Friday, June 20, 2008 - Posts
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Kara, go forth and absorb Picasso and Bernini (and then enlighten the rest of us). For my part, I'm sorry I didn't take art history in college. Or music history. In fact I think I'm a cretin. But I also regret, just as much, that I took zero math and as little science as I could get away with. I thought I was following my passions, too, and maybe I was, but now I think of the puzzle-solving part of math, which I like, and wonder if I dropped it for the wrong ie gendered reasons.
Melinda, I should have known that if I wrote about reading a novel in the evening I would offer myself up as How Does She Do It poster-woman. From now on I will write only after watching The View and Flight of the Conchords reruns. I think mother-guilt dates from whenever mothers, whether stay-at-home or working, decided that it was no longer OK to tell their kids to run outside to play and not give them another thought until bedtime (or maybe on a good night, dinner). I would hark back fondly to that time except that it was the 1950s.
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While I can't answer Melinda's question of whether the bar for mothers-who-do-it-all was always set so high, as a young twentysomething just starting out in my career, I can see that bar vaulting upward among the women of my own generation. With few glass ceilings remaining, the limits to our professional ambitions seem next to nonexistent. But along with our heightened career expectations comes the decision to try to balance both work and family life. For all the inspirational value of Hillary Clinton's historic campaign, even she got choked up trying to explain how she did it all.
About a year and a half ago, I heard Linda Hirshman speak about her book, Get to Work ... And Get a Life, Before It's Too Late, at the women's college I attended. I remember vividly her assertion that women in college should not waste their time studying subjects such as art history. Now, I was an art history major at a liberal arts college, and among the audience were a number of art majors who had emerged from the print-making and painting studios down the hall to hear Hirshman speak. Needless to say, none of us were thrilled with her advice. We were all passionate about the subjects and challenged and fulfilled by our work. Why should we have felt guilty for pursuing our interests?
With the opportunity in recent years to disprove the stereotypes about women's aptitude (or lack thereof) in math and the hard sciences, I often felt in college that I was letting down women everywhere by taking art and literature courses instead of math and physics. Studying at a women's college, I didn't have to contend with gendered expectations about the classes I should take; test tubes and equations just didn't excite me. Still, Hirshman and others like her made me feel that there were fields into which I should venture simply because they remained unconquered by women. It's taken me some time to realize that this can't be right. Can it? Just because a woman can be an astrophysicist, doesn't mean she ought to be one, and just because female art historians are not venturing into male-only territory doesn't mean they should feel guilty about studying Picasso's cubist paintings or Bernini's sublime sculptures.
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