New Set of Priorities for the Career Woman

Sixteen years have passed since the attention heaped on Matina Horner’s “fear of success” theory--that young women’s fear of sacrificing their femininity prevented them from pursuing goals consistent with their talents--helped catapult her at 32 from an assistant professorship at Harvard University into the president’s chair at Radcliffe College.

Today, women have opened most professional doors and walked confidently through. But guilt, exhaustion and career frustration are leading women to “requisition” priorities, said Horner last week in an interview at the Claremont University Center and Graduate School. Horner, a psychologist and mother of three, was at the school to receive an honorary degree and participate in a forum on “Power: Ambivalence, Ambiguities, Alternatives.”

Horner recalled the early ‘70s at Radcliffe, when graduating women were so excited about the opportunities newly available to them that they were quite ready to sacrifice personal needs such as marriage and children. “In many ways,” she said, “they did not wish to be reminded that they were women.”

By the late ‘70s, women undergraduates were getting feedback from those who had gone before them, hearing the downside of trying to have it all. Still, Horner said, if they talked about marriage “they’d whisper it . . . you were somehow letting down the women’s movement or the college or societal expectations.”

Striving for a Balance

What she observes today is young women’s determination to create a better balance between their personal and professional lives. She suggests three contributing factors: the frustration of not advancing in the workplace, “the impossibility of having to carry the burden” at work and at home, and what they perceive as not having “the luxury of making a normal kind of mistake” professionally because they are women.

The latter perception, she said, has resulted in less risk-taking on the job, and thus less creativity and heightened feelings of frustration.

At Radcliffe, which remains an independent women’s college although integrated with adjacent Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., students today “don’t want to be identified as feminists,” Horner said, “yet they’re committed to feminist issues.”

One reason for this reluctance, she said, is the “backsliding” of the women’s movement during eight years of a conservative administration. And the frustrations of other women, she said, have led to some re-emerging interest in the idea of free choice--which may not include a career.

But Horner does not predict any mass movement by women back to home and hearth. The evidence suggests, she said, that women who are working are not only “the most guilty and the most exhausted,” but, in general, are the happiest and have the most self-esteem.

“I don’t think they have that option economically. The luxury of sending women back home is just not there.”

Horner has announced her intention to step down as president of Radcliffe in June, 1989, to devote herself full time to the issue of social change and its consequences. “I have not made a specific commitment,” she said, noting she may opt for academic research, a post in the public sector or in an agency that allocates resources for social change.

Her concerns extend far beyond the concerns of the few women who are privileged to have a Radcliffe education.

She speaks of society’s need to tackle “the family dilemma,” to address the needs of men and women who are working parents and may also be “having to deal with aging parents at the same time they’re dealing with infants.”

Now in the planning stage is a Radcliffe study, “Women: Toward the 21st Century,” which will, in part, redefine male and female rights and responsibilities, such as the no longer viable concept of man as the provider, woman as the nurturer and caretaker--as well as the rights and responsibilities of society and its institutions.

Horner said her dominant concern is “the problems faced by America’s human infrastructure,” which includes a large population of minority women and children living in poverty and without access to health care or education.

“If this is not attended to,” she said, “America’s competitiveness does not have a prayer.”

Two Emerging Patterns

She spoke of two clearly emerging demographic patterns--the aging, educated white population that is slow to reproduce and a population that is “poor, less well-educated (and) reproducing itself at enormous rates.”

The latter population needs programs that cost money, such as nutrition education for teen-age mothers, Horner said (one idea she mentioned was a cigarette tax, which could discourage teen smoking and raise money to combat AIDS and illiteracy). But, she added, “simply throwing money at things isn’t enough.”

The key is prevention, she said, and that starts with assuring participation in society by a broader slice of the population. One answer, she suggested, might be “innovative retraining of people who have been cut out” of the system.

Education is the principal route to self-determination, and it is “suicidal” for America to have a school dropout rate of 25% and a 26% illiteracy rate among its high school graduates, Horner said.

There are no easy answers for the drug problem, she acknowledged: She does not know how to convince a teen-ager that getting a good education is better “than making $2,000 a day selling coke.”

In a historical “blink,” perhaps 15 or 20 years, Horner said, the concept of men versus women, employers versus employees, race versus race, advanced country versus emerging country--the time-honored idea of competition--has begun giving way to the concept of cooperation.

It is a necessary and healthy change, Horner said, a change from dependent-independent relationships to interdependent relationships. But, she added, “We don’t know the rules of the game” yet or “how you play the game and feel good about yourself. I think it’s one of our big challenges.”

As for women and power, Horner said, “America has been incredibly successful in keeping the majority of its population from positions of leadership.” (In her remarks at the Claremont forum, she noted that only 107 women and 10,000 men have served in the House of Representatives, 15 women and 1,140 men in the U.S. Senate).

She suggested that society is hung up on the first-woman-who syndrome, readily and erroneously assuming that such breakthroughs represent true parity.

Horner is concerned, too, that women have abandoned traditional “women’s jobs” such as nursing (last year, for the first time, more women entered medical school than nursing) because these jobs offered little respect, low pay--and because the women’s movement has convinced women they don’t want to be “just a nurse, just a teacher.”

The answer, rather, Horner said, is to upgrade those jobs, to give them dignity, additional responsibilities and salaries that are commensurate.

She points, too, to the phenomenon of women who are changing professions, disappointed and disillusioned with their chosen fields and with a workplace in which “when a woman talks, her ideas tend to be invisible.” In some fields, such as medicine and science, she said, women have encountered an “inability to challenge some assumptions that men have about the ability of women.”

The greatest frustration is among women who have worked their way up in law firms to partnerships, Horner said. “Many had to stick to prove to themselves and others they could do it,” she noted, but now the number abandoning law for fields such as landscape design “has just boomed.”

“I don’t think hard work is what women are moving away from,” Horner said. “I think it’s much more the climate of the work environment” and their frustration in getting their voices--different voices--heard.

As women, “I think we’ve come a long way,” she said, but “our behavior has changed more quickly than our capacity to change attitudes.”

Women, she said, must hang in there until society stops ignoring their needs and functioning under the “naive assumption that everything is generic.”