My father did not graduate from college. When he was in high school he thought about
becoming an engineer, but was discouraged by his guidance counselor who told him that
Jews did not become engineers. He joined the Navy instead and served there during World
War II. After the war, he married my mother and opened a gas station with my grandfather.
He and my grandfather ran the gas station for a few years, but it never generated enough
money. He opened another station and bought a truck and worked as a truck driver for
about 10 years. Later, he went to work for another company and hated not being his own
boss. He opened a bar, and finally a bar and a restaurant.
My mother grew up in a working-class town north of Boston. Her parents divorced and
my grandmother married a man who later became a lawyer. This made it possible for my
mother to attend art school for 2 years. She was fixed up with my father after the war. They
dated for a short period of time and then were married. My mother never worked outside of
the home as I was growing up.
When I was a child, there were different gender expectations for my brother and myself,
and this made me angry. I was a tomboy and I always wanted the cultural advantages that
men received, the greater freedom of choice and power. I did not fit into the traditional “girl”
stereotype. I played sports. I played on the street with the boys. I loved tree houses and
snow forts. I preferred Erector sets to dolls.
Acting like a tomboy gave me some male privilege, but never enough. For example, my
brother could go with my father on truck-driving trips. When I asked to go, I was told it was
“no place for a girl.” My father and I were close, but I think he felt that he needed to contain
me because the qualities he admired were just for boys. This was especially true when I
started to enter adolescence.
I remember one incident when I was in either the third or fourth grade that taught me a
lot about gender role expectations in school. In the wintertime my mother made me wear
corduroy pants under my skirt so that I would be warm. The skirt looked ridiculous to me so
I would take it off and stuff it in a milk box when I left the house. When I returned home, I
would take it out and put it on again. My problem was in school, where the teachers and chil-
dren made fun of me because girls were not supposed to wear pants. The teachers called me
a boy and tried to pressure me into wearing a skirt. They wanted me to act like a little girl
and I had to be punished for crossing gender boundaries.
One of the most painful school experiences for me was being held back in first grade. My
birthday was in November, so at first I was one of the younger children. Half way through
the school year my teacher called my parents and told them that I could not read yet and
did not know my numbers. She complained that I played all the time, did not listen, and was
always making trouble. Later she told my parents that I was not developmentally ready for
the second grade and that I needed to be retained for a year.
Looking back, I am not sure whether I was held over because of my academic perform-
ance or because I was a tomboy and did not fit the image of appropriate behavior for a girl.
A good deal of what school is about is learning to conform and I did not pay enough atten-
tion to the teacher’s expectations for female first graders. Boys, however, were given extra
space. My brother had the same problems as I did in school, but they did not keep him back.
As a result of being kept back in first grade, my sense of who I was in the world was
changed. In my second go around in first grade, my classmates were younger and I felt old,
big, and dumb. The other children did not make fun of me overtly, but the issue of age was al-
ways important. Children always ask each other, “How old are you?” I would have to “come
out” about my age and they would think, “She’s been left back, she must be dumb.” Since then,
I have always felt insecure about my intelligence. It has been a demon my entire life. I think
that part of the reason I pursued a Ph.D. was to help beat that demon into the ground.
SUPPORT 227