Lee’s Autobiography

I became a College teacher in large part because I was a College dropout. This was in the mid-1960s, just before the second wave of feminism broke through to illuminate the seductive ways in which women had been taught to accept limitations in their lives. My religious upbringing compounded a sense of female inferiority with a desire for self-sacrifice as a virtue. Southern tradition reinforced feminine politeness—which often really meant smiling at disparagement. From all appearances, I was a paradigmatic, “good girl,” but I had a streak of willfulness mixed with deep anxieties about failing. I was also both impetuous and romantic. Yet, I was a strong student, placed in accelerated classes in high school, and it was expected that I would graduate from College. I chose to attend Loyola University in New Orleans, a Jesuit institution. There too I did well in my classes, and found the Jesuit intellectual tradition eye opening for its philosophical rigor. This was a heady experience, but also, given my traditional background, a destabilizing one. Eventually, this would lead me to advocate a form of skepticism as instrumental to learning, but at that point, lots of beliefs and values that I firmly held onto had begun to crumble.

Extra-curricular life was equally life changing. I had grown up in the segregated South, attended all-white schools and lived in an affluent all-white neighborhood. In other words, I was pretty limited by class and race divisions as well. College was the first time in my life that I had African-Americans as friends. I met them through an organization that was just forming at the time, Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS. It was new at that time but would soon make history for Civil Rights and, a few years later, anti-war activism. In 1964-65, our SDS group was committed to racial equality. We met regularly to plan sit-ins at restaurants and public places that mandated segregation. We would head into a restaurant as it opened and take up all the tables with one white and one black person at each. As long as they refused to serve us, they lost business. The owners and regular customers screamed and cursed at us, some times threw things, even bricks through windows. It was exciting and frightening. When I would return home for breaks, I felt angry with my parents, accusing them of bigotry and doing my own share of screaming insults. It seemed that I no longer belonged there.

I wasn’t emotionally prepared to see these personal changes through in a well-focused way. By my sophomore year, my professors were urging me to think about law school. I preferred my English courses and began to doubt my ability to live up to their expectations. I felt confused and unable to even imagine myself as a woman pursuing career goals. With one exception, all the professors I had taken courses from were male.

That’s when I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life—though at the time, it too felt exhilarating. I eloped. At 19, my boyfriend and I were underage in Florida, where we were both from, so we crossed the state line to Georgia, found a justice of the peace, and pledged our vows. It didn’t take long for reality to set in. My parents were furious. We had no money. We both dropped out of school while he took a low-paying job and I became a housewife, already pregnant with my first son. We bought a trailer to live in and scraped by for the first year, literally counting pennies for food. We knew that we couldn’t continue in this way, so we asked my parents for help. They agreed to loan us money for my husband to go back to college and get his degree. I didn’t really question it. I was a mother and a housewife and it seemed “natural” that he would be the breadwinner. Besides, he didn’t want me to go back to school and was frank about it. Two years later, my second son was born.

But what was also born at that time was the social movement that helped clarify the fears that had filled me with self-doubt and hopes for something else. Newspapers began covering stories about women challenging the status quo, demanding equal rights, showing how marriage laws and sexist practices maintained women’s subordination. I began to see that by escaping from responsibilities for educating myself, I had entered into an intellectual dead in. By that time, my husband had graduated and started working in a well-paying job. We bought a house in the suburbs and started living the 1970s American Dream with financial security and what probably did seem to others like a perfect family. For me, it was increasingly an American nightmare. I wanted to go back to school, but he refused. I read randomly but missed the precision of course discussion and faculty guidance. A growing dissatisfaction led to quarrels and demands for my own rights as an individual. The feminist slogan about the personal being political became my mantra.

After ten years away, I finally prevailed and returned to College as a junior, majoring in English and Philosophy. The thrill of ideas was again life changing. This time, though, I had a clearer sense of who I was and who I wanted to be. Mostly I wanted to be able to think hard about big issues, like social justice and why societies get so stymied about providing it. My senior year gave me the opportunity to conduct a yearlong research project and thesis. Writing my thesis was the formal beginning of my career as an educator. My faculty advisor, Dr. Allen Tilley, helped me forge the kind of discipline I needed to stay with an interest, encouraged my enthusiasm for my topic, pushed me harder, and allowed me to see that I could achieve this goal. My project centered on a comparative study of ancient religions in which messianic figures are resurrected from the dead. An adjacent avenue of study involved thinking about how religions with apocalyptic convictions dealt with issues of social justice; how that belief system sometimes advanced it but more often fueled gender, racial, and economic hierarchies. In other words, I was still drawn to the issues that had captivated me a decade earlier, but this time my thesis gave me the chance to gain a deeper understanding of them, including seeing myself within that larger picture. I also knew at that point that I wanted to become a college teacher, to be able to work with students in the way Dr. Tilley had with me.

What I saw and what my husband wanted were at cross-purposes and after eleven years of marriage, we divorced. I applied and was accepted to graduate school at Purdue University. I was granted custody of my sons, but with a child support payment so low that even with my graduate assistantship for teaching two courses of composition each semester, we qualified for food stamps. We more than managed though. In certain respects, it was ideal. We joined a small commune with socialist principles of sharing what we had. Most of the other members were also graduate students, one was an adjunct, and there was one other child. We meshed daily life with political values, educated ourselves collaboratively, and encouraged each other to think harder. My experience with my Honors Thesis project had prepared me well to write those essays and then my dissertation.

Eventually we went our separate ways with graduation and getting jobs across the country. Mine was at a small liberal arts college in Geneva, New York. What I took with me was the stimulating experience of a strong learning community, the importance of peer evaluation, and the value of mentoring and being mentored. That’s why I relish the opportunity to teach a course like this. In retrospect, I don’t regret my winding and sometimes rocky path along the way. I gained a certain kind of patience and understanding by working through the mistakes I made, and that, I believe, has made me a better teacher. And I am still thinking hard about issues of apocalyptic belief, gender equality, and individual freedom.