Smart Girls, Gifted Women

Rating:
Summary: Literally changed my life!
Review: I was given this book in the fourth grade by my mother. As it was written for adults, I couldn't quite handle it yet, and didn't read it thoroughly until the sixth grade. It sparked my interest in intelligence, education, and particularly gifted education, which I still carry with me. I am now a student at MIT and hope to soon be doing research on the effect gifted education has had on college students' lives. Everyone who has any reason to be interested in gifted education or education of girls should read this book!

Rating:
Summary: Good Read
Review: This is an interesting and irritating little book, out of print but worth the read for the gifted woman or parent of a gifted daughter. (Probably not the ideal read for a gifted stay-at-home mom, who really needs no further demoralization, but still...) The book was thought-provoking, and I recognized myself in Kerr's portrait of the gifted woman who is so psychologically healthy and well-adjusted-in fact she uses all of her considerable mental and creative powers to adjust herself to the "disability of being female"-that she risks cheating herself out of self-actualization. (Kerr paraphrases Margaret Mead in describing the woman who doesn't finish her research because "the baby smiles so much.") Published in 1985, the book concerns itself with gifted women's underachievement. Kerr examines the (miniscule) research available at the time on gifted women and distills it into some pretty obvious points such as "Marriage and childbirth affect the achievement of high-potential women much more than they do that of high-potential men." Well, no kidding.

I was bothered by Kerr's utilitarian assertion that because giftedness is not necessarily linked to genetics, highly gifted women should not focus their efforts on raising children. In a time when far too many children (statistically about half of the general population) lack attachment to primary caretakers and thus grow into adults incapable of attachment, I think few things are more important. Society already devalues mothering and children far too much, and if women of genius are spiritually resilient enough to fight against the current, well, perhaps that's a better use of intelligence than publishing academic papers.

I think gender is just one of the pieces of a far more complex picture of giftedness that incorporates temperament, sensitivity, and creativity. For example, I would argue that men gifted in liberal arts are also hampered by societal bias; how many potentially gifted male writers turn to traditional yet unsatisfying careers in law or medicine, instead? It's important not to assume that every male engineer or dentist out there is self-actualized. My Ivy-League trained physician father, for example, told me decades ago that he's essentially bored with his career; however, I'm sure that if you interviewed him, he'd rate his life satisfaction as very high.

The book irritated me with its slightly dated strident feminism, yet it also scared me into reexamining my life. I'm 34, and in ten years of marriage, I've published only two stories, one of which appeared in "The Best American Mystery Stories" anthology of 2001. I've spent far too much time cooking and cleaning and working deeply unsatisfying disposable jobs the last decade, though that's a reflection more of being a fiction writer than a woman (except the cooking and cleaning part). I'm often bored and lonely living a provincial life and find my intellectual companionship solely in books. But-and here's perhaps a grand example of the rationalization Kerr describes-I would change little about my life. My experience at Stanford was that the graduate fiction writers, none of whom were married, had almost no life experience aside from teaching fiction workshops, and they seemed trapped in perpetual adolescence, sifting through their boring childhoods for story material, and writing in highly a conventional and politically correct manner, while I was writing about adult issues with, I hope, a more unique and canonical voice.

When my daughter was first born, and people asked what I wanted for her in life, I always said, "to be happy." After reading this book, I'd say, "to be self-actualized." So that's a slight but important shift.