was, broke the whip in her face. Corporal punishment was common in those days, both at home and in school. The military ethos was powerful. We marched around the house singing the anthems of each branch of the armed forces. It all seemed like good fun at the time. Little did we realize that, when the wars of our generation would come, we would find ourselves on opposite sides of the barricades.
The idea of masculinity was inextricably tied up with military combat. Any man who had not done military service was a dubious character, and even those who had been in the military but not engaged in combat seemed vaguely suspect. Each of my brothers would come to terms with this in his own way, but they were all shaped by it. Whatever his other children’s achievements, I believe that the military service of my two brothers meant most to my father, certainly more than my degrees and publications. He also felt a special bond with his cousin Jim Thomas, who had been a prisoner of war. Jim was one of the quietest men I ever met. I sensed that he was inarticulately damaged by the experience, and he later had what was mysteriously called a “nervous breakdown.” But men did not talk much about such matters. It was only decades later that a public discourse began about the devastating mental impact of military service and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The idea of femininity was similarly constricted. The only women in the world of my youth were housewife-mothers and teacher-nuns and shop assistant-maiden aunts. The one thing I knew for sure was that I was not going to be a housewife-mother, not least because, as the oldest in a large family, I was under constant pressure to be just that, even while still a child myself. Any book I wanted to read was preempted by a seemingly never-ending list of domestic tasks. It was assumed that no one chose to be a shop-assistant-maiden-aunt, but it happened because some unlucky women were “left on the shelf.” I thus intended to be a teacher-nun, aiming toward something larger and higher than the small domesticated lives of other women. When my mother advised me never to let a man think I was more intelligent than he was, I dismissed her words with disdain. As the years went on, I had less and less respect for women like my mother, particularly housewives. I had more and more respect for men and actively sought their company and respect.
There was a tension for me between being intellectual and being feminine. It caused me to develop in a one-sided way. I grew confident intellectually, but not sexually. Many girls of my time developed in the opposite direction, but it was still one-sided. That most girls no longer face such caricatures and choices represents one of the great advances in human history. Although even as a child I increasingly felt the existing sexual division of labor was problematic, I could not yet articulate a critique. There was no trace of feminism in my life-world at that time. The male of the species was perceived as rational, the female emotional. I found it hard to think of rationality as opposed to emotion, since they seemed to flow through me as one. The male was destined to inhabit the world of the political, the scientific, the economic, while the female was confined to the domestic realm. I could not accept it, but without a critique of it, all I could do was to feel increasingly uneasy with being female and sometimes wish that I had been born male. At the same time, I was a heterosexual female attracted to the male of the species in the conventional way. Not that I understood much about sexuality of any kind. I’d heard vague suggestions that some men were a bit effeminate and some women a bit butch, but the idea that people of the same gender had sex with each other was not a part of the picture.
Sometime, starting in second grade, I became uneasy, no longer so blissfully happy, no longer so at one with it all around me. I can’t pin it to any one thing. It was a gentle dawning of critical consciousness, I suppose, although I didn’t yet have much of a critique. I no longer took my parents and teachers to be founts of wisdom. My pre-feminist fretfulness about gender was part of it, but it was more than that. As the fifties progressed, I felt like a “rebel without a cause.” Like others of my generation, I saw James Dean as an icon of something struggling for expression. We went mad for Mad magazine and rallied to the rhythms of rock and roll. My parents had 78 rpm records of Tommy Dorsey, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra. That was their idea of music. My first record was a 45 rpm of Elvis Presley singing “Hound Dog” on one side and “Don’t Be Cruel” on the other. In my home, as in homes all over the country, my parents denounced that “jungle music.” The generation gap had opened.
I found adolescence excruciating. I don’t guess it was easy for anyone, but it seemed that some were sailing through it by comparison. Along with my peers, I developed an attraction to the opposite sex, but it ran according to script only for those at the top of the cruel and crude pubescent hierarchy of the popular and cute. At parish dances, where girls were grouped on one side and boys on the other, many of us on both sides watched and languished as the popular ones took the floor. How painful it was standing there in our carefully crafted curls and crinoline skirts and high heels before anyone asked us to dance. It was even worse at unchaperoned dances that turned into “make-out parties.” The popular kids kissed and the rest of us pretended that we preferred to talk and to dance. Games like Spin the Bottle and Post Office were agonizingly awkward. My first crush came at the age of ten, when a new boy arrived in school. I was constantly aware of his presence, blushed when his name was mentioned, and recalled every scrap of casual conversation between us. When our mothers happened to meet at church, it turned out they knew each other and were second cousins, making us third cousins. Thereafter he addressed me as “Cuz,” which killed our one-sided romance.
Sexuality was a mysterious force and I did not come to terms with it easily. For multiple reasons—from my early sense of religious vocation to my adolescent physical insecurity—I felt excluded from full participation in it. As I watched the high school kids on American Bandstand, dancing to the rhythms of rock and roll, I longed to fit into the world as seamlessly as they did, but felt I never would. There was an added dimension to my unease, beyond the usual awkwardness of adolescence. It was the incipient philosopher in me struggling to be. I hardly knew the word. I knew no professor of philosophy or professor of anything. I began to feel that people were so busy going somewhere that they didn’t think about where they were going. I wanted to see the big picture. By the time I was in high school, this became very intense and I started reading works of philosophy. My education began to diverge from the curriculum more and more.
All this unfolded amid a distinct historical atmosphere. Throughout the 1950s, even when innocence and credulity and fun outweighed my emerging unease, a sense of apocalyptic fear hung over all that I did. From my earliest years, I knew the deadliest weapons the world had ever known were being developed. The problem wasn’t that our country had them, but that our enemies had them too. An “Iron Curtain” divided the world between freedom on one side and tyranny on the other. The other side sought nothing less than world domination. The third world war, we were warned, would be a nuclear war. We held regular air raid drills in school and saw frightening films depicting a nuclear attack. We crouched under our desks, as if that would somehow save us from nuclear annihilation. There were debates about fallout shelters, specifically about whether you would be justified in killing someone who tried to get into your fallout shelter. I thought a lot about this, although no one I knew even had a fallout shelter. My mother did have the cellar well stocked with enough tinned food to last for many months. Aside from worries about an attack, I became so concerned about the levels of strontium 90 in the atmosphere as a result of nuclear testing that I wrote letters to US senators about it.
We were taught that communism was the enemy. It was not just a fallacious political ideology, but a cosmological evil. It was hostile not only to our country, but to our religion—the work of the devil. I imagined communists entering my bedroom and demanding that I renounce my nation and religion, even my own parents. I believed that I would be brave and be a martyr if necessary. The whole apocalyptic scenario was heightened by the “third secret of Fatima” in a letter which couldn’t be opened until 1960. I got the impression that it somehow had to do with communism and the end of the world. I had a terrible foreboding about the year 1960 and a sense that I could not count on any future after that. I didn’t actually know any communists, yet Senator Joseph McCarthy said they were everywhere, even in the government, the army, and the film and television industry. I watched the Army-McCarthy hearings and was on the side of McCarthy. He was not only
