Learning to Love the Swamp

Peggy McIntosh, Associate Director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, has written several articles I admire. One I particularly treasure and often send to friends and colleagues is called Feeling Like a Fraud. It comes in two parts [McIntosh, 1985, 1989]. In the second she describes the feelings leading up to her presentation. She says she had been eagerly looking forward to the talk for months. Her earlier paper had been well received, and she was pleased to develop her thinking in the company of people whose work she valued. She wrote page after page of new ideas. However, she found herself unable to organize her ideas or her pages. The day of the lecture approached, and she could not get clear on her outline. She began, fittingly enough, to feel like a fraud. Rather than despair, she explains further . . the trick . . is to try to hold onto the very feelings that are giving you the most trouble, and trust them to lead you to some new ground, some new way of seeing or being [McIntosh, 1989, p. 2]. Dr. McIntosh decided it was the outline form itself that was giving her the most trouble. She preferred a list. She wanted to talk about several different encounters with her topic and track her several efforts at acting on her learning. She describes herself as realizing that for her the notion of an outline carried a ranking of ideas she did not feel; starting with any one . . as the most important distorted [her] sense of the whole matter [McIntosh, 1989, p. 2]. The parallels are clear for me. I too once looked forward to this presidential address, although as it got closer the anticipatory pleasure faded, replaced with anxiety. I tried to reassure myself, as did McIntosh in her world, that my earlier appearances at APPAM and places like it had been generally well received. I too am among people whose work I admire and value. And like McIntosh, as the months passed, I wrote page after page and got nowhere, or at least nowhere I wanted to be. McIntosh cautions us, in her article on fraudulence, not to give up too

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