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Fall 2007
Volume 07, Number 1

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

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Family Matters

Rosemarie Tong
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

I do not think there ever was a time in my life that I did not try to be, do, and have it all. It is just that the older I got and the harder my life became, the more I realized that the price for being, doing, and having it all was overly high and that I no longer wanted to pay it. Although I could start my story of workaholism around age eight, I will fast forward to age twenty-two. By that year in my life, I was struggling—and I mean struggling—to get an M.A. in philosophy at the Catholic University of America. I thought I wanted to be a phenomenologist, to master the works of the likes of Heidegger and Husserl, only to realize that Heidegger’s Dasein would always remain opaque to me and that Husserl’s “eidetic reduction” held little appeal for me. Having waded too far into the waters of writing a dissertation on Dilthey’s Geisteswissenschaften to swim back, however, I found an oasis in a course (then regarded as seriously off-beat) on Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. The instructor, Paul Ki-King Tong, was from “mainland China.” He was an amazingly learned, linguistically-gifted, charming, and perceptive human being. He was also a Roman Catholic priest who had decided to leave the priesthood because of his unwillingness to adhere to Church teachings on contraception in particular, but on reproduction and sexuality in general. Celibacy no longer made sense to him. But at the time I took his graduate course, I did not know that he was a priest on his way to being an ex-priest. I only knew he was a priest, not a surprising fact at the Catholic University.

I enjoyed Father Tong’s course. Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism made sense to me in a way that phenomenology did not. I had no personal interactions with my instructor during the course, but at the end of the course, after our final papers had been returned and our grades submitted, he asked the class if anyone would be willing to drive him to the airport and pick him up several days later. My hand went up—unreflectively. I drove him to the airport. Five days later I picked him up. He asked me if I had had dinner. I said “No.” We wound up at the Orleans House, and over frozen daiquiris, he gave me a small gift, a bottle of perfume. Three months later, I was on my way to Boulder, Colorado, with him. Although Paul and several of his colleagues in the Departments of Philosophy and Theology at Catholic University had won an academic-freedom suit against the university, Paul had no desire to remain at an institution that had sought to fire him simply because he, in conscience, could not abide by the teachings of Humanae Vitae (the papal encyclical that forbade couples to use “artificial” contraceptives). Paul thought it best to accept a joint appointment in Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder (that is what the plane flight had been about).

The year was 1969 or so and Boulder was the place to be if you were what is now called “hip.” I am not sure how “hip” I was in those days as I struggled to complete my M.A. thesis on Dilthey’s Geisteswissenschaften. But in between translating articles from German into English, I skied, played tennis, golfed, hiked, and wined and dined some of the famous people Paul’s magnetic personality attracted: John Denver, Alan Watts, and the Dalai Lama, to name a few. I also attended courses of interest to me, edited journal articles for Paul simply to keep my mind active, and waited for the papers to come from Rome so that he could officially stop being a priest and we could get married, or at least publicly declare that we were a couple instead of a priest and a parishioner. (Paul ran the campus Catholic Newman Center for Catholic faculty and students, but they did not know that we were living together).

During this confused, yet exhilarating three-year period of time, Paul encouraged me to apply to Boulder’s Ph.D. Program in Philosophy. But Boulder turned my application down. No official reason was given, but I was told that my Catholic University credentials (all As and a high GRE) could not compare to equivalent credentials from a major secular university. I was also told that I would be an ill-fit for Boulder’s rigorous program, which was “contemporary,” not “medieval.” I went home to Paul. I protested that I had taken only one medieval course during my whole stay at Catholic University. Then I cried, a lot. After I got over the injustice I had experienced—not gender discrimination, but something akin to religious discrimination—I decided to accept my lot. I would become a teacher of high-school German, putting to use all the German I had learned in my futile quest to become a phenomenologist. But at the point when things could not get much worse for me—I had no desire to teach German, just a desire to earn my own keep and be something more than a ski bum—the fates intervened. The papers came from Rome. Paul was no longer a priest. We were free to marry publicly.

Paul and I left Boulder and headed toward Chicago, where my parents lived. When Paul left the old China in 1947—the year I was born—he was already twenty-two, the son of an extremely wealthy, royalist landlord. He never saw his parents again. They died one year before he finally got a visa to visit a new China in 1978. Thus, there was no place other than Chicago, my hometown, to get married. My mom and dad hosted a reception for us. They embraced us, odd couple that we were: a twenty-four-year-old white woman of Czech ancestry who grew up working class (dad a baker, mom a factory woman), sibling-less, and Catholic—sort of—and a forty-six-year-old Chinese man and ex-priest who grew up the favored son in an aristocratic, patriarchal, Westernized and Christianized family. What a mix!

The year was 1972. Feminism had yet to enter any consciousness, so it never occurred to me to ask myself whether it was a good idea for me to date and marry my former professor. All I knew was that I loved Paul. Of course, had the year been 1978 (by then I had a feminist consciousness), I might have had all sorts of misgivings about living with Paul as well as marrying him. And for sure, if I had had an adult daughter in 1978 and she had announced to me that she was going to marry her professor, a man twice her age from a patriarchal society, I would have been all over her, asking questions about the sexual harassment policies at her college and pointing out how easy it is for an older man in a position of power to persuade a young woman to do crazy things in the name of love. And perhaps she would have looked me in the eye and said, “Mom, I know it does not look right from a feminist point view, but it is right for me: my true choice, my real love.” What would there be for me to say, then, especially because she—if she existed—would know what my two sons who do exist know; namely, that I loved their father who loved me all too much, I fear, as the next paragraph will reveal.

After marrying Paul, he and I left for New Jersey where Paul had a tenure-track job waiting for him at Glassboro State College. On the East Coast I would have access to several universities with strong Ph.D. programs in philosophy: Rutgers, Penn, and Temple. But first there was the matter of the baby. I was eight months pregnant when we arrived in Glassboro in July 1972. Little Paul, as we called him, was born on August 4, 1972, and for the next two years I lived the life of a New Jersey housewife: cooking, cleaning, watching soap operas, walking up and down shopping malls just to kill time, and taking care of little Paul who was a handful (the kind of baby who never sleeps, cries a lot, and spits out all baby food with the exception of mashed bananas). Paul Sr. knew I was going crazy, but I felt guilty about voicing my true feelings to him; namely, that I was bored by my life as “Mommy” par excellence. So Paul expressed my sentiments for me. “Don’t you think it is time for you to go back to school?” he asked. And so we agreed, I would go back to school and get my Ph.D. in philosophy. Unfortunately, most of the universities in the vicinity did not want me. My Catholic University credentials and stints as a Colorado ski bum and then a New Jersey housewife did not make an impression at Penn and Rutgers. They were determined to admit only the best and brightest candidates to their respective programs. Mercifully, Temple took a gamble on me, cautioning me that I would have to switch from continental philosophy to analytic philosophy, and that I would have to prove myself as a student before they could provide me any funding. I said that their terms of endearment were acceptable to me. All I wanted was a chance to show that I had what it takes to get a Ph.D.

Realizing that our lives would get more complicated now that I was going to go to school full-time, Paul and I determined to make our new situation work. I would make the three-hour round-trip commute from Glassboro to Philadelphia everyday with Little Paul in tow, and Paul Sr. would do all the housework and cooking. In those days (circa 1974), believe it or not, Temple had what amounted to subsidized childcare for graduate students and others. I think students from the Education School staffed it, but it did not occur to me to ask. All I knew was that the staff seemed competent, the environment was clean, and that its location was convenient to my office. I usually visited little Paul at lunchtime. He seemed happy enough, even though he was always glad to go home at the end of his nine- to ten-hour day. So was I, despite the fact that by the end of the first semester, Monroe and Elizabeth Beardsley had befriended me. They insisted I be fully-funded and that I become Elizabeth’s research assistant, finding through her my first genuine philosophical interest: the philosophy of law. The problem was that not only was I doing research for Elizabeth, I was also teaching undergraduate courses to earn extra money, preparing for my prelim exams, and struggling to give both little Paul and Paul Sr. some semblance of family life.

Paul Sr. was also experiencing difficulties. Making the transition from celibate life to married life was challenging at times and he was simultaneously making his bid for tenure. Then the situation got even more complicated. Somehow, two years into my graduate studies, I got pregnant again—do not ask me how. John was born when his brother was four. The Temple Daycare Center did not accept infants under eighteen months, so Paul Sr. and I had to figure out some way to handle the situation. We hired a woman in her early sixties to help Paul Sr. take care of the boys, while I spent 6:00 a.m. till 7:00 p.m., five days a week, at Temple. The woman came from 6:00 a.m. till 2:00 p.m. for a pittance (another source of guilt for me) and Paul Sr. arranged his teaching schedule so that he could work at home from 2:00 p.m. till 7:00 p.m. We ate pizza and Chinese carry out a lot—a whole lot. We were exhausted, but happy. Paul got tenure, and, in 1978 largely thanks to Elizabeth Beardsley, I finished my un-publishable dissertation—“Towards a Rational Reconstruction of Anglo-American Law: Reconciling the Insanity and Irresistible Impulse Defenses.”

Now that I had a Ph.D., I wanted a job; and, as you might have already guessed, there was no job for me in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or any easily “commutable” state. Paul Sr. asked me what I would do if I were single. I said I would apply any place, anywhere in the country, that had a job for which I was even remotely qualified. He said to start applying. If you get a job, he said, we will figure out some way to handle the situation. I got a job: Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, one of the top three, liberal arts colleges in the country. Williams had just made the transition from being an all-male institution to being a 50 percent male/50 percent female institution, and it was hiring its first batch of female faculty. I made the cut even though my pedigree was, as usual, flawed. I was considered an oddity because I was from Temple: a university a cut or two below my colleagues’ alma maters.

The moniker “second-rate” did not hurt my bones. What did hurt my bones, however, was the crushing workload at Williams and the fact that Paul Sr. and I had decided that the boys—now age eighteen months and almost six years old—would come with me to Williams and Paul Sr. would drive seven hours every Friday morning from Glassboro, NJ, to Williamstown, MA, and seven hours every Monday morning from Williamstown, MA, to Glassboro, NJ, so that he could spend weekends with us until both of us could find jobs in the same geographical area.

I patched together babysitters and private schools for the boys, bringing them to work with me when my childcare arrangements fell through. To save money, Paul moved into his very large office—the kind of office that has a run-down kitchenette, old-fashioned bathroom, and beat-up sofa because it is located in a college-owned house that has seen better days. I got tenure by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin. Our boys survived our wacky lives, best captured by the memory of the day my husband arrived at 3:00 a.m. on Saturday instead of 6:00 p.m. on Friday (the snow had a nasty habit of shutting down the New Jersey Turnpike) to find me typing an overdue paper. Little Paul was riding his big wheel around the table on which I was typing and his baby brother John was crying in my lap. Dishes were piled high on the kitchen counter; dirty clothes littered the bedrooms; the refrigerator was nearly empty; and the television was blasting. Paul Sr. did not know whether to laugh, scream, cry, or get in his car to drive back to New Jersey. But after he got over his shock, he took the baby, changed his diaper, and got him to sleep. Then he captured little Paul, dizzy from orbiting around the table, read him a story, and got him to sleep. He then started the laundry and washed the dishes before he pulled my hands off the typewriter and pushed me towards our bed. We all slept until noon. Over a late breakfast, Paul Sr. and I wondered how long we could sustain our chaos.

The answer to our question came nearly a decade later. Paul drove up one weekend for Easter—the religious holiday we were celebrating at that point in our lives. It was April 1 st–both April Fool’s Day and Good Friday. Paul arrived in time for breakfast. I had his favorite foods ready: scrambled eggs with scallions, orange juice, banana muffins, and coffee. We sat down. The boys joined us. We ate with gusto. Paul stood up. A pain came over his face. He started to seize. He died right there in front of us—a victim of a massive heart attack. There was no warning. Little Paul, then fourteen, tried to resuscitate his father. His brother John, then eleven, ran upstairs and crawled under his bed. I called 911 suspecting it was over—hoping it was over, wanting my husband to live but not as a “person” in a persistent vegetative state.

Later that day, after the doctor pronounced him dead, crying to me that it made no sense, I hugged my two boys. We would be the three Musketeers. We would go on living, even though God had played a cruel April Fool’s Day joke on us. He had crucified us, for some reason I hoped…or everything about life was indeed absurd.

I blamed my ambition and my career at Williams College for what had happened. Had I not taken advantage of Paul’s self-sacrifice, he would be alive, I told myself. The stress of the commute, of living in his office, of not seeing his beloved boys, of having a workaholic for a wife had killed him—or so I surmised. I felt sorry for my two boys who never complained when I missed their school events, or shuttled them off to yet another babysitter, or told them Mommy couldn’t play. She had to do work. The boys’ clothes were rumpled, their hair was a mess, their schedules were erratic, and their diets were anything but balanced. I was a colossal sinner—a neglectful mother. For my penance, I gave up my job at Williams.

We moved to Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, for a new start. This time, in the South (the home of “family values”), I would not let my career call the shots. I would be a family woman first of all: a real mother. I would bake cupcakes and drive my boys everywhere. They would visit the doctor and dentist regularly, be in bed by 10:00 p.m., and be fed proper breakfasts before they were sent off to school.

After a month or so, the boys came to me, begging me to give them back our old chaotic life. I obliged. As you might suspect, by then I had started to work really hard at Davidson. Moving South had not changed me at all. I still was not the family type. I built an undergraduate program in Medical Humanities from scratch; I became active in FAB, SWIP, and the APA; I started two new books. My father, a widower, moved from Chicago to North Carolina to help me care for the boys. Five years after my dad arrived on the scene, I met and married my second husband—the Director of Davidson’s pre-medical program. My second husband, ten years older than I, was not in the mood to father my boys, however. He had been there, done that. So we agreed that he did not have to try to be my boys’ dad. After all, no one could replace their old dad, and besides, they had grandpa.

To some degree, I was a bigamist. My first marriage was not really over as I entered my second. Indeed to this day, I feel that I still have two separate emotional lives: the one I lived in Colorado, New Jersey, and Massachusetts with my first husband, and the one I live now in North Carolina with my second husband. I also have the profound sense that work has consumed too much of me—that the boys have become men in their mid-twenties and early thirties without me having taken the time to really participate in, let alone enjoy, their growing process. My dad was the lucky one: he carved the pumpkins, went to the games, and popped the popcorn. Without my dad helping me during the five years when I was a widow, and then for nearly a decade after that, I could not have accomplished what I did in the professional world of philosophy and my sons would not have had a man to love them. I suppose that is why, when my father grew old and took ill, the boys and I struggled so hard to care for him in his home. We wanted to make it possible for him to keep his beloved dog by his side, to eat his favorite Czech foods, to smoke forbidden cigars, and to drink occasional beers before he totally lost the taste for life, as he eventually did.

The three of us ran ourselves ragged. After about two years, I told the boys they needed to get on with their lives. The older one had passed up a good job so he could live close to grandpa, and the younger one had deferred graduate school to do his share. Minus their help, the burden of care fell directly on my shoulders. In between work and caring for my dad, I spent about four to five hours a day just in commuting time. I drew solace from Eva Kittay’s book, Love’s Labor, not because I had a dependency worker to help me, but because I was a dependency worker, struggling to maintain some sort of family life for fear that if I did not, no one else would, and then there would be only work—unrelenting work.

My dad died last Thanksgiving. I fear his death was meant as a gift to me—a gift I dare not acknowledge with a thank you, however, for fear of having to confront that part of me that wanted, desperately, even as I cared for him, to be liberated from love’s labor. Life is easier now. There is more time for work, but there is also more time to brood as I watch the young women in our profession, struggling to keep family and work together. The structures of our profession—the attitudes prevalent in it—have changed, but not nearly enough to fully accommodate family matters. And, yet we wonder why there are relatively few women in our profession. My guess is that philosophy’s missing women have not been willing to pay the price of trying to have it all. It is a high price. For me the price has been close to the price the spider in Charlotte’s Web paid. But there is still time left for me. I am not a spider. I do not want to self-immolate like Charlotte: much too ironic a fate for a feminist who wants anything but self-immolation for women.

In July, I will be sixty. I intend to give myself the gift of life and to work only on those projects that I find meaningful—a global feminist ethics of care, for example. I plan to let my family, what is left of it, matter a whole lot; and I plan on doing whatever I still can to make sure that women in our profession pay only their fair share of the dues for membership in it. My hope is to come to a SWIP panel twenty years from now on the topic of “Family Matters” and hear some new tunes being sung, far different from the ones that I have sung today. Afterall, some dreams do come true. There must be ways for women to have it all without paying the ultimate price: themselves. Of this I am convinced.

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