the measure of a woman -- an interview with social scientist carol tavris.pdf

7/28/2019 The Measure of a Woman -- An interview with social scientist Carol Tavris.pdf

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Tavriss grandparents were Russian Jews w hoimmigrated to Chicago at the turn of the century. Hermother broke the rules of convention by becoming a lawyerat the tender age of 21, having decided that if she wouldneed to take courses to become a court reporter, she mightas well go all the way. She then violated another socialnorm by becoming a mother at the then-unheard of age ofnearly 40. The Tavris family moved to Los Angeles duringthe depression because, Carol recalled with a grin, theyfigured if they were going to starve they should at least bewarm. Her mother quit her law practice because no onewas working during the depression, especially womenlawyers. In 1955, when she was just 11 years old, Tavrissfather died, and her mother became the sole breadwinner,continuing to run the insurance agency she and herhusband had started. One of the strongest feministmessages my mother sent me was be sure you are self -sufficient, be sure you can earn your own living.

Tavris learned that lesson well, along with anapproach toward thinking, skepticism, and social activismunique to the cultural tradition of Judaism. Her parentswere nonreligious, and they actively opposed religions thatthey believed fomented intolerance and the mindlessacceptance of doctrine. They came from the strands of

Judaism and socialism that celebrated free thinkers, sherecalled, a tradition of questioning, dissenting, andarguing with received wisdom. Judaism, Tavris explainedin a wry twist of humor, is the only religion in whichpeople are always arguing w ith God. The Talmud, shecontinued, is a set of arguments among Rabbis about

Jewish law. Someone says something, and then there are 45

commentaries and arguments about it. It is a religiousdocument, but one that is based on an intellectual attitude


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of questioning and dissent in a spirit of improving themind, of better understanding, and of moving forward.That spirit was very much my fathers attitude. If myparents set down a rule, I was always free to argue about itand discuss it. They hated because I say so as a reason formaking a child obey. They always gave me reasons for theirrules and always listened if I had reasons for questioningthem.

Growing up Jewish and socialist also inculcated inTavris a sense of social activism as a long-termcommitment. My parents understood that the goals of

justice and egalitarianism are never achieved once and forall, she said. Its a constant battle against the forces ofreaction, superstition, and vested interests. As egalitarians,my parents gave me books to read about successful,interesting women from Harriet Tubman to ElizabethBlackwell which is undoubtedly why my first ambition,as a little girl, was to be the worlds first woman bus driver.I looked around and saw that there were no women busdrivers and said, well, I can be one. I never got anymessages ever , from either parent, about what a womansplace was, or what I could or could not do. This includedreligion. They would never say you wont believe in Godany more than they would s ay you will believe in God.

They would say, Heres why some people believe in God,heres some of the many different concepts of God, andheres why we dont believe in God. I was then free tochoose.

Raised in that spirit of inquiry, Tavris went on to aproductive career as a social scientist, feminist scholar,author, and lecturer. She and her long-time collaborator

Carole Wade wrote one of the first textbooks in womensstudies, The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective
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(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977 and 1984), whichexamined the scientific evidence for and against many

beliefs about women and wome ns lower status historicallyand cross-culturally. Her popular books Anger: The

Misunderstood Emotion (Simon and Schuster, 1989) and The Mismeasure of Woman (Simon and Schuster, 1992) becameclassic exercises in the application of critical thinking andskeptical inquiry to their hitherto misunderstood andmismeasured subjects. Book reviews and Op-Ed essays thatregularly appear in the New York Times and the Los AngelesTimes are always, regardless of the subject, written from herintelligent and thoughtful perspective challenging yetsensitive to the complexities of the issue. Her introductorypsychology textbook ( Psychology , 6th edition, Prentice Hall,2000), co-authored with Carole Wade, was the first toexplicitly and systematically integrate principles of criticaland scientific thinking into the introductory course.Revising this successful and influential text, along withtheir other texts Invitation to Psychology and Psychology inPerspective , keeps Tavris on the cutting edge of newresearch in her field.

Although Tavris has no academic position, no tenure-secured professorship, lecture invitations from universitiesand professional organizations come in regularly, along

with media calls for radio and television interviews, bookreview and Op-Ed assignments, and all manner ofdistractions that she struggles mightily to balance with herdrive to stay focused on writing. A home office nestled inthe canyons of the Hollywood Hills has built-in bookshelves (including one featuring the numerous foreigntranslations of Tavriss many books) and exquisite art. She

lives with her actor husband, Ronan OCasey, who doublesas a gourmet cook, and a gregarious Border collie named
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arguments that will skewer their deepest, most cherishedideas.

Skeptic: And religion would certainly countas one of the most cherished of all.

Tavris: Religion provides many important functions inhuman life, quite apart from its reassurances about themeaning of life and the possibility of salvation. It oftenprovides a close community, warm and emotional holidays,reassuring and familiar rituals and traditions at times of joyand sorrow, harvest and famine. I got all of those things

because of parents thought it was important that Icelebrated and understood our Jewish heritage justwithout the God part. When many people give up the Godpart, they also give up the rituals and traditions of religion,such as weddings, holidays, and funerals. But rituals areessential in human existence. When there is a death, people

need a grieving ceremony in which they get together andcelebrate the life of the loved one who is gone. Religiousceremonies are organized around God, of course. But Ithink what is most comforting for the bereaved is thefamiliarity of the ritual and its part in a long chain of sharedhuman experience, and the immediate comfort of friendsand family. Of course, families can make their own rituals

and traditions, too. My mother solved the what to doabout Christmas when youre Jewish problem by alwaysgiving me a gift from Mrs. Santa Claus, who, she said, issure to be doing all the work, shopping and wrapping allthose presents, while Mr. Santa Claus gets all the credit.She and I made our own tradition, with a little feministlesson tucked into it.


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mutilation! That wont work any more than willforbidding people to worship in their particular religion.Rituals die only when the reasons for them becomeunnecessary.

Skeptic: Maybe the need for ritual andcommunity is, in part, what is driving many ofthese New Age movements. People like DeepakChopra seem to be tapping into something morethan alternative medicine; it is more likealternative religion or alternative

spiritualism.Tavris: Yes, I think the rise of spiritual movements

today reflects not just a hunger for God, but for the kind ofcommunity connection that religion has traditionallyprovided. And I think it reflects a longing for somethingthat is bigger than our small individual selves. Thatsomething used to be co mmunity, country, politics, social

movements. But Americans are becoming increasinglyapolitical and apathetic, and turning inward for answers.The God squad is happy to provide them. But my parentsand their generation had a lifelong sense of obligation toimprove the world rather than themselves.

Skeptic: Without God, what would be thereason to be a moral person, or to try toimprove the world?

Tavris: Helping people. Humanity in general.Bettering the world, if not in time for you, then for yourkids. Justice. Kindness. Those are pretty good reasons. Myparents believed that if you are working only for yourself itis not enough.


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some impenetrable prose that made me feel completelystupid. But within a few weeks I discovered theinterdisciplinary program in social psychology. It wasexactly my cup of tea, so I switched.

In 1968, after taking my preliminary exams, I decidedit was time for a break. On a whim, I wrote a letter toPsychology Today , a new magazine that had just started upon the west coast, and asked for a summer job. They saidthey could only use me if I came for the entire year, and Ireluctantly agreed reluctant because this was just the sortof thing that graduate departments used as an excuse fornot admitting women. Women were forever dropping outto work or have a baby or earn a living, or other oddactivities. So here I was doing the very thing I swore Iwould not do taking a leave.

Skeptic: In all of your present work youplace great emphasis on the scientific method asa means of getting at answers to questions, yetin your background you were raised indisputation and debate where there are no finalanswers. And in your undergraduate training youstudied comparative literature, which is alsosteeped in the tradition of disputation, sosomewhere along the line you made the transitionfrom subjective debate that leads to no finalconclusions, to objective science in whichempirical answers can be derived throughexperimentation.

Tavris: Brandeis didnt teach me much about thescientific method not with all that subjective, qualitativeFreudian stuff but my education there was imbued withthe Talmudic tradition, which, like the scientific method, isall about asking questions. Its not about getting final


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answers. But I must have been a budding scientist, becauseone of the reasons I decided on a career in sociology ratherthan literature was that I liked the idea of testing ideas fortheir relative validity. In literature, your success as anacademic depends on the brilliance and cleverness of yourinterpr etation of a text over someone elses. I thought,Well, thats lots of fun to do and all very nice, but whychoose one interpretation over another? I rememberreading a dissertation on the subject of whether Hamlet wasor was not fat. The pro-fat evidence is that the Queen saysof Hamlet, when he is dueling Laertes, He is fat, and scantof breath, and Hamlet himself says in that great soliloquy,O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, andresolve itself into a dew


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you are. So even though I felt guilty about not going intoacademia, I took the job at Psychology Today.

Skeptic: In hindsight, was this the rightdecision?

Tavris: Oh boy, it sure was! And I say this in fullknowledge of the hindsight bias! I worked with brillianteditors who blew the jargon off my prose, tossed me intodeep water and forced me to swim, and reinforced mycommitment to communicating research findings to thepublic. I met my wonderful co-author Carole Wade there.We taught a course on gender differences at San Diego StateCollege, and out of that course we wrote The Longest War. Working at PT and writing that book began my career as anindependent scholar and writer.

After two years the magazine was sold and moved toNew York, so I went with it. I stayed for about a year then

went to work for Human Nature , a wonderful magazine thatcame out just before the wave of science magazinesemerged in the 1980s. Unfortunately it was ahead of its timeand didnt make it. So there I was, unemployed. But bythen it was too late to reconsider academia; once you fall offthe academic career ladder, it is almost impossible to climb

back on. It was okay, though. The truth is that I am a better

writer and communicator than I am an academic or anexperimenter. I found the right niche.

Skeptic: In recent years you have beenwriting and lecturing about the gap betweenscientific researchers in psychology and themany psychotherapists who are virtuallyuntrained in the scientific method, or thefindings of psychology, for that matter.


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Tavris: Many people dont realize that this gap exists,or the reasons for it. The pop-psych therapists get the publicattention; they write books and advice columns, have radioshows, get on TV. The scientists work in their labs andwrite for professional journals.

At the heart of this divide between many therapistsand scientists is skepticism their attitude toward receivedwisdom. Scientists are trained to be skeptical of receivedwisdom, to question it, to seek other explanations. Manytherapists are trained to accept received wisdomuncritically from whatever authority their particular schoolendorses. Thats why many therapists call themselvesFreudians or Jungians or Rogerians or whateverians.Scientists dont take their identity from the name of so meexpert there arent any Gouldians or Saganians.

Making explicit the difference between empiricalresearch and clinical intuition in psychology has formed athread through all the work I have done. In researching my

book on anger, I discovered a massive amount of evidencefrom experimental research, cross-cultural studies, and fieldwork disputing the clinical assumptions about what angeris, where it comes from, what you should do with it, whyyou should ventilate it, how universal it is, and so on. Whywasnt this valuable data getting out to the practitioners

and the public?

Skeptic: And in your textbooks you have alsobeen at pains to bring critical and scientificthinking to students entering the field ofpsychology.

Tavris: After Anger was published and Id been

writing for magazines for a few years, Carole Wadeinquired if I wanted to do an intro psych book with her. I


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said, I thought you liked me! What an insane idea. Shesaid, No, really, there is a lot that needs to be done in thisarea. She was right. The joke at the time was thatpsychology was the study of the white, male, sophomore

the measure of a woman -- an interview with social scientist carol tavris.pdf

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