Reflections

I became a feminist by necessity. My passion was physics. My feminism was a byproduct of the obstacles that I faced in that pursuit. I remember that a remark I made to my friend Grace Spruch after reading the autobiography of Fay Ajzenberg-Selove (A Matter of Choices: Memoirs of a Female Physicist, Rutgers University Press, 1994) elicited the response from Grace: “I guess you're more of a physicist than a feminist.” This has probably been reflected in my attitudes towards physics throughout my career, and particularly in my positions on committees such as the very difficult 1983 HEPAP Subpanel, or the nearly as difficult 1992 Subpanel. I had no appetite for political jockeying; I was interested only in the best physics results. In 1983 there had been perhaps some part of me that wanted the US to “beat” CERN, because of my poor treatment there. I lost, and the country lost, on that account. Preeminence in high energy physics, which was once the providence of the United States, has been essentially given up to Europe and Japan. So we had to learn to adapt. But as my National Science Board colleague, the mathematician Richard Tapia, liked to tell me, I “think like a physicist,” meaning, I guess, that I instinctively use logical reasoning, as opposed to emotional responses or politically motivated rationales in decision making…