Do Women Lack Ambition?
by Anna Fels
“I WONDERED, BEFORE I CAME HERE, whether I was going to confess to you this secret I’ve had since I was seven. I haven’t even told my husband about it.” The woman across from me, a journalist in her forties, paused and looked at me intently, trying to decide whether she should go on. Sitting there under her worried gaze, I wondered where we were going with this. As a psychiatrist, I’m used to hearing the most improbable and even lurid of personal revelations. But this woman was not a patient. She was a friend of a friend, who had kindly agreed to let me interview her. It was actually the first in a series of exploratory discussions I had scheduled as a start to my research on ambition in women’s lives, and ...
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