coldhearted scientist وداد

Naomi Weisstein was more egregiously mistreated than many of us, but also had a clearer sense of what was happening … perhaps because things were so much less veiled in those days … or perhaps because times were better.

Weisstein: Wellesley faculty were brilliant and had to work at Wellesley because as women they were barred from better jobs.
Now: We wish we were at Wellesley.

Weisstein: For scholarship, you need [good] graduate students, facilities, and communication with colleagues.
Now: We wish our university libraries subscribed to JSTOR.

Weisstein: Is shut out of the boys’ club.
Now: We still are, but we no longer know it.

Weisstein: Is out of the running because she is a woman at an “unknown” place.
Now: We still are, but it is a problem with us and not a structural one.

Weisstein: “It’s as if we women are in a totally rigged race. A lot of men are driving souped-up, low-slung racing cars, and we’re running as fast as we can in tennis shoes we managed to salvage from a local garage sale.” (1977: 248)
Colleague visiting now: “It is a shame to see you running so fast just to avoid falling behind.”

Weisstein: “The lesson appears to be that those (and only those) with extraordinary strength will survive. This is not the way I see it. Many have had extraordinary strength and have not survived.” (250)

*

In the same volume is an essay by Virginia Valian on working. She learned to work more or less the way I like to work, but this is not a motivational essay on task management. It is about the “work problem” of people who do work they care about, and the “crazy, often punitive, attitudes” people have toward work. In my view these attitudes often inform the motivational advice which circulates about work.

That is a point Valian makes as well, pointing out that behaviorist tactics involve systems of external rewards and punishments and assume the work itself is not pleasant. (Her way of training herself to work is even more refined than mine and I should have known about it in my worst days of block. I don’t know that her techniques could have cut through Reeducation, but in the absence of Reeducation I would still have been at a difficult turning point and her methods would have been just the ticket.) In Valian’s system the work or rather, the mere feeling one gets from working, are the reasons to do it.

Valian works in fifteen minute spurts. This has numerous advantages since, for instance, there is no day on which it is impossible to work for fifteen minutes, and since one is never too tired or ill to work for fifteen minutes. Thus, working (on your real work) happens every day, for at least fifteen minutes. That means, in turn, that you are never out of touch with your work, and your development never gets stunted. You also never have to regain lost ground.

Valian’s essay also discusses fears and feelings which obstruct work. These include anger and resentment about work, and also “a sense of competition as a life-or-death struggle–either I would kill others or they would kill me.” (169) She had the feeling that others would be destroyed by her working – one of my primordial fears, that I struggle with daily. She feared winning because she felt it was tantamount to killing someone; she would suffer a form of mental paralysis to avoid this; its byproduct was an inability to work.

Fear of having her own point of view was another of Valian’s problems. She also feared losing individuality, getting “swallowed up by going deeply into someone’s theory” (171), feeling that there were only two choices: absolute individuality or none.

*

To be a successful worker, says Valian, you must “love, respect, and value yourself, as if you were another person.” (175) This, of course, is what I lost in Reeducation and it is what I have had to work to get back so that I could get on. I kept trying to say it would come through working itself, but I knew this was only a superficial, bureaucratic hope. Because, as Valian says in other words, in order to commit to a project you must commit to yourself; only then do you have the perspective you need to manage something large.

Successful workers are not afraid of mistakes or flaws, but do want to do as well as possible, finish, and put on finishing touches. This has always been misidentified in me as “perfectionism” by people who do not want me to take work seriously. I notice, in contradistinction to this, that even in classes I now take as recreation, the supposition is that we will make progress, finish, do better and better. I can only conclude that to tell women their professional work is too good or their goals for it too high is a form of sabotage. It won’t be good for you, little girl.

Axé.