…is that my father seems not to have understood that a woman is not just a woman…is not just a woman.
If you knew him, you would have come away — even after some years of friendship — with the impression that he thought all women were about the same. Much as, say, cats are about the same or zebras are about the same or doves are about the same.
And I really do think that’s approximately what he thought.
Yeah, he recognized that women are human beings (sort of…), and as such are not carbon-copies of each other. But still…
Yes: but still… He regarded women as creatures cut out of the same cloth. Most of us: less than perfectly bright.
No kidding: even though he did know his daughter operated on the genius level, in person he treated me as though I were…yes: less than perfectly bright.
And that, I sincerely believe, was simply because I was female. If his child had been born a male, he would have treated the kid like a future aeronautical engineer.
And for that reason — that amalgamation of all women into a category of “not quite bright” — he didn’t understand or didn’t accept that my kid-genius ambition to grow up to be an astrophysicist was real. That it was based on real understanding of books and articles that were — quite frankly — way over his head. And that I needed parental and professional support if I were to get past the very real, very hostile discrimination against women in the sciences, as that discrimination existed during the 1950s and 1960s.
He wasn’t having any of it, though. As far as he was concerned, the highest and best use of my intellect was for me to become a high-school teacher. And, of course, a wife.
Yeah.
He was still living at the time I finished the Ph.D.
Was he duly impressed?
I think not.
To start with, I doubt that he understood what a Ph.D. represented: the type and amount of work it entailed. And to end with, I also doubt that he realized an academic career on the university level was much different from a high-school teaching job. Nor, indeed, did he understand the significance of publishing. As a matter of fact, I believe he ran away to sea before he finished high school. Hence he would have had neither reason nor opportunity to grasp those things.
Consequently, to his mind teaching was teaching was teaching. Something that women did.