Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity, Second Edition

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For the second edition:

I owe great appreciation to Doree Barton, Karyl Kermani Bisson, Vincent Blocker, Valerie Chevrette, Laura Harris Hirsch, Edith Libby, Kathe Kahn Morse, Lisa Mullins, Alex Tomasi and Rachel Yurman; to the Write Stuff and staff at the Lincoln, MA, Library; and to my friends and colleagues at the Cambridge Innovation Center—especially Erin Euler, Kathleen Costello, Monika Jakubicz, Stacy Kaufman, and Augie Llona. Their insightful comments helped me shape the current work.  Thanks, also, to Ana María Dorta-Duque Ruiz for her beautiful cover design.

For the first edition:

Researching and writing Broken Patterns was a long and fascinating quest. Many people helped along the way, and to them I offer my heartfelt thanks. I am very grateful to my parents. My mother, Sara Richman Harris, supported me in the creative process throughout; my father, the late Raymond Harris, M.D., in addition, suggested the spiral theory on which Broken Patterns is based.

Jessica Millman Begun served as research assistant and editor in the early stages; Deb Silverman, in transcribing the interviews, first noticed the mother-daughter pattern; Joel Bernard suggested the life cycle approach. The late Irene Stiver shared her clinical knowledge and expertise, helping to inter­pret my interview findings and providing encouragement from day one. Jane Hunter provided guidance in my historical search and generously read and commented on the manuscript, as did Gordon Lewin and Mark Orton.

I am also deeply grateful to my colleagues at Simmons College and to Harvard University’s Radcliffe College Henry A. Murray Research Center; Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America;  Dean Michael Shinagel and Quincy House; Nieman Foundation; and Monroe C. Gutman Library at the Graduate School of Education.

I would especially like to thank the women who shared their stories and the many scholars and professional women of the past and present whose hard work made Broken Patterns possible.

Author’s note

A NEW GENERATION

I'm very pleased to be publishing a new edition of Broken Patterns—in part because there's great interest in women's issues just now.  Some evidence is in the tremendous success of Sheryl Sandberg's excellent Lean In, which encourages women to unite, and to stand up for themselves in the workplace. Other evidence comes from recent conversations I've had with young women who are trying to figure out how to live successful personal and professional lives.

Broken Patterns tells the stories of women who entered male-dominated professions in the 1970s and 1980s.  It places those women, their mothers, and their grandmothers in historical context, tracing a push-pull pattern of generational development back to the U.S. Colonial period. Bluntly stated: the more women left home for paying work in one generation, the deeper the societal belief that women belonged at home, in the next. Most of the women I interviewed had grandmothers who worked outside the home in the early 1900s and mothers who were homemakers in the 1950s. My interviewees told me they chose their careers mainly because they didn’t want lives like their mothers’—unfulfilled and subservient to husbands.

Now, a new generation of women is entering adulthood.

Kara is a college junior whose parents divorced when she was 15. Her father then married a woman twenty years his junior and Kara moved between two homes. Kara's mother was a homemaker who left only to meet other moms for lunch and to gossip.  Her stepmother worked in advertising, and, later, in real estate. My stepmother travels a lot, Kara says. She spends time with her women friends, in Las Vegas.  Kara is well-aware of the distinct differences between her homemaker mom and her jet-setting, businesswoman stepmom who was never home.  Also well-aware that women now have choices, she is spending a semester Europe, trying to sort hers out.

Ling grew up in China. Her paternal grandmother was a college professor and Ling's mother held low-level administrative jobs. With ambition, perhaps to become a professor, Ling came on her own to study in the US.  She now has a master’s degree and a boyfriend.  Her boyfriend has working papers but is not a US citizen. Ling wants to stay in the US with him, but cannot legally work, here.  Do I have to be a housewife? she asks.

Sama, a college sophomore with an American mother and an African father, grew up mainly in Africa. Her parents want her to go to medical school but Sama is interested in publishing. She tells me she can't talk to her mother about career or women’s issues. Her mother, a chemical engineer now in her 40s, doesn't seem interested. Why not?  I think it’s because she came along at the end of a wave when there was no question whether she would have a professional career, Sama says. Or, she quips, maybe she’s just not that perceptive.

Kim, 24, is the daughter of a 62-year-old man of Jewish-Hispanic background and his third wife, a nurse, who is Christian. Kim’s step-sister, 42, is a super-feminist, Kim says. Asked what she means by that, Kim says, jokingly, She doesn't wear a bra." After college, Kim worked at a school in South America and eloped with a man she met there. The two recently returned to the US.  At Kim’s mother’s insistence, they are planning a traditional wedding, and Kim will likely go on to professional school.  As the daughter of an intercultural and intergenerational marriage, Kim says, she is unsure where she belongs.

These young women and their peers are entering adulthood in a rapidly-changing, interconnected world. With new technologies, anti-bias laws and more flexible work environments, it often seems like opportunities are wide open to them. But economics, politics and life itself are unpredictable.  Many are grappling with some of the same questions of identity and equality asked by women in generations past.

I hope this new edition of Broken Patterns will provide them—and women of all ages and backgrounds—with insights that will help them navigate the complex psychological, economic, social and historical forces that influence women’s lives.

—Anita M. Harris

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Not long ago, over dinner, a college roommate and I were talking about some of the newly published books suggesting that many professional women are selling themselves short.

My former roommate, a physician who leads a large private practice in Massachusetts, mentioned that, despite working long hours under pressured conditions, she would never have left her career to care for her children because, as one of just a few women in her medical school class, she had so much to prove.  Now approaching retirement age, she’s appalled at younger women who go through medical school only to quit when they have children—wasting coveted medical school slots and, possibly, short circuiting entry for other women. ¹

Soon after that dinner, the Boston Globe cited a study showing that women who go to the most elite colleges and graduate schools are likelier than other women to leave their jobs after marrying—in the mistaken belief that their prestigious degrees will make it easy to pick up their careers when they want to. ²

Then, the New York Times reported that while many women now hold national elective office, women are under- represented at the local level—leading to concerns about a lack of role models for women who might aspire to political positions in the future.  ³

According to Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, despite the tremendous recent gains of working women, the movement toward equality has stalled. Women, she writes, are turning down opportunities for advancement and failing to seek leadership positions, support one another, and push for organizational change. 4

What does this mean for the future?

Nearly 20 years ago, I published Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity.  It’s based on 40 interviews with women of the baby boom generation who, in the 1970s and 1980s, entered male-dominated professional careers like law, medicine, business management, science, architecture and journalism in impressive numbers. Some were inspired by feminist and civil rights movements of the 1960s; others simply took advantage of opportunities that opened as a result of economic and technological change.

But on a very personal level, these women told me, they were driven to seek equality in these careers based on their experiences growing up in the 1950s. While they liked and admired their mothers they didn’t want to live the sorts of lives their mothers–homemakers subservient to husbands—had led.

It also turned out that many of them had grandmothers who had worked outside the home.

Their grandmothers came of age in the early 20th century, a time when women were entering careers in ever-increasing numbers. In fact, by 1925, women made up some 14 percent of the professional ranks. But while women continued to work outside the home, and despite women’s stellar performance during World War II, by 1950 the proportion of women in professions had declined to just 11 percent. In fact, a greater proportion of college presidents and professors were women in 1930 than in 1950.  And the daughters of those earlier working women, some of them the mothers of the women I interviewed, were deemed to belong at home. 

Broken Patterns places the women I interviewed, their mothers, and their grandmothers, in broad historical context. It shows that in the 19th century and again in the 20th, the more women left the home for paid employment in one generation, the greater the societal pull toward domesticity for women in the next.

Today, we are contending with a troubled economy, organizations slow to accommodate to employees’ family needs, and difficulty in defining what it means to be female, feminine, yet equal with men.  Current studies suggest that many women are feeling pulls toward domesticity. Some authors go so far as to tout—even advocate— a new submissiveness.

With recent court decisions upholding equal opportunity, increasing acceptance of new workplace and family forms, and loosening gender stereotypes, it’s unlikely that entire generations of women will return to traditional feminine roles. But, to avoid backtracking, we must find ways to allow women and men alike to nurture, achieve and create.­⁵

A central theme in Broken Patterns is that progress—whether historical, generational, individual or creative —is not linear, following a straightforward trajectory to a goal. Nor is it cyclic—repeating the past. Rather, I believe, progress—in any realm —often takes a spiral path.

Driven by technological, natural, societal or inner forces, we advance toward new opportunities, new surroundings, new ways. At times, we may become overwhelmed or discouraged and reach a stopping point. This does not mean that we have failed. Rather, it is by taking time to retrieve images, ideas, people and experiences from the past that societies and individuals build new frameworks within which to move forward, once again.

I believe we are now in a period of renewal and reassessment. Despite the doom saying, individuals, families, organizations and societies are struggling to find new ways to achieve equality and fairness despite the differences among us. 

I’m pleased to re-publish Broken Patterns because it presents a positive —realistic and reassuring—view of the ebbs and flows in women’s quest for equality.  I hope that by sharing the experiences of women present and past, Broken Patterns will encourage and inspire current generations and those to come to continue the quest for an equitable, humane, and rewarding future.

—Anita M. Harris

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

When I reached my thirties, I had a lot of questions.

I had grown up in the 1950s—an era when, it seemed to me, men worked and women wore high heels and tight skirts and had babies. I went to college in the late 1960s when drugs, sex, and politics challenged the order of our childhood: the traditional family, neighborhood schools, segregation by race and sex. In the 1970s, feminists exhorted us to fight for equal­ity—to prove women could do things as well as or better than men. By 1980, I was a successful television journalist in New York City, trying both to challenge the system and be promoted within it. I wanted to marry a fine, sensitive man who had a lucrative, socially-redeeming profession and plenty of time to spend with me and our children-to-be.

By all appearances, I almost had it all. My work sent me jetting around the country to interview important thinkers. I owned an apartment in Manhattan and was thinking about marrying a surgical resident who had a master’s degree in English litera­ture. But something was wrong.

Early in my career, I had helped to start a weekly newspaper in order to help fight for the rights of others. I wrote an expose of a migrant labor camp where workers were forced by men with guns to pick tomatoes—or weeds, when there were no tomatoes. Later, I wrote about a female judge who seemed to discriminate against welfare recipients and blacks. As a radio reporter in New York, I roamed 42nd Street investigating prostitution and pornography.

I was proud to have travelled on my own, advocated for social justice, made a difference. Maybe it was easier then than it would be later on; many of us, just out of college in the 1970s and bolstered by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, were heady with a sense of mission. Perhaps working on behalf of others came naturally; as a woman, that is what I had been brought up to do. There was a sense of purpose, a drive to prove I could do things women didn't ordi­narily do—to prove I could achieve equally with men.

By 1980, I had joined the Establishment. Outwardly, I was a hard-driving reporter, competing with men on their terms, and gaining skill, recognition and power. Instead of feeling more competent, how­ever, I was becoming less sure of myself. The outer world, which I had once explored with gusto, began to feel dangerous. There were, to be sure, real threats—after all, I was living in New York and as a jour­nalist I had survived more than a few close calls. A deeper problem was that progressing in the world of work, in that outer world, was beginning to threaten my inner sense of self.

Inside, I felt that the person attending press conferences and grap­pling with politicians, scientists, doctors, and lawyers wasn’t really me. I knew myself as a shy person who had, as a child, spent hours at the piano, made doll clothes and held tea parties. I had become a journalist to help people, and now I was making a name off their woes. I was reporting on the world from two perspectives—the Establishment’s and my own. They valued power, speed, money, and machines. I valued, above all else, caring relationships and the enhancement of possibility for every individual.

At work, I started to have trouble making decisions; achievement, there, was defined in terms that felt masculine to me. At home, I quit cooking and decorating, which I’d once enjoyed, because they seemed too feminine. I was stuck—unable to move ahead in either realm. Sometimes I felt like a piece of cardboard.

Then, Frank, a fellow reporter, was promoted ahead of me. Partly, he beat me out through luck—if luck means getting to cover a riot that breaks out in Miami while you happen to be there on vacation. But it wasn’t only luck. When it looked as though a nuclear reactor in Pennsyl­vania might blow up, Frank volunteered for duty. I should have covered the story: my beats included health, the environment, and technol­ogy. But I opted out, worried about the possible effect of radioactivity on my unborn children. Another reason Frank got the promotion was that he covered business and economics—a clear path to upward mobil­ity in our shop. Those fields felt foreign to an English and art major like me. I wanted to give a voice to the people who were losing benefits as the Reagan administration dismantled social programs.

I felt trapped. I wanted equality and I wanted success. I had the skill, I had the opportunity, and I had the drive. But I could no longer push forward—because it was no longer clear to me what forward meant. Yes, there was sexism. Yes, there was sexual harassment.  Yes, there were equal pay problems. But, also, I approached the world differently than did many of my male colleagues. I was interested in different stories. I didn’t enjoy competing. I didn’t like the detachment journalism requires of its prac­titioners. I was uncomfortable with the quest for power over others that many of my colleagues seemed to enjoy.

Had I chosen the wrong field? Was the problem that I was a woman? Was it that my own strengths were devalued ... or that I thought they were? How far would—and could—I bend to gain the respect of the men in charge? Would I ever reach a position in which I could influence how things were done? Or would I be forced to contradict my inner voice until it was silenced? Could I find some compromise?

***

Time for a breather. Fellowship. Sabbatical. School. I took a leave from my job for what I thought would be a year. I interviewed other journalists. What did I find?

One high-level reporter was concerned that if she continued to ad­vance she would become a laughingstock, the butt of jokes. She believed, at some level, that she could not be both successful at work and well-liked as an attractive woman. While she continued to achieve, she played out this conflict in physical terms, through large weight gains and losses, in what she described as a near-obsession with her appearance.

Another journalist had accepted a promotion at the same time her first child was born; her husband took on most of the household and child-rearing responsibilities. She drove herself, convinced that she was in a harness, uncreative, and tried constantly to mediate between her superiors and her underlings. This buffer role, she said, was one her own mother had played in her family in the 1950s. This journalist also shared something with her father—each night she arrived home angry and ex­hausted, just as her father had. I didn’t want to see my husband or my child, she said. I just wanted to go into a room and shut myself off.

Yet another journalist had spent ten years scrambling from freelance job to freelance job. At thirty-two, she had been offered the job of her dreams—in New York. She had also managed to fall in love with a man who lived hundreds of miles away—in a conservative southern town where most women still didn’t work. He wanted children, but the idea of having them terrified her: she was afraid having a child would make her ordinary, like other women.

All women, she believed, were devalued by men. She wanted to distinguish herself, to hold power, to run a news magazine. To me, she said, power is an aphrodisiac. On the other hand, she did not want to live without a man. You can’t cuddle up with your Rolodex at night, she said. Like most of the women I interviewed, she was, in her mid-thirties, at an impasse. But why?

Over the next four years, I interviewed more than forty successful career women in their mid-thirties. I wanted to understand the conflicts women were feeling and expressing. These conflicts went well beyond the problems of balancing career and family.  I wondered if they might, somehow, be rooted in feminine identity itself. What was the basis of these conflicts? Where had they come from? How were they to be resolved?

For the women I interviewed, I had three main questions: First, why had they entered careers when most of their mothers had not? Second, what was it like to make the transition from a traditional background to a man’s career? And finally, where did they see themselves going?

Answering those questions turned out to be more complicated than I ever could have imagined. The conflicts women expressed involved far more than psychology, sociology, law, organizational behavior, or history. Rather, I found, these conflicts stemmed from the interplay of family, individual, society, and technology, going back generations.

***

At first, I believed that this would be a relatively simple project about the state of professional women. I expected to read some studies and illustrate them with a set of interviews. I soon found that the studies were limited, didn’t ring true, or seemed outdated, so I designed my own study with guidance from fellow scholars at the Henry A. Murray Research Center at Radcliffe College. I used an open-ended questionnaire modeled on those employed by social psychologists. The objective was to explain, on the basis of a small set of in-depth interviews, the results of several large statisti­cal studies.

I began quite formally by interviewing 30 women who had en­tered fields once reserved primarily for men—medicine, law, science, and corporate management. To select them, I drew from membership lists of women’s professional organizations and a university alumni association. I also used a snowball sample, in which I asked people to suggest others to be interviewed. Then, through a questionnaire, I ascertained potential subjects’ ethnic, geographic, economic, and racial backgrounds, in order to insure as representative a mix as possible.

While not a scientific sample, the women I interviewed came from different backgrounds. Since, as late as 1980, some 97 percent of professional women were white, all but three of the women I interviewed were white. They came from diverse religious, income and class backgrounds. Some were married with children, or pregnant. Some hoped to have children; others did not. At least one was gay. They were doctors, lawyers, scientists, architects, businesswomen, bankers. All were women who, unlike their mothers, had entered careers predominated by men.

None of the women interviewed was famous—though several have become well known in their fields. I wanted to tell the stories not of superwomen but of average professional women who had struggled and could describe their struggles. Still, in some ways the women I interviewed turned out to be an unusual group. They were more psychologically insightful than I had expected, and quite articulate about their own feelings and emotions. Many saw themselves as role models, as political. Most wanted to prove that women could do things, as one doctor put it.

Sometimes their experiences sounded crazy or extreme. A corporate lawyer had spent a year as a subsistence farmer in Crete. A scientist had suddenly dropped her career to run off to Mexico with a man. Several women described suicidal feelings. While some had dramatic stories to tell, the women I interviewed were, I believe, representative of the generation of women who came of age in the 1960s, a period of turmoil, flux and political activism. They were typical of women who set out to make major changes in themselves and society’s deeply ingrained beliefs about women.

Women wanted to tell their stories. At my twentieth high school re­union, a friend who had become a nutritionist told me, I should be a chapter in your book. So did women I’d barely known at college, as well as perfect strangers. When I described my topic at wedding recep­tions, in my health club, in the classes I taught, woman after woman would say, You should interview me. I’m just like that. (I have used some of their stories to illustrate my findings.) There was such a burning need to talk about the issues I wanted to raise that even women who first rebuffed me ended up asking me to listen. When I called the president of a women’s professional organization to ask for its membership list she told me quite stuffily to write a letter to her board. When I wrote to explain my research, she called me to say that she—and all of her board members—wanted to be interviewed.

I interviewed women in their thirties because they had some experi­ence to look back on and because I thought their potential for internal conflict was highest. Women who had put off having children for the sake of their careers were likely to hit both the limits of the biological clock and positions of responsibility at the same time. As frontrunners born at the beginning of the baby boom, they were, I be­lieved, different from women just a few years older than themselves, who had tended to marry in their early twenties and have families before en­tering the work force. But they were also different from women just a few years younger, who claimed not to know the struggle of breaking into masculine workplaces.

The women interviewed came of age just after the modern feminist movement had begun to make inroads. They had more opportunities than previous generations, and they had the benefits of the birth control pill, a strong economy, liberalism, and increased legal rights. Still, they straddled two generations. Although they had broken new ground, they still carried within themselves the old values and notions of womanhood with which they had been raised.

I focused on women in fields that were predominantly male because I wanted to understand what it was like for women raised with those traditional feminine values—which I then understood to be nurturing or caring—to adjust to professions likely to be hierarchical, competitive, and concerned more with profits and power than with people. I also believed that women in these fields could ultimately reach positions of power and influence in our society. Their choices and philosophies would have enormous impact on the shape of society in the future.

I kept my sample small to allow in-depth interviews and analysis; hence, it was not possible to generalize about the experience of groups of women of differing backgrounds. I wanted to understand what drove a generation of women—despite the differences among them—to break personal, familial, and societal barriers that had previously held women back, so I chose to explore not their differences but their common experi­ences. Where possible, however, I have incorporated material from stud­ies of professional women from varying ethnic, racial, and national back­grounds. Until recently, such studies have been limited in number and scope. Those that do exist suggest added complexity in navigating within predominantly white male settings.

During the interviews, each of which lasted more than two hours and ran to about 80 pages when transcribed, I told women that they were free not to answer any questions that made them uncomfortable and that I was willing to talk off the record. I also guaranteed anonym­ity, which inspired most of the women to reveal intimate details of their lives with incredible frankness.  (To my surprise not all women wanted to be anonymous. Annabel, the only female assistant professor of history at a distinguished university, regaled me with stories about her colleagues and how she had fooled them into hiring her—then told me to be sure to use her name!  I didn’t.)

Throughout Broken Patterns I have changed the names of interviewees and some identifying characteristics to protect confidentiality. But the women described here are real and not composite characters. Because they spoke so per­sonally, we were on a first-name basis almost immediately, and I have used first names throughout.

In the interviews, I delved deep, asking not just what? and when? but why? Often, I asked about discrepancies or hesitations as I noticed them. As the interviews progressed, the women themselves offered memories from their childhoods and family histories. As they did so, I got some answers I had not expected.

Though I had tried for a geographic mix, for example, I would find that a woman who lived in the South had grown up in California, her parents in New York, and her grandparents in Eastern Europe. Class definition was equally problematic: one woman traced her wealthy ancestry to the Mayflower—but had a great-grandmother who had an illegitimate child and wound up selling hats in a millinery store. Another woman had a mother whose parents had been wealthy socialites and a father who worked as a travelling salesman.