coldhearted scientist وداد

Marilyn Young has had a very interesting career. In her essay in Working It Out (213-227), you can see that she thought of herself as a professional historian far sooner in life than I or most people I knew in graduate school in the eighties did. I do not really know why this is or was — because there were jobs when she was in graduate school, but not when we were? Or, were the thirties, when she was born, a less conservative era than the fifties and early to middle sixties, when we were? Or is it a question of class?

Young’s working class parents’ hope for her was that she would work in a liberal profession and not a mind numbing position such as those held by her father, a postal worker, or her mother, a school secretary. (Twenty and thirty years later the middle class hope for me was that I would “not have to work” because I would marry a liberal professional, and I am fascinated that Young’s parents had such optimistic hopes.)

Like Ruddick, Young went to Vassar and then to graduate school; despite noticing the finishing school aspect of Vassar at the time, Young seems to have been somewhat less vulnerable to it than Ruddick (although she still has interesting observations on her own and others’ perceptions of work and gender at this time).

Young felt guilty about her work in college because so much of it was pleasurable. She still looked on it as work, and treated it that way, until the college began succeeding at teaching her its ruling class view of women’s education. She learned that one was not supposed to be working for grades, but for pleasure, and that one was not supposed to be preparing oneself for a world of work or wages. The more she accepted this, the more guilty she felt about the dreary work worlds of her family.

(I suppose this illuminates a discussion about college I have had repeatedly about my own family, who did not understand and perhaps still do not understand why I was working for grades in a focused major rather than “enjoying” and “exploring.” I did not understand because it seemed so foolhardy to me to waste a college education that way. But the worry was about class, and my own attitude toward school was too working class for them. I remember pointing out that anyone who started going to college in the seventies as I did, after the 1971 economic crisis, after Vietnam, while the policies that would become Reaganomics were being set in place and the consensus to support these was being built, was very well advised to set herself up with as good a college record as they could. I still agree with myself on this.)

Young got married in graduate school, of course, as did so many of the contributors to this volume. (Twenty-five years later I would not have dreamed of doing this, having been taught as a child that it was one could have a profession or marry, and later having seen married women passed over by hiring committees because they were married.)

Like many in this group, Young suffered dissertation doldrums having to do with her gender role, but was supported through this and beyond on her husband’s salary. Eventually she became a spousal hire at Michigan (and she has fascinating things to say about staffing and educational experiments and spousal hires there in the sixties). At the time of writing this essay she is just discovering that “the name of the system [is] not simply capitalism; it [is] patriarchy as well” (227). She still experiences her job as volunteer work although she is paid for it, and she still feels somewhat alienated from her work and from herself as worker at this point.

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The marriages of these women are very liberal in comparison to the model I was raised with and also to many marriages I have observed since. While many still see their work as secondary to their husbands’, but they do not question their right to a serious professional identity. Their husbands are not opposed to their developing this further and are willing to do things like move  to help make it possible.

Also, all of these women expected to do something with their educations. Once again, this is so much more advanced than the model I was raised with — wherein women should be educated and think and vote, and might do volunteer work, but should have no greater degree of autonomy than this.

But the most fascinating point for me is one to which I have alluded already: while Young felt guilty about her work in college because it was pleasant and interesting, I felt guilty about it because I was treating it as work. Young treated it as work initially, but then learned to feel guilty about that from her more élite classmates. In that sense the conflict I had with the family about the way I was conducting my college education can be seen as a conflict about class aspirations.

I also note that the moment in which I realized I had been trained to be a professional was at my first tenure track job, where I quickly discovered I was too professionally oriented for a woman. Young, on the other hand, saw herself as a professional even before finishing her dissertation. I am happy about that for her sake, and also impressed that she was able to do this.

Axé.