A Woman's Education by Jill Ker Conway

Author:Jill Ker Conway [Conway, Jill Ker]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307797346
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

5

SCHOLARS WITH PINES

FROM THE DAY I ARRIVED in Northampton, I was on guard against the presidential trap of merging self and institution so completely that there seemed no life outside the role. I’d had trouble with boundaries earlier in life and wasn’t about to repeat the predicament. My childhood and youth had been times of struggle to connect inner and outer self. The external world of repeated family tragedies was too hard to risk really inhabiting, and my private view of the story unfolding in the adult world around me was too dark to talk about. So that left me a blank page in public, something on which kindly family, well-meaning schools, generous friends, professional educators could all project a persona.

Until the moment of rebellion arrived in my early twenties, when I rejected all the well-intentioned prescriptions for my life and left Australia in search of a place where I could investigate the elusive self I scarcely knew. Graduate school, distance from Australia, and family allowed me to complete the archetypal coming-of-age process. I felt I owned who I was, and that the private me was no stranger to her public self-presentation. It was like coming into a port that was a real safe haven when I found the mate who agreed enthusiastically with my self-definition and didn’t seem to want to improve on it.

Doing the conventional things—marrying, beginning a scholarly career—gave me a false sense of security, as though the task of relating inner and outer self had been definitively completed. As a young married woman in my thirties, I expected that there weren’t going to be too many more iterations of the quest for self-definition. But, of course, I was wrong. I wasn’t quite forty when I arrived at Smith and ran instantly into one of the major challenges of adulthood. That challenge is to protect and sustain the inner self we’ve labored so hard to release while fully entering into the roles we have to play as adults with major symbolic, professional, and personal responsibilities. The coming-of-age story doesn’t deal with what we have to do to sustain the inner self against all the structures of society—family, professions, voluntary institutions, political movements, competing vocations—all of which demand conformity to their ideal types.

One of the most seductive attractions of the romantic view of life is the notion that there exists somewhere the perfect partner who resonates emotionally to every note of one’s own inner music. And that there is one vocation we are destined to take up in which we will find nothing out of key and experience no disharmonies between our working and private self. But the reality is otherwise. Most people are a cluster of talents that could potentially be applied in myriad different ways. The young need career counseling for just this reason. And the rate of divorce tells us that the uniquely preordained soul mate is hard to find. So the challenge in adulthood is to sustain that inner self while entering passionately into a complicated set of relationships, any one of which may constrain who we are.

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