A number of years ago, midwife-Ann (then psychology-masters-student Ann) passed me a book called Smart Girls, Gifted Women by a research psychologist named Barbara Kerr. It was published in 1986 and has just had a 20 year update. I'll be giving it to some of you for Christmas.
The rest of you, my undeniably brilliant female friends ... if you ever wondered why you weren't special when everyone said you tested so bright, if you ever felt like someone was going to discover your dirty little secret that you're just not that smart, if you ever wanted to know what happened to you that made you get straight As and feel incapable anyway the answers are in here. Every single reader of this blog who is my actual personal acquaintance needs their nose rubbed in this because I don't have any friends who are not, in their own ways stunningly brilliant. And I would go to some great lengths to beat you all over the head with it.
Some of you are Ivy educated. Some of you are multi-degreed. Some of you are neither. Almost all of you are multi-potentialled and could have done more than one thing well if you'd chosen to. Several of you have already done more than one thing well and are looking at third careers not first or second. I see lots of us stepping back and standing down our own intellectual lives in the name of family or in the name of "quality of life" and calling it balance. I call bullshit on us all. There is a big difference between wanting to work less hours and parking our intellectual aspirations at the door. There is a HUGE difference between supporting our mates' careers and destroying our own.
I've been contemplating what my daughters need and grappling with my own intellectual hopes for the next decade or two. I remind myself again and again of the lessons other brilliant women friends have taught me -- being strong and feeling strong are not the same thing. With an idiotic sense of feebleness and self doubt and over-caution all folded in on the inside, I am still a giant. Watch me walk around the world 10 miles at a step and make it look effortless.
Posted by karen at December 18, 2005 03:54 PM