EDITORIAL

Honoring Multiple Commitments
by Linda Shohet

Moments of clarity or insight happen rarely, and usually when we are not consciously seeking or expecting them. I had such a moment this summer on an ordinary day, curled up on an old swing on our sun-drenched front porch reading a book called, Composing a Life.

Mary Catherine Bateson's book is about the lives of five extraordinary women, all friends including herself, who have achieved professional success in diverse fields but sustained strong family relationships. There was no clear story line. The narrative was constructed as a collage with personal episodes from each of the women lives juxtaposed against musings on social, political and cultural events and problems draw from societies around the world and from vast periods of history. Bateson, ethnographer daughter of Margaret Mead, practices an effortless scholarship.

Where could such an apparently shapeless narrative take me? But the apparent shapelessness is precisely the point; the form of this book embodies its thesis. Bateson believes that life is not a path or journey. Our metaphors of mapping lead us astray, especially about the way women live and learn. Bateson offers the metaphor of composing a work of art; she has discovered that the common bond among these extraordinary women (as well, she believes, as among other women) is their ability to improvise, to take in the interruptions, conflicts and contradictory demand that characterize women's lives, and out of them to adapt and create a new form-call it a life. She suggests that this gift has the possibility of offering new hope in opposition to time-honored male models of singular focus.

The moment of insight touched on my experience as part of the team of writers who created the women's curriculum just launched by CCLOW (see the article by Kate Nonesuch in this issue). The challenge was to forge a common vision of a feminist curriculum among fifteen women from radically different social, cultural, racial and educational milieus who were drawn together for this project through a national call. This was far more complex than might have been imagined. CCLOW had not written a vision statement before choosing the women but decided that the act of creating the vision would be one of the ways to bond the group who, with a few exceptions, had never met prior to the first intensive weekend retreat.

The vision evolved over a year, and its power lay in its connection to the lives of all the women on the team whether Black, White, East Asian, urban, rural, heterosexual, lesbian, married, with/without children, employed, unemployed, single, divorced, healthy, ill; the possible links and distinctions among us were enormous. The bond was the recognition that we were all extraordinary in some way.

The vision eventually adopted was not academic; it tried to talk to women's lives. And as I thought about the statements we made-to honor diversity, to confront issues of power, to tell the truth when it is hidden or difficult, to leave space for emotions and experience and to respect the voices of learners - I recognized Bateson's insight when she asks: “But what if we were to recognize the capacity for distraction, the divided will, as representing a higher wisdom? ... Instead of concentration on a transcendent ideal, sustained attention to diversity and interdependence may offer a different clarity of vision, one that is sensitive to ecological complexity, to the multiple rather than the singular. Perhaps we can discern in women honoring multiple commitments a new level of productivity and new possibilities of learning” (p.166).

In this issue, Nancy Bennett tells about breaking away from the abusive life she had been born to and had followed through part of her adult years. She evokes an image of herself as a child in a home movie driving her bicycle round and round a circular driveway and how her life has been like repeating a well worn cycle. Her realization that you can disrupt patterns and change them has given her strength to move on with her own children. They will not trace circles in driveways any more; they have broken the cycle. She has now become one of Bateson's improvisers, composing her own life.

When someone asks me, “Why women's curriculum?” I now answer, “To honor women's multiple commitments and help them (and men) see that composing a life offers greater hope than tracing old patterns.”