Double Bind

by Robin Romm

  The nineteenth century saw a (somewhat cramped and limited) flowering of female ambition. The Industrial Revolution and the breakdown of the family increased the number of women who, like everyone else, had to scramble to survive. Jane Eyre was one of those women, and in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, one can’t help noticing that survival itself requires considerable drive.

  Marriage as a career goal is another, parallel narrative of female ambition, an older, more durable though possibly waning goal, incrementally giving way to the goals of selfhood and work, and to a wider concern of how we see the world and how the world sees us.

  George Eliot was a phenomenon of ambition, producing magisterial novels, concerned with her reputation and her career. It was no accident that she chose to use a man’s name, as of course the Brontës did as well. Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield loved and admired one another and were deeply in competition. Woolf’s driving ambition, energy, and productivity are often shadowed by the image of her as Bloomsbury aesthete, neurotic and suicidal.

  As I write this, the ways in which gender and ambition are playing out in the U.S. political arena are at once obvious and appalling. Regardless of what we may think, or whether we agree with either of them, there are different styles of power, entitlement, and degrees of latitude that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton take, and are given.

  No matter how far we believe we have come, no matter how many successes we feel we have achieved, it’s still hard to get away from that disparity, that essential inequality.

  In a film such as The Wolf of Wall Street, one may note that its hero sees what he wants and goes after it: a great house, lots of money, a nice office, fancy suits, cocaine snorted off a hooker’s ass. It’s hard to imagine a woman playing Leonardo DiCaprio’s role, and make any of it look like a good idea—not even at the beginning, before all the drugs and orgies. Ambitious women in film either ultimately fall in love or show their tender sides, or else they remain ambitious and single: human nightmares taking out their disappointments and frustrations on the people and world around them.

  To be fair, there are occasions on which both men and women feel compelled to hide or at least mask their ambition. Some years ago, I had the pleasure of spending a year in the company of writers and scholars who had been given a fellowship to spend time at a research foundation. None of the fellows had reached the point of being invited to such a place without having been ambitious. But one of our colleagues—a young man—appeared to have missed the lesson about hiding it, about clothing our naked hopes and desires. He asked for the names of our literary agents; he wrote an article about the rest of us for a national magazine. I had the sense that he made the fewest lasting friendships that year. In a sense, the institution had turned us into children in a schoolyard, looking for someone to exclude: And that person was the openly (the too openly) ambitious one.

  In any case, mannerly ambitious people who pretend not to be ambitious represent only a very small fraction of how people feel and behave in regard to ambition. More reliably, it breaks down by gender. An ambitious man is admirable, a hero or sinner or both. At worst, we may think he’s an asshole, but where would we be without them?

  Whereas, an ambitious woman is a witch out of hell. That fabulous harpy fashion editor that Meryl Streep plays in The Devil Wears Prada; the private school principal fascist that Anjelica Huston plays in Daddy Day Care; the stop-at-nothing, cold-blooded striver that Reese Witherspoon plays in Election; the gangster matriarch Brianna Barksdale that Michael Hyatt plays in The Wire.

  What should also be clear is that the performances I have mentioned are interesting and memorable, fun to watch. This leads us to another thing about women and ambition. Ambitious women are interesting. Hundreds of years after Thackeray’s Vanity Fair was written, the sheer outrageousness and the wacky charm of what Becky Sharp is willing to do to get ahead propels us through the novel; we would never get through the novel if it were entirely about the disillusionment and awakening of the good girl, Amelia Sedley.

  I’m glad for the existence of a book such as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, if only for the reassurance it provides: its suggestion that the additional obstacles women face are neither self-created nor part of their imaginations. It is so clearly a catch-22: A woman must be doubly ambitious to withstand the low opinions of men who automatically assume that women are less intelligent and capable because they are women, while at the same time monitor themselves for any signs of that demon ambition that might cause these same men to see them as she-devils of competitive aggression. For women in that situation, the glass ceiling begins on the ground floor.

  The only thing we can hope for is that little girls notice how much more interesting and attractive ambitious women are than the modest, self-effacing, big-eyed, semi-helpless princesses so in need of rescue as seen in the Disney films. And we can only hope that girls somehow hear this sage advice, instead of learning that women are not allowed to work and strive and achieve, that women should feel embarrassed and try to hide their ambition.

  Not long ago, I asked my eight-year-old granddaughter what she wanted to be when she grew up. I felt free to ask because she’d been surprisingly early to get the idea that adults do something: they work. Her father is a musician, her mom an anthropologist. In the past, she’d said she wanted to be a scientist or a doctor, like her great-grandmother, my mother, after whom she is named.

  Did she want to be a scientist?

  Maybe.

  A doctor?

  Maybe.

  A musician or an anthropologist or a writer or an artist?

  Maybe.

  Then I asked if she would like to be president of the United States.

  She thought about that, for a moment.

  “If I want to,” she said.

  Know Your Place

  MOLLY RINGWALD

  At around five or six years old, I announced to a roomful of people that when I grew up I was going to be a big star. This wasn’t such an out-of-the-ordinary occurrence, as I had been proclaiming what I considered my God-given right to stardom since I could talk. I would tell anyone who would listen. It didn’t seem so much of a pipe dream to me as a certainty—a certainty that only belongs to the very young. I may as well have been saying, “Tomorrow I’m going to wear a purple dress,” or “The Brady Bunch comes on after The Partridge Family and then dinner and bed.” Most people either encouraged or benignly indulged my ambition.

  I doubt if I even would have remembered this particular occasion if the fallout hadn’t made it so memorable. The people I was discussing my future with were family. My mother had driven my siblings and me from Sacramento to Petaluma, where her sister lived with my cousins. Their mother, my maternal grandmother—an outspoken New Yorker—was visiting from her adopted state, Hawaii. My mom never really got along with her own mother, for reasons that I didn’t quite understand at that age. To me, my grandmother seemed funny and friendly and talked with what I considered a peculiar accent. Whenever she visited every few years, she wore muumuus and brought canned macadamia nuts and odd pieces of costume jewelry that dazzled in their impracticality for a child.

  This time she happened to be walking through the living room and overheard my declaration.

  “Molly,” she said. “You can’t say that about yourself.”

  I felt embarrassed because her tone suggested that I ought to be, but more than that I was confused.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because it’s bad manners to talk about yourself like that. Other people can say that about you, but you can’t say that about yourself.”

  I didn’t have time to consider the validity of this statement because the moments that followed were a blur. My mother, who was in the kitchen with my aunt, overheard what my grandmother said and flew into the living room in a rage. My sister, brother, and I were ordered out to the car. Our things were gathered hastily. Even outside I could hear the voice of my normally shy mother yelling obscenities at her. We drove home
without talking, and there was no further explanation.

  Later, I pieced together puzzling complexities of my mother’s relationship to her own mother and realized that, in a sense, in that moment I had been an avatar for her. She had never received even the slightest parental encouragement of any kind. Hearing her mother criticize me had enabled her to stand up and roar at her in a way that she never could have as a child. My grandmother may have done her best to squash her ambition, but my mother would be damned if she would stand by and listen to her do it to me.

  To be fair, I will never know my grandmother’s true motivation in attempting to shame me for being boastful. I suspect it was a generational thing. Back when she was raised, women weren’t supposed to talk about themselves in such a way. In fact, women weren’t really encouraged to talk much at all, and if they had ambition of any kind, it was to be a wife and a mother. Not that there is anything wrong with these pursuits. I am both a wife and a mother, but it isn’t all that I am, and it’s never all that I wanted to be. At the same age that I was playing with dolls in kindergarten, I was also performing in front of an audience, singing with my father’s jazz band, and acting in local community theater. As soon as I was old enough to write, I began writing stories. Then, sometime in my teen years, it was as if a wall came down, and I stopped doing everything except for the one artistic pursuit for which I was the most known: acting.

  I’m not sure why I made this decision. And although I’m not one to blame outside forces for my decisions, I can’t help but feel like I let other people’s voices (voices like my grandmother’s) into my head. The world has always been full of these kinds of voices—the naysayers, critics, and underminers. The Internet age has given us even more arbitrary and vitriolic versions of the same voices—haters and trolls, whatever you want to call them. They attack your physical appearance, your life choices, artistic choices, even your will to live. Underneath it all seems to be the underlying message of “How dare you?”

  How dare you try? How dare you take more than what you deserve? How dare you have a political opinion? Get back in that box labeled “actress.” It’s where you belong.

  It isn’t hard to be influenced by those voices. Most of us (myself included) have them built into our own brains. Freud named this critical voice the superego, though I think everyone should feel free to give it their own name. I call mine “Brenda.” “Brenda” is helpful when she tells you not to text while driving, or maybe you shouldn’t go to that after-party when you have to wake up in the morning and drive your kids to school. But when her voice becomes dominant, she is deafening. The voice overpowers everything, halting creativity. Even worse, she gets in there before you have the chance to become creative because she entirely consumes ambition. Her voice is so loud and screeching that you’ll do anything to shut her up. Go back to bed. Binge-watch television. Buy things you don’t need on eBay. Feel bad.

  “Brenda” is like a devious super villain because she takes on so many different disguises. She has the ability to leave your brain at times and rematerialize in other forms. Once, in my twenties, I auditioned for a small part in a prestigious film. I didn’t get the part, which surprised me since I thought I did a pretty good job. I knew the material very well, as the film was adapted from the work of one of my favorite authors. I was able to speak knowledgeably about the book, and I enthusiastically shared my passion for the writing. I was also arguably a better actress than the one who ended up getting hired, so I was flummoxed as to why I was passed over. Years later, when I ended up in a film with the same man who directed the movie, I couldn’t resist asking him what had made him choose the other actress over me. He passed on these nuggets of advice: “Men don’t want to know what you think of the material. Don’t be so ‘smart.’ Listen to what they have to say and repeat it back to them.” I’m paraphrasing the conversation, of course, but these choice lines are the ones that have knocked around in my head for twenty years. Know your place.

  Maybe I would have landed more parts had I implemented the advice of “Brenda” housed in that small actor/director’s body. After all, being an actress does involve inhabiting the creation of the writers and directors and capturing the fantasy of the spectator. But I couldn’t see why there wasn’t room for both. Why couldn’t I act and still show these other interesting parts of myself? The mythology that pervaded Hollywood when I was growing up was that part of your job as a young actress was to assume the role of an object of desire. This was the false narrative that I struggled with as I evolved into womanhood. Everywhere I turned the many envoys of “Brenda” made me understand that choosing to puncture a hole in that illusion through any kind of overt ambition, whether educational, political, literary, or otherwise, was also accompanied by a warning to proceed at my own peril. Know your place.

  And the worst offense of all? Age.

  Everyone knows that Hollywood isn’t exactly known for its “best practices” when it comes to ageism. Women are discarded just as they cease to resemble girls. Even a very talented Academy Award–winning young actress was recently told by the “Brendas” in her life that she was losing out on parts to younger women. How long, I wonder, can this business get away with denying ageism on the singular back of Meryl Streep?

  The only silver lining of this overt ageism is that it has freed me up to fulfill my creative ambition in any way I see fit. Turning forty was as scary and traumatic for me as it is for most women. I felt certain doors definitively slamming shut behind me, but at the same time, I looked around this new place and it intrigued me. It almost seemed like “Brenda” got locked on the other side (no doubt lurking around, sniffing for new blood). With this newfound freedom, I thought, why not publish the writing? Why not sing jazz? Why not do anything and everything I can do? For me, the issue of time became my imperative, rather than someone else’s idea of my success. In my twenties, I used to worry about what people would think if I expressed an opinion too vociferously; now I feel proud that I can converse with anyone on any given subject. When I go home at the end of the night, I find myself considering not so much what was thought of me but whether I learned something new—if I spent my time wisely.

  Of course, “Brenda” pops back in from time to time. When I hear her voice, most often in the middle of the night, it’s when I’m thinking of the post–Gen X generation/millennial generation and marveling at how they feel the freedom to take what is theirs with ease and confidence. It seems as though they have managed to establish themselves successfully as true multi-hyphenate actresses-directors-creators from the beginning, and no one looked at them askance. I battle “Brenda” in my head when she tells me that it’s my fault—that I cared too much what people thought, that I was too fearful, unfocused, or lazy. That I wasn’t a good enough writer, or that I made the wrong choices. Sometimes she even tells me that I would have been better off without the red hair.

  Last week I was having dinner with a sixty-something-year-old artist I admire. I confided in her about these thoughts I have in my head, and she kindly interrupted me.

  “But Molly, you couldn’t have. Don’t you see?”

  I stopped talking and considered what she was telling me. She also happens to be the mother of one of the brightest millennials of her generation.

  “None of these young women could’ve done what they are doing now if it hadn’t been for what you have done, or what I have done. Just as the future generations will get to do more because of these young women.”

  I thought a lot about what she said on the train ride home. I made lists in my head about what I’d like to achieve for myself in the next ten years, and it’s long. (Get ready, “Brenda”!) The list making took me all the way to my stop. And then, because I also think about how my own daughters feel about ambition, the next day I asked my eldest, who is twelve (a part of what has been dubbed the “Founders” generation), what her biggest ambition is.

  She considered my question and after a moment answered definitively. “My biggest amb
ition is to not stress about ambition.” She smiled and shrugged. “I just want to be happy.”

  Maybe this generation is on to something.

  Ambition: The Cliffie Notes

  JOAN LEEGANT

  Spring, 1971. Sanders Theatre, Harvard University. It’s a Saturday; perhaps it’s raining. I’ve been in this lecture hall before. I’m a student here, a Cliffie, as Radcliffe women were called, a term made famous the year before, after Ali MacGraw showed up at the Radcliffe dorms to impersonate one for the filming of Love Story. Some of my friends tried to sign on as extras; I was, apparently, too busy. In this giant room inside Harvard’s neo-Gothic, red-bricked Memorial Hall, Harvard Law professor Paul Freund teaches the wildly popular Social Sciences 137: The Legal Process. Eight hundred rapt undergraduates, myself among them, squeeze into the narrow seats twice a week to hear Freund expound on the moral underpinnings of the law, beginning with the fictitious case of the Speluncean Explorers, trapped travelers who cannibalize one of their number to survive. Are they guilty of a criminal offense? Is morality relative? Is the law fungible? How do we decide what’s right?

  Today, though, I am not here to listen to the great professor. Today is the LSAT, the law school admissions test. Although I am an English major—a switch from government made earlier this year, and one of my few smart moves during college—I am determined to stay true to my plan to become a lawyer. I don’t have much of an idea of what lawyers do except become Harvard professors or Supreme Court Justices or what I see on Perry Mason, and also that they talk a lot, based on a verbose uncle in upstate New York. But I’ve been told by teachers and family members and assorted other adults all my life that I am destined to do something responsible and productive. Being responsible and productive comes naturally to me. A serious child, then a serious adolescent, morally minded and precociously tall, always taken for older—I was five-foot-six by age twelve—I seemed perfectly cut out for the part. By high school, I owned several suits. Though what probably appealed to me most about the law in particular when I first conceived of the idea in eighth or ninth grade—and what continues to appeal to me this day of the LSATs, conduct of the Speluncean Explorers aside—is its near worship of rules. I love rules. My home life was chaotic. Fixed codes of conduct would have helped.