Quiet Aspirations

by Barbara Anne Radtke

I have been reading memoirs lately. They are mostly by women who have had great success in their careers and have overcome barriers in their fields. It is not unusual for the authors to say they have broken a glass ceiling today because they stood on the shoulders of some great, well-known women in the past.  For example, in her recent memoir The Art of Power, Nancy Pelosi cited the women of Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and specifically Sojourner Truth.

I am currently reading The Worlds I See by Fei-Fei Li, a woman considered the godmother of AI. Throughout her book, she does not appeal to a great foremother in her field, but to the quiet aspirations of her biological mother. In school in China, Fei-Fei realized she loved math and science and wanted to be a scientist. At the time, girls were not considered good candidates for education in that field. Her mother’s desire for her to fulfill this nascent dream brought the family to the U.S. Each time Li faltered in her goal, her mother gently encouraged her to keep on.  After finishing her doctorate and being hired to direct her own lab, Li also credits her mother with asking her a question that was instrumental in focusing her scientific goal.

Li’s story resonated with my experience.  My mother, Anne Henzel Radtke, had quiet aspirations for her children. Her own educational dream was extinguished by tragedy. She wanted to be a lawyer, a monumental goal for a girl in the 1930s.  That was abruptly put aside when her father died. She took a program in secretarial studies and went to work full-time to help her mother support their family.  When she married, my mother wanted her children to be able to channel their goals in the proper educational forums. My dad concurred. These aspirations became part of the climate in our home. Our conversations were often fueled by the expectation of higher education. Once, when my dad became involved in the construction of a new bookstore at Princeton University, the whole family took a rare field trip to spend the day walking around the campus.

When sharing Li’s story and my own reflections, I found my friends had similar memories. One woman in her 80s told me that, when her mother reached 13, her grandfather thought her mother should leave school and go to work.  Her grandmother thought otherwise.  She wanted her daughter, my friend’s mom, to finish school and learn to be a bookkeeper.  This dream involved further schooling that required tuition. My friend’s grandmother stayed up at night doing hand embroidery to sell in order to save for that expense.  They achieved their goal. This was one story among many that was shared with me in conversations about how achievements on one’s family tree happened. I have begun to think that, in order to stand on the shoulders of someone great, there are quiet aspirations that provide the scaffolding to get to those shoulders.

Perhaps these stories, shared by friends before the election, are also instructive about our national future.  They speak about quiet beginnings of which we may now only have an inkling. There are parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, friends and neighbors who are constructing supports for a new generation. They will provide new leadership for a tomorrow I will probably not be here to witness. We must work today, however, to construct a scaffold that builds good character; that creates a vision of the common good where all flourish; that encourages pathways to develop talents into skills; that helps us reflect on history not be sheltered from it.  AND, among those now being shored up by such scaffolding, I am sure there is at least one who will stand on the shoulders of a great and break the ceiling. 

Response by Kathy Hendricks

Like you, Barbara, I was fortunate enough to have my own aspirations supported and encouraged by my parents. My father set up bank accounts for me and my siblings so that we would have the option of going to college if we chose to do so. There was no preference for my brothers over my sisters nor was there any pressure to pick a particular career or lifestyle path.

I can also relate to the many women who influenced and inspired me. Women I knew and women I knew about. What I love about the image of a scaffold is that it is both vertical and horizontal. Unlike a ladder, in which the one above us must be knocked down in order to keep climbing, the scaffold spreads outward as well as upward, thus allowing space for those that came before and those who will follow us.

My six-year-old granddaughter recently took part in her classroom “Mystery History” activity. It entailed sharing six facts about a figure from history and seeing if her classmates could guess who she was. She chose Yaa Asantewaa – the Queen Mother of Ghana who was a key leader in fighting British colonialism. I love how my granddaughter’s scaffold includes a woman of color from another country and era and who serves as a role model of integrity, dignity, and courage. After a brutal election cycle, we are most certainly in need of this kind of role model in our lives as well as playing our part in building scaffolds that future generations can climb and continue to construct.