Martian's Daughter: A Memoir (15 page)

While I was doing this research, I received another badly needed lesson in humility. I could do a lot of my work at home, but one hot, late summer day, in an advanced stage of pregnancy, I went to New York to keep an appointment with Gary Becker, whom I still regarded as a mentor. I arrived at Penn Station from Princeton in the midst of a subway strike and had to battle a huge crowd, all trying to get taxis.

When I finally arrived at Becker's office, hot, disheveled, and out of breath, I found that he wasn't there. Filled with righteous indignation, I stomped into the office of the department secretary and unburdened myself of a long soliloquy on the irresponsibility of faculty members who didn't keep appointments with students, particularly in light of all I had gone through to get there. When I finally paused for breath, she asked quietly if I would like to know why Professor Becker hadn't showed up. “I certainly would,” I replied. It turned out that his wife, who suffered from postpartum depression, had attempted suicide that morning. My self-righteousness evaporated in an agony of embarrassment.

A few weeks after this incident, our son Malcolm was born. My friends had been amused at the thought of bluestocking Marina becoming a mother, but like many first-time parents, I couldn't believe how enchanted I was by this newborn creature. Fortunately Bob, who had diapered more than one young cousin, could fill in for my total lack of experience where babies were concerned, and it didn't take me long to catch on. My brain, which seemed to have gone into hibernation toward the end of my pregnancy, stayed there for several months afterward, and Bob and I spent much of the time in the happy but sleep-deprived daze common to new parents. It was clear from the very beginning that Bob regarded himself as an equal partner in the parenting adventure, long before such an attitude was fashionable or even socially acceptable.

My husband and my parents were totally supportive of my intention to finish the PhD and then combine motherhood with an academic career. But in the world of the late 1950s my decision was more generally regarded with surprise and, often, disapproval. During my pregnancy, acquaintances and even strangers would respond with raised eyebrows when they learned, in the course of a cocktail party conversation, that I intended to lead a double life as both mother and scholar.

I could take these reactions in my stride, but my mother-in-law was a different matter. A strong and intelligent woman, herself a college graduate at a time when that was rare for a female, she was also an old-fashioned lady closer in age to my grandmother than my mother. Although I liked and admired her, I had always felt that she didn't entirely approve of me. When she learned of my plans, she was horrified. Convinced that I would ruin my health, make my husband miserable, and neglect my children, she told me I was being selfish to insist on going on with a career outside the home. I was upset at the effect that the tension between us was having on Bob, trapped between the views of the two strong-minded women he loved most. I was also terrified that there was a chance she might be right.

Without Bob's staunch support, I might have succumbed to the then-current view of the proper role for a married woman with a family. As it was, I cried a lot and demanded constant reassurance from my husband but stuck to my course. My first publication, my master's thesis revised into a monograph, came out at about the same time that our son was born. In response to my mother's long-ago warnings that I shouldn't let my brains show too much, I inscribed her copy “As evidence that blue stockings don't necessarily form a chastity belt.” I thought I was being terribly clever, but as usual she had the last word: “I think you've married the only man in the world who would put up with you.” The longer Bob and I have been married, the more convinced I am that she was right.

When I resumed my monthly trips to Columbia to discuss the latest chapter of my dissertation with Professor Hirschman, he commented that he hadn't received either a chapter or a visit from me in several months and asked why. When I told him that I had recently had a baby, he looked surprised. Although I had last seen him less than a month before Malcolm's arrival, he had never noticed. Inured as I was to the
apprehensions with which other professors regarded the possibility of pregnancy in female students, Hirschman's cheerful insouciance and the genuine warmth with which he congratulated me made me want to hug him. At last someone seemed to recognize that a woman could exercise both her brain and her uterus at the same time.

During all the time that I was going to graduate school and embarking on motherhood, I was in a constant state of anxiety about my husband's career prospects. I nagged him constantly to write more and publish faster in order to enhance his chances for promotion in a department that put a heavy emphasis on scholarly output. But Bob, who preferred to let his ideas germinate at their own pace before committing them to paper, and who devoted as much care and time to the preparation of a lecture for his students as on research for his next journal article, felt that I was trying to impose on him priorities different from his own.

Having grown up in two households where emotions were quick to surface in shouts and arguments, it took me a while to realize that Bob's New England reserve was suppressing the tension and unhappiness created by my nagging. I, on the other hand, assumed that his lack of overt response meant that he didn't share my concerns, increasing my fears about the future. If he didn't get the promotion required for tenure, he would have to leave Princeton, and heaven knows where we would end up. Perhaps my father's fears about exile in some academic outpost, far from the world with which I was familiar and offering little or no professional opportunities for me, might come true.

As it turned out, Bob didn't get tenure at Princeton and had to start looking for a job somewhere else. Over the next few months, he received several job offers and decided to accept one at the University of Pittsburgh, whose ambitious new chancellor, backed by Mellon money, was determined to raise it from a largely commuter school to national status as a research university. My mother, who believed, along with the
New Yorker
magazine, that civilization stopped at the Hudson River, was appalled. She asked if I would come back to New York to buy my clothes. But I took comfort from the fact that we were going to a good-sized city with several universities, offering the possibility of interesting friends and decent opportunities for me.

One of the first things I discovered about my new hometown was that
it didn't deserve its bad rap. Like almost everyone else, I had an image of Pittsburgh as the city where coal-fired steel mills and home furnaces belched smoke that produced actual “darkness at noon” on winter days. Stories about executives going through two white shirts a day and housewives washing their window curtains every week were legion. My own memory of Pittsburgh, where my father and I had spent a night on the homeward leg of our cross-country car trip in 1946, was of a darkened sky and black smoke belching from the “dark satanic mills” that ringed the city's downtown.

By 1960, though, Pittsburgh had undergone the first of several transformations: a drastic cleanup of its polluted atmosphere. What emerged from the murk was a very livable city that converged on a compact downtown located at a point where two rivers, the Allegheny and Monongahela, meet to form the Ohio. Approached from the west, the first view of the city as one emerged from the Fort Pitt tunnel onto the Fort Pitt bridge was—and is—positively stunning: a city bordered by rivers, with high hills on one side and a downtown of landmark corporate headquarters, which became increasingly elegant as the building boom progressed, on the other.

By the time moving day came, I had started to look on the bright side: we were starting the next chapter of our lives in a new city, where no one knew me or my family. “Here's the first chance I've ever had to establish myself as my own person, on a blank slate rather than a template formed by other people's expectations,” I told myself. It was an exhilarating thought. As for my own next steps toward a career, as I commented years later, “I had this kind of innocent, sublime self-confidence that something would turn up.”
⁴

We had been in town only a few weeks when unexpected good fortune walked into our lives in the form of Josephine Pierce. Josephine was a divorced African American single mother of two school-age daughters, girls who called her faithfully every day when they got home from school. It seemed perfectly natural to both of us that she should take on the washing, ironing, and housecleaning, on top of taking full charge of first one and later two small children while Bob and I were at work—a set of duties that would require two or three different people today. She stayed with us for twenty-three years, even moving with us to California,
Washington, and Princeton, once her daughters were grown. By the time she retired our own children were adults and, sadly, she was in some ways the only child left, having suffered a series of small strokes that neither she nor we were aware of. In the days before widespread day care, I could never have achieved my twin goals of career and motherhood without such loyal assistance.

While I was still in the midst of finishing my dissertation, I met Benjamin Chinitz, a senior faculty member in the economics department at the University of Pittsburgh. Ben was teaching a course in econometrics at the time and asked me if I would be his teaching assistant. Although my knowledge of econometrics could have gone through the proverbial eye of the needle and left room for the thread, I saw the offer as an interesting challenge, as well as a potential learning experience, and said yes. By dint of some late nights poring over the textbook, I managed to stay a chapter ahead of the students and apparently did a good enough job to persuade Ben to offer me a much more ambitious assignment.

Ben was not only a professor of economics; he was also codirector of an ambitious multiyear study of the economy of the six-county Pittsburgh region, which was beset by a steady decline in employment in the steel industry, the traditional core of its economy. Money for the project was running short, and the academic economists who had been brought together in Pittsburgh to do the research were scattering back to their home institutions before the final volume of the study, a forecast of the region's economic future, had been written. Desperate to finish the project within their rapidly shrinking budget, Ben and his codirector, Ed Hoover, took a chance on an unknown with a PhD completed only a few months previously (in 1962). They asked me if I would be willing to pull together the pieces of the forecast, the work of several different researchers, into a coherent volume.

Never one to just say no to a new challenge (my stepfather Desmond once said I needed “a chastity belt for the mouth”), I took on what all three of us thought would be a fairly simple job of assembling and editing the material. Actually, the task was more complicated; I had to do most of the writing and even fill in some of the gaps in the research. I was driven to the edge of despair several times, but the book,
Region with a Future
, was completed and published in 1963.
⁵
The two directors of the
project were relieved and delighted that I had been able to pull it off. And I could say, only half jokingly, that I written one more book in the field of regional economics than I had read.

With that project completed, Ed Hoover and Ben Chinitz returned to full-time teaching at Pitt, and they took me along with them into my first academic job, as a part-time lecturer teaching the introductory course in international economics to evening students. Most of these people, all men and usually in midcareer, came to class after a full day's work, and it wasn't easy to hold their attention. The fact that I was female, and younger than any of them, made it all the harder to establish my classroom authority.

Just as the first class began, a tall, gray-haired man near the front said, “Excuse me, but are you the teacher?” My yes was followed by a pause. Then he blurted out, “Oh. You see, at U.S. Steel, we don't pay women to think.” Covered with confusion, he tried unsuccessfully to backtrack. I'm sure he blamed his mediocre grade in the course on that revealing gaffe, but I hadn't taken it personally. He had simply stated a fact; an accurate reflection of the culture that prevailed, not only at U.S. Steel, but at other big industrial firms as well. And Pittsburgh, then one of the country's main manufacturing centers, had cleaned up its air but not its social structure, represented not only by its attitude toward women but by the fact that it was a town divided into bosses and workers; there wasn't a group of middle-class professionals large enough to buffer the city's “us against them” mentality. Up until that moment, I had studied and worked in academic environments. When the man from U.S. Steel blurted out his surprise, the extent of male domination in the “real world” hit me full force.

With a toddler at home and now another child on the way, I found part-time teaching was just the right amount of professional involvement. But on the first day of the fall term in 1963, the senior professor in my field dropped dead of a heart attack in the departmental office. Desperate to fill the holes in the teaching schedule, and without knowing that I was pregnant, Ben, the department chairman, asked me to change my status from part-time lecturer to full-time assistant professor and take on the two courses now without a teacher. With some misgivings, but with the “I can tackle anything” enthusiasm of youth, I agreed.
It turned out that hiring the spouse of a faculty member into a full-time position violated the university's strict nepotism rules, but by the time the bureaucrats in the personnel department noticed I was settled into my courses, and no one wanted to do battle with the economics department to dislodge me.