In the early 1950s, Jane Gould's life resembled that of many middle-class women of her generation. Despite the rewards of marriage and mothering, Gould found herself plagued by a deepening sense that "something was missing." For Gould this feeling was not an epitaph but an inspiration-the beginning of a personal, political, and professional journey that would help to transform women's lives and earn her a permanent place in contemporary women's history.
First at the Alumnae Advisory Center and then as director of the Barnard Placement and Career Planning Office, Gould helped to reshape perceptions about women and work. A pioneer in the middle-class return-to-work movement, she established women's career networks and developed programs to help women define their personal and professional goals and negotiate-or "juggle"-the demands of career and family. She brought to these challenges a compassion born of personal experience, as she struggled to balance her increasingly absorbing work with heavy family responsibilities and worked to find a stonger sense of self amid persistent feelings of fear, inadequacy, and "unbelonging."
Gould's work propelled her into the growing women's movement: in the early 1970s, she became one of the founders and the first permanent director of the Barnard Women's Center. From 1972 to 1983 she worked to open the Women's Center to feminist activism and to diverse communities and organized a groundbreaking series of conferences, The Scholar and the Feminist. Her rewarding but often tense relationship with Barnard-which she compares to a long "love affair"-culminated with the explosive "Towards a Politics of Sexuality" conference, which reflected riveting conflicts within academe and the feminist movement.
Told from the perspective of the author's seventy-eighth year, Juggling is both an empowering personal story of determination in the face of internal conflict and external limitation and a unique historical account. In recounting a life which both paralleled and propelled critical struggles within the women's movement, Gould's memoir documents the development of important ideas and social transformationsm, while candidly reflecting upon their impact on one woman's life and consciousness.
