Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives - Couverture rigide

Chapter One
What is Ambition?

I wondered, before I came here, whether I was going to confess to you this secret I’ve had since I was seven. I haven’t even told my husband about it.” The woman across from me, a journalist in her forties, paused and looked at me intently, wondering whether she should reveal her secret. Sitting there under her worried gaze, I wondered where we were going. As a psychiatrist, I’m used to hearing the most improbable and even lurid of personal secrets. But this woman was not a patient. She was a friend of a friend, who had kindly agreed to let me interview her. It was actually the very first of a series of exploratory discussions that I had scheduled to start my research on ambition in women’s lives, and I already found myself in unfamiliar territory. How had my seemingly straightforward question about childhood goals elicited a long-hidden secret?

The journalist looked at me uncertainly but continued. “When I was about seven, I had a notebook at school, and I would write poems and stories and illustrate them. I was going to write and illustrate children’s books. They were clearly based on the books I loved. And I had this acronym that was like magic, like a secret pact with myself. I didn’t even tell my sisters its meaning. It was IWBF—I Will Be Famous.” She broke out into nervous laughter. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I told you. You must understand, I didn’t want to be recognized in the streets. My pact was tied up with writing and being recognized for it. I’m sure it was tied up with my father’s approval and the literary world he operated in.”

This was the long-withheld secret? Not sex, lies, or videotapes, but an odd incantation from childhood? It was the first of what were to be many lessons for me on how hidden and emotionally laden the subject of ambition is for women. I soon came to realize that although the articulate, educated group of women I interviewed could talk cogently and calmly about topics ranging from money to sex, when the sub- ject of ambition arose, the level of intensity and anxiety took a quantum leap.

It was hard to know what to make of the often long-winded, evasive, contradictory, and confused responses this subject elicited. A woman editor of a popular magazine vehemently denied that she was ambitious and produced an astounding string of euphemisms about pursuing “her personal best,” “self-realization and understanding,” and enlightenment, sounding more like a Zen master than an executive in the midst of the bustling, highly commercial magazine world. A choreographer who had recently started a career as a playwright gave me the following reply when asked about her ambitions: “I don’t have any ambition. Well, I’m interested in creativity and in my work. I’ve been working on a one-act play and a screenplay. I guess one could say, ‘That sounds ambitious,’ but the fact is, what I don’t want to do is promote myself. I do work.” A woman in her forties who had started but then left a fledgling business to be at home with her children said emphatically, “I’m just thrilled that I didn’t spend my twenties or thirties trying to grow my business and be a star in that world. I have a close friend who was also in a start-up, for a very hot product. They got a lot of attention. But she spent seven years at it, took too much cocaine, had an abortion, and by thirty-nine had no children or life or job.” Yet toward the end of the interview the same woman suddenly revealed her continuing fantasy of returning to a career and making a success of it. A young woman who works on math textbooks announced, before I so much as asked a question, that she felt troubled by her lack of ambition. “I think it’s all tied up with this business of goals. There needs to be some target out there. At work every year we have this development discussion, and we meet with our supervisors. And they ask, ‘What are your short- and long-term goals?’ I always put something down, but it’s nothing I feel passionate about, it’s usually some small project.” The absence of ambition seemed no less fraught than its presence.

The women I interviewed hated the word ambition when applied to their own lives. One woman executive began by stating, “That word is not one I’ve used much in my vocabulary. On previous occasions when asked whether I was ambitious, I would tend to say no. I would describe myself as purposeful.” For these women ambition necessarily implied egotism, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, or the manipulative use of others for one’s own ends. Despite the fact that women are currently more career-oriented than at any time in history—and often more clearly ambitious—there is something about the concept that makes them distinctly uncomfortable. These women’s denial of their own ambitiousness was particularly striking in contrast to the men I interviewed, who assumed that ambition was a necessary and desirable part of their lives. They often chided themselves for lacking sufficient amounts of it. Perhaps even more surprising, the very women who deplored ambition in reference to their own lives freely admitted to admiring it in men. If ambition was, by definition, self-serving and egotistical, why was it not only acceptable but desirable for men?

As I tried to sort through the diverse responses to my questions and to home in on the aspect of ambition that made women so uncomfortable, I realized that I needed to backtrack. I needed to understand what ambition consists of—for men and for women. But the more I tried to pin down its meaning, the blurrier it got. When I asked people to define ambition, nearly all of them, after a few attempts, finally resorted to examples: “Take Bill Gates . . .” There was something elusive about ambition. Everyone seemed intuitively to know what it was, but no one could articulate it.

In psychiatry, as in most branches of science, the study of a complex phenomenon often begins by tracing it to its earliest, simplest form. So I decided to review the childhood ambitions recalled by the women I had interviewed. Perhaps in this embryonic form I would find clues to its most basic elements. And indeed, compared to the wordy, ambivalent responses that these women had given about their current ambitions, their answers concerning childhood were direct and clear. They had a delightfully naïve and unapologetic sense of grandiosity and limit- less possibility. As a child, each of the women had pictured herself in an important role: a great American novelist, an Olympic figure skater, a famous actress, a president of the United States, a fashion designer, a rock star, an international diplomat. “My fantasies about what I wanted to be? I think they were very ordinary, like being a ballerina. I took dancing lessons for seven years. I think of those kinds of fantasies as being common. Or maybe I’d be an artist—being anything that I did well. I wanted to be the best. I thought everyone had those kinds of fantasies, but I haven’t really thought about this.” “When I was a kid, we had a summer home in rural Maryland and on the way there we’d see signs saying, ‘Impeach [Supreme Court Justice] Earl Warren.’ And my mother or one of my siblings would say, ‘One day that sign is going to say “Impeach Jenny Fenlow.” ’ Oh God, it’s hard to believe, but that’s what I thought I’d be, a Supreme Court justice.” “Oh, my ambitions? They were very pedestrian. I was going to be either a brilliant writer or an actress. I had a very specific picture of being an actress. I wanted to be Sarah Bernhardt; I mean, I was extremely ambitious. I wrote a musical when I was in eighth grade that was produced at school. When I look back on it, I think, I wrote that?”

In nearly all the childhood ambitions, two undisguised elements were joined together. One was a special skill: writing, dancing, acting, diplomacy. But the childhood ambitions recalled were not just about developing a talent or expertise. The images of future accomplishment virtually always included a large helping of attention in the form of an appreciative audience. In each picture of the future self, the woman- to-be was front and center; she was the star of her own story. Public recognition was either included explicitly or, more often, implied by the very nature of the endeavor chosen. Special talent was assumed. In part, it was this open celebration of their specialness that made their childhood ambitions seem so silly or even embarrassing to the women who recalled them, that made them laugh and then ask me nervously if I thought their ambitions were normal.

Looking through developmental studies of both boys and girls, I noticed that they virtually always identified the same two components of childhood ambition. There was a (at least theoretically) practicable plan that involved a real accomplishment requiring work and skill. And then there was an expectation of approval: fame, status, acclaim, praise, honor. Each ambition was a narrative about a wished-for future, and in each story the child projected him—or herself into an adult life as a productive, admired member of society.

Of the two aspects of ambition, or at least of childhood ambition, the first seemed nearly incontrovertible. Without an element of mastery, after all, a picture of the future is not an ambition; it’s simply wishful thinking. It’s about luck or fate—you are merely a passive recipi- ent of whatever fortune comes your way. You may desperately want to win the lottery, but that wish is not an ambition. Ambition requires an imagined future that can be worked toward by the development of skills and expertise.

Long ago the scientific community embraced the notion that there is a powerful and innate pleasure in mastery. Approximately half a century after Freud postulated his “drive theory” of motivation based on sex and aggression, researchers and theoreticians alike realized that a huge portion of behavior simply could not be explained in these terms. By the 1960s workers in the fields of animal behavior, child development, and even psychoanalysis accepted the existence of a powerful drive to explore, manipulate, and control the environment—in other words, to develop mastery.

Jean Piaget and other developmental psychologists who focused on children’s need to master both intellectual and motor tasks discovered that children would repeat a task over and over until they could predict and determine the outcome. Theorists such as Erik Erikson began to posit a human need to “be able to make things and make them well and even perfectly: this is what I call a sense of industry.” Researchers even turned their attention to “the addiction to bridge or solitaire, vices whose very existence depends upon the level of difficulty of the problem presented.” Robert White, at the time a Harvard professor of psychology and one of the seminal investigators of motivation, named this drive to mastery “effectance.” In describing such behavior he noted, “It is characteristic of this particular sort of activity that it is selective, directed, and persistent, and that instrumental acts will be learned for the sole reward of engaging in it.” Mastery has its own powerful, built-in motivational engine. And there is no evidence to date that the intensity of this motivation differs between girls and boys, women and men.

The delight with which children describe their ambitions derives in no small part from the pleasure they foresee in developing this mastery. Children, as well as adults, passionately engage in learning skills—a fact so obvious that at times its significance is overlooked. There are few people whose lives do not include multiple areas of mastery—at home, at work, at play. People who strive to improve their professional skills often greatly enjoy their evolving expertise. But just as often they work at perfecting their avocations. Think of the intensity with which people practice their golf or tennis strokes—hardly key survival skills—or pursue bird watching, heading out to the woods and fields at dawn.

In Frank Conroy’s classic memoir of his childhood, Stop-Time, he captures the sheer joy that children, like adults, take in mastery. The young Conroy becomes fascinated with the yo-yo and painstakingly works his way through a book of tricks, standing hour after hour practicing in the woods across from his house:

The greatest pleasure in yo-yoing was an abstract pleasure—watching the dramatization of simple physical laws, and realizing they would never fail if a trick was done correctly. . . . I remember the first time I did a particularly lovely trick. . . . My pleasure at that moment was as much from the beauty of the experiment as from pride. Snapping apart my hands I sent the yo-yo into the air above my head, bouncing it off nothing, back into my palm.

I practiced the yo-yo because it pleased me to do so.

Doing a thing well is an end in and of itself. The delight provided by the skill easily repays the effort of learning it.

The wish for mastery is undoubtedly a key component of ambition. But the pursuit of mastery virtually always requires a specific context: an evaluating, encouraging audience must be present for skills and talents to develop. Frank Conroy, in the same childhood scene, rushes off to show his new yo-yo expertise to his friends and to two particularly proficient older boys, Ramos and Ricardo. He seeks their acknowledgment of his ability. Like the young Conroy, we all need our efforts and accomplishments to be recognized. Without such earned affirmation, long-term learning and performance goals are rarely reached.

As the term is used here, recognition means being valued by others for qualities that we experience and value in ourselves; it involves appreciation by another person that feels accurate and meaningful to the recipient. Because recognition affirms a person’s individual experience or accomplishment, it is different from other forms of attention.

Attention can perhaps best be pictured on a graph. On one axis attention goes from positive to negative; on the other from personal to generic. If you rob a bank and are caught, you will likely receive attention that is both negative and highly specific to you personally. If you win your local bingo tournament, the attention will be positive but generic; no particular individual skill or quality was involved.

One area of the diagram would represent attention that is at once individualized and affirming. It is this combination that defines recognition. The attention is specific, accurate, and positive. It might be praise for a series of photographs you have displayed, for the furnishings of your home, or for a program you designed for your computer. It could be admiration expressed for work in the local environmental group, or recognition for being a steady friend or for a presentation at work. The affirmation elicited is particular to the person; most likely no one else would have done these things in exactly the same way

Attention received purely for an accepted, societal role such as being a minister, policeman, doctor, scholar, parent, or teacher is usually affirming but only moderately individualized. In my own life, for example, I receive a certain amount of recognition for being a psychiatrist. And indeed being a psychiatrist represents a personal accomplishment—I got through medical school and residency. However, it is also a role that I share with many others and that elicits a response that is, to that extent, positive but slightly impersonal. There are lots of psychiatrists out there. Recognition for belonging to a specific group can overlap with recognition that is highly individualized—as it might be if I were praised for my skills by one of my patients. Both types of recognition are central to the formulation of an ambition.

"Deeply engaging and terrifically readable. . . . Fels . . . digs into an impressive mound of data, from scientific research to movies, identifying prejudice and unconscious bias as she goes." —O, The Oprah Magazine

"Why is that women who can talk about anything find it so hard to talk about ambition? In this insightful study, Fels, a psychiatrist, argues that women fear--correctly--that seeking recognition will expose them to attacks on everything from their sexuality to their sanity" --The New Yorker

"For impassioned research and analysis, Anna Fels's book ranks with the great feminist classics of the 1970s." --Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickled and Dimed

"Bracing. . . . Fels's analysis of women's tortured relationship with ambition is nothing less than a reclamation" —Elle

“A brilliant, clear-eyed, and wonderfully readable discussion of the role of ambition in women’s lives–chock-full of valuable information and insights–a book that is not to be missed.” –Maggie Scarf, author of Intimate Partners: Patterns in Love and Marriage

“For men, reveling in praise is as natural as breathing, and the confidence that approval produces becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to further triumphs. Women, however, too often stuff their badges away in a drawer and, in doing so, sabotage the support that would spur them to achieve more success. Thus they cheat themselves in yet one more economy: the marketplace of accolades. Fels deserves credit for illuminating this dance of denial.” –BusinessWeek

“Remarkable . . . reframes the struggle for equality in a powerful way.” –Salon

“Fresh and original and has the qualities of a novel. As I read it, I recognized myself and many other women in its pages. This book is not only important but true.” –Jamaica Kincaid, author of My Brother

Necessary Dreams makes a provocative case for female ambition. It works as a feminist treatise, a study of human motivation and a how-to manual for revamping the too-often demoralizing American workplace.” –Austin American-Statesman

“Certain to trigger debate. . . . Timely, well-researched . . . practical and useful.” –Tucson Citizen

“This thoughtful and thought-provoking book will help talented women everywhere cross the last frontier–the mental barrier that prevents them from admitting their full ambition and embracing their success openly. Perhaps then it will be possible to build the right support systems for work and family, instead of expecting women to shoulder the burdens alone.” –Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School and author of Men and Women of the Corporation

“What distinguishes Fels’s book from other feminist laments is the case it makes for ambition as a basic human impulse. . . . Fels has done her research.” –Washington Post Book World

“How wonderful to discover a book that is so important, so original, and so beautifully composed. . . . Fels’s judgment is measured, but the cumulative effect is devastating. Necessary Dreams is a moving meditation on contemporary women and the obstacles they face.” –Peter D. Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac

“Career women–or anyone raising smart daughters to do big things–will find a lot within [this book’s] pages to think about and discuss.” –Publishers Weekly

“Fels shows that women, like men, have a drive to excel, and that for women, as for men, happiness is connected to achieving recognition for real accomplishments. Her suggestions are therapeutic gold, at once creative and realistic. Accessible, clear, conversational, this could just be the book that lets working women stop feeling guilty.” –Katha Pollitt, author of Antarctic Traveller

“There is more good sense about women's lives in Anna Fels's book than in anything I've ever read.” –Phyllis Rose, author of Parallel Lives