Meet Zelda Gamson: 87 years old, widow to a famous sociologist, still cutting her own bangs, and looking back on a life whose shape is only beginning to emerge. She, too, was a tenured professor; she's been a mother, a dancer, an activist, a householder, and an early expert in "gig work" and "code-switching" before either term was coined. In "Don't Play Like a Girl: A Midcentury Woman Leaps Into Life," Gamson tells the story of how she forged her own path even when her choices were limited and her way unclear. From getting pepper-sprayed at a Vietnam War protest to being drugged without her consent during the birth of her first child to finding her bliss alone on an island, Gamson shares a funny, harrowing, lively tale with an intimate perspective on universal questions. How can we give to others while still holding onto our essential selves? What should young women now understand about how quickly their right to self-determination can vanish? How do we live with joy amidst turmoil? Wise and warm, "Don't Play Like a Girl" offers a relevant, instructive vision for a contemporary world that demands unprecedented improvisation. People of her generation and her fellow academics, activists, and fun-lovers will return to their youth with Zelda Gamson. Young women and young men will love and learn with an elder who still feels like they do.
"This is a memoir of a self-possessed woman exploring her mind but not yet sure what she thinks. Zelda, a daughter of striving immigrants coming of age in turbulent times, finds her voice while recognizing that her life was shaped by forces outside of her choosing or control. Beautifully written, the book follows her through the important events of her life against the pivotal events of our times. She became a preeminent scholar and thought leader. But as the book reveals, this wasn’t always so. The book is a page turner written with heart for the little girl who struggled to find herself."
-Deborah Hirsch, Educator, college administrator, consultant
"This is a delightful memoir by a smart, talented, and persistent woman who managed to develop a highly successful professional career before that was common for women. Challenged by traditional gender roles and the white men’s club in academia, Gamson soldiered on to carve out a path for herself while raising two children and watching her husband’s much easier career trajectory.
"This book is full of fascinating anecdotes and includes close looks at Jewish Philadelphia in the 40s and 50s and Martha’s Vineyard in the 80s and 90s. Anyone who has grown up in a chaotic family, faced class bias, loved an immigrant community, raised kids while working, struggled with sexism, pursued a life of activism, enjoyed spirituality and religion, faced the illness of a loved one, or dealt with one’s own illness and aging is likely to enjoy this book."
-Estelle Disch, Sociology, women’s studies
"Gamson conveys a particular generation's experience. It's the generation of educated women who came of age post World War II. She vividly describes the personal struggle to achieve fulfillment and significance when marriage and family and domesticity defined womanhood--and multiple glass ceilings were taken for granted. All this told with honest emotional openness about her embrace of a life-long loving marriage.
"Zelda gives us a window into daily life in academia in the heyday of post war flourishing of the multiversity, describing how the taken for granted social life of faculty was upended by the sixties, how new social science fields began to reshape the disciplines--and why one needed to rebel against institutional cultures and structures even as one loved the academic world.
"And she tells us movingly about how it is to get old while continuing to sustain lust for life--an account readers of a certain age are likely to be grateful to have read and readers of a younger age may want learn about."
-Richard Flacks, Sociologist, activist
"Blending personal narrative, social history and analysis, Gamson’s memoir captures the messiness, difficulty as well as the hopeful excitement of breaking with conventions. She didn’t play like a girl even as she raised children, danced, worked, and challenged social assumptions about class and gender. She returned regularly to questions of class inequalities often via research on education. In each aspect of her life, private and public, she found herself pressed against status quo conventions. Her recurring frustration is palpable and provides a metric by which to appreciate the intense anger of the many constituencies long marginalized that attempt redress via social movements.
"Gamson begins with her 1930’s Philadelphia childhood in a working-class Jewish immigrant family most recently from Ukraine. She describes her public-school education, her alienation at UPenn, and subsequent epiphanies in the more nurturing environments of Antioch College, University of Michigan, Harvard, and beyond. Her life story provides an unbroken thread through the changes of the 1950’s and 1960’s in U.S. universities. A sociologist by training, she occasionally refers readers to research that demonstrate that her experiences were far from unique—academic jobs, for instance, were routinely via phone calls between established (mostly male) scholars who typically would recommend their brightest (male) protégés since women, they assumed, would marry and leave the academy to raise families. Or they believed that women were just not as good as men.
"Zelda and her peers had been opposing U.S. expansionism in Southeast Asia and challenging barriers to women for well over a decade—as female graduate students, young faculty wives, and serious scholars. When I became a young faculty wife and scholar, her generation was still pressing for institutional changes even has they mentored another generation of activists. Some ask why social justice movements come and go. Read Gamson’s memoir to understand why they survive against forbidding odds."
-Charlotte Ryan, Sociologist and activist
"“Don’t Play Like a Girl” is a beautifully written, passionate, powerful account of what it was like to be a smart girl and a smart woman when there was little room for either. (It makes us reflect on how much more room there is and isn't now.) But this is no self-pitying chronicle (impossible given her recognition of the obstacles faced by many worse off, and her labor to change things). Instead Zelda Gamson embraces the contradiction that life offered her more constraints than opportunities (though of course there were some of those too), and yet she made her life whole, successful, and often happy through her own efforts and choices. It is infuriating, heartbreaking, and inspiring to read this funny, angry, honest, and insightful account of a life that felt lived from the margins but should have been cherished in the center.
"Of course this book should be read by aging women who shared many of the kinds of difficult choices Gamson did. And by the men who rarely noticed or understood the depth of the disappointments. But it also should be read by those who imagine that the days of such constraints are over. There is much to learn about the creativity and determination it takes to overcome the tough moments that feel decisive and catastrophic, but don’t have to be. And in the end at least in this one case produced wisdom and a love of life that reminds us that it’s worth it to find ways to renegotiate the terms of one’s life to make it truly one’s own."
-Abigail Stewart, Psychologist/women’s and gender studies
"I started reading this memoir and couldn’t put it down. The text draws one into a deeply personal story that is engaging, interesting, and compelling. The style of the writing, frank and poetic, bears the mark of an accomplished writer who shares her personal sense-making in ways that connect with the life experiences of the reader. What is this book about? One answer is that it is a response to the heartfelt and intellectually keen questions of a well-educated contemporary woman who has lived many decades: What does my life add up to? What is the meaning of the twists and turns my path has taken? Have the choices I have made as I navigated the many demands and expectations I faced resulted in a life that makes a difference? How do I handle the anger that I still hold about constraints imposed on me? What does “finding peace” mean in the later years of life? While these questions are situated in the life story of Zelda Gamson, they give voice to the thoughts that weave through the minds of many women, younger and older, who feel committed to work, family, social justice, spiritual growth, supporting others—who grapple with how to handle others’ expectations while still holding on to their own hopes, motivations, and values.
"Another answer to “what is this book about” and “why read it” is that it offers a sociological collage of what creating a life has looked like for a passionate woman in twentieth-century United States and early twenty-first century. As readers, we experience the tension between the opportunities and limitations facing a young woman in the 1950s at one of the country’s most renowned liberal arts colleges. We feel the outrage of a talented woman whose options are greatly constrained by the professional opportunities offered her husband and the widely accepted employment practices of the time. We recognize the emotion and tension of deeply loving one’s children and spouse while also recognizing that, in doing so, one’s own dreams have much less of a chance to develop. We also see the first-hand experience of a woman contributing to the changes in the decades of the second half of the twentieth century when practices about gender and race, questions about the role of the U.S. in the broader world, and recognition of the fragility of the planet were gaining traction.
"Gamson’s story is not only about living history during this period; her story is about being in places, working with people, and taking actions that were significant in making history. Her recollections of life across days, years, and decades, bring alive a period of American history when great change was happening in American society, especially for women. Just as important is Gamson’s unwavering sense of, and insistence on, her own agency to forge her own path, even among constrained options, to be true to her own values, and to make a difference.
"Each page of this memoir is filled with details of an active, busy, unwieldy, and demanding life. Yet Zelda Gamson shows that creating a life also involves the simplicity of time spent in nature, being alone, engaging in spiritual practice, watching the birds. Complexity and simplicity co-exist, creating the fertile ground in which women can cultivate a life of meaning and significance."
-Ann Austin, Higher Education, college administrator