Stephen M. Ward Quote
Remarkably, Grace never considered pursuing a career and very rarely sought consistent employment. At no time in her long life was Grace driven by the question of how to make a living. Accordingly, political considerations frequently guided her choices about employment, including where to work, for how long, and even whether to take a job. This set of choices, of course, was available to her because of the relative material security she enjoyed at most stages of her life: her comfortable middle-class upbringing and the family support she continued to enjoy when she returned to New York during the 1940s; her marital union with Jimmy; and the support of her political community, as she sometimes worked as a member of the organization’s (minimally) paid staff and later received financial support from Freddy and Lyman. But that alone does not explain her employment decisions. Grace’s indifference to career and upward mobility reflected her decidedly nonacquisitive personality and a complete disinterest in status or the trappings of any sort of professional life. This was evident in 1940 when Grace earned her Ph.D. Securing an academic job was never on my mind, she said decades later, thinking back to her mind-set and priorities while completing the degree. With no aspiration of becoming a professor— I had not studied philosophy in order to teach it—Grace had allowed herself to sink into her studies without regard for where they would lead, intellectually or materially. The need to eventually find employment beyond what she had already been doing was never in my consciousness. It just never bothered me, she recalled. What I knew was that by and large I had been able to make a living because I was a very good typist and I figured, if I needed money I can type. 84 And that is what she did over the next two decades, taking various secretarial and clerical jobs, most of them short term or temporary and some of them part time.
Remarkably, Grace never considered pursuing a career and very rarely sought consistent employment. At no time in her long life was Grace driven by the question of how to make a living. Accordingly, political considerations frequently guided her choices about employment, including where to work, for how long, and even whether to take a job. This set of choices, of course, was available to her because of the relative material security she enjoyed at most stages of her life: her comfortable middle-class upbringing and the family support she continued to enjoy when she returned to New York during the 1940s; her marital union with Jimmy; and the support of her political community, as she sometimes worked as a member of the organization’s (minimally) paid staff and later received financial support from Freddy and Lyman. But that alone does not explain her employment decisions. Grace’s indifference to career and upward mobility reflected her decidedly nonacquisitive personality and a complete disinterest in status or the trappings of any sort of professional life. This was evident in 1940 when Grace earned her Ph.D. Securing an academic job was never on my mind, she said decades later, thinking back to her mind-set and priorities while completing the degree. With no aspiration of becoming a professor— I had not studied philosophy in order to teach it—Grace had allowed herself to sink into her studies without regard for where they would lead, intellectually or materially. The need to eventually find employment beyond what she had already been doing was never in my consciousness. It just never bothered me, she recalled. What I knew was that by and large I had been able to make a living because I was a very good typist and I figured, if I needed money I can type. 84 And that is what she did over the next two decades, taking various secretarial and clerical jobs, most of them short term or temporary and some of them part time.