Double Bind

by Robin Romm

  At the LSAT, the proctors wait for us to get seated, to shed our jackets, settle our bags on the floor. The room smells of wet socks, a musty, dry heat from the radiators, the metallic breath of hundreds of twenty-one-year-olds who’ve forced down a fast breakfast of black coffee. A faint cigarette smell sits among us, brought in on the hair, the jeans. I have a two-pack-a-day habit and a fresh box of Marlboros. No sandwich, no candy, as I also have an eating disorder. The test will take all day, with officially scheduled food, cigarette, and bathroom breaks. The room is hushed, only the sounds of test booklets being moved to the optimal spot at the center of each desk, of regulation pencils lightly tapping. Personal computers, even the bulky desktops, haven’t been invented. There are no cell phones to turn off or check at the door. Nobody speaks.

  One of the proctors looks at a clock. Another gives instructions. Do only one part at a time. Do not move on to the next part until instructed. If we finish a section with time to spare, we’re to read our answers over or sit quietly. If we don’t finish a section when they call it, let it be—there is a cost to guesswork that makes guessing riskier than leaving the answer blank. It’s a matter of odds, we’ve learned in the informational letter we received weeks before, giving us our identification numbers and reminding us of the time and place: You might get the question right, but you might get it wrong, and wrong is not a zero; it counts against you.

  A proctor tells us to take up our booklets, open the seal. Then: Go! Five hundred pencils scratching paper. Five hundred audible mouth breathers. If I don’t hear all five hundred, I certainly hear the couple dozen in my immediate vicinity. We are tightly packed. I can’t see other booklets and answers—it would be difficult to cheat—but I see hands moving, pencils darkening the circles of multiple choice. I see someone’s foot nervously bobbing across the aisle, hear a fingernail drumming wood, the people on either side of me shifting in their chairs.

  So, when at the roughly fifteen-minute mark, I begin to sneeze and cannot stop, I know that those nearby can hear me. Soon I know everyone in the room can hear me. I’m keeping one hand over my nose, the other searching my bag for tissues, trying not to attract attention, and I’m mortified. Also mystified. I hadn’t felt a cold coming on the night before, or this morning; I hadn’t felt sick or strange at all. Nor do I have allergies. Soon the sneezing is constant, convulsive. It’s as if a giant allergen has jumped up onto my little desk and squatted on my test booklet and sent forth its tentacles directly into my nasal passages. Sneezes are coming an average of every ten seconds. Within three minutes, I’m exhausted; within five, worried; within seven, a pariah.

  It’s a major disturbance. Nobody who can see me can concentrate, and though I don’t know about the ones who can’t see me, I’m pretty sure they’re having trouble too. Those closest to me are getting agitated. They’re staring in my direction. A proctor lifts her head. Any moment, one of the students will raise a hand and ask the proctor to speak to me. I get up, gather my jacket, my bag, my rain hat—for it was raining, after all, when I arrived—my test booklet, gather it all up as unobtrusively as I can and make my way to the front before another convulsion seizes me. I turn in the booklet, cancel my score, leave the room, and step outside. The sun is shining. I put on my jacket, skip the hat.

  And immediately stop sneezing.

  Three years before, in September 1968, three hundred newly admitted Radcliffe freshwomen sit in the auditorium in Agassiz Hall on a crisp New England afternoon listening to greetings from Mary Bunting, a plain-looking, gray-haired woman wearing a pastel cotton shirtwaist and glasses, looking for all the world like an aging Sunday School teacher or someone’s grandmother. It is somewhat startling, therefore, to consider that Bunting, Radcliffe’s fifth president, was then only fifty-eight years old, a PhD microbiologist whose research had once involved studying the effects of radiation on bacteria. She had come to national attention in November 1961, two years after assuming the Radcliffe presidency, gracing the cover of Time, in which she identified a societal problem she called “a climate of unexpectation” for girls. Nobody cares, Bunting said in Time, what women do with their education. While everyone asked little boys what they wanted to be when they grew up, little girls were asked where they got their pretty dresses. The result was a “waste of highly talented, educated womenpower,” a “prodigious national extravagance.”1 Bunting set out to change that and devoted her career to raising expectations among and about women, and to helping create opportunities for them that they’d previously been denied. During her presidency, women were admitted for the first time to Harvard’s graduate and business schools, Radcliffe students received Harvard diplomas—their classes had been coed with Harvard since World War II—and Radcliffe undergraduates were explicitly and vigorously exhorted to achieve, especially in the highest echelons previously reserved for men. Though Bunting herself had four children and two husbands, the implication was clear: We were to look beyond marriage and family, and beyond fields traditionally populated by women. Teaching, nursing, social work, anything carrying the stigma of a support role: not acceptable. Ditto for working in an ordinary business or service industry or at a trade. The acceptable paths for a Radcliffe student were to the professions, the arts, the life of the mind.

  It was not merely a privilege but a duty to aspire to the highest ranks, Mary Bunting told us in the Agassiz auditorium that September day after reciting a litany of achievements already amassed by this roomful of eighteen-year-olds before we’d even gotten started: this many concert violinists, that many Westinghouse Science Scholars, this many championship athletes. A roomful of Most Likely to Succeeds. If there was a climate of unexpectation out there, none of us had grown up in it. We were the future of women’s achievement, Mary Bunting said. We were being given the gift of a superior education coveted by many—admission to Radcliffe that year made it the most selective college in the country, far more selective than Harvard. Entry was ours to take and use wisely.

  The message was unmistakable: You’ve been selected. Don’t let us down.

  In the winter of 1971, a few months before the LSATs, a nagging, unwelcome thought was hovering at the periphery of my mind. I tried to ignore it, but it refused to go away, and it was this: Though I’d performed satisfactorily enough in my pre-law courses in government, I’d fully loved my English classes. I couldn’t care less about literary criticism, the tediously analytical essays we had to read, the equally tedious papers we had to write, but I loved the novels and stories and poems and plays. Irish Theatre, the Harlem Renaissance, Slavic literature, a whole semester of Faulkner. When each term’s catalog came out, I was a kid in a candy shop, greedily devouring the descriptions. I wanted them all. All year I read like a starving person. I got mediocre grades in English, my work decidedly undistinguished, but I didn’t care. Who cared about grades when you had fourteen weeks of Chekhov?

  Why, then, was I looking at law schools? If I loved literature, if I spent hours in the listening rooms at Radcliffe’s Hilles Library plugged in and headphoned to old LPs of poets reading their work, the gravelly voice of Robert Frost forever engraved on my memory, why was I persisting in the notion of being a lawyer? I wasn’t an activist; the student protests against the war had ripped through my undergraduate life like a tidal wave, shutting down the campus, canceling final exams, bringing out the National Guard, and I had watched it all from the sidelines, a mildly interested observer. I might be a decent advocate, could articulate a point of view, but I hated confrontation, hated arguing. I had never joined a debate club or had a taste for verbal sparring. I had no aptitude for strategy, for posturing or bluffing for the sake of a win.

  But I couldn’t align my future with my love of Tennessee Williams and Turgenev. In 1971, the country was burning. I was a middle-class Jewish girl from Long Island whose relatives were union organizers and wholesale dress salesmen and accountants, and, notably, Allen Ginsberg, my father’s cousin. I’d met him once when he was performing Buddhist chants
at an outdoor theater. Our family members weren’t English professors in tweed jackets, discoursing on Spenser and The Faerie Queene and living in stately houses on Cambridge’s Brattle Street, a neighborhood with an aura so rarefied it might as well have been its own country. A choice pressed itself on me. My teachers, my family, Gloria Steinem writing in Ms., Mary Bunting, they’d all let me know what I needed to do: stand up and take my rightful place in society, claim the authority women had been unfairly denied, and run things. Reading novels and writing poems was not standing up or taking any rightful place or running anything.

  My roommates were going to medical school, business school, for PhDs. Law schools were heavily recruiting that year to try to raise their numbers of women from an average of 5 percent to 20 percent. Six months after the debacle of the spring LSAT, I was back in the cavernous lecture hall of Sanders Theatre, signed up for another round. A girl I knew from my hometown who had gone to Tufts and whom I remembered as being excessively studious was seated in the aisle across from me. We’d said hello on the way in. I hadn’t seen her since high school.

  Once again a proctor looked at the clock. Once again a proctor told us to break the seal and open the booklet. Once again someone called: Go!

  I worked through the first section, perhaps the next. At some point, I glanced across the aisle to see my high school acquaintance furiously coloring parts of her test booklet with a yellow highlighter. Back and forth, back and forth went the bright neon ink. I’d never heard of anyone using a highlighter for the LSAT. She was expert, practiced. She moved the marker across the page efficiently, quickly. It was mesmerizing.

  By the time I woke up, a half hour had passed. I forced my head off the desk and worked on questions until the proctor shouted, Time! I put my pencil down. Perhaps there was a bathroom or cigarette break then. I’d have time to consider. I could cancel the test score, which surely would be a poor showing.

  Or I could finish the exam, turn in the booklet, live with the results. Because if I didn’t, I’d have to wait another year to apply. And what would I do then? Not go?

  In 1969, a little-known experimental psychologist named Matina Horner published a report on her doctoral dissertation research. She was studying women’s relationships to achievement and had identified something that was holding women back that she called, apparently after herself, the Horner Effect, or the Fear of Success Syndrome. Later, this would be called, simply, Fear of Success, or FOS, as opposed to FOF, Fear of Failure. Fear of Success was described as particularly afflicting young, often well-educated, middle-class women who were smart and likely to succeed, from families that not only encouraged high motivation but also expected their daughters to fulfill traditional roles. Unlike Fear of Failure, which means you’re worried you aren’t up to the task and might blow it, Fear of Success assumes you’re entirely capable but fear the consequences of that capability. Maybe you think you’ll be threatening to your significant male others—husbands, boyfriends, fathers, brothers—­who won’t like your competence. Or you fear you’ll be seen as unladylike in your white doctor’s coat or blue suit while running a shareholders’ meeting. Or if you’re married or a mother, maybe you’ll feel guilty about the time you’re spending on your research or job or whatever it is you’re succeeding at, and not enough time with the husband and children. So Fear of Success, the theory goes, conveniently comes along to shoot you in the foot. It undermines you from pursuing your goals, thus rescuing you from anxiety and the consequences you’re worried about. To the untrained eye, your behavior may look like Fear of Failure—you don’t apply yourself, you’re riddled with doubt and second-guessing, you procrastinate or blow off requirements or, in the case of one study, get pregnant just when your success is about to peak—but it has nothing to do with the terror of failure and all to do with the terror of succeeding.

  Matina Horner, the daughter of Greek immigrants, was raised in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. In 1961, Horner graduated the all-women’s Bryn Mawr and, eight years later, with a newly minted PhD in hand, she and her husband went to Harvard with three young children, where Horner took a position as a lecturer, moving up a year later to assistant professor. Two years after that, in 1972, Radcliffe tapped her to become its sixth president, succeeding Mary Bunting. Horner was thirty-­two years old, the youngest president in the college’s one-hundred-­year history. It seems shocking to me now that Horner at the time was a mere ten years older than the seniors who graduated that year, myself among them.

  At Radcliffe, Horner’s ideas took off like wildfire. It was the perfect storm of theory and cultural shifts. In Mary Bunting’s time, the focus was on removing external obstacles to women’s achievement—admission to professional schools, equal access to education and careers. Now Matina Horner came along to say that obstacles might reside within the women themselves. Whereas before, we had to give ourselves pep talks to not fear failing, now we had to scour our psyches for the ostensibly real—but hidden—reasons for not forging ahead with that graduate school application, that job possibility, to see if what was causing us to doubt or think twice was something we couldn’t see and sounded counterintuitive: the fear of actually doing it well.

  There is something both brilliant and crazy-making about this way of scrutinizing one’s motivations. If, say, you find yourself not working hard enough to produce the publications you need to qualify for tenure at a university job about which you’re ambivalent, you might reasonably conclude that the low productivity is your way of making sure you don’t get tenure, thus resolving the situation. In short, getting you off the hook. But with Fear of Success as the operative theory, you have to probe deeper and ask if your unproductive publishing behavior is a sign that you really do want the tenured position and are undermining yourself by thinking you don’t; you then behave in ways to ensure that you don’t succeed, because you’re afraid of the ultimate side effects of a successful tenure award. So you plod away at the publishing, ignoring the impulse to search out another line of work.

  If you’re in doubt about a life choice, scrutinizing your thinking and conduct for Fear of Success means not trusting your instincts because your instincts may be your fears in disguise. If—as a twenty-one-year-old with little life experience and an outsized need to please others—you’re on the path to a career you don’t think you want but don’t know why, Fear of Success tells you to stay the course because it’s your worry about being successful talking, and women must not let that worry hinder their achievement. In a situation of doubt or ambivalence, assuming a Fear of Success keeps you in, when what you really want is out.

  A year before Matina Horner was appointed Radcliffe’s president, I took a summer school course with her. It was called Psychology of Women. Horner was thirty-one years old and friendly and informal. She was nothing like the Harvard professors I’d had the previous three years, all of them austere, remote, and male. The class was small. We got more personal attention than we’d ever gotten. I learned all about Fear of Success and thought it could probably explain a lot of things for a lot of women. Maybe also me. Was I confused about my future because I was afraid of being good at it? Had I fallen victim to the terrible things holding women back? It was possible; it made sense.

  But here’s the dirty secret. I liked my class with Dr. Horner, who was warm and caring and the only female professor I had in my college career, but nothing about the Fear of Success rang true to me. I’d been succeeding my whole life, and though I wanted to be doing something different from what I was headed toward, I didn’t fear success and hadn’t experienced the negative consequences Horner’s theory seemed to insist on. To the contrary: Success was expected of me, a given. I didn’t feel guilty or embarrassed by being successful. I liked it. The recognition, the praise, the approval. I even liked the suits.

  I sat in Dr. Horner’s class that summer and thought there must be something wrong with me. Maybe I wasn’t a true woman; maybe because I wasn’t worried about not putting a future husband
first—though who’d want a husband like that? I wondered—or being seen as unfeminine if I wore business attire meant that I was a secret man. I scoured my psyche to see if my confusion about my future had telltale signs of Fear of Success so that I could reassure myself that I was a real female. Because that’s what women, real women, Dr. Horner told us, felt. I couldn’t find any. This made me worry more. I didn’t have, it seemed, normal women’s psychology. Later, after I’d become a lawyer, the first purchase I would make would be a pair of the highest heels I could manage, so that I would be over six feet tall in the courtroom, able to stand up to, or tower over, the men. The shoes were a pointy brown number with bows.

  In 1972, I went to law school. I did my course work but had little ambition beyond that. I assumed I was simply a low-key, noncompetitive person. I spent summers waitressing instead of chasing down legal experience, except one miserably hot August, the same month Richard Nixon resigned, working for a federal agency in Washington, the highlight of which was watching the resignation on TV with all the government employees a mile from where Nixon was making the announcement. Otherwise, what elicited the most enthusiasm for me during law school was feminist irritation, if not outrage, over the insensitivity of certain faculty. The torts professor relied on football analogies to explain negligence, and the man who taught Civil Procedure refused to switch to the newly mandated “Ms.” when calling on female students, saying it sounded like something an illiterate Southerner would say. He insisted on asking each woman, “Is it Miss or Mrs.?” I joined a delegation charged to try to set these recalcitrants straight, which met with moderate success.