[I wrote] for my graduation picture in the high school yearbook: "I seek the key to understanding everything in life, especially myself." I groan and yet the key comes back to haunt me as I try now in ever-advancing middle age to figure out what happened to that girl. It is this tracking back and forth between girl with longings and woman with doubts that makes itself felt in so many of these memoirs. I was THAT unhappy girl (how many of us weren't?). And now these/we women of some achievement with books and students of their own, look back and reconstruct that other story of becoming... a professor. At what cost? Can I be happy now? This is an accomplishment I surely never dreamed of; my sole ambition in those days of fifties femininity was to be a smart boy's girlfriend (okay, smart and cute). What if underneath I am still my sixteen-year-old self seeking the key, or eighteen seeking Experience overseas. The nineties are my (chrono- logical) fifties revisiting the historical fiftics. And of course, in that play of decades, I am not alone. It is part of feminist history.

 

In her book-length manuscript, "Should: A Reverie on Growing Up Female in Post World War II Australia" (1995), Colleen Chesterman, an Australian writer, consultant, and femocrat (an Australian coinage), elaborates many of the themes threaded through these memoirs. In choosing the word reverie, Chesterman alludes to Bachelard's definition of a state "somewhere between memory and story-telling." But this in-betweenness takes her not only to Bachelard's idea of a "potential childhood" of one's own but to a childhood shared with others. "Like many other women who became involved in the women's liberation movement of the 1970s," Chesterman writes, "I have always had a conviction that the movement had its origins in the ways we grew up as young women in the 1940s through to the 60s. As a young woman in Australia I faced many confusions and contradictions in negotiating my place in society." To dramatize what this confusion meant for girls with intellectual aspirations, Chesterman gives the name Pam to a character in her memoir, a girl like Chesterman whose life she fictionalizes. Inventing Pam also meant breaking down the bound- aries of genre separating nonfiction from fiction. But Chesterman is not interested in some simple notion of truth. What matter are stories, stories that can render a certain experience - of growing up in postwar Sydney, of leaving home to go overseas and become a true intellectual, ultimately returning to live in the country of childhood, only with the internal rup- ture that leaving always produces. And she invites readers to "insert them- selves" into the stories as "participants and questioners." 

 

In "Should," Chesterman insists on the ways in which girls were inhibited, when they were not outright prevented, from imagining an ambitious life, a career. Asked in school to announce their vocational plans, the girls timidly picked between "teaching and bloody nursing." Inspired by the role of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Pam says she wants to become a lawyer. Her uncle, a lawyer, reacts to this news with some alarm. Pam immediately backpedals:

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"Do you think I'd find it too hard? I wouldn't try it if I couldn't manage it." "There'd be no doubt about your ability. But it's a terrible career for a woman." Pam's face went hot. 

"It's a man's career, Pam. So few women do it. And those that do...! I saw that poor Gravatt girl going through the Law after me. You've only got to look at her to see the costs. Bent forward, stooping. Grey hair, hanging down all over the place. Completely grey. Losing her teeth. Ah God, it's a shocking sight. No man would have her." 

Pam's eyes widened. Could that be true? All the study required by law. Would it mean that you would need spectacles, go grey? And to have no husband, no marriage, no little children? What kind of woman would that make her? Almost as bad as the fussy old creatures at school. 

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Her belief in the power of literature to expand the universe challenged, Pam gives up her aspirations and tows the line. Overseas, in supposedly sophisticated Manhattan, girls like Pam received the same discouragement. My father, a lawyer like Pam's uncle, scoffed at "lady lawyers." In the fifties, I was afraid of my parents' opinion and easily persuaded that what I really wanted was what they wanted for me. That is how, in 1957, I allowed them to talk me out of going away to school (escape, freedom, excitement) and into living at home (surveillance, conflict, boredom). Surely I didn't believe in the merits of dormitory living, campus community. No, I was too worldly, and so I would have my junior year abroad as a consolation prize. Overseas, the trump card. Like Pam, I too caved with little show of resistance. Maybe what I was afraid of was not, as my parents later said defensively, going away to school, leaving home, but crossing them when I was so filled with self-doubt. What did I know? 

 

In the last chapter of "Should," titled "Losing My Voice-and Finding It," Chesterman talks about the role of the journey in the life stories of the (many Australian) women writers she has read in the course of writing her memoir: "Only in another country can they develop themselves, can they reach fulfillment. This seems to be associated particularly with women who see themselves as intellectuals or creators." The journey, of course, is a fre- quent metaphor in autobiography. But here - as in the case of Lim and Kaplan - the voyage overseas is literal. Going overseas is both a literal requirement of a successful escape and a metaphorical vehicle for an internal displacement. "Should" comes to mean a shorthand for all the restrictions that hemmed in the generation of women who became the doers and architects of the second wave and also a way of understanding the bond between these women - today middle-aged - and their mothers, young mothers during the fifties, mothers who enforced the rules that regulated their daughters and restricted their own lives as well. Giving up the "shoulds," emptying her head of "other people's instructions," becomes a way for Chesterman to write this personal narrative and to reclaim a form of writing she had abandoned in graduate school. (In a neat turn, the writing completes a university doctorate in the creative arts.)

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