A Good Reader Can Make Your Day

From Catherine C., a reader of Babes in Boyland:

I believe that the stories you’re trying to construct are basically stories of identity, individual, cultural and institutional. You happened to be delivered into a moment in American history when previously all-male colleges, those bastions of white privilege and power, were being forced to accept women. In your community and family’s cultural background, time spent earning an intellectual education was beyond the world of possibility, especially for a woman. What took place was your search for identity set against the similar search being done by Dartmouth (probably mostly against their will) and the general national shift into accepting that women had both a right and a place in the world of Ivy League education formally reserved for only the sons of the rich and powerful. So there’s a story inside a story inside a story, and perhaps what you might think about is how your personal story unfolds as the other two stories struggle more or less successfully with making their own transitions to where they (we) are today.

While you had plenty of examples of women, happily or not, who accepted their prescribed cultural role without question, the only woman you intimately knew who hungered for a broader view of the world was your mother.  She found the books of those alpha males, but was also disillusioned by men, most notably your father. She died just at the moment when you were offered this extraordinary opportunity and needed her for support. You also were given the chance to offer her entry to that larger world, and possibly redemption for her own losses and suffering, but it came too late. While we can only surmise how she might have responded to your journey, the fact remains that you watched her suffer and die before she could give you the support and encouragement that might have made your transition somewhat less alone and traumatic.

You did receive encouragement, but mostly from the men in your life, the women (your aunts) couldn’t possibly understand and probably actually figured it would have been better if you had been pregnant, at least that they understood and knew how to deal with the crisis. Your choice was much more dangerous. Historically Sicilians have as much faith and trust in women as they have in formal academic education. So off you went into a world that by its very history and construction dismissed you as a woman with limited economic resources and a strong ethnic presence who was now bent on disrupting their tidy little world. So the questions became now who were you and where did you belong? A question that we must all face when leaving home, but yours was profoundly complicated by all these other, larger factors.

By your own account you were a child who recognized the need to continually prove your place in a group.  Perhaps what your high school teacher saw was your innate survivor skills, which rightfully led him to believe that Dartmouth wouldn’t kill you. What he couldn’t possibly fathom was the toll it would take on your sense of feminine identity. He only saw your your strength and determination without understanding that it needed to be in balance with your social and personal need to be validated and recognized for your innate sense of the feminine. In your family, however, being a woman generally meant denying your hunger for intellectual pursuits. In exchange for not having an education and knowledge of the outside world you got a nice dining room set and total acceptance as “one of the girls.” (Here I was delighted when you referred to “cake and coffee.” The only other place I’ve ever heard it used is in my family and only by the women. It’s as if life’s anguish and difficulties could always be dealt with and accepted or conquered by sitting down with other women and demolishing two pots of coffee and a Cinnamon Swirl coffee cake.)

You go to a world that was unwillingly forced to redefine who they were and then accept the notion that “as a woman” you might have a very real sense of perspective and ideas with merit. If, as you continually suggested (or possibly rubbed their noses in) the reality was you were an intellectual force to be reckoned with as well as a woman, then they were forced to examine and redefine who they were, their position in relationship to women and their casual assumption of power and authority.

You must have been as welcome as Margaret Sanger at the Vatican.