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Janet Lieberman - The Wisdom Trail: In the Footsteps of Remarkable Women

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Book:
The Wisdom Trail: In the Footsteps of Remarkable Women
Author:
Janet Lieberman / Julie Hungar
Publisher:
Penguin Publishing Group
Genre:
Books / Non-fiction
Year:
2009
Rating:
3 / 5
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An invitation to eavesdrop on a remarkable group of women who in their eighth and ninth decades reflect with candor and insight on the common threads in their well-lived lives

The Wisdom Trail follows the life trajectories of extraordinary women, now in their seventies and eighties, who share to a remarkable extent a set of qualities that produced their successful lives. The vital women whose voices are captured in this book look back with well-earned perspective on the crises and opportunities, the decisions and accidents that marked their varied but ultimately satisfying paths.

In listening to the lively and candid recollections of these women, Janet Lieberman and Julie Hungar offer stories that have value for women and men alike. From the heyday of Good Housekeeping-the era of the silent majority-to World War II, when the absence of men at home set a new measure of independence for women, through the sexual revolution and the civil rights and womens movements, these women have accumulated powerful stories that address the essential facets of womens lives: family, work, and love. As Lieberman and Hungar lead readers along The Wisdom Trail, they identify a set of characteristics these women share that has relevance for men and women of all generations, and which make them worth pondering and reflecting on today. Flexible pragmatism gave them the ability to maneuver their way around constraints that at the time appeared insurmountable. Deep personal courage enabled them to leap into risky personal career decisions and face down bias at home and in the workplace. All of them displayed the love and care to form and nourish deeply satisfying relationships. Their capstone quality was a lifetime commitment to serving the community and the world beyond.

The Wisdom Trail is a journey into a world where women share their triumphs and their tragedies with equal parts generosity and instruction. It is also an examination of the arc of American life-from hardship to boon years-and the effect that has had on the character of women and their families. The value of the lessons contained in The Wisdom Trail is perhaps never more useful than it is today as women continue to struggle with balancing work and home and all Americans face the challenge of doing more with less.

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Table of Contents

To the men in my life those whom I have loved and lost my son Gary who was - photo 2

To the men in my life: those whom I have loved and lost: my son Gary, who was an inspiration for this book and a solid theorist on social mobility, and my husband, Jerry, whose affection and love were all-encompassing: and to my consistently and constantly loving family: my son Randy, who thinks his mom is the best and is remarkable in his interest and devotion; to my daughter-in-law, Marilyn, who is a paragon and an inspiration, and who was supportive and understanding in my effort. To my grandchildren: Sandy, whose keen intelligence, gentle support, profound creativity and caring love are boundless; to Rebecca, who is tireless in her devotion, gifted in her insight, and remarkably versatile in her talents, and to Jack, who cares deeply for humanity, helped inspire the theme, was always encouraging, and contributed significantly to the concept.

My family is my inspiration and their participation is what makes it all worthwhile.

JANET LIEBERMAN

For Gordon

JULIE HUNGAR

WOMEN OF THE WISDOM TRAIL

Introduction

The Wisdom Trail runs through the stories of the women who have lived along the fault line between two ways of defining the roles of women in the family and the wider world. Traditionally, womens principal role consisted of being a dutiful wife, the keeper of hearth and home, and the bearer and nurturer of children. Today their role includes an expectation that they will also have careers in occupations once open only to men. The women of the Wisdom Trail are now in their seventies and eighties. They first experienced the upheaval of womens roles in the twentieth century and made the transition into the new place available for women. Now, in the twenty-first, they look back and recount the events and influences, the choices and accidents that marked the paths that ultimately led to gratification and serenity.

The women we interviewed for this book are not the only ones to reach this fortunate stage. They are a sampling of the many women who have continued to have active, satisfying, useful lives far beyond the age we used to call old. They share a commitment to serving society, and they have succeeded in doing that by taking advantage of opportunities, persevering in the face of obstacles, and meeting challenges resolutely, while nurturing gratifying connections with family and friends. They are outspoken, gutsy, and undeterred by restrictive conventions. Their wisdom lies in the choices they made as the world around them changed, and in the attributes that led them to make those choices.

The women whose travels we follow have lived through extraordinary times, encompassing two different sets of expectations for women. The twists and turns of the twentieth century produced compromises and opportunities that coincided with the personal goals of the Wisdom Trail women. By seizing the possibilities inherent in prospects that appeared limited, they found growth. Their wisdom is the product of lifetimes spent embracing the challenges of their changing roles with enthusiasm.

They do not see themselves as exceptional. They were not conscious of charting a remarkable course as they did it. The Wisdom Trail is a road mapped in retrospect. The choices and characteristics that make their lives valuable as examples become apparent only when we listen to them reminisce. Like everyone in their generation, they have been shaped and buffeted by historical events, gone through the same life stages, and faced the same decisions. Yet the women of the Wisdom Trail chose to rise to the challenges, not just watch the world go by. Born and raised in a society with a definite idea of a womans role, they were able to adapt to the changed social landscape as that role became unclear. They were ahead of the next wave, or primed to catch it as it came upon them. Most did not have a vision of what they would do, but they had an internal drive to move out of the old pattern. They seized or created opportunities to expand their lives while improving life for others. Ultimately, they left their communities, and often the wider world, a better place, and that has enriched their own lives.

For most of them, though, achievement came after their early years and the old conventions. Girls growing up during the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II were raised with a clear, if limited, set of expectations: They would grow up to be wives and mothers, then caretakers of aging parents. Perhaps they would work before marriage in an office or a shop; they might aspire to a college education and become a schoolteacher or a nurse. The main reason for sending a girl to college at that time, though, was to find a husband, and she didnt need more than two years to do that.

This was the life pattern for most American women. Throughout our history there were a few brave pioneers who defied the conventions to become artists or writers or to enter medical or law school. There were the heroines of the womens suffrage movement, which finally bore fruit in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote. Our womens mothers lived through the Jazz Age, when some of societys rules relaxed, but things tightened up again during the Depression.

Then World War II turned life upside down. We all know the story: Women, single and married, were needed in the workplace, even in jobs that had always been done by men, because there werent enough men at home. Some postponed having children because their husbands were at war; others postponed marrying. Succeeding in such jobs brought a new sense of independence. Then, in the great rush to get back to normal after the war, a womans place was back in the house, raising children and presiding over a home for the sake of her husbands career. And thats what women did; for evidence, we need look no further than the seventy-seven million baby boomers born starting in 1946 and over the next two decades. But the genie of independence had been let out of the bottle.

The women of the Wisdom Trail were born in the 1920s and 1930s, and had been nurtured on the old assumptions. Most of them married and had baby boom children. But as their children went off to school, they began to break the mold. A few of them had started careers before that; more often, the first major move outside their role as homemaker was into volunteer work. When they found they could get things done and liked what they were accomplishing, they branched out. From running a music education program as a volunteer, they might get a job on the symphony staff; from working on political campaigns, they might decide to run for office themselves.

Then the sixties blew in, and the stirring of change grew into a wind. Already ahead of their time, our women took hold of new opportunities and raised their daughters to believe that they could do and be whatever they wanted. Many of the women of the Wisdom Trailperhaps another aspect of their wisdommarried men who supported their aspirations and encouraged their daughters as well. The women seldom had a plan, but they were opportunists who seized openings as they appeared.

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