EVA PITCHERThe Culminating Life Structure of Early Adulthood originates when the tasks of forming a life structure become more imperative than the explorations marking the Age 30 Transition. In the career sample it began at 33 or 34 and ended at 40 or 41. This structure was strikingly different, in its external aspects as well as its subjective meanings, from the Entry Life Structure of the twenties. At the same time, it was in some respects similar to and continuous with the previous structure. In comparing the two, and in examining the formation of the second structure, we must attempt to discern the forms of stability, the forms of change, and the qualitative differences between them. For most career women it was a time of great difficulty but also one of great personal growth and development.
Like the period of the Entry Life Structure, this period evolves through two distinct phases (see Chapters 6, 8, 12). The first phase is devoted to establishing and stabilizing a new life structure. It typically lasts two or three years and ends at 35 or 36. In the second phase, Becoming One’s Own Woman, the primary task is to enhance one’s life within the existing life structure and to realize the major goals and aspirations of early adulthood. A woman wants to become more independent, to speak more fully with her own voice, to be affirmed by others for the accomplishments and personal qualities most important to her. This phase lasts until about 40, when a woman enters the Mid-life Transition, and the life structure itself comes into question. Since the two phases were discussed in detail in Chapter 8 in relation to the homemakers, I will review them only briefly here.
This phase was not easy for most career women. Toward the end of the Age 30 Transition each woman had made at least a few major life changes such as embarking on a new job or occupational path, getting married or divorced,starting a family, beginning or ending a serious matrimonial relationship. Some women had not yet made an overt change but had set themselves new goals that they planned to act upon over the next several years. These women began the Culminating Life Structure with an “intended structure” that could not immediately be established. They needed a few years to make the key choices, to form the central relationships, and to integrate the components into a new life structure—or, failing this, to settle for something else.
The first phase was often a time of unwelcome instability and uncertainty just when a stable structure was urgently needed. Most of the unmarried childless women were eager to marry and start a family, but they were not in a matrimonial relationship or were in a relationship of ambiguous prospects. Most of the married childless women were not sure whether to have a child in a problematic marriage. The currently married mothers were desperately trying to manage a Neo-Traditional Marriage Enterprise and full-time career, as well as trying not to be too subordinate in family or workplace. The eight mothers who had recently divorced spent the first phase recovering from the desired yet disruptive change and exploring new ways of living as single working mothers.
There were corresponding difficulties in the domain of occupation. Some women had recently entered a career path leading to the upper reaches of the corporate or academic world. They were trying to find their way in exciting but rather alien territory. Others wanted a long-term career but knew that they would have to move to a less prestigious corporate or academic setting. The impending career shift cast its shadow on all their current involvements.
Several businesswomen decided at the start of this period that they would soon devote themselves primarily to family, perhaps leaving the corporate world altogether and working at things they enjoyed. They spent the first phase half-in and half-out of their current jobs, unable either to depart or to be much involved in the work world. Subjectively, they experienced this phase as a transitional time, and from a purely occupational point of view it was. In the context of life structure development, however, it was part of the Culminating Life Structure since the primary developmental task was to form a new life structure. The sense of urgency was especially acute because these women were living in an incomplete or provisional structure just when it felt so important to be establishing a new and satisfactory one.
By age 35 or 36 the first phase was completed, and the career women had established a Culminating Life Structure that would last until the end of this period. In some cases the new life structure amply realized their hopes; in others it was seriously flawed. Without exception, however, it was significantly different from the Entry Life Structure of their twenties.
The first task of this phase is to maintain the life structure. If the life structure is highly unsatisfactory in certain respects, the woman may feel strongly impelled to make major changes in a central component. To do so is, in effect, to “break out” of the existing structure. The wish for change is countered, however, by a powerful conservative tendency that operates to maintain life structural stability. During this phase it is hard to change the life structure or to pursue aims outside its boundaries. An attempt to break out is sometimes made in the late thirties (see The Seasons of a Man’s Life) but it usually leads to compromise or accommodation within the existing life structure rather than to a basic modification of the life structure. Many career women found themselves stuck in a highly flawed Culminating Life Structure: they could find no effective way to either improve their lives within it nor to break out and form a new life structure.
The second task of this phase is to enhance one’s life within the life structure. A woman needs to attain the satisfactions and accomplishments available within the life structure and to start Becoming One’s Own Woman (see Chapter 8). The Culminating Life Structure is the vehicle for concluding the era of early adulthood—for realizing the key aspirations of one’s youth and laying a foundation for the impending era of middle adulthood. An unsatisfactory Culminating Life Structure does not allow us sufficiently to live out crucial aspects of the youthful self or to accomplish essential goals of early adulthood. Conversely, a relatively satisfactory Culminating Life Structure gives us a fighting chance of fulfilling our primary hopes and dreams.
All of the career women experienced some measure of success as well as disappointment with regard to both occupation and love/marriage/family. From the start of this period, most career women looked to both occupation and love/marriage/family as vital sources of satisfaction and self-esteem. They sought a great deal in the work world: to make a significant contribution, to earn advancement, recognition, and income consistent with their performance, to be taken seriously as a professional and a person. Likewise for love/marriage/family: If married, each woman wanted to be appreciated for her marital-maternal efforts, and, even more, to be valued for herself and not merely for her performance of domestic duties. If unmarried, she wanted a marriage or enduring love relationship on more equal terms. Most of the childless women wanted to be a mother within a mutually nurturing family.
By the end of this period, many married career women began to realize that their Neo-Traditional Marriage Enterprises were too hard on them. They were working full-time at demanding jobs, sharing the provisioning role with their husbands as coprovisioners, and they were also almost totally responsible for the “second shift” (the apt term is Arlie Hochschild’s) of child care and domestic responsibilities. Whether married or single, many career women in the phase of Becoming One’s Own Woman began to envision an Egalitarian Marriage Enterprise in which both partners would share provisioning and domestic rights and responsibilities on more equal terms. Several of the businesswomen and about half of the faculty women were able in the Culminating Life Structure or the Mid-life Transition to transform their Neo-Traditional Marriage Enterprises into Egalitarian Marriage Enterprises or to build Egalitarian Marriage Enterprises in a remarriage.
In their twenties, the career women assumed that the work world was a meritocracy operating on terms of gender equality and rationality: benevolent authority would watch over women as well as men and promote those who deserved it. During the Age 30 Transition the women had become less naive about the work world. The businesswomen, for example, came to understand that a corporation could fill its entry-level positions with an endless supply of bright young women from excellent colleges. The entry jobs led nowhere. A worker could continue only by being promoted to the first rung of a managerial or technical ladder, and these positions were restricted largely to men. By their thirties most women who had held entry jobs dropped out (to seek a more congenial workplace, or, more often, to start a family), were pushed out, or both. The terminology was different but the reality similar for the faculty members.
The women studied here were among the small number of women who advanced beyond the entry level. During the Age 30 Transition they established a foothold, however precarious, at the bottom of a higher ladder. From this new vantage point they gained more perspective on the scene below and an initial sense of the terrain above. They realized that pursuing a career in their thirties would be extremely demanding and would severely constrain their relationships to family, friends, and self. Their chances for appreciable advancement were mostly uncertain or low. The corporation/university was not a quasi-family in which people worked and played together and cared for each other. It had a strongly hierarchical structure. A significant job change involved a new place in the hierarchy—a place higher or lower on the existing ladder or on a different ladder.
In the Age 30 Transition and throughout their thirties, the career women learned that competition was built into the pyramidal structure of the organization. Each level contained perhaps 10 to 20 percent as many people as the one below, and the percentage decreased as one moved up the ladder. At every point, many people were competing for one opening. Those who were not promoted might remain in the same position for a while or make a lateral move. Before long, however, they would be terminated or would quit, unable to tolerate the boredom or humiliation. The striving to perform well and to advance in one’s field may stem from many specific motives—excellence, power, recognition, money, love, approval. Whatever their motives, however, people in their thirties must “succeed”—must do better than most of their peers—or they will have to move elsewhere and perhaps endanger their careers.
Each woman discovered that people were promoted not simply for their ability and the quality of their work. There was also an organizational game called “politics.” People got ahead in part by playing this game well—manipulating others, practicing one-upmanship, forming alliances, and doing in competitors. In the woman’s mind it was a man’s game, something that many men engaged in as a matter of course. It was a game that she, like many other women (and many men), felt unwilling or unable to play. The woman rejected the game and believed that “the main thing is performing the work well, and I want to be evaluated and rewarded on that basis.” At the same time she wondered how much her discomfort with the game was based on naiveté and the exclusion of women from the informal male sociability where so much “politicking” occurred. She began to realize that job performance, personal relationships, and social networks were inextricably interwoven in the life of the organization. Women were at a strong disadvantage in this world: they were badly outnumbered; men excluded them from many activities and relationships in which important decisions were made; and the women often had difficulty “playing the game” on men’s terms.
The woman realized, too, that women and men were often on different ladders. A small number of budding stars were chosen and placed on a “fast track” (which is also a long-term career track leading far upward) by their early thirties—and with rare exceptions they were men. Not all of the initial stars would advance far, but very few others had much of a chance. The great majority of men would not move beyond the middle levels, and few women would go that far. Women were entering the corporate/academic world in larger numbers than ever before but the organizational gender splitting was still strong. Women worked largely in segregated female enclaves or as “tokens” in predominantly male groups, perhaps as staff to the top professors or executives, but they rarely had a place high in the power structure. When a high-level position formerly held by a man was given to a woman, there was often a reduction in salary and authority and an increase in responsibilities. This state of affairs was not created by a few sexist men in a particular corporation or university. It was (and is) a widespread phenomenon based upon the gender splitting in organizations, in individuals (women as well as men), and in society as a whole.
The issue of authority is crucial here. An authority is a source who has an influence on others and contributes to the management and understanding of an enterprise. There are many kinds of authority. A position of line authority confers the legitimate right to initiate and make decisions in an organization. Even when authority is handled in a relatively collaborative way, there is a point at which, failing consensus, the individual or subgroup with line authority must make a decision binding on the group. A position of expert authority may be held by a person who is seen as having special knowledge or understanding (such as a scientist or outside consultant). She has no authority to make a decision, but her views on the pros and cons of various options are given heavy weight by the decision makers. Many kinds of authority can be exercised in many different ways.
In the business world it is clear that higher rank generally involves greater line authority or, in the case of staff, more direct influence on those who exercise greater line authority. In academe faculty members are formally regarded as colleagues who work together on largely individualistic, equal terms. But the university also has a strongly corporate or bureaucratic character. An academic department is an organized division of the larger university organization. A private university is, in legal terms, a corporation. Faculty members are in principle equal, but some are more equal than others. It makes a huge difference whether one is a “junior” or a “senior” faculty member and on or off the “tenure track.” Every department has a head and other managerial positions that to some degree control the teaching, research, administrative, and other activities of individual faculty members. Committees make crucial decisions regarding hiring, promotion, and the allocation of funds, persons, and other resources to various departmental ventures. Faculty members who have greater rank, research funds, and administrative authority exert greater influence on policy generally. Women at every level are often at a disadvantage in this entire process.
The basic reality is this: organizations tend to exclude women from positions of line authority. Most of the career women found it difficult to gain a sense of their own inner authority and to acknowledge (even to themselves) that they wanted such positions. They tended to equate authority with authoritarianism—the unilateral, exploitive use of power. This way of exercising authority is widespread in work organizations and a source of many problems. Improvement will come not from the elimination of organizational structure and authority but from the development of a wiser, more collaborative use of authority.
For many women, inner conflicts about authority compounded the powerful external obstacles to their advancement. At the same time, the developmental process of Becoming One’s Own Woman made it increasingly important for women in their late thirties to speak with their own voice and to be affirmed through appropriate promotion and recognition. It gave a special urgency to their career struggles and reduced their tolerance of subordination and discrimination.
The cultures of corporations and universities abound with powerful though often shadowy imagery of women. To get ahead, a woman should be competent yet still “feminine.” The word “yet” says it all; there is an assumption that femininity is fundamentally antithetical to competence, and thus to the exercise of authority. This assumption springs from the basic gender splitting. The qualities considered feminine are, by and large, those of the traditional homemaker: the charming little girl, the devoted wife and mother, the helpmate to a male hero but never a hero in her own right. The traditional homemaker may also be an extremely competent worker, providing care and service to others, furthering the man’s career, being a program “coordinator” (a title often given predominantly to women for a work role that involves much responsibility without commensurate authority). But it seemed to many career women that a woman must tread softly when she attempts to be competent in the ways of the masculine/provisioner: head of the enterprise, policy maker, fierce competitor, inspiring leader, hero. Many career women believed that to succeed, a woman should be reasonably assertive but not too demanding or ambitious, caring yet not overly maternal, businesslike yet not cold.
By age 40 or 41, all of the career women were at a turning point in their lives. The turning point marked the end of the Culminating Life Structure and the onset of the Mid-life Transition. Some women were getting divorced or remarried, or going through major changes in a love relationship. Others had teenage offspring and were coming to a new phase of their motherhood. Some were starting to think and feel in new ways about love relationships and marriage. Since career was so important to them all, it is perhaps not surprising that the most dramatic changes were in occupation.
I’ll divide the sample into three broad groups on the basis of occupational achievement and indicate the kinds of change that were going on at this time.
High Achievement. Six women had very successful careers and a highly affirming Culminating Event. Ellen Nagy was promoted to a senior position at a major corporation, an event that fulfilled her youthful aspirations and brought her to the beginnings of senior membership in her world. Debra Rose was promoted to a regional directorship. Amanda Burns, Megan Bennett, Alice Abel, and Helen Kaplan became full professors and were gaining international recognition for their work.
Moderate Achievement. Seven women were making substantial career progress, but their situation and prospects were somewhat less bright than those above. When interviewed at 37 to 40, three of them had middle-management staff positions without line authority in large corporations. They were in fields such as human resources and corporate communications, largely staffed by women. Each had the possibility and the hope of rising higher but knew that the odds were not great. The outcome of their late thirties enterprise was not yet clear. Eva Pitcher had just been denied tenure and was moving to another university where she was offered a tenured professorship. She was dealing with mixed feelings of success and failure and reappraising her academic aims. At 40 Hillary Lewin and Rachel Nash had been tenured professors for several years but had been minimally involved in scholarly work. They now felt a need for greater intellectual achievement and began actively to pursue their research interests.
Low or Ambiguous Achievement. Seventeen women were making limited career progress. Nine of these were businesswomen. Michele Proto and Pam Kenney had corporate administrative positions offering some security but limited possibilities for advancement. Abby Murphy left the NYC corporate world in her mid-thirties and at 40 was a manager for a medium-size company. Kim Price moved to a large financial institution in hopes of improving both her income and her social contribution. When interviewed at 39, Melissa Howard was about to be demoted from a low-level management position. She knew that her corporate career was in shambles but was giving herself another year or two before seeking other options. Amy York, Sally Wolford, Jessica Hall, and Lisa Rourke left their corporate careers in the middle to late thirties in order to give family a higher priority and, in time, to pursue more limited occupational goals. We will see in the next chapter how life evolved in the Mid-life Transition for the businesswomen who were over 40 at the time of interviewing.
Of the eight faculty members in the low-achievement group, Kristin West and Holly Crane were late bloomers who first became assistant professors at 41 and 40, respectively. For each, this appointment was the Culminating Event of early adulthood. It was highly affirming to be identified as a promising scholar. It was also disconcerting to discover that most assistant professors were ten years younger and most of one’s age peers were males of higher rank. These women had perhaps five years to prove themselves. The other six faculty members were 36 to 40 when interviewed and nearing the end of their appointments as assistant professors. Florence Russo at 39 had just received the devastating news that she had been denied tenure. Four others were approaching the “up or out” time when they would either be given tenure or terminated. Each had received a clear message that her chances for tenure were minimal. The women understood, too, that it would be almost impossible to obtain a tenured professorship at an institution comparable in standing to their present one. A difficult time to Become One’s Own Woman! In considering new options, each woman had to think not only about the acceptability of various “lesser” institutions but also about becoming a low-level educational administrator or even moving entirely out of academe.
Virtually all of the academic women enjoyed their work in the academic world, first as students, then as researchers and teachers. They enjoyed teaching and their interaction with undergraduate and graduate students, especially with young women. Many of the faculty women provided much-needed role models to the upcoming generation of undergraduate women and men.
As they turned 40, the career women began to be seen, and to see themselves, as entering a relatively “senior” generation in contrast to the generation of “junior” women colleagues in their late twenties and early thirties. Due to previous gender discrimination, the current senior generation of women was much smaller than the junior and contained very few women over age 45. When they themselves were younger, our subjects had had little mentoring from other women or men. Now, many of them had an interest in being helpful to their younger female colleagues; the possibility of mentoring younger men was rarely mentioned. The generation of younger women (roughly age 25 to 35) looked to their seniors for mentorial relationships. However, despite the interest and potential benefit on both sides, very little mentoring occurred. There was a good deal of generational splitting in each group: the relationship between the two generations was conflictful or blocked rather than constructively engaged.
The younger career women generally experienced the older as unhelpful and in some basic sense irrelevant. The older women’s knowledge and skills often seemed obsolete, rooted in an outmoded historical period. The senior women seemed too preoccupied with their own careers to take a mentorial interest in younger, potentially rivalrous women. The younger women found it hard to value or identify with an older woman who was not a wife or mother; the image of the Single Career Woman (see Chapter 3) operated powerfully. In addition, most of the senior women were in positions of limited rank and authority. The juniors usually accepted the current view that gender discrimination was minimal: women could now do and become anything they wanted; the only barriers to success were women’s own lack of ability or motivation. Accordingly, the junior women generally blamed the seniors for not advancing farther and considered them irrelevant to their own aspirations.
The senior women were often disappointed in the younger, who seemed not to appreciate the struggles they had gone through to establish an initial beachhead for women in these male-dominated worlds. They felt that the young women looked primarily to the men above them for support and sponsorship. The men in turn seemed more interested in younger women, for reasons that sometimes seemed to have more to do with sexuality than with mentoring.
There was some truth and some distortion on both sides. Corrosive generational conflict exists in every historical period, among men as well as women. However, it was particularly unfortunate among these women, since it divided them at a time when they most needed each other. Many in the senior generation lost an opportunity for leadership, for mentorship, and for the satisfactions accruing from both. The junior generation lost the potential benefits of being mentored and of receiving the wisdom of its pioneering elders.
Of course, the relationship between these two generations, though crucially important for the well-being of society, is inherently problematic. Along with a convergence of interest, there is always going to be a fundamental conflict of interest between the senior generation, rooted in its own historical origins, and the upcoming junior generation eager to succeed it and to place its own stamp on history.
But the generational conflict experienced here also has sources in the socio-cultural conditions of the time. These women were part of the first and second generations attempting in some numbers to ascend the professional hierarchy of corporations and universities. To the extent that they succeeded, the traditional character of the organizations would be irrevocably changed. The change was supported by federal affirmative action laws and by a small number of male executives. However, it was resisted by a new conservative political regime, by many individuals, and by the inertia of organizational structures. One way that organizations resist the advancement of subordinate groups is to foster divisions within their ranks. The splitting of these two generations of women was strongly facilitated by organizational pressures opposing “feminism,” and supporting the illusory view that gender barriers were so minimal that women need not worry about discrimination.
Finally, generational splitting has inner psychological sources within the personalities of individual women. The psychological sources vary in kind and degree. One general theme, however, is the conflict between the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure and the internal Anti-Traditional Figure. The Traditional Homemaker Figure feels uneasy and alien in the male work world. She regards men as the primary carriers of authority, power, and knowledge. In her view, the woman properly contributes by being “relational”—taking care of the personal needs of others, being a coordinator rather than an authority, assisting the men. She is put off by achieving, “pushy” women and by unauthoritative, “weak” men. She wants to perform well but is anxious about rising too high in the organization. Even the more “liberated” career woman has an internal Traditional Homemaker Figure who complicates her career strivings and her relationships with female and male coworkers. The Traditional Homemaker Figure tends to be maternal rather than mentorial with younger women.
The internal Anti-Traditional Figure plays her part as well. At best, she supports a woman’s efforts to Become One’s Own Woman and to foster the development of younger women. When this figure is sharply split off from all that is traditionally feminine, however, she may inhibit the mentoring function. She may insist, for example, on remaining a rational, impersonal, task-oriented worker who keeps all feelings out of her on-the-job relationships lest she be seen as an “emotional female” unable to do a man’s work. It is hard to care for younger adults in a mentorial way if one is afraid of being seen as too maternal. Neither internal figure was entirely dominant in any career woman; integrating or balancing the two was a significant issue for all.
EVA PITCHERI had been a graduate student from 22 to 28. I liked graduate school and had a good reputation without being picked out as one of the stars. I’d married a graduate student at 25 and had my children at 27 and 31.
I came here at 32 on a non-tenure-track three-year lectureship. At 33 I became assistant professor, and at 36 I became an associate professor. That was an important promotion in the sense that it would make it a lot easier to leave here with that rank. I never thought my chances of getting tenure here were too good—they never are for associate professors—but I couldn’t help thinking there might be a possibility. But two years ago at 38 I was denied tenure. Since I’m leaving I’ve just sort of said to hell with the school; I’m not going to be a good citizen when they’re not going to keep me around.
I’ve done quite a bit of advising of students—purely academic relationships. It does take a lot of time, but I get a lot of satisfaction working closely with somebody on their project. I’m trying to get them to think on their own. My department has mostly male students, though I’ve worked with three or four women students, but nothing personal because I do think in dealing with students it’s important to keep some distance. I’m not interested in becoming a sort of mother figure for these students. I have a feeling that if I showed more feeling that they would see me as being more maternal, and that is something I don’t want.
My husband has always been very supportive of my career. We have each been offered and accepted full professorships elsewhere, although he would prefer to stay here. It’s a good marriage. Since we’re both academics we can really talk to each other about our work. He’s very good with the children and plays with them and is very loving and interested in them. He’s not a housework kind of person, though. Part of our marriage is that I in fact have given more time to home things than he has, and I’ve sort of accepted the fact that that’s not going to be equal. I would rather it be equal. It really is a compromise that I have to make. He contributes at home, but not as much as I do. I go home earlier than he, and he works Saturdays and I stay home. Neither of us has had much time for anything more than work and family—you just sort of have to pare down your life. I have never had many friends, mostly just acquaintances. The children are getting older and more independent now, which frees up some time.
I find a lot of satisfaction through motherhood and work, but it basically means I don’t have time for other things. I’m very pleased that I’ve been able to combine kids and having a serious career, but it means compromise. I don’t think anyone should think it’s simple to combine work and family. If you want to have two big serious things in your life you’ve just got to be willing to tell people that you just can’t do other things.
FLORENCE RUSSOI’m 39 now. I became an assistant professor here at 33. I teach three art classes. Some students are talented, but at this school you get students who aren’t talented, who couldn’t make it into a better college, and they’re not that motivated.
The higher achievers will give you the feedback that you need to keep excited about your teaching, and as long as you have a few good students it’s worth it. I feel through my students I’m working and getting better, and I see a potential in them and can help them evolve as artists, and it’s very rewarding. I’ve had one or two special students in the past five years, and this year I had one female student I did a lot with. She was very motivated, and she drained me. She got me thinking about things when she’d ask questions I didn’t know the answers to, and then I’d try to find the answers. So I keep learning through my students, too.
My husband, James, and I are very close. We have two children, and I really enjoy the children and being a mother. My husband and I both teach, and we have a very important relationship in order to do what we’re doing. To have the two children, for me to teach, for him to teach, for both of us to have projects, it’s very difficult. My husband and I have a mutual understanding that if we’re going to do two careers we have to do it together. He’s not helping me; we’re working together. The house really only gets cleaned when we have company. What we really need is a housekeeper, but we can’t afford one. I’m balancing being a teacher, an artist, a mother, wife, and sometimes I feel very negligent in one or more areas. My life is a constant struggle in order to balance out all my energies. It’s a constant conflict.
An important part of my life during the past few years is a project I’ve been working on for which I thought I’d be recognized. It was by some, but not where it really meant something in terms of promotion. The project was to begin a collection of women artists who are nationally and internationally known in my area. The collection carried the hope that I would get a tenured position here. It was a three-year project that was central to my life and carried a lot of hopes; it’s comparable to writing a book in other fields.
I came to do the project when I had a majority of women students and felt there weren’t enough role models for women artists. I think I’m supporting women by doing this project. Many women artists have been ignored; the textbook in art history is four inches thick and does not mention one woman.
I got up the collection and wrote the catalog, and we had a lovely opening. It was well received, and I think it has brought some attention to the college. I hope the collection will just keep growing and growing. I feel the pieces I have chosen as curator are strong and beautiful and will be strong statements when I’m gone. The collection will be something the college will always have even though it may not always have me.
This year I was recommended for promotion and tenure by the Promotions Committee but did not get it. I’m very, very frustrated and angry and bitter and feel very, very sad about this whole thing because there’s nothing I can do about it. So in spite of all I’ve done if I don’t get promoted next year I will have to find another job!
I’ve been feeling more and more competent in this position, and I’m angry that I didn’t get that promotion, especially since I feel discriminated against because I’m a woman. I’ve been working toward this promotion for five years, and I deserve it. I have done things in five years that men on the staff who have been here forever have not done.
It’s important to me to be affirmed in what I’ve been working so hard toward. I feel a lack of motivation and am very unhappy. I feel depressed and angry, and I cry a lot. I can’t do any more than what I’m doing; I don’t have any more time in my life to do more. I keep thinking where can I go? What are my options? I can’t think of any. The college is like bloodsuckers: they use assistant professors for seven years and then let them go and start out with fresh blood from newly graduated students.
At the end of the Culminating Life Structure, twelve of the thirty career women were in their first marriage and five were in their second marriage. Nine were currently divorced. Four were single-never-married. No career woman had a first marriage in this period. Five remarried. Three got divorced.
Twenty career women were mothers as the Culminating Life Structure ended. Nine mothers were businesswomen (seven currently married, two divorced), and eleven were academics (seven currently married, four divorced). Of the ten women without children, six were in business, four in academe.
Only three career women had a first child in this period, as compared to seventeen in previous periods, chiefly the Entry Life Structure and the Age 30 Transition. This finding is consistent with survey and census data indicating that a very small percentage of women have a first child after age 34. The number has increased somewhat in the past decade, but it is still well under 10 percent of the population of mothers.
It is of interest also to look at mother’s age when she had her last child. Of the women who started a family before age 34, no businesswoman and only four academics had an additional child after that. In other words, women who become mothers before the end of the Age 30 Transition (as the great majority do) generally have their last child by age 34. This finding holds for the homemakers as well. Little attention has been paid to mother’s age at last child. Further study will show, I believe, that roughly 90 percent of all women who become mothers by 34 have no more children after that. In the past, before adequate birth control became available, childbearing often continued into the late thirties and forties. The change has important consequences for women’s lives and development. It contributes to the historical process by which women increasingly participate in the labor force and look to occupation as a significant component of the life structure, especially in the years beyond the early thirties.
During the Culminating Life Structure the career women became increasingly remote from the family of origin, which was usually rather fragmented, geographically dispersed, and lacking in integrative ties. In some cases a parent had become ill and was cared for out of loyalty or guilt. The physical and psychological distance from parents and siblings was generally not unwelcome, but it raised nagging questions about personal roots, about the continuity of generations and the evolution of familial ties over the course of adulthood.
Let us turn now from the single components to the evolution of the life structure in this period. Three broad types of Culminating Life Structures were built and maintained. I’ll discuss each structure, showing how it evolved over the course of this period and giving individual variations on the main themes.
Seventeen career women formed a Culminating Life Structure in which both occupation and family were central components. Many of these women carried the dual Anti-Traditional Dreams of the Successful Career Woman and the Neo-Traditional Marriage Enterprise. This group included six businesswomen and eleven faculty members. Ten of these women were in a first or second marriage for much or all of this period. Most of them used the first phase of the Culminating Life Structure to crystallize a structure in which they took chief responsibility for family within a Neo-Traditional Marriage Enterprise while pursuing a more than full-time career.
The remaining seven women were divorced for much or all of this period. They were committed to both career and motherhood, and marriage was an unfilled component of the life structure. Although interested in remarrying, they were cautious in their relationships with men. To be minimally eligible as a partner, a man had to accord the women the right to equality, independence, and a career within an Egalitarian Marriage Enterprise.
All seventeen women in Group A built a Culminating Life Structure combining family and full-time career. In the process, they enriched their own lives as well as the lives of other persons and institutions. Motherhood enhanced their sense of fulfillment as women and their sense of legitimacy as career professionals. The career gave them the independence and the sense of a competent self that they believed they could not have had as full-time homemakers. But there were also serious problems. The internal Traditional Homemaker Figure and the internal Anti-Traditional Figure coexisted in an uneasy truce that exacted a considerable psychological toll on each woman. Even with housekeepers and other assistance, many of the women carried virtually all of the domestic responsibility. At the same time, they often spent fifty or sixty or more hours a week on their careers, and many women did a fair amount of job-related travel. Despite their best efforts, career and family were often antithetical rather than convergent.
By their late thirties most of these career women came to understand the illusory nature of the image of Superwoman, who could “do it all” with grace and flair. Their self-image was more that of the Juggler, who kept many spheres in the air without dropping any or losing a step in the perpetual forward motion. While continually seeking balance, most women found it impossible to give anything like equal priority to the various components of the life structure. In general, occupation was by far the first priority, with motherhood second, marriage a poor third, leisure and friendship a rare luxury, and, with all the external tasks to be done, almost no time for the self.
The women’s lives were usually hectic, at times chaotic and exhausting. Nevertheless, most women considered their lives to be relatively satisfactory and worth the effort. They believed to attempt less would be worse, and many of the women they knew were struggling with similar or greater problems. It would get better in time, they hoped, as the children grew older and the career stabilized.
Marriage and love relationships were problematic in a different way (though not necessarily in a greater degree) for the women who combined motherhood and career than they were for the others. In the relationship with husband or lover the women wanted to be valued as women and as persons, and to have a balance of closeness and separateness, strength and dependency, rational competence and feeling. These wishes of the woman were often contested by the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure (who warned her of the dangers of seeking too much occupationally and losing the feminine) and by the internal Anti-Traditional Figure (who feared that any compromise would lead to subordination and loss of the self). There were also conflicting images and feelings in the husband and others.
In some respects most of the husbands held nontraditional views regarding marriage and supported their wives’ occupational strivings. Like most other men and women, however, they were by no means free of internal gender splitting. Each husband had a traditional masculine self-image that kept him from sharing equally in the domestic responsibilities and made him uneasy about being less “successful” than his wife.
By the start of the Culminating Life Structure, many husbands were earning less than their wives and doing less well occupationally. This was especially true of the businesswomen’s husbands; most of them were in business or business-related professions, where the prospects for men appeared to be better. The husband was distressed by his limited advancement in contrast with his wife’s relative success. Emma Beechwood has given us an example of the disparity and of the couple’s collusive effort to mask it during the Age 30 Transition (see Chapter 13). This theme took on greater significance in the Culminating Life Structure as Emma worked on Becoming One’s Own Woman, he on Becoming One’s Own Man. She had the marital task of supporting his career and tolerating his relative failure, without being deterred from pursuing and enjoying her own career. He in turn had the task of supporting and enjoying her career, without becoming too resentful of her success and too deprecating of himself. No easy matter! Given the many potential sources of discord, a couple did well to have only moderate problems in the Culminating Life Structure.
The same issues and themes were prominent in the Group A women’s occupational endeavors. Four of the seventeen were high achievers. Ellen Nagy, for example, was promoted at 40 to a high managerial position of a national corporation—an unusually high rank for a woman though not at the top of the corporate structure.
ELLEN NAGYAfter my divorce at age 33 I knew I wanted a relationship, but I also knew that it really might not happen. I started dating, but I was very scared and wary. It was a difficult time. I had grown up without any living-alone experience, and I knew that I was highly dependent on men and needy of men. One reason I’d never contemplated divorce earlier was that I was terrified of being alone without a man. It was such a paradox: I was involved in the Women’s Movement, very career-oriented and capable, but my feeling was that to be without a man was a fate worse than death. I really tried to build out of myself, and finally I came to the point where I just said, “Yes, I am a woman who is much happier living with a man.” So it became a choice, and that was an important thing for me to learn at about 35.
I met my present husband, Roger, and it was an instantaneous love-at-first-sight chemistry. He was separated. By his late thirties he was a very successful businessman. We had a difficult, stormy relationship the first two years. We would back off then get back together again.
Despite the turmoil in my life during those years, my relationship with my daughter, Jennifer, became steadily better. Day after day after day my time and appreciation of that child and reward from her has been wonderful and increasing. I am able to deal with her far better than most everything else in my life. She’s an interesting, thoughtful person. My pleasure around mothering grew, and I marveled at that—it was like an extraordinary blossoming flower. I have regretted that I couldn’t have another child, but Roger is totally opposed to having one. I told him that I had completely accepted it, but it’s very difficult.
When I was 35 Roger and I decided to live together. Roger quit his corporate job and went into business for himself for the next five years. It did not work out for him, and it was an extremely difficult time. Recently, he came to terms with the fact that he needs to do something else.
At 34 I was promoted at a large international company. I started to realize that, whether I wanted it or not, I was a symbol of success for other women: I had worked for over ten years, I had a managerial position, I had been married, and I had a child.
After a year or two in my position, I began to feel a growing concern about the future. I began to ask, “What’s next? Where can I go from here?” The logical next step on the career ladder wasn’t available to me at that company, and I wasn’t sure many women would ever be in the top positions of any international corporation. I wanted to expand my horizons and test the entrepreneur part of me, so I got interested in Wall Street.
At 36, I joined a leading firm. It was a major career shift. It was a completely different field of work from what I had been doing for fifteen years where I was more comfortable than I had realized. I was hired into middle management. My otherwise all-male group was dominated by one man who didn’t want me there, and my being a woman was absolutely critical. Being competent was not an issue. It was an awful situation, and I knew I had no future there. They told me they were not ready to promote a woman, “especially not you,” because I was too assertive.
Age 36 to 38 was an extremely difficult period for me. A lot was going on in my life. Roger and I had a very close, emotionally competitive relationship. We needed to be together, but we needed to be separate, too. Life was unpredictable, and both of us had heavy career demands. I felt that his commitment to me was tenuous—that any day he would be offered a good position elsewhere and would leave me. And I had so much trouble with my career that it posed a significant strain on our relationship. After a terrible fight, Roger announced that he was moving out. I told him that leaving was not an option, that we had to stay together. After that argument we got more committed and married when I was 38. We stopped keeping our assets separate and made provisions for each other in our wills.
My firm decided that I should leave. That was fine because it had been apparent to me that it was not going to work, and I had already been looking for another job. Small- and medium-size companies are still unlikely to hire a woman for any senior role. Larger corporations are under more pressure and are hiring women in low-level jobs in management. I went to a medium-size corporation in a senior management position. I didn’t yet have the credentials to be in a very large company, but this was fine. I have a forty-person staff.
It is interesting to be working at the very top of a corporation. I am not in one of the top positions, but I’m working very closely with the two or three people who are running the corporation. My job is very frustrating, unpredictable, and risky. It’s difficult to have any level of continuing satisfaction because I have a lot of derived power but no direct power. I’m turning 40 and will have been here two years next month. I’m the highest-ranking woman in the company.
My personal interest in being involved in this research project is that I’m very much at a time in my life where I feel I need to take stock and think about which way to go now. I feel as if some kind of choice is coming. I’m not sure if it’s going to be next week or next month, but it’s coming. Where I am now, today, is that I am a full-time, married, committed executive and a mother, married to a man who is certainly a feminist; he just automatically deals with the stuff about our two careers and sharing domestic work. This little family of three was not an automatic family at all, and it has just started to work as a family.
My daughter, Jennifer, is growing. I know she has to separate, and I hope I will have the ability to let go and let her be where she has to be. It’s like counting the grains of sand in the hourglass between now and the time when she turns 18 and goes away to college, because I know that’s it. I hope we’ll be friends and will see one another, but she will not be living with me after that. I feel as if every day is precious.
Turning 40 has absolutely been a big deal. I don’t think I have dealt much with it, but I know it’s going to grow. In some ways I feel my age, I like my age, and I like where I am in my life. I don’t have a great wish to be some other age, but I associate 40 with someone who is ideally grown up. I associate it with a time by which one should be on a direction one is comfortable with and not contemplating a whole new change of direction, but that is not me. So maybe I’ll grow up when I turn 50 [laughs].
In time I could get one or two more promotions, but as I look ahead I’m not sure that making it is a route to real satisfaction. I look at where I am now, and where I thought I would be at 40, and I realize that I have less of a sense of where I want to be now than I did at 30 or 35. When you’re younger you’re pursuing things more single-mindedly. Now I start to look at far more and focus on broader options. There are many things that I never had time for, and now I’m starting to let them in and enjoy them.
I’ve moved beyond my earlier goals, which were very low. I have always looked at the organization in terms of what could I reasonably aspire to. In recent years I have said, “Forget all about what I would like to do; I don’t have any chance of getting there because I am a woman.” Now we have whole crops of young women coming out of business school, law school, medical school, planning their careers from age 22, if not earlier. But there is increased conflict about family. Everything is in a state of change, and the young women are getting a lot of conflicting messages. Now there is a reversal. If there are four people competing for the next step you might get it because you’re a woman and the company needs one woman in a visible place. Years ago they would tell you directly that you didn’t have a chance of getting the job because you’re a woman, and in some ways it’s easier to deal with that open discrimination. They’re hiding it much more now. But women can do any job as well as men. Sure we’re different, but when it comes to work there is no difference. For women, being successful is not at all reinforced. If you’re lucky people will say, “Gee, you’re one of the few successful women executives who is also feminine.” Translation: “Successful women executives are not feminine.”
I want to do this job for a while, and I want to be successful at less cost to myself. That’s part of the challenge now. I’d like to be in an environment with people with ideas. Important parts of me are not getting lived out. I don’t always want to be climbing the next step on the corporate ladder. There’s always a next step. I watch the 60-year-olds putting in their last energies trying to move up, and it’s so foolish. Not only are you bankrupt when you’re all used up, but you haven’t had a whole lot of pleasure while you were doing it. Corporate executives are so clearly trapped because they’re making so much money, and it’s hard to give that up. I’ve been in this world twenty years, and I don’t see much of the enjoyment part. I get enthusiastic about the things I’m doing, and I like being challenged, but I’m not always enjoying it a whole lot.
I’d like to do this for a while, but then I’d like to do something else. I have awful unfinished business in the form of having another child; I just can’t seem to get that one dealt with except by default. Never have I wished to be a full-time mother, but the best part of my life has been the process of watching my child grow.
I have also been musing about the role of close women friends in my life. One of the things I do not like about this lifestyle is that it’s hard to develop, maintain, expand friendships with anybody, and it’s virtually impossible to do that with men. My life is so busy I just don’t see my friends.
My family has always been a weight, never a joy, an obligation to be taken care of and not a source of support. My father had cancer recently, and my mother has been in a depressed state for ten years. I’m seeing my parents every three or four weeks and talking to them on the phone at least once every couple of days because of their health. My sister and I have an okay relationship. She has had a lot of problems and was just one more person in the family for me to take care of. We don’t see each other much. I am there for her if she needs me, but I would never turn to her.
A final interview with Ellen occurred two months later, after she had accepted a major promotion in her company.
I’ve been promoted, and I love it, but I am working very long hours and not sleeping well. I have a lot of tension and pressure. I get up at 5 a.m. because I can’t sleep, get into the office around 8 a.m., work late, go home, have dinner, and work until I go to sleep. I know that has to change. I love this job, but it is taking every ounce of ability and energy to get on top of it.
I came home from a trip the other night at 10 p.m., exhausted, with a splitting headache, hadn’t eaten. When I walked in, my daughter Jennifer sat me down to help with her homework! I wanted to help, but it’s very difficult. Roger just got a job that he is extremely happy with. Now we are both in highly taxing jobs that we love, and we’re both traveling a lot most of the week. We have some difficult juggling to do. There’s an awful lot of strain with each other because so much of our energy is caught up in our jobs right now.
When I look at my next stage I just don’t know what that will be. I felt like I was in the middle of a mid-life crisis when we first began these interviews three or four months ago. But with the great fortune of getting a job I love at the level of responsibility I’m going to be having now, I don’t feel concerned about where I am going next. I like my life the way it is now and would like it to continue like this. I like the combination of mothering and wifing and the job I’m in. I like the way that works. I like the balance in my life. I do have some regrets, though. I wish that I had had another child, although I know there’s absolutely no way I could have done that. At some point I’ll look for the next step, which I hope will be some kind of intellectual challenge, not necessarily in a corporate hierarchy. I’m clearly getting to the point at which the number of further steps on the pyramid, here or anywhere else, are few. I feel freed up from having to figure out what I want next.
It’s a funny switch. You measure yourself by very external things for a long time, and then a switch takes place. You recognize that you’re going to judge yourself and your happiness and your fulfillment by internal feelings, not by where you are on any ladder. It’s the inner goal that I’m running against now. I don’t have to prove to anybody except myself that I can do it.
I have a very odd sense of having always been the person out of step or marching to a different drummer. Except that somehow the music changed, the marching changed. I continued to march on the same path, and all of a sudden the world changed, and that path became the mainstream. Things that I did first and was widely attacked for are now widely reinforced. Many women are doing it all now as a matter of course.
Five of the women in Life Structure A were moderate achievers. Emma Beechwood, for example, had recently been promoted at 37 to director of a department, a position at the top of a staff ladder in a field that was relatively open to women. Although nothing was assured, she now anticipated further promotion, with the continuing support of her male sponsors. Hillary Lewin was full professor at a school she found intellectually and personally barren. She also did part-time research at a nearby university; this work enriched her professional life but left her marginal between the two worlds.
Finally, eight of the women in Life Structure A were low or ambiguous achievers. For example, Jessica Hall had felt stuck in a position of considerable responsibility and limited authority and salary. At 39 she finally made the decision to leave the corporate world, to see what it was like to spend time with her 5-year-old daughter, and to explore the possibilities of opening her own small business. During her thirties Kim Price had reached a middle-management position but saw no chance for promotion or for significant contribution in her field. At 40, with a mixture of hope and trepidation, she moved to a large corporation. Holly Crane obtained her doctorate at 38, spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow, and at 40 became an assistant professor. She knew that, given her late start, she was at a disadvantage in the battle for tenure. Five other faculty members, among them Stacey Lane and Erica Warren, had been assistant professors for several years when interviewed at age 36 to 40. All of these women understood that they had poor prospects of obtaining tenure at their current institution or another comparable one. They were forced to consider the possibility of taking a faculty position at an institution not to their liking, of moving into low-level academic administration (not a preferred option), or of moving out of academe altogether. These five women constitute almost half of the eleven faculty members in Group A.
STACEY LANEAt 31 I got my master’s degree and began work on my doctorate. For the next six years my life was divided into so many parts—writing the dissertation, part-time teaching jobs in local colleges, and raising my three kids. At 37 I got the Ph.D. degree, and a year later took a three-year terminal assistant professorship here. My whole life has developed more by chance than by choice. At the time, this appointment seemed the best option even though it had no tenure-track possibilities. I don’t regret taking it, although I don’t know where it will lead. At 40 I’m in the terminal year—like a terminal disease.
My life for the past five years and my prospects for the future have been very much influenced by the end of my marriage at 35. Actually, the marriage came apart very slowly over a long period of time. There was a kind of separation going on throughout our marriage. We were each pursuing separate things and not making time for us. We were friends and intellectual companions, which was always very satisfying. We are still close friends. But Tyler seemed increasingly remote and had increasingly long periods of depression and wasn’t able to seek professional help. I couldn’t deal with his remoteness, and it began to bother me. I wasn’t part of his private world, and I was very lonely in the marriage. My connection with the kids helped me feel an emotional bond and intimacy that filled the gap in the marriage. Tyler and I didn’t have a satisfying sexual relationship, either. The emotional attachment seemed missing. We couldn’t take and give to each other. I looked down the road five years, and I could see that it was likely that we’d be divorced, so why keep trying? I initiated the divorce.
I’ve made only two real choices in my life. The first was to go for my Ph.D., and the second was to leave my husband. The divorce was very civil and very sad. Explaining to the kids was hard. Tyler and I are still friends, and the kids spend weekends with him, so they have adapted very well. It came out that both of us had had brief sexual encounters, but nothing that special. I think the divorce was a good decision. One has some regrets, either being married or not married. I was very lonely while married, and I’m still lonely most of the time. There’s not much of either love or leisure in my life now.
I haven’t had an important love relationship since the separation, nothing that might grow into a permanent relationship, though that’s what I’d like ideally. Two years ago I went out with a younger graduate student, but he got scared off and left me [tearful]. He was kinder and more attentive, more playful than anyone else I’ve known. It was a more passionate relationship that made me feel attractive and sexually viable. I didn’t expect that we’d get married or anything, but it was so nice while it lasted. Why couldn’t it go on longer?
The really big decision facing me now is what to do about work next year, and that ties in with family as well. My children are firmly rooted in this community, as I am, and they have close ties with their father. I am intrigued by the idea of moving to the South, where I grew up, but I can’t try that for at least five years when all the kids will be in college. What I’d like most for now is to continue teaching here and living in this community with my family as it is, but that’s not possible. If I could get another academic position around here, I would take it. I would even take two part-time jobs that could be put together, but I don’t think any such option will become available.
This means that my career may have to be sidetracked for a while. I may decide to stay here and take a nonacademic job for a few years, but if I drop out of academia now, I’m not sure I can go back later. I don’t know what I look like as a candidate for an academic job in comparison with recent Ph.D. graduates, who are younger and less expensive. I might apply for a fellowship next year to write a book on my dissertation, but I don’t know whether I could get a fellowship, and my ambitions to publish the dissertation have eroded, along with my confidence that I’m up to the task. Giving up the whole career doesn’t have any reality for me; it’s just an unformed idea that I can hardly think about. I imagine I would be qualified for various positions, but I don’t know what it would mean to abandon the very structured framework of academia that I have always lived within.
I realize that my entire adult life has been one of accommodation—first to husband, then to family, then to the needs of various departments. I’ve always gone from pillar to post. My sense of a professional plan has lacked force and continuity, and my career has been a fragmented affair. I was entirely a student and part of the student world right up until I got divorced, then all of a sudden I had to grow up. I am most secure and satisfied in my role as a mother, and I count this as my first responsibility and joy. I think that women’s experience is more a day at a time, not looking ahead. I find teaching very rewarding but lack confirmation of myself as a scholar. In some ways the prospect of seeking a nonacademic job is a relief. I am a survivor. My academic future seems bleak, even if I had mobility and heart for the task. It’s hard to imagine what my life will be like a year from now. I may be making Dunkin’ Donuts.
ERICA WARRENI divorced at 32. I am 38 and relatively happy now. Aside from the job pressures, I like my life and enjoy my colleagues very much. I’m very happy in my second marriage. We have a much more satisfying, equal relationship than I had with my first husband. My relationship with George is a much more egalitarian kind of relationship. It’s not a perfect relationship, but generally our view is that we have equal responsibilities and rights, and we share the housework and child care pretty much fifty-fifty.
It’s weird. In my school if a man takes a leave of absence to do child care it’s applauded and admired, but if a woman does it she’s seen as taking time away from her career and is seen as less serious about her career than a man. It’s a very weird twist history has taken.
It’s a central pressure for me to balance my family life with my career. There’s something in the back of my head that says it’s not worth it: having a career and kids and doing it all and living like this. Why do I have to keep trying to do it all? I’m 38 years old, and I feel like I should have a clearer vision of where I’m going in the next few years with my career. The next couple of years I’ll be up or out, and I know what I have to do to get tenure. I’m at a choice point where I have to decide whether or not I want to put a large part of myself into my occupation. There’s a part of me that says it’s not worth it; I don’t want to live my life like this anymore. But how else would I live? I don’t know what other options there would be for me. I really love my work, and I have no other work experience as an adult other than teaching at colleges. I got my Ph.D. and became an assistant professor here at age 37. I love teaching and the interaction with students, and I’m an excellent teacher. I’ve begun to find research topics in my field that have importance to me.
My question for the next two years is this: Should I opt for family and have a child with my second husband or go for tenure? I’ve always had a major conflict over whether I wanted a job or a career, and taking time to raise children has probably cost me a career. Maybe if I worked hard enough and ran fast enough I might catch up. I’ve had a continual juggling act to balance my family life with my career, and after all these years I’m exhausted. There’s a voice in me that says it’s just not worth it anymore. Why do I have to keep trying to have it all? I think Superwoman is dead; she died of exhaustion.
In this structure, family became for the first time central while occupation lost its formerly central place. It is exemplified by three women, all in business, all low or ambiguous achievers. No faculty members formed this structure, although, as we have just seen, several faculty women were having occupational difficulties in their late thirties and were not sure that an academic career could remain central after 40. Three businesswomen, Amy York, Lisa Rourke, and Sally Wolford became increasingly disenchanted with the corporate-financial world during the Age 30 Transition and the first phase of the Culminating Life Structure. Lisa Rourke and Sally Wolford had their first child during this time, when the idea of family acquired more immediate reality and emotional urgency than before. It was important to be a mother, though not a permanent full-time homemaker within a Traditional Marriage Enterprise. Starting a family did not mean that the woman gave up entirely on outside work and lived “merely” a domestic life—her internal Anti-Traditional Figure was too strong for that. But by 35 the woman did give up the aim of having a long-term corporate career and making occupation central in her life. Instead, she built a Culminating Life Structure around a modified Traditional Marriage Enterprise, giving first priority to family and planning to pursue some kind of outside work as domestic conditions permitted.
The women opting for this kind of Culminating Life Structure were making two heavy bets, with odds that were hard to judge. First, they were betting that family would be suitable for the self and viable in the world as the central component of the life structure. This meant that they would enjoy motherhood and at least a moderate load of domestic responsibility, that the marriage would be sufficiently durable, that her husband would be a good enough provider, father, and marital partner.
Second, they were betting that they could make a good-enough life structure with occupation as an unfilled or peripheral component. While giving up a career path that had turned sour, they assumed that it would be possible in time to have some kind of meaningful work. Even if occupation had little or no place in the Culminating Life Structure, it would become more central in the future as family came to provide fewer demands and satisfactions. One of the great hazards, of course, was that occupation had already become essential to these women’s self-esteem and to the character of their relationships with persons and institutions. How would they go about Becoming One’s Own Woman in the late thirties—achieving youthful goals, being affirmed, gaining a stronger sense of inner authority and competence, becoming a more senior member of their world—without occupation as a major vehicle? Could this developmental work be done primarily through motherhood and family life for these women?
SALLY WOLFORDSally Wolford married at 28 but did not attempt pregnancy for four years, devoting herself instead to work, independence, and leisure. At 32 she decided to start a family. The decision to get pregnant was triggered by her old timetable (“Thirty is as long as one can wait to start a family”), and by the recognition that her career was at an impasse. She had worked for almost ten years at a large firm, and she had not been promoted, despite recurrent promises. She was beginning finally to understand that she was in a dead-end job. For three years Sally tried without success to get pregnant. Hovering on the brink of motherhood, she could not bring herself to quit the stagnant job and seek new work. When she finally got pregnant at 35, she was more than ready to leave the corporate world for a while.
Ten career women—six in business, four in academe—had no children, and occupation was the central component of their Culminating Life Structure. Two women were high achievers, three moderate achievers, and five low or ambiguous achievers. Three were married throughout this period, three were single-divorced, and four were single-never-married. Life Structure C is of special importance. It comprises a third of the present sample but closer to 50 percent of women in professional careers, especially in the corporate-financial world. It is important symbolically as well: childlessness has traditionally been regarded as the bitter fate of excessively ambitious women. Many have argued, on just these grounds, that career is inimical to family and that a woman who wants a good family life should not involve herself in a demanding career. Others, at the opposite extreme, have maintained that women should have both career and family and, with modest support and ingenuity, can readily do so.
My findings suggest that the situation is more complex than either of these views recognizes, and that we need a deeper examination of women’s (and men’s) lives before drawing conclusions. Two thirds of the career women in this study did have children, and most of these combined family with full-time career. The mothers who had a career were at least as ambitious, successful, and satisfied with their lives as the childless career women. And, what is especially striking, the women without children were generally similar to the mothers in their feelings and expectations about motherhood. Both groups had entered adulthood with an interest in developing some occupational skills, but they expected to marry in due course and to give higher priority to family than to outside work. The women who became mothers were surprised to discover in the Age 30 Transition that they were ready to commit themselves to a full-time, long-term career along with family. Most of the nonmothers had a corresponding but more distressing surprise: for various reasons they would not have a family in the foreseeable future, perhaps not ever.
Only two of the women who remained childless throughout the Culminating Life Structure took the position that they would never, under any conditions, become a mother—that they simply did not want to have a child. The other childless women continued actively to hope that they would do so when conditions changed: the married women, when their marriage or other conditions improved; the single women, when they married. Some women came to understand that the chances for motherhood were minimal or zero in the Culminating Life Structure they formed. They accepted the loss with varying mixtures of anger, regret, resignation, despair, sadness, and relief. The desire to have children existed in almost all the women studied. Many also had the desire not to have children—not to be stuck with the entire burden of child-rearing and homemaking, not to be largely excluded from the public occupational world. Each woman had to deal with her multiple feelings on both sides of this dilemma, and with the cross-pressures emanating from loved ones, institutions, and the culture at large. As we have seen, some mothers in Life Structures A and B did not have the inner readiness or the external conditions they required for motherhood until the thirties. Likewise, a few of the ten women in Life Structure C may bear or adopt a child in the future, if their external conditions and inner readiness make it more feasible.
Let us look now at some individual variations among the childless women. Julia Hart and Pam Kenney had initially planned to marry soon after college and become homemakers with outside jobs. After marrying in the Age 30 Transition, they found their marriages so shaky that they put off starting families. In the first phase of the Culminating Life Structure these women made a conscious decision to focus on career and delay motherhood for the indefinite future. At the same time they experienced the absence of motherhood as a personal loss and a reminder of an inadequate marriage. Marriage gave them the benefits of a shared domicile, the legitimacy of being married rather than single (a real asset in the corporate world), and a base upon which to lead an independent life. But the partners spent little time together and had a limited personal relationship. Neither woman had a child when interviewed at 39 and 43, respectively.
JULIA HARTAfter earning her MBA at 29, Julia Hart went to work for a large firm. She enjoyed her work and carried the Anti-Traditional Dream of the Successful Career Woman. She wanted a long-term managerial career and tried to get on a career path in her early thirties. At 34 she understood that her chances for being promoted were slim at best, especially since she was a woman and a late starter. Julia had not received the early mentoring which might have taught her something about corporate ladders and how they operate, and from 34 to 36 she explored other job possibilities. She then took a staff position at a major international corporation, hoping to make her way into line management and the corporate structure. The next three years were spent in a series of planning and troubleshooting assignments. These jobs, though of great importance to the company and to Julia’s personal growth and development, did not form a career path leading into the upper reaches of management. When interviewed at 39, she was in the exquisitely ambiguous position of having made significant contributions to corporate growth yet also of having no clear basis for advancement. Julia’s Culminating Life Structure was thus a decidedly mixed blessing. The career, though rewarding in many ways, was disappointing in the present and uncertain for the future. Her marriage, likewise, was satisfying in many ways, yet also limited. Ready neither to have a child nor to renounce motherhood totally, she was biding her time.
BROOKE THOMPSONBrooke Thompson had divorced at 26 after a stormy three-year marriage. When interviewed at 37 she was single and childless and had put together a satisfying life for herself, although her future was unclear. She had recently started a serious “commuting” relationship with a man who lived on the West Coast. She was coming to the end of her current appointment as assistant professor and knew that she would probably not be promoted.
I came here at 33. Women friends have become increasingly important to me. At 34 I began a relationship with Jerry, an academic who is five years younger than me. He is incredibly positive and playful. We’ve had a three-year commuting relationship. It’s a wonderful relationship at this stage of my life because when we’re together it’s 100 percent on, and when we’re apart I just concentrate on my work. We’ve both been married and divorced and have sort of an anti-marriage stance. I’m pretty sure I don’t want children. As I get clearer about the family issue I get freer. I think for me and many women the family is not a good place to be.
I don’t earn much money, but in a lot of ways this job seems almost too good to be true. It’s a wonderful free situation. We’re all young and really interested in what we do, and we work hard, and it’s a good work situation. My courses are very successful, and I feel I have come into my own as a teacher. I’m hopeful about tenure, but I haven’t published a great deal. I’m 37 now and want to publish my first book to establish myself in my field.
So many of my female students say, “We’re going to have it all—career and family.” First of all, that’s a hard life. But who says that’s “having it all”? It suggests that work and family are the only things in life, and you won’t be happy without them. It’s being built in as the expectation. It doesn’t give a woman room to say, “I just want one of those things or something entirely different that will make my life meaningful.” To “have it all,” not only are you going to have to educate yourself to get a career, you’re going to have to think about setting up a different kind of marriage and family life where you find a partner who will participate equally with you in the domestic work. It shouldn’t be up to the woman to have to manage all these things alone somehow.
MEGAN BENNETTMegan Bennett was a high achiever. Pregnancy followed by miscarriage was perhaps the dominant event of Megan Bennett’s life during the Age 30 Transition. As her Culminating Life Structure began, she gave up trying to have a child and dedicated herself to an academic career. She made her own career primary and, with her husband’s agreement, rearranged the marital relationship so that it contained her as the star and him as a supporting player. The recognition of her husband’s limitations and the decision not to have children were great blows to her but also provided the beginning of a process of liberation: she became freer to pursue her own course and to have ambitions in her own right. During the Culminating Life Structure Megan became more her own woman and embarked upon a distinguished academic career. Her Culminating Event at 40 was her appointment as full professor and director of an academic research lab. Her childlessness was thus embedded, as both cause and effect, within her entire process of living.
AMANDA BURNSI came to this school at 38. I have a faculty position and do some minor teaching, but I’m basically an administrator. I have worked for some fantastic people and have had good mentors. I have also worked for people I don’t have respect for, and I know I don’t want to work for someone like that again. How you are enabled to work depends so much on your relationship with those who are in superior positions to you. I have a good working relationship with my boss here. I have had nothing but solid support from him and have been able to build and do what I think is important. I have grown through the process of my various jobs to the point where I believe I am a good administrator. I like my work here. I feel I am building an exciting department. I’ve always been reasonably successful, and the politics are great fun for me. I know what I need to do in order to play the game well. I know you have to have a power base and support from your superiors and an idea of the playing board. I’m very intrigued by what I’m doing here; there is an intellectual integrity and ability behind an administrator’s ability to handle and deal with a system and the people within the system.
I have chosen a lesbian personal lifestyle. I think the difference in relationships with women is that there is more saneness in terms of understanding the emotional components of where you come from, and there is much more equality, and there isn’t a set definition of roles in the relationship. In my marriage I got into a very competitive, angry thing, and that has not happened in my relationships with women. I made the choice to make the ongoing emotional connection be with women, though in my friendships I have close relationships with men. But I don’t choose to live with men. There is a comfort and a naturalness and rapport with women that’s just easily better for me.
I have had relationships with women since I was 26, after my divorce. I’ve loved each of these women, and I have a special love connection to each person even after the sexual relationship has ended. I think you outgrow people, be they men or women.
The woman I live with now is a very intelligent, sensitive, very caring person, very deep and very introspective and compassionate and understanding. She has a great capacity for sharing. I’m a very action-oriented, outer-oriented kind of person, and Linda provides a balance that is helpful for me. She is a close friend. There is not an expectation that we should always be together.
I have never thought of these relationships as marriages, although I think of each relationship as permanent at the time. It’s another kind of relationship. It’s a commitment between two people, but I would never want to emulate society’s form of marriage. I don’t want or need that extra baggage that has to do with roles and power. You can make a commitment between two people and live within the relationship when it’s good for each of you, and you can end it without tearing each other apart, though endings are wrenching.
There is a lesbian community within the larger academic community here. People have always made innuendos; there has always been that speculation about me. If you’re a lesbian and in certain kinds of positions then you’re talked about. But you’re talked about anyway if you’re a single female at a certain level. I’m not public because I don’t think it’s ever in our lifetime going to be totally accepted, and I accept that.
There were four single-never-married women, all in the business world. By their early thirties each of these women had had at least one serious romantic-sexual relationship that ended without marriage.
In the first phase of the Culminating Life Structure, they felt acutely that they were in a hard place both matrimonially and occupationally. They came to the shocking realization that they might well not have a choice with regard to marriage and family—that the kind of man they wanted was extremely rare and probably already married. This meant that they would most likely have to work and support themselves until retirement. At the same time, they were becoming more realistic about their jobs and their career prospects. They could not imagine continuing in their present jobs for another thirty years. It became essential to get on an occupational path that would suffice for the long term: work that involved less competition, less overtime and travel, and more opportunity for a personal life. They were also becoming more aware of the limitations of the corporate world. It would not provide a quasi-familial supportive context. There was almost no room for women at the top of organizations and very little in the middle. The only way to have a minimally adequate life, it seemed, was to be part of a couple and family. Male colleagues were interested in romantic affairs as a supplement to, not a replacement for, their marriages. The social world was organized around couples. A single woman was a fifth wheel, and rarely included in the couples’ network. To be single was to be relatively isolated.
By 35 or 36 the women established Culminating Life Structures as single, dating, marriage-oriented career women. The structure was based upon a deep compromise. They continued to seek matrimony while recognizing that it was becoming unlikely. They continued to pursue a corporate career, but they limited their aspirations, took gender-appropriate paths, and made more time for their personal-social lives. Occupation, the central component of the life structure, was a source of both satisfaction and suffering, and love/marriage/family was an unfilled or partially filled component.
The struggle between the two internal figures continued. The inner voice of the Traditional Homemaker Figure became more vociferous, more bitter: “You wouldn’t listen to me! You wanted to be independent and able to take care of yourself, to be free of entangling relationships. You didn’t want the kind of life that most women are glad to have. Well, you have lived that way and where has it gotten you? You are approaching 40 with no husband, no children, and an uncertain career. I told you so.” The internal Traditional Homemaker Figure thus invoked the negative image of the Single Career Woman (see Chapter 3) and the ultimate personal disaster of being alone. At the same time, the internal Anti-Traditional Figure tried to make the best of this life: “Whatever its limitations, my work sustains my independence and my development. I would rather be single than caught in a deadening marriage like so many women I know.”
The inner warfare between the two figures evolved through the second phase of the Culminating Life Structure. Sometimes one voice was stronger, sometimes the other, depending upon mood and circumstances. Improvement in work situation or a love relationship led to greater hopefulness and self-esteem, decline to growing despair. Some of the childless women went through a crisis in this period—a feeling that the life structure was intolerably bleak and pointless, yet unchangeable. Most of the single childless women had serious questions about the present and misgivings about the future: “I have worked so hard to have a fuller life, how did I get into this position? What are my possibilities for the future?”
In this condition it is often difficult not to get depressed and full of self-recriminations: “I was too critical of men, too naive about gender discrimination, too insistent upon my rights, not sufficiently feminine.” The accusations from within received much implicit support from without. The oppressive image of the Single Career Woman is reflected upon a woman from parents, friends, coworkers, the mass media, and the texture of everyday social life. Very few single childless women in the Culminating Life Structure had come to terms with being childless. They could do so only by going through a painful developmental process of dealing with the loss and of gaining a new perspective on the possibilities of meaningful life in middle adulthood, and this process extended beyond 40.
Not having a child is a painful experience for many women in their thirties. By age 30, women who earlier had no special desire for motherhood often start having maternal wishes. According to a popular saying, “She hears the biological clock ticking.” But the clock is not solely biological; it is psychological and social as well. Biologically, the woman has at least another ten or fifteen years to have a child. In the psycho-social timetable of the life cycle, however, a childless woman who wants a family but is not married in her thirties is in grave danger of remaining childless. A woman’s anxiety about the loss of motherhood is likely to peak in the late thirties, in the phase of Becoming One’s Own Woman.
The wish to be a mother involves much more than the wish for one’s own offspring. Motherhood enables a woman to live within a family, giving care to others and being taken care of in ways important to her. It is often part of the foundation of her sense of self and of being in the world. Having a child guarantees nothing, but not having a child is experienced by many women as a loss with potentially catastrophic consequences. She often has the sense of an inner emptiness. One version of this theme is given by Michele Proto in Chapter 15. Here is another from a single-divorced woman approaching 40:
KRISTIN WESTWhen I graduated from college the choices seemed limitless. I wanted a chance to live independently for a few years but assumed I’d still have the option to have children. But somehow by making that one choice so many years ago I’ve come down a path that year by year has led me farther and farther away from motherhood. I turned 25, then 30, then 35, and the choices began to disappear. Now there’s a strong probability that I’ll never have a child. Not to have a child, ever—how is that possible? All women have children, that’s just part of life, isn’t it? How did this happen to me? I like my work and think I’ve developed as a person in ways I couldn’t have if I’d had children in my early twenties. But the cost of not having children seems too great. What will it be like to be 45, 50, 60 without a child of my own? Will I come to mourn the loss of my unborn children? All I have in my life now is my work. What will happen when I don’t have work or children—when there’s nothing, a complete void in my life? It terrifies and saddens me. Being childless now feels like an all-encompassing black hole.
TRISHA WALLAt 33 Trisha Wall established a domicile and a stable quasi-marital relationship. The couple was still together when she was interviewed at 40. Both partners valued the relationship, and both had mixed feelings about marrying and having children. He was still hesitant about remarrying. Trisha was afraid that matrimony might limit her own independence and activate latent problems between them. She still vividly relived her experience as a daughter, precociously playing the traditional homemaker/mother with her siblings and her long-suffering widowed father—a martyr who lost all pleasure in life. “No more caregiving, no more total responsibility for others!” was her motto in home, work, and life. This self-restriction protected Trisha from becoming a traditional homemaker but also severely limited the investment of her self in her life. The fear of becoming overly responsible for a dependent husband led her to prefer a marital relationship in which neither partner made strong demands on the other. The fear of excessive maternal and wifely responsibilities kept her from having children. In her late thirties she had a relatively satisfying staff position, but she had little sense of a long-term career direction.
When I was 33 Dean and I moved in together, and we’ve been living together ever since. We feel like a couple and are accepted as a couple by our friends and relatives. He was ready to live together but not to marry because he has a lot of hurts and hang-ups from his first marriage. Actually, both of us are ambivalent about marriage. I have always seen some value in our getting married—building something together and not being such independent characters, yet I am also afraid of queering the deal.
Dean also had mixed feelings about having a child. He says that a child would really upset his life—but then sometimes he thinks he’d like to have a son. I’m clearer about that: I don’t want to have children. I told him that there are lots of women in New York who would like to have his son; he should have it with one of them. If I had a child I would feel responsible, but I would also be resentful over giving time that I could have for myself. I occasionally feel like that with Dean when he gets too needy. That powerful feeling goes back to my childhood; my widowed father was devoted to his children and never had any life of his own. I picked up my attitudes about not wanting kids from him.
At 34 I got more serious about my career, although work has never been an all-consuming interest. You know, people say, “What are your goals, what direction are you going in?” I have to tell you, I have simply gone where the best job was at the time and done the best I could. When it seemed appropriate to leave, I found the best job I could go on to. At 32 I started to realize how tough it was, how poor most of the jobs were, and how many barriers there were for a woman in my field. I got fired from one job because I refused to spend the weekend with a client!
I had some really bad bosses and no good ones. When I left a job it was because I had no more challenges and was bored. A good boss would have transferred me. Until recently, my bosses were intent on climbing themselves; they had no conception of nurturing people and giving them room to grow, especially a woman. There was always a privileged inner circle of young fair-haired sons who were allowed to advance.
I got serious about advancement at 34 and looked for another position in the same company, but mostly I got discouraging remarks from people who saw no place for a female. At 35 I got a great job at an international corporation as director of a department. Since then my career has taken off; I am now one of the top thirty in the company, and I earn over 60 percent of our household income. Lots of things have happened over the past several years, but the big change began at 34, when Dean and I got more committed and started living together. That’s also when I started becoming more aware professionally. Instead of being totally focused on Dean, I had a shared focus: him and work.
For most career women, the Culminating Life Structure was a time of great difficulty but also great personal growth and development. Almost all had found a place for themselves in an occupational world and were making their way, although the life structures they built were often very difficult. Many of the married career women with children began to realize that their Neo-Traditional Marriage Enterprises were too hard on them. They were working full-time at demanding jobs, sharing the provisioning roles with their husbands, and were at the same time almost entirely responsible for the “second shift” of domestic responsibilities and child care. Whether married or single, many career women in the phase of Becoming One’s Own Woman began to envision an Egalitarian Marriage Enterprise in which both partners would share provisioning and domestic rights and responsibilities on more equal terms. Several of the businesswomen and about half of the faculty women were able in the Culminating Life Structure or the Mid-life Transition to transform their Neo-Traditional Marriage Enterprises into an Egalitarian Marriage Enterprise or to build an Egalitarian Marriage Enterprise in a remarriage.
By age 40 or 41 virtually all of the career women, whatever their circumstances, were entering a time of inner questioning of love/marriage/family and work that would continue in the next period of the Mid-life Transition.