Martian's Daughter: A Memoir (16 page)

The course I was most excited about was one on the interactions between international trade and economic development that I developed and taught with a friend and colleague, Jerry Wells, who had spent several years in Nigeria doing field research for his PhD. Jerry and I both were committed to the idea that being open to economic relationships with other countries was a distinct plus for countries trying to mount the ladder of economic development. Ours was a contrarian view; the theory of development popular at the time called for government dominance of economic activity, high import barriers, and an economy as self-sufficient as possible. We were ahead of the curve, but the mainstream began to move gradually in our direction. And we pulled at least some of our students along with us, although we didn't find out how successful we'd been till decades later. One of the most radical and anticapitalist of those students, who later became a distinguished professor and department chairman at Bryn Mawr, teaching courses in business, as well as economics, wrote me that “the seminar the two of you taught changed my life.”

While Bob and I were settling into our family and professional lives in Pittsburgh, all hell was breaking loose in the world around us. Two events in 1961 escalated the temperature of the Cold War with the Soviet Union: President Kennedy's failed invasion of Fidel Castro's Cuba through the Bay of Pigs; and the Soviets' construction of the Berlin Wall, which isolated the population in the eastern part of the city from their counterparts on the western side. The Cold War very nearly boiled over into a hot one the following year, when American ships blockaded Cuban ports in order to prevent the Russians from placing missiles with atomic warheads in that country, only sixty miles from US shores. I walked into Ed Hoover's office when we got the news, to ask him if he thought this meant the onset of atomic war. Ed, ever calm, was reassuring, but it was a couple of days before the nation was sure that the Soviets had backed down.

Worse was yet to come. I was sitting under a hair dryer on the Friday
before Thanksgiving 1963, heavily pregnant with our second child, when word came that President Kennedy had been shot. As our disbelief was gradually replaced with horrified acceptance, my colleagues and I wandered around the department offices in a daze, trying to figure out how to respond to a national tragedy far beyond our experience. At home, Bob and I struggled to explain to four-year-old Malcolm what had happened. He found the permanence of death a hard concept to absorb and, at one point, shouted triumphantly, “Mommy, Daddy, he isn't dead; I just saw him on TV.”

In the days that followed, Jack Ruby emerged from obscurity to shoot and kill John F. Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in full view of millions of Americans glued to their television sets. And, in La Jolla, California, my father's widow, my stepmother Klari, now remarried to a research physicist, fulfilled her father's legacy of suicide by walking into the Pacific Ocean to her death. Sadly, there could be no question as to her intentions. In ruling that her death was attributable to “suicide by drowning,” the Coroner's Office of San Diego County noted that the skirt of her elegant black cocktail dress had been rolled up to hold “approximately 15 pounds of wet sand.”
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Although her emotional demands had driven my father crazy throughout most of their marriage, Klari had turned into a dedicated caretaker, closely attuned to his needs, exhausting herself both physically and emotionally after he fell ill. I had hoped that in her marriage to the gentle, low-key Carl Eckart she would at last find the tranquility that had eluded her throughout her life. For a time, she thought she had. In one draft of her autobiography, she describes her life in California: “I have met and made friends with many new people, I also get to see many of my old pals, Carl works at his desk, I swim and loaf and, for the first time in my life, I have relaxed and stopped chasing rainbows.”
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I will never know what happened to move Klari from satisfaction to suicide. Whatever it was, her death revived my guilt at having unwittingly contributed to her deep-seated insecurity, by rejecting her efforts to serve as a stand-in for my mother during my teenage years. By the time Thanksgiving arrived, the pileup of tragedies made the idea of a day commemorating our blessings seem like a cruel irony.

True to her academic heritage, Laura Whitman was born during
Christmas vacation, on January 3, 1964. Her timing allowed me to finish the teaching term, despite my mother-in-law's admonitions against exposing myself to “the young people” in such a delicate condition—then a common view among the older generation. From the start, Laura was a placid and cheerful baby; a good thing since, thanks to her brother's vulnerability to childhood illnesses, the circumstances surrounding her arrival were anything but.

Just before Christmas, Malcolm had come down with chicken pox. My obstetrician told me, first, that my eighty-five-year-old grandmother, who was visiting for the holidays, might contract the disease in the form of painful shingles and, second, that if I hadn't had chicken pox and did contract it, the baby might actually be born with it, which meant I certainly wouldn't be allowed to deliver at the maternity hospital. Fortunately, I did have the disease in childhood, and Laura was born in Magee-Women's Hospital without incident.

On the day that she and I came home from the hospital, though, Malcolm developed scarlet fever. He wasn't dangerously ill, but it meant that an infant who was fed every six hours had to be awakened to take a preventive dose of penicillin every four, rendering her parents even more sleepless than usual. Malcolm topped off the plague-house syndrome by coming down with German measles when his sister was less than a month old. It was a mild illness but dangerous to the fetuses of pregnant women, and no vaccine was yet available, so I thought it might not be a bad idea for Laura to get it over with early in life. My mother-in-law was horrified at the idea, and, despite my efforts to expose her, Laura remained robustly healthy.

When I returned to teaching from maternity leave, the economics department had a new chairman. Mark Perlman was an economist with an impressively broad knowledge of history, literature, and philosophy, in addition to his own field. He was also a deeply religious Conservative Jew, who viewed the world through a moralistic lens without the narrow-mindedness that is so often associated with the word. The formality of his dress and manner of speech was leavened by the brightly colored bow ties he habitually wore and by sudden, surprising bursts of humor.

Mark was a wise and generous professional mentor to me, the first person who took seriously my goal of climbing the academic ladder, and
gave me practical advice on how to go about it. He asked me to spend a year as the department's associate chairman, handling all the applications for graduate admissions and financial aid, while he got his bearings in a new environment. In return, he promised to guide and encourage me through the steps required for promotion. He was as good as his word; within two years of his arrival I was promoted to associate professor and received the lifetime job security of tenure that went with it.

At a time when women were first entering this man's world, managing my relationships with male colleagues was not always so smooth. Over several years, I wrote a series of articles with a somewhat younger junior colleague. As coauthors, our skills were complementary: I was good at formulating ideas about how international monetary interactions worked, and he had the statistical skills needed to test how well these hypotheses fitted the facts. But after we'd been working together for a while, he started touching me “accidentally” and hinting that we should make our relationship more than professional. “Back off,” I growled. When he didn't take the hint, I told him that he would have to behave or our collaboration would stop. Our joint articles, which appeared in several leading economics journals, were an important part of the publications portfolio he needed to be promoted to tenure, so my threat had the desired effect. But this was neither the first nor the last time, beginning with my evasive action to keep my senior thesis adviser at Radcliffe at bay, that I had to use my wits to keep relationships with male colleagues from straying off the reservation.

As I was climbing the academic ladder at the University of Pittsburgh, Bob was moving upward a couple of rungs ahead of me. Recruited as an assistant professor in 1960, by 1967 he had become both a full professor and chairman of the English department, having published a well-received book on dramatic literature the preceding year. During the four-plus years of his chairmanship, he rejuvenated that department, recruiting a number of talented young PhDs from leading universities, many of whom became widely recognized scholars during their careers at Pitt.

In the second half of the 1960s, three developments together transformed American culture: the civil rights movement, the emergence of feminism in the form of a definable women's movement, and the mass protests against the escalating Vietnam War. The coalescence of these
three movements—which spurred a broader economic, social, and cultural radicalism in many professors and students—permanently altered the face of American college campuses and, ultimately, of the nation itself.

No one knows exactly how and when mass movements originate, but two events, both in 1963, were important markers. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr articulated the goals of the civil rights movement in his unforgettable “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered to some two hundred thousand demonstrators in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28. At about the same time, Betty Friedan's book
The Feminine Mystique
struck a chord with many American women as she described the frustrations and limitations of the housewifely role that postwar American culture defined as a return to normalcy. This consciousness-raising, together with the increasing availability of the Pill, which enabled women to make individual decisions about birth control and the connection between sex and motherhood, created a powerful launching pad for the developments that, over the succeeding decades, vastly broadened women's choices in shaping their own lives. And I, who had started out without role models for encouragement, gradually acquired more company in knocking down gender barriers and had to spend less time defending the path I had chosen.

While the impact of the women's movement built gradually, in an evolutionary and nonviolent way, the civil rights movement spurred powerful responses. The positive response was the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the brightest spot in the legacy of President Lyndon Johnson. The negative responses were both numerous and horrifying. They included the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi during the “freedom summer” of 1964; the brutality with which local police responded to the peaceful marches for civil rights in Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery, Alabama; and the Ku Klux Klan's assassination of one participant in the latter march, a white wife and mother from suburban Detroit named Viola Liuzzo, because she was riding in a car with a black man. And the mid-1960s were scarred by riots in the black ghettos of many large American cities that caused deaths, injuries, and widespread destruction of property. The worst one was in Detroit in 1967; after more than forty years, the city has still not recovered.

I blush now to admit that I never took part in the marches or other
public protests that marked these tradition-shattering developments. Although I was a trailblazer for feminist goals in the conduct of my own life and career, I never tried to advance feminists' political aims, or those of the civil rights movement, through public declarations or actions. In later years, I came to regret this passivity, wishing that I had spoken out more forcefully against the wrongs these movements were committed to righting. I came to recognize that being the mother of two small children (Viola Liuzzo had five), preoccupied with work and family, was not an adequate excuse.

It was years before I fully acknowledged how much the political and cultural changes stimulated by the women's movement had spurred my own professional advancement. And throughout my life I have exerted pressures for reform by working inside established institutions rather than protesting against their failings from the outside. I genuinely believe that both kinds of behavior are essential for change, but I can't deny that my desire to be liked rather than reviled, included rather than excluded, shaped my own choices.

There was no escaping, though, the impact of the Vietnam War and the escalating protests it engendered. American troops were first sent as combatants to Vietnam in the summer of 1965, and by 1966 teach-ins, sit-ins, and more violent forms of protest were erupting on college campuses all over the country. In many cases, protests against the war melded with black students' grievances. On my own undergraduate campus, a black Harvard student named Franklin Raines called for revolution from the steps of Widener Library, and at Bob's alma mater, Cornell University, a black student named Tom Jones, leader of a group occupying Willard Straight Hall, was photographed on the building's steps, a rifle over his shoulder and a cartridge belt filled with bullets across his chest. No one could have foreseen that, in their middle years, both these men would become pillars of the establishment as top executives of major financial institutions, nor that Frank Raines would chair the Harvard Board of Overseers.

The storm of violence at our leading universities became minor ripples when they reached the University of Pittsburgh. Pitt students, many of them the first in their families to go to college, were more interested in joining the establishment than tearing it down. But there were noticeable
reverberations in our university environment. I wasn't particularly shocked by the eruption of four-letter words in students' everyday conversation (my mother had been expert in the use of profanity, after all), but I was taken aback by the fact that they didn't seem to have any other vocabulary at all. There were also more serious pressures on the faculty. Male students had to maintain a certain grade-point average to avoid losing their student draft deferments, and more than one student informed me ominously that the C grade I had just given him could be signing his death warrant. Thus grade inflation was born, and, though I tried to resist it, I soon found myself giving more As and fewer Cs and Ds than ever before.