Read Online Composing a Life by Mary Catherine Bateson - Free Book Online

that go off and want to do these things, it’s just a joke. You’ll get married and then you’ll never come back. We can’t waste money on you!’ I said, ‘No such thing! I’ll go on with this whatever I do.’”
    She didn’t get a grant, even in that field that was already in many ways led by women. But she went to Europe anyway, did her research, and wrote a first draft of a dissertation. She did get married and did not return to Columbia or finish the doctorate. And yet the clarity of her commitment to dance and dance education was never abandoned and has been woven into emerging understandings of how children develop and how the sick are healed, and today even that research may be recycled.
    We all married quite early, either as students or soon after, in ways that fit with our other interests. None of us expected to give up our other work and involvements completely, but we had rather limited understandings of the puzzle this posed. We all put the puzzle together differently. Two of us, Joan and Johnnetta, had children early, setting our work aside; Ellen and I deferred childbearing until we were professionally established. Alice has been in many ways the least domestic of us all and has never had children. After finishing at MIT, she took a job in R&D at General Electric in Utica, which gave her a chance to develop real, practical competence in engineering; she expected that she would eventually return to school for a doctorate in theory. “Coming out of MIT I didn’t have the sense of hardware I learned later. But I did learn how to think theoretically there, not just plugging in formulae.” She did a theoretical senior thesis in hydrodynamics and electromagnetism, looking at the energy not accounted for in the rotation of the earth due to the movement of fluids inside. It concerned issues of shortening relative distance and changing the frame of reference, so she used the example of an infinite rake in a garden and asked how fast a caterpillar would have to move to escape.
    “I was looking for that person who was a brilliant scientist who could also listen to music or look at a painting,” Alice remembers, “so the world of people I could be involved with was rather small—I guess I just didn’t think much about sexual drives because my head drive was so strong that it dominated everything. But then a French woman I had been very close to at MIT who had moved to New York was killed in a fatal car accident, and I went into total shock. All at once I realized I would never see this woman whom I loved again, and I had never taken the time to go and see her. And then I suddenly got involved with a lot of men, and it was all very exciting and very draining. I really can’t figure out how I survived except that when I worked on technical things I worked as if nothing else was going on—but the rest was chaos.” That period ended in exhausted collapse combined with a toxic reaction to an over-the-counter sleeping pill.
    After that, Alice spent a few weeks with her parents and went back to Utica to marry Paul, an artist and industrial designer. Even many years after their divorce, he continued to be a steadying and supportive friend. “He was extraordinarily original, one of the few artists I’ve known who could talk and who really loved technology. Theoretical science came more easily to me—I could see how to put things together and make them work as easily as he could pick up a paintbrush and out comes this beautiful thing, and I’d say, what difference does it make if I do it with a differential equation and you don’t? Don’t get bent out of shape.”
    The couple soon moved back to the Boston area. Except for a brief period of attempted collaboration with her father, Alice went through the early years of her scientific and engineering career working under the umbrella of large institutions and avoiding leadership roles, motivated by the sheer pleasure of the technical work. It was only as an