Sue McPherson
March 4, 2002
Following is the text of an email from myself to Peter Wallensteen, regarding my bio, My Life So Far, and the Alva Myrdal Conference, Sweden.
To Professor P. Wallensteen, March 4, 2002
Dear Professor Wallensteen,
I appreciate your willingness to make my short bio, My Life So Far (see attachment), available to the participants of the Alva Myrdal Conference: Questions to our Time, March 6-8, 2002 at Uppsala University, Sweden. http://www.pcr.uu.se/myrdal/myrdalalva.htm However, unless it is posted to the conference web site, there is little chance that it will be taken seriously and that conference participants would bother to respond. The issues I have raised, in relation to Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein's book, Women's Two Roles: Home and Work (first published 1956), are not as important for women who are already in academia and working towards furthering their careers. For the most part, they would be interesting mainly for women outside academia, and probably mainly for the benefit of working-class women, especially those who themselves have questioned the place of paid work in their own lives. Since my views and life experience are ones that do raise a "question to our time," the theme of the conference, I should think that they would provide a rather different perspective to other scholars' presentations on the work and life of Alva Myrdal.
As to your concern that I missed the deadline for applying to present a paper at the conference, I must explain that I have not been affiliated with any university until recently, and have not had access to calls for papers to conferences.
I realize this is an academic conference, and surely this is one of the most pressing matters in our society. Are we to continue to believe (as some of us did) that those in the middle classes, and in academia, are always going to know what is best for us, and that they should be advising us in making our life decisions, while at the same time excluding us from having any significant input?
When you say that "If there is a public debate, that is fine and should be encouraged, but the participants are scholars, not representatives of the general public", I wonder what you mean by that. I have been well-educated - in Canada, and the reasons I am no longer a PhD student at university have nothing to do with my ability.
I do want you to know I have read some of the papers on the web site, and there indeed insights into Myrdal's gender ideology and the contradictions in women's lives, and some of the changes her beliefs went through, as her career and her life progressed. But like all of us - after all she was only human - she made mistakes, and telling women how to live their lives, especially while living her own a different way, was one of them.
I do wonder about the purpose of this conference, whether it is, as you state, to "further academic research within the nine themes," or whether it is to celebrate the whole life of this remarkable woman, flaws and all, or whether the purpose is actually to raise "questions to our time".
As I state in My Life So Far, I was led to believe that what was missing in my life was paid work, but that I could make a new life for myself and have a career after the children were older. It is unlikely that I will be able to have that career now, and the fact that we are in a recession is one of the reasons. But what my own academic studies and research have brought me back to is the realization that it is not necessarily paid work that leads to fulfilment in life, for oneself or for the feeling that one has contributed something useful to society. Neither do I believe that marriage and family life are essential elements for happiness in life, although these work for many people. Women - and men too - live their lives in diverse ways, and do find meaning for them in other ways and not mainly through various combinations of family life and paid work.
I am grateful that you chose to post the details of the conference, and the papers to be presented, on your web site. I hope that you will continue to do so, in this way bridging the gap, to some extent, between academia and the world outside. I would also be most grateful if you would post on the site my short bio - My Life So Far. If you do receive comments - on the bio or on any aspect of the conference - and would like to reconsider your decision not to post any on the web site, perhaps I would be able to assist in transferring messages and setting up a page for them.
Sincerely,
Sue McPherson
Colchester, UK
sue@mcphersons.freeserve.co.uk
Sue McPherson’s web site: http://samcpherson.homestead.com/homepage.html