What do you think?
Rate this book
Composing a Life
Profiles of five women that aim "to shed light on personal and career obstacles women face in achieving success" by a cultural anthropologist (Publishers Weekly).
Mary Catherine Bateson has been called "one of the most original and important thinkers of our time" (Deborah Tannen). Grove Press is pleased to reissue Bateson's deeply satisfying treatise on the improvisational lives of five extraordinary women. Using their personal stories as her framework, Dr. Bateson delves into the creative potential of the complex lives we live today, where ambitions are constantly refocused on new goals and possibilities. With balanced sympathy and a candid approach to what makes these women inspiring, examples of the newly fluid movement of adaptation--their relationships with spouses, children, and friends, their ever-evolving work, and their gender--Bateson shows us that life itself is a creative process.
"A masterwork of rare breadth and particularity, encompassing all the rhythms of five lives and friendships, and interweaving their stories in ways that reveal grand social truths and peculiar personal graces."--The Boston Globe
"Well-formulated and passionate . . . Offers nothing less than a radical rethinking of the concept of achievement."--San Francisco Chronicle
"As stimulating as it is hopeful . . . shakes up well-meaning truisms . . . adds new dimensions to our views of the world."--Elizabeth Janeway, author of Man's World, Woman's Place
"Bateson has an extremely interesting mind and the ability to express herself with extraordinary literary felicity . . . Too much truth steams behind the quiet elegance of these passages."--The New York Times Book Review
Mary Catherine Bateson has been called "one of the most original and important thinkers of our time" (Deborah Tannen). Grove Press is pleased to reissue Bateson's deeply satisfying treatise on the improvisational lives of five extraordinary women. Using their personal stories as her framework, Dr. Bateson delves into the creative potential of the complex lives we live today, where ambitions are constantly refocused on new goals and possibilities. With balanced sympathy and a candid approach to what makes these women inspiring, examples of the newly fluid movement of adaptation--their relationships with spouses, children, and friends, their ever-evolving work, and their gender--Bateson shows us that life itself is a creative process.
"A masterwork of rare breadth and particularity, encompassing all the rhythms of five lives and friendships, and interweaving their stories in ways that reveal grand social truths and peculiar personal graces."--The Boston Globe
"Well-formulated and passionate . . . Offers nothing less than a radical rethinking of the concept of achievement."--San Francisco Chronicle
"As stimulating as it is hopeful . . . shakes up well-meaning truisms . . . adds new dimensions to our views of the world."--Elizabeth Janeway, author of Man's World, Woman's Place
"Bateson has an extremely interesting mind and the ability to express herself with extraordinary literary felicity . . . Too much truth steams behind the quiet elegance of these passages."--The New York Times Book Review
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
195 people are currently reading
2263 people want to read
About the author
Mary Catherine Bateson
42 books62 followersMary Catherine Bateson (born December 8, 1939) is an American writer and cultural anthropologist.
A graduate of the Brearley School, Bateson is the daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.
Bateson is a noted author in her field with many published monographs. Among Bateson's books is With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, a recounting of her upbringing by two famous parents. She has taught at Harvard, Amherst, and George Mason University, among others.
Mary Catherine Bateson is a fellow of the International Leadership Forum and was president of the Institute for Intercultural Studies in New York until 2010.
(from Wikipedia)
A graduate of the Brearley School, Bateson is the daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.
Bateson is a noted author in her field with many published monographs. Among Bateson's books is With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, a recounting of her upbringing by two famous parents. She has taught at Harvard, Amherst, and George Mason University, among others.
Mary Catherine Bateson is a fellow of the International Leadership Forum and was president of the Institute for Intercultural Studies in New York until 2010.
(from Wikipedia)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 129 reviews
April 9, 2009
What I learned from this book...
Don't tackle a book on women's emerging roles in a "post" feminist society while still smarting from being fired as dean of a prestigious university.
Aside from that, it's interesting to read the feminist perspective from 1989 -- the year I graduated from college, oblivious to the tissue layers of resistance that constituted the glass ceiling in my own career path. I was equally unaware of the carbon-threads of sexism that had shaped propelled my college studies toward the liberal arts and not architecture or engineering.
Two decades in the workforce has made all of these tethers abundantly clear.
Bateson discusses the experiences in her life and in those of four of her friends, how they were bound or unbound by the expectations around them.
I found the stories of her acquaintances more compelling and intriguing. What was it like to be a female high-tech exec in the 80s? What was it like to be the first female, African-American president of Spelman? These are the stories of women's lives in the post-feminist world who really mattered, and who really put in motion what will untether the potential of my daughters.
It's an indulgent, naval-gazer of a book, with an author wrestling with her anger of her firing. But there are nuggets in here that tell the story of how the world is changing and will continue to change for women everywhere.
Don't tackle a book on women's emerging roles in a "post" feminist society while still smarting from being fired as dean of a prestigious university.
Aside from that, it's interesting to read the feminist perspective from 1989 -- the year I graduated from college, oblivious to the tissue layers of resistance that constituted the glass ceiling in my own career path. I was equally unaware of the carbon-threads of sexism that had shaped propelled my college studies toward the liberal arts and not architecture or engineering.
Two decades in the workforce has made all of these tethers abundantly clear.
Bateson discusses the experiences in her life and in those of four of her friends, how they were bound or unbound by the expectations around them.
I found the stories of her acquaintances more compelling and intriguing. What was it like to be a female high-tech exec in the 80s? What was it like to be the first female, African-American president of Spelman? These are the stories of women's lives in the post-feminist world who really mattered, and who really put in motion what will untether the potential of my daughters.
It's an indulgent, naval-gazer of a book, with an author wrestling with her anger of her firing. But there are nuggets in here that tell the story of how the world is changing and will continue to change for women everywhere.
April 3, 2009
This was a lovely book. I recommend it to every woman I know. I'm glad I read it now, and I hope to read it again ten years from now and take different things away.
February 5, 2021
I'm starting to think I like Bateson's introductions and conclusions, but not too much else. The premise of this book is very good and very important. We tend to think of our lives as very linear - moving toward one clear end goal. Colleges think this way too and entice students and donors based on their success in "established careers." The reality for most people, however, looks different. This book was written in 1989 and it's even more true today: people switch careers, change jobs, have times of quiet and times of activity, seek new hobbies, have new priorities, throughout life. These improvisations and themes are much more true to actual life than the focused linear line. (plug here for the liberal arts education that prepares people far better for a flexible career/life).
Bateson makes the excellent point that women are especially attuned to the cyclical phases of life, often taking time away from the paid workforce for childbearing and rearing, etc. She astutely notes the differences between men and women and bemoans the fact that modern 'feminist liberation' has become a way of 'acting like men' - to the detriment of both sexes. She encourages complementarity and cooperation, always in a spirit of active cooperation. She would agree with St. John Paul II that this age, in particular, calls for the 'feminine genius' (though she includes quite a few odd jabs at the Catholic Church that she doesn't defend very well at all. especially odd considering she is a convert?).
In any case, as I said, the premise is good. The execution of these ideas in the books is sloppy. She takes a group of her friends, highly unrelatable to the majority of the population, and uses them as examples of 'improvising/composing a life.' The chapters are poorly organized and she switches between women so quickly half the time you don't know who you're reading about. She also devotes nearly a whole chapter to what appears to be a personal vendetta against Amherst College, where she was briefly a Dean.
So - to conclude - many correct ideas, though sometimes too simplistically stated, and poor conveyance of those ideas.
Bateson makes the excellent point that women are especially attuned to the cyclical phases of life, often taking time away from the paid workforce for childbearing and rearing, etc. She astutely notes the differences between men and women and bemoans the fact that modern 'feminist liberation' has become a way of 'acting like men' - to the detriment of both sexes. She encourages complementarity and cooperation, always in a spirit of active cooperation. She would agree with St. John Paul II that this age, in particular, calls for the 'feminine genius' (though she includes quite a few odd jabs at the Catholic Church that she doesn't defend very well at all. especially odd considering she is a convert?).
In any case, as I said, the premise is good. The execution of these ideas in the books is sloppy. She takes a group of her friends, highly unrelatable to the majority of the population, and uses them as examples of 'improvising/composing a life.' The chapters are poorly organized and she switches between women so quickly half the time you don't know who you're reading about. She also devotes nearly a whole chapter to what appears to be a personal vendetta against Amherst College, where she was briefly a Dean.
So - to conclude - many correct ideas, though sometimes too simplistically stated, and poor conveyance of those ideas.
January 26, 2025
This was the second book in my turning 30 giftbag. First off, it’s interesting to read a piece that betrays its historical time period. Written in the 80s, Bateson’s message is centered on women’s emancipation from the role of housewife to promote developing a larger look at life that includes career changes, domestic relationships, creative hobbies, cooperative projects, etc. which all come with starts and finishes, struggles and successes.
Her idea of embracing discontinuity and disruption can be expanded from what has been experienced by mothers and wives to the disruptions many of us experience living the reality of the modern working world. Bateson tells of mothers packing their bags to follow their husband’s career changes, or being pulled out of pivotal meetings to take care of a sick child, but the modern circumstances where tenure jobs are a scarcity, defined pension benefit plans seem like tokens of the past, and millennials are taught they will change careers more times than they may prefer, can be understood within Bateman’s philosophy.
Instead of life progressing to a single point, Bateman offers the philosophy of improvising a life composed of multiple points, which brings alternative perspective and enrichment. She introduces the idea of living a life of response rather than as an aggressive drive towards an end-goal which can be narrow-minded. When we respond we adapt and might find things we could have overlooked. Her philosophy can be anti-institution and pro-institution. Embracing a colleague’s decision to leave a senior administrative position to start her own consulting practice, Bateman expresses the benefit: “in escaping from a career-track in which her rhythms were directed from above, she has become able to orchestrate her own life” (Bateman 175). On the other hand, she acknowledges that “it is also possible to be deeply critical of a person or an institution and still be committed to it” (Bateman 188). You can still orchestrate your own life within the institution, if you find the right balance of commitment and independence.
A few other of Bateman’s ideas resonated with me:
1. A tendency to self-sacrifice:
A university classmate once tried to argue with me that all human acts are motivated by self-interest. Such an all-encompassing statement is false. When you read about or witness certain individual’s dedication towards certain projects or other people, the idea that they serve another because it is gratifying to them falls flat as an explanation for their profound commitment. Bateman is able to explain the alternative perspective, that which women have traditionally experienced in culture: “[One] vulnerability that women raised in our society tend to have…is the quality of self-sacrifice, a learned willingness to set their own interests aside and be used…by the community” (Bateman 54). As an anthropologist Bateman brings studies of human cultures and habits to her writings and would be well equipped in a debate to express the truth I believe, that some humans are driven to make things better for the whole, rather than only the self.
2. The best form of partnership:
She explores different forms of relationships in a partnership and concludes that symmetrical relationships provide an illusion of equality when in reality social and genetic circumstances are ultimately different for each individual so they cannot be equal. Symmetry promotes competition. Her alternative is a relationship based on asymmetry but governed by mutual care and commitment, where each individual takes their turn giving and taking. Her definition of partnership can be one of marriage, or simply a working partnership: “Men and women often do their best work in tandem, with a clear sense of common direction and a degree of complementary that allows…for contrasting approaches to the same problem. Work relationships of any kind are enlivened by difference combined with mutual commitment” (Bateman 78). Her description of writing a book with a friend hit home as I have also experienced this best and rare form of working relationship. Bateman gives words to the awesome found in these partnerships: “each of us had knowledge and skills the other lacked; we had no need to prove one set of skills was superior to the other or to conceal our areas of ignorance. Our rhythms were sufficiently different to stimulate each of us to work harder” (Bateman 99-100).
3. The modern technological world cancels out its own savings:
When someone tells me, back in my day we had do all that by hand, there is the implied suggestion that I have it easier today with a computer which calculates a summation so that I don’t have to manually check that a ledger balances and for that I should be grateful. I disagree. Computers save manual processes, but with them come more expectations which require more labour to produce more results. Labour which is more complex if back in the day all you were doing was footing the columns of a ledger. Bateman understands my counter-argument and grounds it in history: “[Our] society of material opulence in which we generate endless hours of needless work cancel the savings offered by technology. […] This is not news: the pattern has been obvious for over fifty years, ever since the mechanical washing machine was used not to reduce time spent doing laundry, but to make it possible to change sheets and clothing two or three times as often” (Bateman 125). With technology, expectations also rise. Equipped with a computer, I am expected to do so much more which cancels any savings.
4. Hidden overtime to take care of a household:
Bateman invites us to think of women having an obligatory additional job on top of their explicit employment or business projects. The job of taking care of a household requires overtime that is non-negotiable: “People of talent and ambition do enough work for two and are unlikely to invest vast amounts of time in other activities. You may be able to work secretly on a novel or plan a revolution after working one job, but you can hardly do so after two. […] The fact that women work a second shift while their husbands work only one is deeply unfair. Our indignation obscures the fact that the difference between men and women is not that men work one shift and women two, but that women with jobs usually do not have the flexibility to decide what to do with that second shift, which is already committed” (Bateman 167). Her idea can be updated to consider any individual who takes care of a household. Groceries need to be bought, meals need to be made, dishes cleaned, laundry washed, sheets changed. The house-work shift is an obligatory commitment that makes it near impossible to work two jobs as well as run the tasks necessary to home life, which for me often runs into late nights of overtime spent over the stove or sink.
5. If you have to pack your bags, you can unpack them again:
Bateman wants you to be okay with failures or endings and uses the expression moving from strength to strength to remind readers that they have the ability to start something new when one thing ends. She tells of her experience of fleeing Iran during the revolution which felt like a loss of years of work, but in consolation she learnt that she was able to pack her bags and start again. “There is almost always more ahead than we can guess,” so it’s okay to cut your losses and pack the metaphorical bags even if you don’t know where you will unpack them yet (Bateman 208).
To conclude, I love this metaphor: “Composing a life is a little like making a Middle Eastern pastry, in which butter must be layered in by repeated folding, or making a samurai sword, whose layers of differently tempered metal are folded over and over” (Bateman 214). I like to think of myself as the samurai sword as I surprise myself in finding the resilience to go from strength to strength but doing this creates hardness. My sister gifted me this book and she offers advice as comforting as layered buttery pastry. She has taught me different ways I might compose a life. I’ve also learnt to look for unconventional models to widen my consideration of what composes a life. Bateman’s colleague caught the eye of another woman stuck in the outskirts of a fray of socialites at a cocktail party once and winked at her, saying “How about that? I like the edges too” (Bateman 231). We can learn from the edges to compose a life that is right for each of us.
Her idea of embracing discontinuity and disruption can be expanded from what has been experienced by mothers and wives to the disruptions many of us experience living the reality of the modern working world. Bateson tells of mothers packing their bags to follow their husband’s career changes, or being pulled out of pivotal meetings to take care of a sick child, but the modern circumstances where tenure jobs are a scarcity, defined pension benefit plans seem like tokens of the past, and millennials are taught they will change careers more times than they may prefer, can be understood within Bateman’s philosophy.
Instead of life progressing to a single point, Bateman offers the philosophy of improvising a life composed of multiple points, which brings alternative perspective and enrichment. She introduces the idea of living a life of response rather than as an aggressive drive towards an end-goal which can be narrow-minded. When we respond we adapt and might find things we could have overlooked. Her philosophy can be anti-institution and pro-institution. Embracing a colleague’s decision to leave a senior administrative position to start her own consulting practice, Bateman expresses the benefit: “in escaping from a career-track in which her rhythms were directed from above, she has become able to orchestrate her own life” (Bateman 175). On the other hand, she acknowledges that “it is also possible to be deeply critical of a person or an institution and still be committed to it” (Bateman 188). You can still orchestrate your own life within the institution, if you find the right balance of commitment and independence.
A few other of Bateman’s ideas resonated with me:
1. A tendency to self-sacrifice:
A university classmate once tried to argue with me that all human acts are motivated by self-interest. Such an all-encompassing statement is false. When you read about or witness certain individual’s dedication towards certain projects or other people, the idea that they serve another because it is gratifying to them falls flat as an explanation for their profound commitment. Bateman is able to explain the alternative perspective, that which women have traditionally experienced in culture: “[One] vulnerability that women raised in our society tend to have…is the quality of self-sacrifice, a learned willingness to set their own interests aside and be used…by the community” (Bateman 54). As an anthropologist Bateman brings studies of human cultures and habits to her writings and would be well equipped in a debate to express the truth I believe, that some humans are driven to make things better for the whole, rather than only the self.
2. The best form of partnership:
She explores different forms of relationships in a partnership and concludes that symmetrical relationships provide an illusion of equality when in reality social and genetic circumstances are ultimately different for each individual so they cannot be equal. Symmetry promotes competition. Her alternative is a relationship based on asymmetry but governed by mutual care and commitment, where each individual takes their turn giving and taking. Her definition of partnership can be one of marriage, or simply a working partnership: “Men and women often do their best work in tandem, with a clear sense of common direction and a degree of complementary that allows…for contrasting approaches to the same problem. Work relationships of any kind are enlivened by difference combined with mutual commitment” (Bateman 78). Her description of writing a book with a friend hit home as I have also experienced this best and rare form of working relationship. Bateman gives words to the awesome found in these partnerships: “each of us had knowledge and skills the other lacked; we had no need to prove one set of skills was superior to the other or to conceal our areas of ignorance. Our rhythms were sufficiently different to stimulate each of us to work harder” (Bateman 99-100).
3. The modern technological world cancels out its own savings:
When someone tells me, back in my day we had do all that by hand, there is the implied suggestion that I have it easier today with a computer which calculates a summation so that I don’t have to manually check that a ledger balances and for that I should be grateful. I disagree. Computers save manual processes, but with them come more expectations which require more labour to produce more results. Labour which is more complex if back in the day all you were doing was footing the columns of a ledger. Bateman understands my counter-argument and grounds it in history: “[Our] society of material opulence in which we generate endless hours of needless work cancel the savings offered by technology. […] This is not news: the pattern has been obvious for over fifty years, ever since the mechanical washing machine was used not to reduce time spent doing laundry, but to make it possible to change sheets and clothing two or three times as often” (Bateman 125). With technology, expectations also rise. Equipped with a computer, I am expected to do so much more which cancels any savings.
4. Hidden overtime to take care of a household:
Bateman invites us to think of women having an obligatory additional job on top of their explicit employment or business projects. The job of taking care of a household requires overtime that is non-negotiable: “People of talent and ambition do enough work for two and are unlikely to invest vast amounts of time in other activities. You may be able to work secretly on a novel or plan a revolution after working one job, but you can hardly do so after two. […] The fact that women work a second shift while their husbands work only one is deeply unfair. Our indignation obscures the fact that the difference between men and women is not that men work one shift and women two, but that women with jobs usually do not have the flexibility to decide what to do with that second shift, which is already committed” (Bateman 167). Her idea can be updated to consider any individual who takes care of a household. Groceries need to be bought, meals need to be made, dishes cleaned, laundry washed, sheets changed. The house-work shift is an obligatory commitment that makes it near impossible to work two jobs as well as run the tasks necessary to home life, which for me often runs into late nights of overtime spent over the stove or sink.
5. If you have to pack your bags, you can unpack them again:
Bateman wants you to be okay with failures or endings and uses the expression moving from strength to strength to remind readers that they have the ability to start something new when one thing ends. She tells of her experience of fleeing Iran during the revolution which felt like a loss of years of work, but in consolation she learnt that she was able to pack her bags and start again. “There is almost always more ahead than we can guess,” so it’s okay to cut your losses and pack the metaphorical bags even if you don’t know where you will unpack them yet (Bateman 208).
To conclude, I love this metaphor: “Composing a life is a little like making a Middle Eastern pastry, in which butter must be layered in by repeated folding, or making a samurai sword, whose layers of differently tempered metal are folded over and over” (Bateman 214). I like to think of myself as the samurai sword as I surprise myself in finding the resilience to go from strength to strength but doing this creates hardness. My sister gifted me this book and she offers advice as comforting as layered buttery pastry. She has taught me different ways I might compose a life. I’ve also learnt to look for unconventional models to widen my consideration of what composes a life. Bateman’s colleague caught the eye of another woman stuck in the outskirts of a fray of socialites at a cocktail party once and winked at her, saying “How about that? I like the edges too” (Bateman 231). We can learn from the edges to compose a life that is right for each of us.
June 2, 2017
I have been meaning to read this book for years, and I guess yet another person must have cited it, and finally I decided to see if the library had it (they didn't, but they borrowed from another library). So even though I am not exactly bowled over by it, it's good enough to make me want to read her other books. Had I read it when it came out, it probably would have made a bigger impression on me, but at this point in my life I can't help thinking "What an interesting time capsule" -- but I still have to give it at least 4 stars because (A) it is a really great time capsule, and (B) it is not the author's fault that our society seems to have regressed so much that the problems she chronicles are not only still with us, but threaten to make her report sound like some alternate universe in which progress is still possible (when the reality currently on offer is that you CAN turn back time, all the way to before the civil war, apparently -- no doubt we'll be giving Alaska back to Russia any minute now).
So if you want to think about how you live -- what you choose to do, how you cope with what happens instead, etc. -- this would be a great place to start. The book is about women (five specific women: the author and four friends), and is to some extent addressed to women, but I would urge men to read it, too. This is good stuff, people. And she's a wonderful writer.
So if you want to think about how you live -- what you choose to do, how you cope with what happens instead, etc. -- this would be a great place to start. The book is about women (five specific women: the author and four friends), and is to some extent addressed to women, but I would urge men to read it, too. This is good stuff, people. And she's a wonderful writer.
April 22, 2020
This book is starting to be a bit dated (written in the late 80s) but I still love it. It’s relaxing to see life as an ongoing composition, that it need not be focused on one thing in order to be interpreted as successful. What if divided energy is what life asks of us and we just settle into that instead of feeling like we’re doing it wrong or that things should be different than they are? Our lives are so individual, what grabs us, calls to us, what we struggle with — all unique to that individual. I love that about people!
Read
May 14, 2012The Forum on Education Abroad had a Women's Leadership Workshop I attended in Denver - I attended and left with a recommendation to read this book. The author suggests that ambitious, professional upper middle-class women will likely not follow a single career trajectory from the start but rather stitch together a life from many separate pieces found along the way. I read this book in tandem with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's "Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975" thanks to University of Oklahoma's shelving system - finding the latter was a gift that reinvigorated my life force, and it would not have happened if I had not been looking for Bateson's text. I could never be as brave and clear headed as Dunbar-Ortiz, and my evolving professional trajectory will neither likely reach the peaks of Bateson's protagonists. That said, I'm grateful that both books came into my life when they did, as they have helped me achieve some greater clarity around such questions as "what am I doing with my life," "what is a career" and "what does the work I do - both paid and unpaid - mean to me and to the greater community?"
September 1, 2010
Bateson explores women's lives through her and four of her friends' experiences. This would be American women in the 20th century. it was published in 1990. Most of the women are at least a decade older than me, so they are the generation of my role models. The women who lead the way into non-traditional fields and positions; who came up against the challenges of career and family care-giving before me. Their stories are inspirational and revealing. Bateseon's ideas about these women's ability to reconstruct their lives after major discontinuities, to integrate and collaborate, problem-solve and support others offer hope for the future.
April 21, 2021
Despite the book being slow and winding at times, I felt like Bateson had a lot of important things to say about sexism and feminism that made the book worth reading. I especially appreciated how she actually teased apart the interactions that occurred during her time as a dean at Amherst that, piece by piece, culminated in an experience of sexism and being pushed out of the university. Bateson was Margaret Mead's daughter, and I read this book after reading an article about her life after she died.
I did find it very odd that the one thing that Bateson never really talks about is childcare. She talks at length about how women must "compose their lives" out of pieces that don't necessarily flow together easily, and she talks about the important creative work that women do in caring and managing the family.... but she never talks about what do women actually do with their kids if they're also having the kind of high-powered careers that her friends whose stories she shares in this book have.
I admit that one of the things that I found fascinating in the article was that Bateson talked about how her mother had a maid come in to do the dishes, that Mead didn't feel like doing dishes was a good use of her time. In Bateson's book, she mentions fleetingly a nanny when she was growing up, and it piqued my interest very much. I really wanted to know more about Bateson's life growing up with her mother's choices around child-rearing. I also really wanted to know about Bateson's life in Iran.
I hate to say the "p" word because I'm not a millenial, but Bateson also never addresses the privilege that she and her friends have and how this allows them a certain flexibility in their lives and certain opportunities. Not acknowledging the privilege and not looking at intersectionality certainly makes this book feel dated, but it also helped me to understand the perspectives of women of the generations immediately before mine. So I think this would be an interesting book to add to a syllabus full of more contemporary feminist writers.
These are the passages that I found worth highlighting and remembering:
- On the idea that women's lives are drastically different from the past, which I would argue that they are not: "It is no longer possible to follow the paths of previous generations. This is true for both men and women, but it is especially true for women, whose whole lives no longer need be dominated by the rhythms of procreation and the dependencies that these created, but who still must live with the discontinuities of female biology and still must balance conflicting demands."
- On composing a life: "Composing a life involves a continual reimagining of the future and reinterpretation of the past to give meaning to the present, remembering best those events that prefigured what followed, forgetting those that proved to have no meaning within the narrative."
- On the need for growth throughout our lives: "The need to sustain human growth should be a matter of concern for the entire society, even more fundamental than the problem of sustaining productivity. This, surely, is the deepest sense of homemaking, whether in a factory or a college or a household. For all of us, continuing development depends on nurture and guidance long after the years of formal education, just as it depends on seeing others ahead on the road with whom it is possible to identify. A special effort is needed when doubts have been deeply implanted during the years of growing up or when some fact of difference raises barriers or undermines those identifications, but all of us are at risk, not only through childhood but through all the unfolding experiences of life that present new problems and require new learning. Education, whether for success or failure, is never finished. Building and sustaining the settings in which individuals can grow and unfold, not “kept in their place” but empowered to become all they can be, is not only the task of parents and teachers, but the basis of management and political leadership—and simple friendship."
- On the difficulties of comparing cultures when culture intersects when gender (which it always does): "Marriage is not the ideal way to learn about cultural difference, since the contrast between cultures can easily become confused with the contrast between male and female, and any two-way comparison can be interpreted as better and worse, high and low. When I am teaching anthropology, I try to encourage students always to think in terms of three cultures, their own and at least two others—not one other, because they could too easily reduce true human diversity to a single dimension of difference, us and them, civilized and savage. The stereotypes of savages or primitives do not stand up to the awareness of the diverse forms of adaptation of preliterate societies, with their distinctive ingenuities and elaborations. Neither does the stereotype of civilization, which is constantly shifting and revealing an endless series of problems."
- On the difficulty of true equality: "The American ethical response to discrimination is the passion for equality, for asserting that a given kind of difference is, or should be, irrelevant and that the task of social justice is to construct a society that will make it so. Thus, social justice is achieved by installing the moral equivalent of wheelchair ramps to provide the appearance of equal access. In general, we seem to believe that the way to achieve fairness is to structure social conflicts so they will be as nearly symmetrical as possible; we then encourage competition between rivals on what is meant to be a level playing field. As a society, we do not believe that outcomes can be expected to be equal, but we do like to believe that it could have gone either way. When the big guy beats the little guy, we like to see him do it with one hand tied behind his back."
- On the need for all people to have the right to choose: "Today, I believe that we will not learn to live responsibly on this planet without basic changes in the ways we organize human relationships, particularly inside the family, for family life provides the metaphors with which we think about broader ethical relations. We need to sustain creativity with a new and richer sense of complementarity and interdependence, and we need to draw on images of collaborative caring by both men and women as a model of responsibility. We must free these images from the connotations of servitude by making and keeping them truly elective."
- On the need for well-rounded people: "We occasionally honor the possibility that a range of interests might be more fertile than narrow concentration by speaking of Renaissance men of endless vitality and appetite who combine interests in art and science and the increase of wealth with active love lives and large families. But perhaps men and women who are allowed to address multiple commitments in flexible contexts will achieve in new ways. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the kind of synergy we associate with the Renaissance man can develop in the lives of men and women who multiply their spheres of sensitivity and caring."
- How prejudice works even when discrimination is illegal: "Nowadays, prejudice is relative, not absolute. There is no fixed rule that excludes, just a different probability, a slight stacking of the cards against certain people, a different and more destructive standard of judgment that makes every error fatal."
- On the need for true change, not just inclusion: "During the seventies, many women believed that if women were simply admitted to full participation in decision making, the world would be a better place. This no longer seems as simple as it once did. We can see now that those women who succeed in adopting traditional male models leave the world very much as it is, and so we celebrate the success of women who participate on male terms with a certain ambivalence. We no longer see femaleness as guaranteeing a higher degree of caring; rather, we are concerned with the question of how the necessary combinations of caring will be made and how the old divisions of labor, constructed in terms of separate spheres of activity, will be redistributed across genders."
- On the need for harmony between people, sexes, cultures, the environment and everything: "The fundamental problem of our society and our species today is to discover a way to flourish that will not be at the expense of some other community or of the biosphere, to replace competition with creative interdependence."
I did find it very odd that the one thing that Bateson never really talks about is childcare. She talks at length about how women must "compose their lives" out of pieces that don't necessarily flow together easily, and she talks about the important creative work that women do in caring and managing the family.... but she never talks about what do women actually do with their kids if they're also having the kind of high-powered careers that her friends whose stories she shares in this book have.
I admit that one of the things that I found fascinating in the article was that Bateson talked about how her mother had a maid come in to do the dishes, that Mead didn't feel like doing dishes was a good use of her time. In Bateson's book, she mentions fleetingly a nanny when she was growing up, and it piqued my interest very much. I really wanted to know more about Bateson's life growing up with her mother's choices around child-rearing. I also really wanted to know about Bateson's life in Iran.
I hate to say the "p" word because I'm not a millenial, but Bateson also never addresses the privilege that she and her friends have and how this allows them a certain flexibility in their lives and certain opportunities. Not acknowledging the privilege and not looking at intersectionality certainly makes this book feel dated, but it also helped me to understand the perspectives of women of the generations immediately before mine. So I think this would be an interesting book to add to a syllabus full of more contemporary feminist writers.
These are the passages that I found worth highlighting and remembering:
- On the idea that women's lives are drastically different from the past, which I would argue that they are not: "It is no longer possible to follow the paths of previous generations. This is true for both men and women, but it is especially true for women, whose whole lives no longer need be dominated by the rhythms of procreation and the dependencies that these created, but who still must live with the discontinuities of female biology and still must balance conflicting demands."
- On composing a life: "Composing a life involves a continual reimagining of the future and reinterpretation of the past to give meaning to the present, remembering best those events that prefigured what followed, forgetting those that proved to have no meaning within the narrative."
- On the need for growth throughout our lives: "The need to sustain human growth should be a matter of concern for the entire society, even more fundamental than the problem of sustaining productivity. This, surely, is the deepest sense of homemaking, whether in a factory or a college or a household. For all of us, continuing development depends on nurture and guidance long after the years of formal education, just as it depends on seeing others ahead on the road with whom it is possible to identify. A special effort is needed when doubts have been deeply implanted during the years of growing up or when some fact of difference raises barriers or undermines those identifications, but all of us are at risk, not only through childhood but through all the unfolding experiences of life that present new problems and require new learning. Education, whether for success or failure, is never finished. Building and sustaining the settings in which individuals can grow and unfold, not “kept in their place” but empowered to become all they can be, is not only the task of parents and teachers, but the basis of management and political leadership—and simple friendship."
- On the difficulties of comparing cultures when culture intersects when gender (which it always does): "Marriage is not the ideal way to learn about cultural difference, since the contrast between cultures can easily become confused with the contrast between male and female, and any two-way comparison can be interpreted as better and worse, high and low. When I am teaching anthropology, I try to encourage students always to think in terms of three cultures, their own and at least two others—not one other, because they could too easily reduce true human diversity to a single dimension of difference, us and them, civilized and savage. The stereotypes of savages or primitives do not stand up to the awareness of the diverse forms of adaptation of preliterate societies, with their distinctive ingenuities and elaborations. Neither does the stereotype of civilization, which is constantly shifting and revealing an endless series of problems."
- On the difficulty of true equality: "The American ethical response to discrimination is the passion for equality, for asserting that a given kind of difference is, or should be, irrelevant and that the task of social justice is to construct a society that will make it so. Thus, social justice is achieved by installing the moral equivalent of wheelchair ramps to provide the appearance of equal access. In general, we seem to believe that the way to achieve fairness is to structure social conflicts so they will be as nearly symmetrical as possible; we then encourage competition between rivals on what is meant to be a level playing field. As a society, we do not believe that outcomes can be expected to be equal, but we do like to believe that it could have gone either way. When the big guy beats the little guy, we like to see him do it with one hand tied behind his back."
- On the need for all people to have the right to choose: "Today, I believe that we will not learn to live responsibly on this planet without basic changes in the ways we organize human relationships, particularly inside the family, for family life provides the metaphors with which we think about broader ethical relations. We need to sustain creativity with a new and richer sense of complementarity and interdependence, and we need to draw on images of collaborative caring by both men and women as a model of responsibility. We must free these images from the connotations of servitude by making and keeping them truly elective."
- On the need for well-rounded people: "We occasionally honor the possibility that a range of interests might be more fertile than narrow concentration by speaking of Renaissance men of endless vitality and appetite who combine interests in art and science and the increase of wealth with active love lives and large families. But perhaps men and women who are allowed to address multiple commitments in flexible contexts will achieve in new ways. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the kind of synergy we associate with the Renaissance man can develop in the lives of men and women who multiply their spheres of sensitivity and caring."
- How prejudice works even when discrimination is illegal: "Nowadays, prejudice is relative, not absolute. There is no fixed rule that excludes, just a different probability, a slight stacking of the cards against certain people, a different and more destructive standard of judgment that makes every error fatal."
- On the need for true change, not just inclusion: "During the seventies, many women believed that if women were simply admitted to full participation in decision making, the world would be a better place. This no longer seems as simple as it once did. We can see now that those women who succeed in adopting traditional male models leave the world very much as it is, and so we celebrate the success of women who participate on male terms with a certain ambivalence. We no longer see femaleness as guaranteeing a higher degree of caring; rather, we are concerned with the question of how the necessary combinations of caring will be made and how the old divisions of labor, constructed in terms of separate spheres of activity, will be redistributed across genders."
- On the need for harmony between people, sexes, cultures, the environment and everything: "The fundamental problem of our society and our species today is to discover a way to flourish that will not be at the expense of some other community or of the biosphere, to replace competition with creative interdependence."
March 22, 2011
There's much of interest here. Above all the stories about her four friends, prominent women who made creative contributions, and how they dealt with all kinds of challenges during their lives - personal ones, others involving discrimination. Bateson adds bits of insight about her famous parents, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. [I would probably enjoy reading her account of their life together, "With a Daughter's Eye".]
Possibly her main point is that the single-minded pursuit of a career is not the only way to contribute significantly to society [or even to academia]. It is often claimed that women just can't do well in their careers because their lives are interrupted by child rearing, their time is claimed by supporting their husbands, etc. Bateson indicates this may be a blessing in disguise, with the same creativity used to juggle all the different roles actually being of enormous benefit to the content of whatever career the person has -- and the perception and willingness to change careers midstream too.
It may be the kind of mind I have [which cannot absorb abstract thinking, 'philosophizing'...], but I kept feeling she was just not quite saying what she wanted to say. She will broach a subject in a roundabout way, giving examples from her own life or one of her friends, but then formulate her ideas in a way that just doesn't come across to me. I sense that she is saying something important, something I would actually agree with if it were stated in a way that was clear to me, but it remains vague and I am uncertain whether I am guessing her meaning [or direction] or not.
This makes it a very open-ended discussion and it might be good to read in a discussion group; you can have dozens of discussions about various issues raised in the book.
Possibly her main point is that the single-minded pursuit of a career is not the only way to contribute significantly to society [or even to academia]. It is often claimed that women just can't do well in their careers because their lives are interrupted by child rearing, their time is claimed by supporting their husbands, etc. Bateson indicates this may be a blessing in disguise, with the same creativity used to juggle all the different roles actually being of enormous benefit to the content of whatever career the person has -- and the perception and willingness to change careers midstream too.
It may be the kind of mind I have [which cannot absorb abstract thinking, 'philosophizing'...], but I kept feeling she was just not quite saying what she wanted to say. She will broach a subject in a roundabout way, giving examples from her own life or one of her friends, but then formulate her ideas in a way that just doesn't come across to me. I sense that she is saying something important, something I would actually agree with if it were stated in a way that was clear to me, but it remains vague and I am uncertain whether I am guessing her meaning [or direction] or not.
This makes it a very open-ended discussion and it might be good to read in a discussion group; you can have dozens of discussions about various issues raised in the book.
June 16, 2007
It seems I've practically underlined this whole book but here are some of my favorites:
"We see achievement as purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting of a massive tree trunk that has first to be brough from the forest and then shaped by long labor to assert the artist's vision, rather than something crafted from odds and ends, like a patchwork quilt, and lovingly used to warm different nights and bodies."
"We must invest time and passion in specific goals and yet at the same time acknowledge that these are mutable."
"Trying to get a [college] faculty to change a curriculum is like trying to move a graveyard."
"Being a mommy is part of being a good president."
"We must transform our attitude toward all productive work and toward the planet into expressions of homemaking, where create and sustain the possibility of life."
Ok, I better stop there, otherwise I'll have the whole book in here. I found connections to my life NOW as well as ideas and a way of thinking about the FUTURE.
READ THIS BOOK!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you Arlene for recommending it!
"We see achievement as purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting of a massive tree trunk that has first to be brough from the forest and then shaped by long labor to assert the artist's vision, rather than something crafted from odds and ends, like a patchwork quilt, and lovingly used to warm different nights and bodies."
"We must invest time and passion in specific goals and yet at the same time acknowledge that these are mutable."
"Trying to get a [college] faculty to change a curriculum is like trying to move a graveyard."
"Being a mommy is part of being a good president."
"We must transform our attitude toward all productive work and toward the planet into expressions of homemaking, where create and sustain the possibility of life."
Ok, I better stop there, otherwise I'll have the whole book in here. I found connections to my life NOW as well as ideas and a way of thinking about the FUTURE.
READ THIS BOOK!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you Arlene for recommending it!
Want to read
January 24, 2021Dr. Bateson died on January 2, 2021. She was the daughter of Margaret Mead, the anthropologist. From the Washington Post: In “Composing a Life,” Dr. Bateson described how she and four other women managed to organize their lives amid conflicting social, professional and familial demands. She disliked the term “juggling” to describe the multiple responsibilities placed on women, saying in 1996, “If I try to juggle, I will drop something: my job, my child, my husband, my community.”
Instead, she wrote about “composing a life,” about using the mosaic of a woman’s experience to build a career, a family, a set of values and a network of friends as if creating a work of art through improvisation.
The book was not an immediate success, but within a year or two it began to make bestseller lists, as readers — mostly women �� bought multiple copies for reading groups and friends. Dr. Bateson spoke at forums across the country, urging her readers and listeners not to be limited by social expectations and to pursue education and develop new skills throughout life.
Instead, she wrote about “composing a life,” about using the mosaic of a woman’s experience to build a career, a family, a set of values and a network of friends as if creating a work of art through improvisation.
The book was not an immediate success, but within a year or two it began to make bestseller lists, as readers — mostly women �� bought multiple copies for reading groups and friends. Dr. Bateson spoke at forums across the country, urging her readers and listeners not to be limited by social expectations and to pursue education and develop new skills throughout life.
November 30, 2009
This is a book Hillary Clinton mentions reading in "Living History". Written by the daughter of the sociologist Margaret Mead, it carries a feminist thread but seemed particularly applicable to me as I do indeed compose a life for myself in changed circumstances. It is one of those books where the author seems to spend a long time telling you what you already know. It is written in the form of sharing the histories of 5 women, including the author. they have all been professionals/academics/spouses/mothers/caretakers of elderly etc, etc. Takeaway is that women are above all multi-taskers, sometimes at great cost to themselves & their work but this talent adds considerable value to whatever they do, however they choose to do it & with whomever they work/live. It needs to be updated to 2009, but is still very interesting & well written.
August 13, 2008
This book was written by an anthropologist and is a study of five different women (the author included) and how they have to improvise as today's modern women in "composing a life" that includes re-definition of typical female roles in the past and a balance of those things (caretaking, home making, etc) with their careers and ambitions. I didn't have anything against the content or ideas. It was written like a case study and was just sort of a boring read. She essentially was hashing home the same point again and again. (What use to work, what use to be the norm is now changing and so one must be highly adaptable to reconcile past and present) I got through about 2/3 and then just had to give up, I couldn't really finish it.
August 27, 2011
The basic premise: the idea of having a single career and a steady ascension in a field is our most common vision of a successful path, but what if we chose to see the elements of our life instead as odds and ends to be arranged in harmony, like a patchwork quilt?
Bateson looks at five women (including herself) for clues on women develop and balance their personal and professional lives.
When I read this book a few years ago, it didn't speak to me very much. Each life is so different, and I didn't read about any of the women in the book and think "that's the answer!" But now I see that that's the point: if we're each the artist composing our lives, only we can tell the story of our lives. This book is a great bit of inspiration.
Bateson looks at five women (including herself) for clues on women develop and balance their personal and professional lives.
When I read this book a few years ago, it didn't speak to me very much. Each life is so different, and I didn't read about any of the women in the book and think "that's the answer!" But now I see that that's the point: if we're each the artist composing our lives, only we can tell the story of our lives. This book is a great bit of inspiration.
July 10, 2012
Another book I picked up at a local thrift store because I thought it looked interesting. In a lot of ways I couldn't relate to the women in this book. They were all highly successful world-traveled women juggling careers and families, my education doesn't go any further than high school, I've never been married or had children and have never traveled out of the States, but it still gave me a lot of food for thought about how hard it still is for women trying to have it all and how much we still have to seem to fight to have our own lives. It was a good reminder of how empowered we really are to create our own lives.
February 18, 2012
I'm really glad I read this when I did. I needed reassurance that what my life was at the time was normal, that searching is ok, and that it might take some time and multiple re-directions to get there. It was a little dated as far as women's roles, but I don't think that that's enough not to read it. If you are at or coming to a crossroads - in your career especially - read it. Do not read it if you are looking for modern feminist work. You will be disappointed.
August 20, 2010
I see how this book might have an impact on women who read it when it was published in 1989 but it felt outdated and irrelevant to my life. So much of it was about women in the workplace and difficult gender roles in society and the home, which just aren't issues I think about or deal with on a regular basis.
February 12, 2012
p 241
Each of us constructs a life that is her own central metaphor for thinking about the world. But of course these lives do not look like parables or allegories. Mostly, they look like ongoing improvisations, quite ordinary sequences of day-to-day events. They continue to unfold.
November 20, 2008
hmmm...not so much a book I would recommend. Perhaps I had too high hopes but...no. I find it too academic and completely dated. A great thing to think that women have come so far in such a short period of time but this is definitely a book I cannot relate to. Disappointing!
May 6, 2011
It might be time for me to reread Composing a Life. I'd reread this book every few years since first reading it back in undergrad. Bateson, interviews four amazing women about motherhood, work and life in general.
April 15, 2021
This account, written by the daughter of Margaret Mead, of the lives of four contemporaries plus herself, analyzing how these rather accomplished women made sense of their lives while balancing their work and family responsibilities, is a useful though dated analysis of how women address competing demands. Fortunately, I think we've come a ways since 1989, when this book was published. The five women didn't grow up with expectations of "having it all," much less models for doing so. Young women today are fortunate to see a few models and probably to have that expectation - a different world. Regardless, I found Bateson's musing on the various lives thought provoking. I was particularly intrigued to learn more about Joan Erikson, Erik Erikson's wife, who did not finish a Ph.D. after she married, but who went in a very different direction, as well as helping to edit her husband's writing. Anyway, an interesting analysis.
Read
November 8, 2017Bateson, daughter of Margeret Mead and Gregory Bateson, is a keen observer of contemporary US culture. She uses four examples of professional women's careers and her own to draw conclusions about our society and to suggest ways to improve and, even, survive as a society, culture, and species into the future.
While I don't think any of what she is saying I hadn't heard before, (though, when she was first writing this in 1989, it was quite new), it was refreshing and encouraging to hear her describe complex lives that remain fruitful because of the multiple goals held, redefined, and attained. Bateson holds and shows that lives, interrupted, and facing conflicting priorities can be sources of creative improvisation. This creativity is, in turn, a source of wisdom.
A hopeful, empowering book.
While I don't think any of what she is saying I hadn't heard before, (though, when she was first writing this in 1989, it was quite new), it was refreshing and encouraging to hear her describe complex lives that remain fruitful because of the multiple goals held, redefined, and attained. Bateson holds and shows that lives, interrupted, and facing conflicting priorities can be sources of creative improvisation. This creativity is, in turn, a source of wisdom.
A hopeful, empowering book.
April 4, 2021
Beautiful writing on a subject that remains painfully relevant almost 30 years after publication. Yes, composing a life is a skill that all women and men in our society need to thrive and contribute. I was struck though that the characteristics she spoke of that diminished women's futures remain, namely the quality of self-sacrifice and the readiness to believe messages of disdain and derogation. We often call the second theme the Imposter Syndrome today. And isn't it amazing that this highly educated woman who was the daughter of two innovative and quite creative anthropologists would feel this herself?
Bateson is an insightful and sensitive writer. In her work, she also reveals a loving friend, professional, mother, wife and daughter. I was sad to learn of her recent death but am confident she was surrounded by love as she left this earth.
Bateson is an insightful and sensitive writer. In her work, she also reveals a loving friend, professional, mother, wife and daughter. I was sad to learn of her recent death but am confident she was surrounded by love as she left this earth.
Read
August 14, 2021I love this book. It resonates so much with my experiences and validates so clearly the skills that women are often criticized for, like the ability to multitask productively and an eclectic array of interests. I am concurrently reading Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us and seeing parallels left and right between the two books. Life is not a zero-sum game. Bateson ends with this: "The fundamental problem of our society and our species today is to discover a way to flourish that will not be at the expense of some other community or of the biosphere, to replace competition with creative interdependence. ... We are in need of an understanding of global relationships that will be not only sustainable but also enriching; it must come to us as a pos9t9ve challenge, a vision wort fulfilling, not a demand for retrenchment and austerity" (239).
September 6, 2017
I love the concept of composing your life. I found many profound and helpful nuggets of wisdom and insight as I navigate this world of a single working female in a churchy world. A lot of the reviews pointed out how old the book is (true) and the insights from an older generation (also true). I found my historian hat helpful to both glean wisdom from people in the past and see patterns that are quite unyielding in our culture. You can tell care was taken with each example and all the words were chosen well. I also appreciated her honesty and perception of the university hierarchy (ah, institutions). Overall, it gave me some much-needed hope for this next stage of life, and hopefully I'll see I'm not wired so wrong after all!
September 12, 2019
It took me eight months to read this book, and although I’m giving it two stars I did appreciate the wisdom and the elegant prose I found in its pages. For me the challenge in reading this was not the semi-dated material (written in 1989) but rather the organization of the book. I could not keep the details of the five women straight. The book is organized around themes, so there are one or two sentences about how one of the women handles a certain aspect of balancing work, family, personal obligations, etc and then it goes on to the next and the next. It would have been so much easier to read if we could have had a chapter with one woman’s experience at a time. I won’t say I recommend, but I did get some food for thought out of this.
Read
August 15, 2023An analysis of the lives of five successful women. Bateson starts plainly, but packs in a tremendous amount of thought. She shows that women can combine production with a rich family lives; she shows that adaptability and creativeness are important to this successful combination. She asserts that women must believe in their own capabilities. Women who are strongly dedicated to their work have few hobbies and must manage their time effectively. Marriage is an interesting topic for Bateson. Although commitment to a single marriage was an important choice to her, she is very non-judgemental about other lifestyle choices. She writes eloquently qbout the need to retain good feelings about marriages that do not last.
February 7, 2021
I tried to finish this book but had enough about 2/3 of the way through. I understand that Bateson was brought up in the 1950s but her complete unquestioning acceptance that women would have to sacrifice their careers for their family just grated on me. As Margaret Mead’s daughter, she really has no excuse about being unable to question why she should spend two hours cooking meals for her husband , learn his language and follow his career rather than finishing her own research. It was mostly depressing how these brilliant women with every advantage growing up generally didn’t seem to try to change the system rather than just accept that’s how it is.
July 19, 2020
Love the premise--Bateson writes about her own life and the life of four friends who are all women and finds themes and differences in the various experiences they've had. Some sections of the book felt a bit tedious to read but a lot of chapters really made me think, especially "Give and Take" in which she discusses how relationships of all kinds benefit from diversity but mainstream U.S. society teaches us to emphasize similarity in almost everything. Feminist and anti-racist analysis didn't feel very current but, well, neither is the book. Lots to think about!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 129 reviews