"I really came out of high school believing I wasn't bright enough to be a doctor," Ms. Miers told The Dallas Morning News in 1991. "Career days at high school, you just got no encouragement.Maybe you younger people today have trouble getting your mind around that, but, trust me, women growing up in the 50s and 60s were not encouraged to take on careers. I graduated at the top of my high school class in 1969 and yet no teacher ever encouraged me to pursue a career of any kind. I believed law and medicine were out of my reach, meant for a completely different sort of person. I remember meeting a female law student when I was in college -- that is, art school -- and thinking of her as incredibly strange and wondering how she got the idea that she could go to law school. It wasn't until I was four years beyond college that I formed the thought that I could have gone to law school. And, by the way, in art school, the male students were treated as if they were the ones to be taken seriously, though I must say one art teacher gave me a serious piece of economic advice: If I was moving to NYC, I would need a "sugar daddy" and he had some phone numbers to share.
How did Miers get the idea to go to law school? She was impressed by the lawyer who dealt with her family's financial affairs after her father had a stroke.
Also:
Miers goes out on the town with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman.
The NYT choose a fabulous photo of Harriet Miers to illustrate its article.
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20 comments:
So when did you go to law school?
Thank you for being positive about the choice. None of us knows much about her and it's very annoying to me that most stories basically equate unknown with bad. Greta Van Sustern, to her credit, lauded the choice of a non-judge (i.e. someone not in the same mold of all the rest). I love the idea of all these non-starry women achieving high status. Thanks again.
Bearing: From 1978 to 1981.
The more we learn about Miers, the more Miers is an interesting choice. One can't help wondering, though, how an attorney with such an impressive resume and client list, after almost a lifetime at the bar, has such a tiny net worth ($566,000).
I had to think about this a bit, but Ann is right. I graduated a year ahead of her, and some of the women were going to graduate school, and, starting to go to medical school, but I can't think of any who went to law school. I know 3 female MDs her age, but no JDs, despite being an attorney.
But then, I compare this to today, and things are so different. Half both of those schools are now female.
It is not that it didn't happen before, it was just rare. Very rare. Justices O'Conner and Ginsburg are older than Meirs. And one of the partners in my brother's firm, who is probably in his early 60s now was taught patent law by his grandmother. Indeed, when I was in Business School, I didn't want to burst the bubble of one of my profs who thought she was breaking into this male bastion - because my grandmother had taught in the school 40 years before.
Let me add that, at least when I was an undergraduate, a majority of the kids in school were happy with this situation.
I think that the reason that I ultimately didn't end up marrying the girl I went with through college was that, despite tinkering with liberation, she really expected it to be her husband who went on and got the graduate degree - because that is precisely what happened to her. She and the guy she did marry graduated 1-2 in her department, but he was the one to get the PhD, despite her being the one admitted to top tier schools.
When I was in school, the guys pretty much knew we needed to get graduate degrees - usually professional degrees (MD, JD, MBA). And we all did. Most of the women still seemed fixated on marriage.
I didn't figure it out until later, as they women were starting to talk the good talk, but weren't really serious about it yet.
I, too, was an art major, largely because we didn't associate college with future employment. There was no culture of professional women, much less professional women with a family life. Also got the sugar daddy advice.
I worked for lawyers part time, and my dear boss took me to a bar luncheon in the '70s with guest speaker Gloria Steinem. She asked all the women lawyers to raise their hands. Two. Asked for male lawyers, all the rest. She asked all the women secretaries. A sea of hands. Male secretaries, none. The room was buzzing. "That's why I do this," she said.
Still, a professional life is not for everybody and is not an unmitigated good. What we did not have that women have now is the choice to decide for ourselves.
Ann -
My wife, a few years younger than you I gather, says the same thing: she was real smart (I think she's telling truth about that) but no guidance counselor encouraged her to make the choice she made, which was to leave the small town 40 miles south of Madison, travel to the U and go to actual college, rather than secretarial school or something.
Yet I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and I always wondered with some doubt if the girls in my class experienced the same thing. I can remember quite a few girls who were real smart and acted on it.
So what kind of place did you grow up, I wonder. Was there a rural-suburban-urban divide? Is there still? And when girls attack, is it defensive or predatory?
slocum-
Oh please. Did society corral you into a professional degree and career? I am as upset as the next guy that life requires me to work - quite hard, and on a regular basis, no less(!) But no one made me do it.
We can marry rich, wait tables, mix concrete, become porn stars...who doesn't have to rustle up a plan for success and/or survival at various points n their lives?
...what anselm said!
Just to throw in here to take a little heat off anslem - I don't think it's totally ridiculous to maintain that if you kind of cock your head and squint a little, it's possible to perceive women these days as having more choices than men. That is, I think it's pretty obvious that women choosing a career rather than focusing on family face way less "What's up with that?!" reaction than an actual stay-at-home guy.
State it another way: in the realm of informal social expectations, in this context, the strongest of all has always been and continues to be that men will have a career. If you perceive not having a career and having a career as equally valuable and worthwhile decisions, that doesn't automatically equate to freedom. (Give, of course, that we're all free to do whatever the hell we want.)
Slocum,
Even accepting your observations as applicable to society at large, correlation is not causation. Each of those women who are living "the professional lifestyle" without having gotten the degree, etc., worked it out on their own and with a specific partner.
Any man is free to do the same. It's dangerous to extrapolate generalities on a single group from societal tendencies, even strong ones. Doing so invites bright ideas about legislating (or otherwise forcing) what is ultimately a failure of individualism away.
Re Miers,
The bipartisan objections are clearly unrelated to her sex. The fact that critics generally don't feel the need to hedge for the sake of P.C. shows how weak of a nominee she is.
I hope it also proves not only that women have gained some equality of perception as wa-mom says, but also that the P.C. that has been bluntly wielded as an enforcement mechanism is fading from use.
I just realized I was referring to the comments of "slocum," not "anselm." And what's sad is, I was actually trying to be careful about that.
I understand you're limiting your point to a social observation. But then that's all it is. I suspect that the main reason men don't play the stay at home role is because they don't want to.
Many of them may not want to because of internal expectations, or from having never considered the option. If a man wants to stay at home, is willing to give up the alternatives, including a professional career, I think he can find a partner with whom he can work this out.
The difference from women is that a man won't end up there by default. All that is required is desire.
Thus, if your observation is just an observation, so be it. If it is a complaint, I take issue with it.
Slocum,
What I said was a woman did not have a choice if she wanted a professional career--and it was legal to discriminate: there was no law to stop people from denying me loans without a man's signature or refusing my job application for "help wanted male" jobs. When I applied to law school, they asked me if I was planning on getting married and having babies soon. I chose not to go to law school because I didn't want to put in the time for something I didn't really want to do, but I always worked, as most women do. My career, though, was not my main focus in life.
Men have always had the option to go to law school or be a mechanic. Your resentment of the women in your neighborhood is palpable, but you can't blame them for the choices of adult men.
Slocum, with all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about.
Of course there were exceptional women who were professionals before, oh, 1968, and if you were lucky enough to have one as a mother, you might have been able to conceive of yourself that way. But -- I totally resonate with Ann's saying this, I graduated from college 2 years before she did -- in the culture at large there was little encouragement, little precedent, and really, much mockery. If you had professional ambitions or intellectual aspirations it cut against you both ways: it damaged your datability, as intelligence was regarded as presumptuous, aggressive, and unattractive (a guy actually said to me, "I like airline stewardesses because they don't think"), but it also was by definition second-rate. You could aspire, but you weren't equipped to achieve the heights a man could reach. It was so very Freudian. (And, of course, the notion of female inferiority became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as we all had so little confidence.)
To this day I cannot hear some male talking head on TV say "the judge, the astronaut, the surgeon, he or she" without a thrill of vindication that it is impossible for a younger woman (much less a man) to comprehend. I'll never get over it.
My "Slocum, you don't know what you're talking about" was in reference to his first comment at the top of this thread. To give Slocum his props he's right about the male side of that. You did not have the option to be supported by someone else's work. And to the extent that you do now, it's still an uneasy option.
Thanks, Somross. Your comment for some reason reminded me of how I was not just not encouraged, but actively discouraged. I remember one teacher saying to me, weirdly, "I'd like to keep you in a cage." This was a reaction to some comment I made of the sort that I now realize is the sort of thing that would today cause delight and make someone perhaps exclaim "brilliant!" Her point to the extent that she explained it seemed to be that it would be fun to keep me around to say something like that once in a while for her amusement, similar to having a canary in a cage to sing. This was just one of many disturbing signals I received from teachers that I needed to be somebody else.
From an NYTBR review of a memoir by climber Arlene Blum, a sentence that well describes the attitude toward women and "altitude" of all kinds back in the '50s and '60s:
"As one climber said when asked by Blum to defend his assertion that there are no real women climbers: 'It means that women either aren't good climbers or they aren't real women.'"
This is what those of us experienced who came of age 40 years ago. But Slocum is right: a certain politically-correct overcompensation has set in, even if it remains superficial. Many more males still reach the heights (and one can argue about why: many women have more divided motivations), but girls and women are better at playing the school game: better with words, better at sitting still. This also leads back into another question discussed here recently: whether all this loving cultivation is squandered on girls if they're going to play at work for a few years and then become full-time mothers.
But understand why we d'un certain age see things the way we do. We were subjected to a real, profound, and very pervasive discrimination, that not only denied us opportunities but denied our capacities. It's almost as if women had to prove that canard wrong, through a generation of ferocious careerism, before they could go back and reconsider the value of the other side of their natures.
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