Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives - Hardcover

Anna Fels is a practicing psychiatrist who has written for the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Self, and, most recently, the Science Times section of the New York Times. A member of the faculty of the Weill Medical College of Cornell University at New York Presbyterian Hospital, Fels lives with her husband and two children in New York City.

Chapter One
What is Ambition?

I wondered, before I came here, whether I was going to confess to you this secret I’ve had since I was seven. I haven’t even told my husband about it.” The woman across from me, a journalist in her forties, paused and looked at me intently, wondering whether she should reveal her secret. Sitting there under her worried gaze, I wondered where we were going. As a psychiatrist, I’m used to hearing the most improbable and even lurid of personal secrets. But this woman was not a patient. She was a friend of a friend, who had kindly agreed to let me interview her. It was actually the very first of a series of exploratory discussions that I had scheduled to start my research on ambition in women’s lives, and I already found myself in unfamiliar territory. How had my seemingly straightforward question about childhood goals elicited a long-hidden secret?

The journalist looked at me uncertainly but continued. “When I was about seven, I had a notebook at school, and I would write poems and stories and illustrate them. I was going to write and illustrate children’s books. They were clearly based on the books I loved. And I had this acronym that was like magic, like a secret pact with myself. I didn’t even tell my sisters its meaning. It was IWBF—I Will Be Famous.” She broke out into nervous laughter. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I told you. You must understand, I didn’t want to be recognized in the streets. My pact was tied up with writing and being recognized for it. I’m sure it was tied up with my father’s approval and the literary world he operated in.”

This was the long-withheld secret? Not sex, lies, or videotapes, but an odd incantation from childhood? It was the first of what were to be many lessons for me on how hidden and emotionally laden the subject of ambition is for women. I soon came to realize that although the articulate, educated group of women I interviewed could talk cogently and calmly about topics ranging from money to sex, when the sub- ject of ambition arose, the level of intensity and anxiety took a quantum leap.

It was hard to know what to make of the often long-winded, evasive, contradictory, and confused responses this subject elicited. A woman editor of a popular magazine vehemently denied that she was ambitious and produced an astounding string of euphemisms about pursuing “her personal best,” “self-realization and understanding,” and enlightenment, sounding more like a Zen master than an executive in the midst of the bustling, highly commercial magazine world. A choreographer who had recently started a career as a playwright gave me the following reply when asked about her ambitions: “I don’t have any ambition. Well, I’m interested in creativity and in my work. I’ve been working on a one-act play and a screenplay. I guess one could say, ‘That sounds ambitious,’ but the fact is, what I don’t want to do is promote myself. I do work.” A woman in her forties who had started but then left a fledgling business to be at home with her children said emphatically, “I’m just thrilled that I didn’t spend my twenties or thirties trying to grow my business and be a star in that world. I have a close friend who was also in a start-up, for a very hot product. They got a lot of attention. But she spent seven years at it, took too much cocaine, had an abortion, and by thirty-nine had no children or life or job.” Yet toward the end of the interview the same woman suddenly revealed her continuing fantasy of returning to a career and making a success of it. A young woman who works on math textbooks announced, before I so much as asked a question, that she felt troubled by her lack of ambition. “I think it’s all tied up with this business of goals. There needs to be some target out there. At work every year we have this development discussion, and we meet with our supervisors. And they ask, ‘What are your short- and long-term goals?’ I always put something down, but it’s nothing I feel passionate about, it’s usually some small project.” The absence of ambition seemed no less fraught than its presence.

The women I interviewed hated the word ambition when applied to their own lives. One woman executive began by stating, “That word is not one I’ve used much in my vocabulary. On previous occasions when asked whether I was ambitious, I would tend to say no. I would describe myself as purposeful.” For these women ambition necessarily implied egotism, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, or the manipulative use of others for one’s own ends. Despite the fact that women are currently more career-oriented than at any time in history—and often more clearly ambitious—there is something about the concept that makes them distinctly uncomfortable. These women’s denial of their own ambitiousness was particularly striking in contrast to the men I interviewed, who assumed that ambition was a necessary and desirable part of their lives. They often chided themselves for lacking sufficient amounts of it. Perhaps even more surprising, the very women who deplored ambition in reference to their own lives freely admitted to admiring it in men. If ambition was, by definition, self-serving and egotistical, why was it not only acceptable but desirable for men?

As I tried to sort through the diverse responses to my questions and to home in on the aspect of ambition that made women so uncomfortable, I realized that I needed to backtrack. I needed to understand what ambition consists of—for men and for women. But the more I tried to pin down its meaning, the blurrier it got. When I asked people to define ambition, nearly all of them, after a few attempts, finally resorted to examples: “Take Bill Gates . . .” There was something elusive about ambition. Everyone seemed intuitively to know what it was, but no one could articulate it.

In psychiatry, as in most branches of science, the study of a complex phenomenon often begins by tracing it to its earliest, simplest form. So I decided to review the childhood ambitions recalled by the women I had interviewed. Perhaps in this embryonic form I would find clues to its most basic elements. And indeed, compared to the wordy, ambivalent responses that these women had given about their current ambitions, their answers concerning childhood were direct and clear. They had a delightfully naïve and unapologetic sense of grandiosity and limit- less possibility. As a child, each of the women had pictured herself in an important role: a great American novelist, an Olympic figure skater, a famous actress, a president of the United States, a fashion designer, a rock star, an international diplomat. “My fantasies about what I wanted to be? I think they were very ordinary, like being a ballerina. I took dancing lessons for seven years. I think of those kinds of fantasies as being common. Or maybe I’d be an artist—being anything that I did well. I wanted to be the best. I thought everyone had those kinds of fantasies, but I haven’t really thought about this.” “When I was a kid, we had a summer home in rural Maryland and on the way there we’d see signs saying, ‘Impeach [Supreme Court Justice] Earl Warren.’ And my mother or one of my siblings would say, ‘One day that sign is going to say “Impeach Jenny Fenlow.” ’ Oh God, it’s hard to believe, but that’s what I thought I’d be, a Supreme Court justice.” “Oh, my ambitions? They were very pedestrian. I was going to be either a brilliant writer or an actress. I had a very specific picture of being an actress. I wanted to be Sarah Bernhardt; I mean, I was extremely ambitious. I wrote a musical when I was in eighth grade that was produced at school. When I look back on it, I think, I wrote that?”

In nearly all the childhood ambitions, two undisguised elements were joined together. One was a special skill: writing, dancing, acting, diplomacy. But the childhood ambitions recalled were not just about developing a talent or expertise. The images of future accomplishment virtually always included a large helping of attention in the form of an appreciative audience. In each picture of the future self, the woman- to-be was front and center; she was the star of her own story. Public recognition was either included explicitly or, more often, implied by the very nature of the endeavor chosen. Special talent was assumed. In part, it was this open celebration of their specialness that made their childhood ambitions seem so silly or even embarrassing to the women who recalled them, that made them laugh and then ask me nervously if I thought their ambitions were normal.

Looking through developmental studies of both boys and girls, I noticed that they virtually always identified the same two components of childhood ambition. There was a (at least theoretically) practicable plan that involved a real accomplishment requiring work and skill. And then there was an expectation of approval: fame, status, acclaim, praise, honor. Each ambition was a narrative about a wished-for future, and in each story the child projected him—or herself into an adult life as a productive, admired member of society.

Of the two aspects of ambition, or at least of childhood ambition, the first seemed nearly incontrovertible. Without an element of mastery, after all, a picture of the future is not an ambition; it’s simply wishful thinking. It’s about luck or fate—you are merely a passive recipi- ent of whatever fortune comes your way. You may desperately want to win the lottery, but that wish is not an ambition. Ambition requires an imagined future that can be worked toward by the development of skills and expertise.

Long ago the scientific community embraced the notion that there is a powerful and innate pl...