["Respondent #1, age thirty-six, describes the feeling of limited optionsâ almost an inevitabilityâ she had when she ventured to imagine her own future:
So my daughter was born when I was twenty and I was an at-home mom; I didn't work. When she was about four and the kids were getting ready to go to school, I said, "OK, now what am I going to do with my life?" Kind of a transitional thing. I decided to have another baby. So we had two more, actually, two more boys, so I have the four children, the two older and the two younger, so there are two sets and I was an at-home mom the whole timeâŚ. When the kids got older, and I'm looking at my life, like, "Well, I'm not going to be an at-home mom forever. I want to do something." and I chose to go to a massage schoolâŚ. I decided to enroll and go to school there. I got a lot of flak from my family, not necessarily the children, but my husband, my parents, his family. It was like, "Well, what do you want to do that for?" And my husband's statement was "Well, I really wanted to start investing in some stocks and so I think that's what is more important to do with the money than to send you to school."
The struggle to establish her own path begins for a woman in adolescence. It certainly makes logical sense that the adolescent life stage can provide young people with the optimal situation for defining a sense of identity, providing that all the possible models and outcomes from which to choose are readily available to the adolescent and that all of those models are socially acceptable. Not yet firmly tied down by adult commitments, the adolescent may sample a variety of possible occupations, beliefs, and attitudes, eventually adopting a more or less permanent sense of who he or she is. However, even at the close of the twentieth century, we find that the range of socially sanctioned outcomes for the female is limited. If a woman's identity develops in line with the expectations of her family and social circle, she can feel affirmed by others, comforted by her "fitting in." However, if women are not free to consider fully what their intuition, their bodies, their motivation, and their intelligence might be telling them, their choice may be that to fit in, they must feel incoherency, emptiness, a sense of things "not being right." Women with same-gender impulses have experienced an extra layer of limitation and therefore, an additional layer of inauthenticity.
Because of the paucity of sex information, scarcity of role models, the pressure to marry, as well as a lack of permission to exercise their individuality, many women in this study reported that their sense of themselves felt somehow "off" until they moved into a life in which they saw women as potential partners. At that point, the pieces began to fit.
It is important to note that despite the pressure of popular wisdom and expectations, there have always been female adolescents for whom marriage and/or motherhood never felt right. In addition, there have always been women who experienced a pull to their same gender with such a power that it could not be denied, despite the societal pressure behind it. The women in this study, formerly married lesbians or bisexuals, do not necessarily fit into these categories. For these women, relationships with the opposite sex and marriage to a man have either felt right at the time they were entered intoâ they believed there were no other optionsâ or experienced as an inevitability."]
