with my femininity/sexuality while remaining in the marriage.
As I got more into my work I needed less from my husband, but he remained supportive during those early years. When I started traveling I would cook and stock up the freezer with food, but gradually I started feeling less responsible for our home life, and my husband took on more and more of the domestic tasks. He was pretty uncomplaining about it, and this allowed me to get more involved in my work.
My husband graduated from medical school when I was 25, and we moved to Connecticut to be near his work. I looked for a job in the area, but my heart wasn’t in it. We were both commuting but in different directions, and that was very symbolic. My increasing involvement in international travel led to a very different work life than his. When we had lived in New York we had rarely been alone with each other—he was always working late, and I was always taking courses at night—so we each had a full-time life with lots of other people and not together. When we moved out of the city we didn’t have children and didn’t know anyone in the new town. We were both involved in demanding jobs, were both tired, and evolving in different directions. Looking back on this time I can see that my husband and I were becoming isolated from each other, but I did not acknowledge this until several years later. I still thought that his career was the primary one and that he would be the primary wage earner who would always support the family.
My career progress accelerated through my work on the international team, and my expertise broadened to more general corporate business problems. During this time, my supervisor Lou and I formed a close working relationship in which he encouraged me to venture into new areas of work. Through his sponsorship I became a project leader, and with this increased responsibility came a growing sense of my own competence.
At 27 my husband and I decided to have a child; we just couldn’t put it off any longer. I certainly didn’t think about stopping work—ostensibly for financial reasons, but really I couldn’t imagine being home on a full-time basis. We were under constant pressure to have kids from friends, business associates, family. The plan was that we would have three children, and I would work part-time.
During the second phase of the Entry Life Structure the fifteen faculty members had a relatively high incidence of major marker events such as marriage, divorce, remarriage, and initial motherhood, and they went through significant change in both occupation and marital relationship. Seven young women had their first child between ages 25 and 28. Only two became mothers earlier and two later; the remaining four women were childless at the time of the study and unlikely for various reasons to have a child.
Four faculty members had their first marriage at age 25 to 28. Megan Bennett and Grace Tobin got serious about matrimony at 25 and began relationships that culminated in marriage at 28, and neither had a child within the Entry Life Structure. Eva Pitcher and Alice Abel married in the Age 25 Shift. Their husbands were fellow graduate students who supported their wives’ occupational development and independence. Alice Abel and her husband agreed to defer parenthood and formed a mutually satisfying enterprise as a childless dual-working academic couple. Eva Pitcher had her first child at 27 and received her doctoral degree at 28; she continued working but gave first priority to homemaking. For all four faculty members, major changes in marriage, family, and occupation took place in the Age 30 Transition.
Eleven faculty members had married in the Early Adult Transition. Love/marriage/family posed great difficulties for all of these young women in the Entry Life Structure, and several had a rock bottom time. Only Florence Russo’s marriage was intact and relatively stable at the time of the study. Four women divorced at age 23 to 27; in the second phase two of them started second marriages that were better than the first yet still problematic. Another six women divorced in later periods, usually in the Age 30 Transition—the most likely time for divorce in all three samples—but the marital problems were evident in the Entry Life Structure.
The early marrying faculty members initially expected that marriage would provide the basis for a fulfilling modified Traditional Marriage Enterprise. Her husband’s academic career would, each woman assumed, give her a valued place in the academic world; he often encouraged her interest in graduate studies and appreciated her intellectual/academic qualities. It was not clear to either spouse, however, what kind of long-term career she would have and how she would combine career and family. In the first phase of the Entry Life Structure it became increasingly evident that the young woman’s hopes for the marriage were extravagantly unrealistic. Her husband was heavily absorbed in his own career. The early sense of shared academic pursuits turned out to be largely illusory; they had different friends, different interests, and barely overlapping social/occupational worlds. In some cases his career progress was problematic, and she became the primary breadwinner by taking a job that hampered her career while supporting his. If she was a “faculty wife” without her own primary academic role, she had the humiliating experience of being a second-class citizen—an outsider loosely appended to the academic world and not really part of it.
The young woman was also much more subordinate than expected within the marriage. She did most of the domestic chores. If they had children, she took most or all of the homemaking and child-care responsibilities, and he usually had little involvement in household or children. In many cases, the husband’s initial willingness to defer parenthood turned out to be an aversion to becoming a father: he preferred not to have children, or to have them only if she was ready to be primarily responsible for their care. The young couple’s sexual engagement, often weak at the start, progressively declined. Some couples had an explicitly “open” marriage in the second phase. In other couples, one or both partners had extramarital relationships that later became known to the other.
Nine of the eleven early marriers had a first child by age 28. Within a few years of motherhood most women began to understand that they were living essentially as traditional homemakers in a Traditional Marriage Enterprise on the fringes of academe. To live differently, they would have to wage an all-out fight against the Traditional Homemaker Figure in themselves, in their husbands, and in the surrounding culture, and they would have to commit themselves to an occupation. Otherwise they would be trapped in exactly the kind of life structure they had tried so hard to avoid. They attempted various changes: improving the marriage, ending the marriage, taking a job, getting on a clearer occupational path.
Two early marriers, Stacey Lane and Holly Crane, became mothers in the Early Adult Transition, and focusing on the limitations in marriage and occupation was a major part of the Age 25 Shift for both. In the second phase of the Entry Life Structure they made a sustained effort to do more with occupation and to improve their badly flawed life structures.
HOLLY CRANEHolly Crane married a faculty member and became a mother and homemaker at 21. She did not go to graduate school, but became a “faculty wife.” Although her husband was a professor, she had virtually no academic-intellectual life. At 25 she understood that she was essentially a housewife in a Traditional Marriage Enterprise with three children and a terrible marriage:
By 23 I was overwhelmed, exhausted, and depressed. When my husband went off to work in the morning I’d think, “What am I going to do today?” The long stretch of the day was empty, and it was the same day after day after day. I became very sad, very depressed. I went to a doctor and was given antidepressants. They helped me sleep better but didn’t touch the feeling that my life wasn’t as it was supposed to be. My husband, Ralph, was distant emotionally and sexually, and he was not involved with the children. I learned later that he began having affairs at that time.
At 25 I began a movement out of the home. First I got involved in politics. Then I took a job, which gave me the feeling that I was a good, competent worker. Ralph supported this move; the busier I was the less I needed from him. I was guilty about leaving the kids but learned that having outside work made me a happier, better mother. At 26 I took a graduate course and loved it. The next year, with the encouragement of the people I worked with, I became a full-time graduate student and did extremely well. I finally got a glimmer of hope that I could do something professionally. I became more dissatisfied with the marriage and had an affair. At 29 I completed my master’s degree, took a full-time job, and began to work on the feeling that my life must change.
Six of the eleven early marriers had their first child in the second phase, at ages 25 to 28. In the Age 25 Shift none of them was committed to a long-term career. Each one assumed, however, that as a mother she would continue to work (perhaps at a slower pace), while her husband contributed to the homemaking and accommodated partially to her work schedule. By the end of the second phase, however, most of these young women realized that these hopes were unrealistic. Their husbands contributed too little, and the young women felt stuck with the homemaking. Their self-development required them to get more strongly involved in an occupation and to find a better balance of family and occupation. Four divorced in the Age 30 Transition, and Rachel Nash was getting divorced when interviewed at 43.
Finally, three early marriers did not become mothers in the Entry Life Structure (or later). None of these marriages endured for long: Amanda Burns and Brooke Thompson divorced at 26/27; Kristin West began a permanent separation at 34, and none remarried.
AMANDA BURNSAt23, two years after graduation, Amanda Burns married her college boyfriend. She had just obtained her master’s degree, he his MBA:
In college I wondered whom I would marry, but not whether I would marry. My husband and I were both interested in more education and having a career, each in our own way. He claimed to be very interested in my career, and then it turned out he wasn’t. I was clear with him that I wanted a family, but I wasn’t going to be just a housewife—forget that. I didn’t see having kids as changing my life in any way, other than enhancing it. I figured that we’d get students or somebody to live in and help with the kids, and I’d still pursue my career. Eight months after the wedding I got pregnant; it wasn’t planned, but it fit into my vision of the future, so I accepted it. Three months later the doctor advised me to abort for medical reasons and I did. I was very sad about it at the time, but as I look back maybe it was just as well.
When I was 25 my husband insisted that I give up work, start a family, and become a housewife! I said, “I was clear with you from the beginning about how I felt, and I’m not going to throw it all away because you say so, even if you are the husband.” At that point his career wasn’t going very well, and he felt terrible about that. To make it worse, I was quickly promoted. We got into horrible fights in which he would lay on me that “This is what I think, and this is what you’ll do.” And I’d answer, “But that’s not the way I see it.” When he couldn’t change my mind, he’d lose his temper and hit me. He abused me several times and broke my arm once. Years later, when I read about battered women, I realized, “My God, I was one of those people!” He was always very sad about losing control, but he was very volatile and would just snap. I had known him since I was 20, and he had never acted that way before. I guess I just wasn’t doing what the book said you should do. He kept telling me, “Look at your mother, look at my mother, they’re both educated women who stayed at home raising the children, and this is the way it’s done.” When I said, “But that’s not the way I’ll do it,” it just infuriated him. When I turned 26 things got so bad that I moved out for good, and we divorced a year later. By then I was in a doctoral program and committed to a full-time career. I was also in a lesbian love relationship but I didn’t rule out heterosexual marriage and family in the future, although they were becoming more optional.
As the period of the Entry Life Structure ended, all fifteen academics and only eight businesswomen had been married. Fourteen career women (five in business, nine in academe) were mothers. Motherhood was both a fulfillment and a dilemma for these young women. They had assumed earlier that, after starting a family, they would devote several years primarily to homemaking before resuming outside work. At age 28 or 29, however, each woman began to question this basic assumption. She had an initial identity and sense of occupational competence that she was not ready to give up even temporarily. The internal Anti-Traditional Figure urged her to make occupation central in her life. Combining family and occupation became a major life task of the Age 30 Transition for these women.
Sixteen career women had no children by age 28 or 29. The shape of the next life structure was often more ambiguous for these women than for the mothers. All of them wanted to maintain or expand their engagement in work, and most wanted a family as well.
The Entry Life Structure was a time of personal development and growing occupational commitment for most career women. They had been responsible workers for several years and had gained a sense of independence and competence, and they wanted to establish occupation as a major part of their lives. They became more intolerant of dull, demeaning, or unrewarding work and took greater initiative in seeking advancement within the current workplace or elsewhere. As the period ended, most of the women had taken at least a modest step forward.
The career women learned in the Entry Life Structure that a woman cannot exist in the public world on good enough terms without having a serious, full-time occupation. She cannot do it by an entry level job or by being an eternal graduate student. Her husband and his career cannot provide the basis on which she makes a place for herself in the work world. If she wishes not to live within a Traditional Marriage Enterprise, she has to make her own way occupationally and to be valued for who she is.
By their late twenties the career women were beginning to recognize the importance of work in their lives. How much she would invest—in self, time, and energy—in occupation remained to be seen. In the life structure she began to imagine, family was the central component and occupation was important but second in priority. In what sense could she have a career and family? How could she combine the two? The answers to these questions continued to evolve in every developmental period thereafter.