I had to fight to keep myself as I wanted to be.
—William Carlos Williams
Wandering through the stacks in the University of Oregon library during a break from tole painting in a study carrel I used once a week, thanks to my husband’s faculty status, a book caught my eye: “The Mirror of True Womanhood: A Book of Instruction for Women in the World.” A new mother, I needed advice. The book, published in the late 19th century, didn’t seem out of date when I considered many women I knew in our quiet Eugene neighborhood in 1972. Oregonians described themselves then with some pride as “at least 10 years behind the rest of the country.” Coming from Los Angeles, it seemed like more. Not that I didn’t appreciate the skill and stamina homemaking required, but I felt unbalanced.
The book wasn’t helpful. Neither were others stretched along the dusty shelf. It shared a call number at the Library of Congress with titles like: “Having It All: Strategy in the Sex Wars,” and “Help for the Hassled, Hurried, and Hustled” — which, in 1877, when it was published, was written by a man. The author, Reverend Bernard O’Reilly, was a New York priest who had been chaplain of the Irish Brigade of the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. In 22 chapters with titles like “The True Woman’s Kingdom: The Home” and “The Wife’s Crowning Duty: Fidelity,” Father O’Reilly managed to stuff everything he thought a woman should know.
The bottom-line — “Women’s entire existence, in order to be a source of happiness to others as well as to herself, must be one of self-sacrifice.” If she failed she might end up like the selfish mother, en route to Europe, whose vessel was “wrecked amid the icebergs off the coast of Newfoundland,” or the lazy housewife who suffered the even direr fate of having her disappointed husband “migrate to California.”
When I think about it now I am reminded of writer Laurens van der Post, who wrote in his memoir of friendship with Carl Jung, “We live not only in our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time.” Father O’Reilly reflected his Victorian sensibilities, and perhaps nervousness as the world shifted beneath his feet. He ended his book by saying, “Men are born to be the providers in the home: they are formed by nature and still further fitted by education for every species of toil. The home with its quiet, its obscurity, is for woman: she is made to grow up in the shade.”
***
As the woman’s movement gained steam I was caught between the residue of 19th century expectations and the rising curtain of the looming 21st. I felt like someone trapped in the “Star Wars IV” garbage bay, where two sinister steel plates squeezed Luke and his friends closer to extinction minute by minute. The quick thinking of the little droid R2-D2 saves the rebel heroes by disarming the power switch at the last moment. None of us had droids. We knew a way of life was vanishing, but we didn’t know what would replace it. Many of my Oregon neighbors stayed put at home. I navigated into the working world, convinced that was the answer. For years I congratulated myself that I was balancing home and work so well.
***
Decades passed. I climbed the academic career ladder. Hunched at my desk late one gloomy afternoon at the high school where I was principal, I was trying to write my monthly newsletter column. I was exhausted. Out the window I watched a drug deal unfold across the street at a dilapidated motel, under a garish blue flickering sign. Not for the first time, I called the San Jose Police fast-response urban crime team. They were on speed dial.
“Okay,” I thought to myself. “I’m on top of things. In charge. I’ve got the corner office, the secretary, the title, the position power, the salary, and the responsibility for the safety of hundreds of people.” What I had lost was direct contact with students and any semblance of control over my life. Out of balance… again.
While much has been gained through the women’s movement, much has been lost. Even Betty Friedan admitted things hadn’t gone as she hoped. Marriages crashed, including her own. Children lost unstructured playtime — no one was home. Obesity skyrocketed as fast food replaced home cooking.
***
It is ironic that women characterize progress as moving into a male world; a world filled with as much stress and responsibility as exists at home. The grass isn’t greener on the other side of the street. Every painter knows distance changes color. The backgrounds are muted, softer; the foregrounds sharper, easier to see.
Was it worth the sacrifices I made? I was never home and I missed it. Returning to my newsletter project I began reading a memo from the art teacher. At the top he had scrawled a quote from G.K. Chesterton — “If you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it for the 1000th time, you are in danger of ‘seeing’ it for the first time.” The teacher was requesting field trip permission for a photography project. Chesterton wasn’t talking about women and work, but I decided that afternoon it was time for a change.
I wrote my column that month on “Drawing Upside Down.” It was a technique I learned in painting classes and used in writing classes. It dawned on me it would be useful for problem solving in general. We get caught up drawing ‘generic’ shapes, which are sometimes preconceived symbols instead of what is in front of us. Drawing and painting with the reference turned upside down forces us to see the shapes as they actually are.
The next month I announced I would be leaving at the end of the school year.
It was time to rebalance…again. Time to write a new chapter, colored less by social expectations and more by not just looking at my life, but seeing it.
***
Pundits say “work/life balance” is possible with a little effort and planning. In my experience that is a denial of reality right out of “Titanic” — the scene where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is about to freeze to death in the North Atlantic, but first manages to mutter, “I don’t know about you, but I intend on writing a strongly worded letter to the White Star Line about all this.”
***
Turning away from what society acknowledged as “success” was harrowing, not impossible. It felt like waterskiing. To get out of the water you point the skis up, straighten your spine, bend your knees slightly for flexibility as you hit the rough spots, take a deep breath, fix your eyes on the horizon, and yell, “Hit it!” At the end of the run you let go of the towrope, spread your arms for balance, and skim along on your own toward shore. It’s the best part of the ride.
I didn’t have a droid to help me navigate my crisis of faith — in my career, my job choices, and my self image; but I did have a husband, who shouldered more so I could pursue goals for which the price was too high, the results too unsatisfying, the risks too great. Not risks to my marriage, but risks to me. A person who needed more space, more books, more time for projects, more time at home. It’s the axiom — one I’d forgotten — that Joseph Conrad set down in “The Secret Agent”:
“We can never cease to be ourselves.”
In art, placement and balance work together to insure that no part of a painting pulls too much attention. Something else I had forgotten.
Bloomberg Businessweek reported in its January 9, 2012, issue that in 1970, 35 percent of women worked outside the home. Today it is 69 percent. Its cover was a large baby bottle with a man standing inside under the headline “The Perfect Husband.” In the lower right it says, “He cooks, cleans — and lets his wife climb the corporate ladder.”
Society has a new balance. History will decide if it was worth the price we paid.
