Maturity, said Erik Erikson, the famous explorer of the human life cycle, is when you wake up on your 50th birthday and don't regret your life. My classmates and I in the Radcliffe class of '67 have reached that daunting milestone. So what's our answer?
Those who have regrets keep them to themselves. The rest of us regularly offer up our judgments every five years, when Harvard asks its graduates, male and female, to write about themselves for the class "Redbook," a "collective autobiography of triumphs and failures, bragging and tales of woe." As the preface to our just published 30th-reunion report warns, what we have to say can be "breathtakingly candid, insightful, boring, witty, curmudgeonly, heartbreaking." But it's always an intriguing peep into 1,493 personal diaries.
All told, the women of '67 account for only 293 of those. We can hardly claim to speak for a generation, except insofar as revolutions, including social ones, are often made by the few on the front edge. We are not the inventors of feminism, but we are its first lifelong beneficiaries, eager and able to enter whatever profession we contemplated. So we define a large part of ourselves by our job titles, and then change the jobs and the titles along the way. Margot Eberman de Ferranti turned 50 and resigned from the civil division at the Justice Department to become a mediator in local courts. Economist Karen Hagstrom Johnson says, "I still have the same job at the Federal Reserve Board. I think that I have fallen into the trap of letting my work expand to fit the available time." Irene Marie Leary just decided to attend law school while continuing full-time work for Texas Instruments. Computer scientist Elaine Lipshutz Best says, "I imagine it seems odd to people who remember me that I am working at Los Alamos National Lab. I haven't always felt comfortable there, but I've always managed to find projects--solar energy, earthquake modeling, biomedical applications--that I was glad to contribute to."
We married too and had kids, and we rank our families above our professional accomplishments. Jane Hughes, wife and mother of two who has worked for 25 years as "a change agent" in government and in foundations, says her "biggest surprise has been discovering that my family is the axis of my life, not my work." Susan Butler King Brown feels bewildered over having kids so late: "Would this have been easier in my 20s or 30s?" Lucy Lee Grimes Evans lists "mother of four" as her occupation even while decrying, as a member of her local Democratic town committee, how "women are still woefully underrepresented" in state and national politics. But for lots of us, like Susan Smith Ellenberg, our children are all grown up and "we've had to get used to being less a part of their lives."