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expression of caring for her lover Jack and, after his death, for the continuity of their engineering work together, and for the people who had depended on it, that she eventually accepted leadership responsibility. “There I was,” she said, “a person who had previously been used to doing technology, where the only condition of doing interesting work was proving I could do it. I had never asked for anything other people wanted, money, power, all I wanted to do was solve problems and then find another problem.”
    No one acts entirely out of self-interest, just as no one acts entirely out of altruism, but the assumption of self-interest is a common simplification in attempts to understand the behavior of others, particularly for those whose good sense has been diluted by reading too much economics. Women often err in the opposite direction. Because they were traditionally taught to emphasize service, their choices may be unintelligible and therefore deeply suspect. Yet although their motives don’t match the expectations of those around them, I have been struck by how terribly hard this group of women worked as students and later on in their careers, and how often work is unappreciated when the motive behind it is not understood.
    It is not only in childhood that people of high potential can be encouraged or held back and their promise subverted or sustained. The year before I went to Amherst, a group of women had declined to stand for tenure. One of them simply said that after six years she was used up, too weary and too eroded by constant belittlement to accept tenure if it were offered to her. Women were worn down or burnt out. During the three years I spent as dean of the faculty, as I watched some young faculty members flourish and others falter, I gradually realized that the principal instrument of sexism was not the refusal to appoint women or even the refusal to promote (though both occurred, for minorities as well as women), but the habit of hiring women and then dealing with them in such a way that when the time came for promotion it would be reasonable to deny it. It was not hard to show that a particular individual who was a star in graduate school had somehow belied her promise, had proved unable to achieve up to her potential.
    This subversion was accomplished by taking advantage of two kinds of vulnerability that women raised in our society tend to have. The first is the quality of self-sacrifice, a learned willingness to set their own interests aside and be used and even used up by the community. Many women at Amherst ended up investing vast amounts of time in needed public-service activities, committee work, and teaching nondepartmental courses. Since these activities were not weighed significantly in promotion decisions, they were self-destructive.
    The second kind of vulnerability trained into women is a readiness to believe messages of disdain and derogation. Even women who arrived at Amherst full of confidence gradually became vulnerable to distorted visions of themselves, no longer secure that their sense of who they were matched the perceptions of others. When a new president, appointed in 1983, told me before coming and without previous discussion with me that he had heard I was “consistently confrontational,” that I had made Amherst “a tense, unhappy place,” and that he would want to select a new dean, I should have reacted to his picture of me as bizarre, and indeed confronted its inaccuracy, but instead I was shattered. It took me a year to understand that he was simply accepting the semantics of senior men who expected a female dean to be easily disparaged and bullied, like so many of the young women they had managed to dislodge. It took me a year to recover a sense of myself as worth defending and to learn to be angry both for myself and for the college as I watched a tranquil campus turned into one that was truly tense and unhappy.
    The problem, as I came to understand it when I had