ALGUIEN, 1888-1973
She paid for us to go to college, not having been able herself. She says of her parents:
They were both very good people who brought out what was most futile in the other, which is quite a tragic situation. If you have a good person and a bad person, that is one thing. But when you have two good people who are hurting each other, then you get real tragedy.
SOME THINGS ABOUT HER
This great-aunt resembles her grandmother Henrietta Kahn, it is said. Her father was born in Russia. Her grandfather’s side of the family was from Alsace and had moved to Poland in Luther’s time, because of the persecution of the Huguenots; when Catherine the Great partitioned Poland they became Russian by default.
Henrietta Kahn stopped going to Temple after marrying my great-great-grandfather. When they emigrated my great-grandfather married a Beecher — a daughter of John Sidney Beecher, to be exact. John Sidney was a son of Austin Beecher, who was a brother of Lyman Beecher; he was thus a first cousin of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
It is off topic to say that it seems my great-grandmother, née Helen M. Beecher, knew Mrs. Lincoln when living in St. Charles, Illinois. And her grandfather was a founder of Chicago College, now the University of Chicago. And considering all of this and Wye House and Frederick Douglass and the IWW you can see I come from some kind of gravitas and very many generations of activists and readers.
QUEEN VICTORIA
My great-grandmother’s physician said at one point that her illness was “being a Victorian,” as such she was afflicted with sacrifice and penitence; according to my mother the Victorian disease had struck her family, too. It occurs to me that to be raised as a Victorian and then land in the 1950s is a real one-two punch; to be raised as a Victorian and land in the suffrage movement after high school is easier.
WOMEN WORKING
A person of her time, my great-aunt helped to implement U.S. colonization of Puerto Rico if one wishes to put it that way, and the relocation of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. Her first job had been in a bookstore, and her next a secretarial position for the suffragist movement. This was about 1910. And here is a fragment of the poem “1910” from Poeta en Nueva York.
No preguntarme nada. He visto que las cosas
cuando buscan su curso encuentran su vacío.
Here is a randomly found article about women and work in 1912. Both of my grandmothers went to good universities and had careers, as did most of their sisters. All of these people were born before 1900 and had children very late. In Reeducation I was told this was pathological since it was “so unusual” and also that it had to mean the men in our family were weak. I hardly understood why, but leaving that aside I hastened to tell the Reeducator he might take a course in American history.
I believe my Reeducator was thinking of the 1950s, not the 1910s, which were comparatively progressive. I also think he did not realize women have always worked. I was surely on the front line of a battle on education and careers for women but history is not linear.
WAR WOUNDS
Evidently I am a casualty in that battle on education and careers for women. I do not like this at all, I want to be triumphant. It is more accurate, however, to say that than to say I am I am just someone who does not know how to manage time, which is what the victors and also the men who want my time would like to say.
This is why the insistence that everything is one’s fault and is related to lack of skill, is the feature of academic advice I most dislike. I am not speaking in defense of those who felt entitled to this or that but in favor of the recognition that there are casualties, as there are in wars.
Here is another interlude in the post: a practitioner says I am like someone who has been to a war. When disabled veterans wish they could walk, do you think they wonder whether they could have saved themselves had they been slightly more skilled at the time of that fight? Do you blame them for not having been?
ASSUMIR, VERBO TRANSITIVO
And I so do not want to be a casualty, or to step out of that role. And I took that entire education as a dry run, apologetic and trying not to be too career oriented, since that was frowned upon. To the family my great-aunt’s gift was not acceptable and in deference to them I never fully accepted it. Perhaps I should assume it, take it on, carry it with grace at last, do that now.
IT IS POLITICAL
Coming still closer to the bone, I would like to stop spending or having to spend so much time defending myself against my own attacks upon myself for the sin of having an education and a job. I do not want to spend another rare, beautiful day indoors. I do not believe it is possible to think one’s way to perfection. I have acted on my own behalf before; Olodumare let me do it this week.
I think the key is to realize this self doubt and undermining from without is a political issue; it is not about personal attributes or failings or “career skills”, it is about politics and power.
WHAT I MIGHT TELL THE PERSON I AM SEEING TOMORROW
That the question is professional and practical, and the problem is structural, not personal, perhaps. That destruction of my work may momentarily assuage some ego pain of two or three people, but will hurt the university, perhaps. The men in the big house will do what they can to place one in some hierarchy, below them or above. It is hard for them to imagine holding a conversation straight across the table but they can do it.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I’m sorry I said that. The 50s really were bad for women, and one of the worst ways was the authoritative assertion of trans-historical Truth about the way things ought to be, without observation of how they had been. We are not always solely responsible for our lives; they can be shaped by other people and their expectations, and to get free of that first it is necessary to recognize what we did and did not choose. I would say you did not bring your familial expectations upon yourself.
I, however, am glad you said that because it is real food for thought.
It is very interesting to think about my great-aunt and about the interesting implications of all of this.
Bring familial expectations upon self, no, but I certainly do carry them around.
I am mostly desirous of telling academic advisors who condescend to one, how dare they, and I suppose I will be doing this until I have them in the ground! 😉
And also — I am just interested in this in general, I am trying to think myself into the right attitude for weird meetings tomorrow and also I have had some general realizations lately that I am trying to assimilate. Thinking about this also allowed me to:
– comprehend better, perhaps, the strange life of my mother; she also does not understand it and keeps asking questions about it; I self-immolated later in life than she did, but I still did it; we are not opposites but parallel in this way
– know more about my aunt and that part of the family, it is fascinating
– think more about my connections to this area and the connection of that to my research project … and this is important.
Here’s what it is: I am terrified that I might actually be a casualty and not recover. It is sort of like being a shade people will not let go (and OMG, the blog character speaks from beyond the grave, this is sort of creepy).
But no: the thing is that the blog character wants to revive and I resist the idea of being victim / etc. — and yet you are right, I should give self credit for being a casualty even if others do not.
First being walking wounded and not feeling others deserved to have to deal with that, being so uncomfortable with it. Then turning into a casualty. The message one gets is that all of these things should not have happened to one, one should be able to take all of this and still be perfect. Or, on the other hand, that it is already all over (in which case, as I keep saying, I do not want to hang around as a ghost).
OK, I’m glad it turned out to be useful; I was afraid I made things worse.
My father’s side of the family had a lot of interesting women. My mother’s side, so far as I can tell, was mostly downtrodden farmwives.
No, it is just shocking to think one might have already lost. However the recast of what I have been half convinced is personal to something squarely political is nothing short of revolutionary.
Fascinating. The women in my family have always cared little for convention, have not been especially ambitious and until our generation were not well educated but well read and artistic nonetheless. They had very rich lives. They did not envy or admire men, especially, or want to be like them, although they were fond of men in general. These were my mother and her sisters, and I miss them.
Things have been different for me, of course, but I owe a lot to these women, who never doubted themselves no matter what anyone’s opinion was of them.
DEH’s comment recasts my whole struggle in life as a political and not a psychological one, it is fascinating. I am only just assimilating this.
I am just coming up with a theory of women’s ambition in my family. Bluestockings rebelling against Victorianism, and then my mother got Victorianism plus the 50s, a double whammy, and associated bluestockings with Victorian style authority. So what she wanted to do was not force me to such things … but I am career oriented. It is so interesting how oppressed we all were and how much struggle went on among us for this reason.
Like everyone, I do not want to think I have already lost, or that there isn’t something I can do, another round where, armed with greater wisdom, and so on…
My family appears to be unfailingly interesting — and all elite in one way or another, even when they are just workers. And there are a lot of famous figures in it, I thought everyone had that, apparently not.
And maybe I inherit this, all this authority, and should stay in touch with it, use it right.
The personal is political.
To believe that everything is political is to deny personal agency. But to believe that everything is personal and that il n’y a pas de hors-soi is also to cheat oneself, because agency does not exist in a vacuum; it is conditioned by the historical moment.
Yes, I know, and I don’t mean to suggest “blaming ‘society'” or something like that. I am just looking at a political reading of certain lives that I hadn’t thought of before.
*
Note for post: I also just caught a glimpse of what it might be like not to live under what, if I were an ancient Chinese or Desert Father or someone, I might call the Four Pillars of Authoritarianism. If any one of them had not been there, or not come into my life. It might be time for a different kind of defining event, I am so tired of being overshadowed by these.