A feminist professor learned she was developing Alzheimer's and planned to kill herself before she declined too severely. The NY Times tells the story:
The Last Day of Her Life
While no man is an island, the clichéd story of her life (as a pioneer of women's studies) provides a decidedly humorous aspect to a tragic tale of death and disease. For example, she took Prozac to treat her depression. Also, her work helped to invent gender identity and explored the once solid boundaries in the relationship between parent and child.
And then, there's this bit about her husband and her equal marriage:
Then there's the contrast between her mothering and grandmothering styles:
I don't delight in this woman's death, but I will continue to laugh at the absurdities of her life.
The Last Day of Her Life
While no man is an island, the clichéd story of her life (as a pioneer of women's studies) provides a decidedly humorous aspect to a tragic tale of death and disease. For example, she took Prozac to treat her depression. Also, her work helped to invent gender identity and explored the once solid boundaries in the relationship between parent and child.
Quote:Quote:
The prospect of mental decay was particularly painful for Sandy, whose idea of herself was intimately entwined with her ability to think deeply and originally. She was a pioneer in the field of gender studies: She created the Bem Sex Role Inventory in 1974, which assesses a person’s traits along a traditional gender continuum; led Cornell’s fledgling women’s studies program from 1978 to 1985; wrote a groundbreaking book, “The Lenses of Gender,” in 1993; published a memoir, “An Unconventional Family,” in 1998; became a licensed psychotherapist in 2000; and returned for a second term as the director of Cornell’s renamed feminist, gender and sexuality studies program in 2001. Friends and colleagues knew Sandy to be intensely observant, a person who spoke her mind with a bluntness that could be off-putting. Her best friend, Karen Gilovich, a psychotherapist who lived around the corner, said that one of Sandy’s favorite conversational openers was: “I find myself thinking . . . .” You never knew what would follow. She once wondered aloud, for instance, where the line was between acceptable and unacceptable behavior between parents and their children. Would it automatically be wrong for a waitress who comes home exhausted to ask her young son to rub her feet? Massage her back? Cuddle her? “She was the most clear thinker I have ever seen,” Karen said, “with the ability to cut to the core of any messy issue.”
And then, there's this bit about her husband and her equal marriage:
Quote:Quote:
It was a bit like the earliest days of their relationship, back in 1965, when they met at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh. She was a senior psychology major; he was a new assistant professor of psychology. Just four months after being introduced by Sandy’s roommate, they married.
They vowed at the time to share everything 50-50: the housework, the child-rearing, the inevitable career compromises. For a while, this worked well. So well, in fact, that in 1972 they were featured in the inaugural issue of Ms. magazine, in an article titled “A Marriage of Equals.”
The Bems were both psychology professors, at Stanford and then Cornell, and they traveled around the country giving tandem talks about society’s creation of sex-role stereotypes. They were a slightly odd couple. Sandy was petite and not the least interested in fashion. Daryl was bigger, dapper, six years older and already a bit stooped, with a scholar’s pallor, a kind face and a courtly manner cultivated over his years of performing as a magician. (He would also come to be known, later in his career, for some controversial experiments involving ESP.)
They turned their politics into a way of life, raising their two children, Emily, born in 1974, and Jeremy, born two years later, in what they described as a gender-neutral way. “Many other feminist couples have experimented with egalitarian relationships and feminist child-rearing,” Sandy wrote in “An Unconventional Family.” But few “have shared the details of their daily lives as exuberantly as Daryl and I.” She talked about everything, in print and on the lecture circuit: letting Jeremy wear pink barrettes to kindergarten; driving Emily past the same construction site every day because a woman was on the crew; hanging a chart on a kitchen cabinet to let the children know which parent was “on duty” that week.
Despite their good intentions, though, the marriage grew strained. As their children went through adolescence, Sandy complained that she felt like a single parent, with Daryl not fully engaging with the family’s needs. They both saw the paradox in their supposedly egalitarian marriage floundering in such a gender-stereotypical way. In 1994, when the children were 19 and 17, the Bems separated.
After the split, Daryl acted on his attraction to men, a part of his sexuality that he never hid from Sandy. He liked to joke that on their first date, he told her there were three things she should know about him — “I’m a stage magician, I’m from Colorado and I’m primarily homoerotic” — and that she calmly replied that she had never met anyone from Colorado.
About a year after the separation, Daryl began a long-term relationship with a communications professor at Ithaca College. Yet he and Sandy never divorced, and he remained a frequent visitor to the big house in Cornell Heights where they raised their children. He ate dinner there a few times a week and stayed involved in the lives of Emily and Jeremy — even more involved, in a way, than when he lived with them. He also remained one of Sandy’s best friends and one of her few close confidants. (She had a short-lived relationship with a woman soon after Daryl moved out and remained single after that.) Daryl wrote in the epilogue to “An Unconventional Family,” which was published four years after they separated, “Sandy and I are still kin.”
Then there's the contrast between her mothering and grandmothering styles:
Quote:Quote:
Becoming a grandmother was never something Sandy had cared much about. But when Felix was born, she was thrilled. He was in the neonatal intensive-care unit when she arrived in Austin; doctors had detected a bacterial infection in his urine and were administering antibiotics. Sandy sat in a rocking chair alongside the bassinet, and Emily handed the infant to her, naked except for his diaper, the IV port in his tiny hand capped off until the next infusion. She gazed down at her grandson, placid and perfect. She cooed and babbled. For weeks afterward, she talked about those first moments holding Felix. “I don’t know what I was saying or what I was doing,” she would say. “But he just looked into my eyes.”
Emily was surprised to see her mother so at ease in the traditional role of Felix’s bubbe (Yiddish for “grandmother”). As a parent in the 1970s, Sandy turned every interaction with her children into a political act. During story time, she would go through their picture books with a bottle of Wite-Out and a Magic Marker, changing a hero’s name from male to female, revising plot lines, adding long hair or breasts to some of the drawings. Story time was a different experience with Felix. Sandy would cuddle with the baby and turn pages. If she couldn’t remember the word for “zebra” or “lion,” she wouldn’t fuss about it. “Oh, it’s some animal,” she would say.
She told Emily that her “new brain” might actually make her better suited to being a grandmother than her focused, hyperanalytical “old brain.” She seemed to have found a way of being that she liked, content to sing silly songs and make nonsense sounds for hours on end.
Emily liked her mother this way, too. It had sometimes been difficult to be Sandy’s daughter. As a child, Emily wanted to wear her hair long and take ballet lessons; Sandy, ever vigilant about gender stereotypes, nudged her to cut her hair and play soccer instead. But now Sandy didn’t seem to care about such things. Emily thought that her mother was taking pleasure in life in a way that the old Sandy could not have anticipated — and she found herself hoping that the joy her mother took in Felix might make her reconsider her intention to end her life quite so soon.
I don't delight in this woman's death, but I will continue to laugh at the absurdities of her life.
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