Rebels in White Gloves

by Miriam Horn

  But what begins to seem like an argument for “natural” motherhood quickly takes one of McClintock’s characteristic turns. To say that a female is hardwired to attend to relationships does not mean that she is better fitted to parenthood. “You might argue that being exquisitely sensitive has negative effects, causing you to be overprotective. Maybe the less attentive parent promotes adventurousness by letting the kid do something he or she is scared to do, because the parent simply doesn’t perceive the kid’s fear.”

  In other words, one should mistrust reductionist stories, particularly those that turn out to justify the status quo. McClintock scoffs at stories like Robert Wright’s about the greater innate drive in males for dominance and how it might explain their persistence at the corporate top. “These stories are so glib, and so biased; they’re always told from the point of view of the alpha male. Look, imagine you’re studying baboons and you drive out in your Land Rover. This is what you see: a dominant male, hugely bigger than the females in his harem. There might be a few subpuberty males hanging around, but the other adult males are pushed to the edge and don’t approach. When any female is in heat, the dominant male does all the mating. You think, Okay, there’s no cultural bias in this description: it’s a clear male hierarchy.”

  But that is not the story told, McClintock says, by the work of her colleague Jeanne Altmann, chair of the committee on evolutionary biology at Chicago. For several years running, Altmann has returned to the same group of baboons. “And what do you know? She found the same group of females, but each year she found a different dominant male. She also saw that some females get access to water first, that some get their babies snatched and others don’t. It turns out that whether a female has power is of vital biological importance, affecting the mortality rate of her offspring and therefore the survival of her genes. So, do you take your yearly snapshot and describe a male hierarchy, or do you say, Here’s a matrilineal coalition where the key hierarchy is among the females. Do you use the word harem, which conjures up Arabian Nights and sex solely for male pleasure and all kinds of cultural meshegos, or call it a female coalition with a clear, linear dominance hierarchy and transient studs? Then the question becomes, Why would females form coalitions? and suddenly you’re spinning a very different story.” Wright’s description of a male who comes and goes as he pleases is inverted: Now the females have agency, using the male as long as they need him and then sending him on his way. Armed with such primate evidence, an evolutionary psychologist might argue that for females with adequate resources, single motherhood has proven a successful strategy—that it is a behavior “in our genes.”

  McClintock herself would be cautious in proposing such extrapolations, having seen her own science too often turned to foolish ends. Thirty years after proving the function of pheromones in humans, she is blackly amused by an ad for Jovan perfume, which claims to combine the pheromone androstenol with beautiful floral notes to send “attractant signals so powerful that there can be only one response.” Androstenol, she points out, is a compound produced by the male pig that causes the female to stand motionless so he can mate with her. Cans of it are sold through veterinary catalogues, with instructions to spray it directly into the nostrils of the sow. “To extrapolate wildly from insects to pigs to humans this way runs counter to everything good and powerful in science.”

  McClintock was equally dismayed when her rat sex study was branded a feminist paper, because, she says, “to say I did feminist science suggests that I had a political agenda ahead of time to demonstrate that female rats could be independent and assertive, just like males, and then designed studies to prove that hypothesis. That would be bad science. The fact is, my studies could be repeated by the most misogynist, chauvinist scientist, and he would be forced to come to the same conclusion.” She does believe, however, that her work can and should serve political ends, that she is actively rewriting the biological doctrine that has been so powerful a force in defining women’s nature and lives. “I am a feminist and I do science and I think my good science can certainly be used for feminist purposes. I think it’s fun to subvert the dominant paradigm.”

  McClintock’s history is proof of one of the central tenets of the feminist analysis of science: that a woman scientist’s experiences will often lead her to ask different questions or to see phenomena previously overlooked or to interpret data differently. She would not have discovered the role of pheromones in humans if not for her own experience menstruating in synchrony with the other women in her Wellesley dorm. Her lab is often disproportionately populated by women students, and she has supervised their studies of such “female subjects” as girls’ inhibition in competition; the perception of domestic violence by perpetrators and victims; self-esteem in mothers; and the psychology of daughters caring for elderly parents.

  Martha attended Wellesley at her mother’s urging. “She said, ‘Whether you marry or not, you’ll depend on women and should go somewhere you’ll learn how to do that.’ She said that with a good education I’d have something interesting to think about while folding diapers, which has also proven true. I had no plans when I arrived there, beyond maybe being a first-grade teacher. I was fourth-generation Wellesley, and thought the women who’d gone before me were what I’d grow up to be—a well-educated mother and community volunteer. My grandmother got engaged at Wellesley and knew she would move to western Massachusetts, where my grandfather farmed. She took astronomy because she figured in the country she’d see the stars and could teach her children their names.”

  After Wellesley, Martha found the “no-woman’s-land” of Harvard’s graduate program in sociobiology disconcerting. “Title Nine hadn’t happened yet. I wasn’t allowed to eat in the faculty club with my chairman or to use the stacks in some libraries or the squash courts. I was explicitly told by faculty that they admitted me only because the field needed people to do parametric studies, which are essentially the housework of the discipline, and that women kept nice neat lab notebooks. There were no women faculty, which was demoralizing.”

  At Penn, there were no women either, “but by that time, I didn’t expect them. It’s hard to describe how schizophrenic you had to be. Some conflicts you didn’t even try to resolve, like preparing to be a faculty member even though there were no women faculty.” The University of Chicago, where she got tenure, was happier. “Chicago had a long tradition of equal regard for women. It was one of the first research universities to go coed, a hundred years ago. When I got there, Hannah Gray was president and a third of the faculty were women. Though even now in many departments there are no women. And if you look at tenure decisions across the university, you see that in cases that are at all ambiguous, they turn down the women and accept the men—which means that to get the same treatment, women have to be better than men.”

  In the profile of McClintock that ran in Chicago, biopsychologist Esther Thelen described the best strategy for women in science: “Do as Martha does. Just shut up and do the work.” In fact, says Martha, “my strategy is to do the work and keep talking. You can’t spend the energy necessary to be a creative scientist and fight those political battles all the time. And I would rather do the science that makes the point than spend my time working on sexual-harassment policy. But I’m delighted there are women faculty doing the latter, and I completely support them. It’s absolutely appropriate to pick fights on behalf of women. But it takes a lot of energy, and you can only do it if you have a lot of emotional and intellectual support.”

  That support, Martha has always had. Refusing the formula that sets a woman’s public, professional life against her private life, Martha not only studies the protective effects of strong social relationships, she has also always depended on such relations. “Everything important I’ve ever done was with the support of a man in my life. There is a myth that someone like me has gotten where I have by being ruthlessly single-minded and cut off from social contact. But I was never off by myself, some brave woman in glorious solit
ude. I’ve always had a close, committed relationship and lots of affirmation from men that what I was doing was interesting and was a big part of what they liked about me. Of course, I got the reverse. Are you kidding? Most of the time. But every one of my major professional decisions has been made in the context of a relationship; that’s always been right up there as a determining factor in what I did. I don’t think I’d have had the courage to do it otherwise. It would be asking a lot to have the personal strength to pursue a professional or intellectual passion without that emotional support. I couldn’t have done it, nor should anyone expect themselves to.”

  Breaking discriminatory barriers, finding a way to integrate professional and family life: Even as the graduates of Wellesley ’69 set about reframing ideas about women and work, they had to negotiate a world built on the old ideas about where women belong.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Breaking the Barriers

  When the women of Wellesley began their working lives, most had fairly uncomplicated aims: equality, self-determination, and, of course, money—necessary for all the rest. Virginia Woolf counted an income “infinitely more important” for a woman than the vote, because “intellectual freedom depends on material things.” While there has always been a strong antimaterialist strain in feminism, protesting women’s role as a symbol of wealth for men and advertisers’ exploitation of their boredom and self-loathing, it was something else again for these women to go to work to win the autonomy their mothers never had. Rosalie Kiki Clough, ’69, an “accidental feminist,” whose only dream at Wellesley had been “to have enough chest to wear low-cut velvet dresses and then get married and have kids and be active in my church and drive a Country Squire station wagon and advance my husband’s career,” instead worked her way into a vice-presidency at Dean Witter after “Prince Charming failed to show.… Now I couldn’t tolerate a husband who was weak and needed chains on me or constant adulation. I have independence and freedom. Money buys me that.”

  Many of the women of ’69 have become breadwinners because they had to: Their husbands were downsized or low earners or left them, or they never married. These women had to support themselves, their children, and, increasingly, older relatives—a quarter now give regular financial help to parents or in-laws. Barbara Furne Simmons, one of the few women in the class whose mother became the family’s breadwinner after Barbara’s father left, had, in turn, to largely provide much of the support for her two sons after her own husband left. Though Barbara thought him a “great gene-pool type” with an MBA from Harvard and an engineering degree from CalTech, his intense commitment to work left her lonely; at night, when she wanted his companionship, “he wanted a wall around him” so he could unwind. “We just stopped talking to each other, and one day he came home and said he was moving out. I kept hoping we would reconcile, thinking, There are babies. But Jim was working in Silicon Valley, where the reigning belief was that if you’re not getting satisfaction, then there are other places to get it. It was a time when marriages were disposable, like houses: This is my starter home; this is my starter marriage.”

  More than half these women have been the principal breadwinners, and a fifth have been the sole breadwinners in their family. Fifty-eight percent have held a job with higher pay than their husbands’. Forty percent keep some of their money separate from that of their partner; of those, half keep it all separate. The majority share equally in their family’s spending and investment decisions. The Wellesley microcosm reflects a global trend. Collectively, women’s incomes have won them power in the world: All told, women earned more than $1 trillion in 1994, a fivefold increase over 1975. They have also earned other currencies of power: Television correspondent Martha Teichner, ’69, has repeatedly been slammed by conservative organizations for proffering the kinds of favors that once only men were in a position to grant. When she interviewed Hillary Clinton on CBS Sunday Morning in January 1997, for instance, she was criticized for commiserating with Hillary on the “nonstop bashing” her former classmate had endured.

  Avenging Angels

  Catherine Kostick Ravinski, ’69, is a judge for the Social Security Administration in Miami. Until 1994, she was an appeals judge at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia. “I’m a driven, competitive, aggressive person. I’m a star at what I do. At headquarters, my support group was mostly men. At lunch we’d head for the health club, get on adjacent Stairmasters, and bat around legal issues or vent frustrations. In a sense, I am my work. I chose to do one thing extremely well, abandoning my mother’s belief that a woman should be well rounded and dabble. I’m a very physical person, which my mother was not. I love sports, white-water rafting (the more dangerous the better), driving; I don’t enjoy reading, sewing, knitting, or anything that requires sitting still. My nicknames at headquarters were the Cattle Prodder, the Bionic Woman, the Beastmaster. I am self-absorbed, focused, impatient, driven, rude, irreverent, mean, a loyal friend, a vicious infighter, a defender of the underdog.”

  Catherine has been married since June 1973. “My husband, Richard, is much more easygoing than I am, interested in antiques, gourmet cooking, gardening. He is accommodating and flexible and has little drive; since 1989, he’s been a self-declared househusband, and has taken over all the shopping, cooking, cleaning, and yard work. He also makes jewelry, wreaths, stuffed animals, flower arrangements, and is known for his fine luncheons and dinners. He has made three major moves to follow my career. We’re almost inseparable and share most activities, though he does tolerate my going ‘out with the boys’ and is generous about inviting my colleagues to the house for meals and special treats.”

  It would be hard to fit Catherine into any model of essential female character traits. If she seems, at first, to have perfectly reversed roles and temperaments with her husband, she then inverts the formula again, talking of how her “heart sings” to be with her present colleagues—“three other female judges and one male, who considers himself ‘one of the girls.’ ” Though she fails to conform to most notions of a “woman’s way” of working toward gentle compromise and conciliation, her role as a kind of avenging angel—ferociously representing the weak against the strong—has its own history as a woman’s way of being in the world. Nineteenth-century feminists frequently fought on behalf of the poor and exploited and enslaved, channeling anger born of their own private experience of constrained liberty into public battles on behalf of other trapped human beings. Most of the people who come before Catherine for hearings, she says, are poor, disabled, poorly educated, and terrified. “So, while patience is not one of my virtues, I take pains to ensure that I have it while at the bench, and strive to be kind, compassionate, and respectful. While a very intense person, I try to turn that intensity toward good and useful objectives. While somewhat hard and opinionated, I have gone to the mat many times for people who lack the power to fight for themselves.”

  Like her predecessors’, Catherine’s pursuit of public justice is in part a way to redress injustices first experienced in private. It is a motivation she shares with many of her classmates: Abby van Alstyne, for instance, dropped out of Wellesley to work on the Poor People’s Campaign and has spent twenty years as a civil rights lawyer in Alabama, impelled, she says, to rebel against the arbitrary exercise of power she had witnessed as a girl at home, but been helpless to fight.

  Catherine Ravinski explains her ferocity with a grandly bitter tale of her mother’s life. Raised in “colonial splendor” in the Philippines, Catherine’s mother married in America and was “abused physically and emotionally. Her in-laws hated her for not being Russian, poor, and like them. She suffered abject poverty, starvation, and lack of medical care—without complaint. Though charming and fair-minded, with deep religious convictions, she was unable to control her six children, or ‘savages,’ as we were called. We lived on a small farm, often on the brink of starvation, with nearly nonexistent medical and dental care, somewhat like wild animals. Five of us were girls (‘another girl,’ my Rus
sian Baba would say with disgust). Since we were ‘only girls,’ we had to do chores and work like dogs while we went to school. There was tremendous pressure for perfection, an A-plus in everything, yet with an underlying message from my father that we were, by nature, incompetent and inferior and would never make the grade.

  “My mother spent her days doing household chores, which she was ill equipped to handle and did poorly. She died at fifty-one of metastatic cancer, which had gone too far because of her trait of not insisting on her needs—she did not fight back.

  “All of this instilled in me a fierce desire for financial and personal independence, accompanied by a less than gracious attitude toward would-be oppressors, abusers, and users. I advise young women to immediately challenge anyone who tries to step on them. Anyone who tries to hurt me or those I care about I will swiftly ‘decapitate’ (preferably by verbal means, but if necessary, by any means); if a would-be abuser raises his or her ugly head in my presence, I’ll be only too happy to cut ’em a new asshole.”

  In 1969, Cynthia Gilbert became a stewardess for Pan American Airways. The skies had always drawn her with their promise of freedom. She would have been an astronomer, she thinks, had she not absorbed as a girl the certainty of feminine failure in physics and math. A glamorous blonde, with a bright, sweet manner, the kind of woman who likes flowered dresses and full-length mink, Cynthia loved her vagabond life; she relished testing her wits in strange and sometimes treacherous places. It did not seem too onerous, as the price of her ticket to ride, to cut her hair, wear a girdle, and stay single and childless and underweight.