Carolyn Heilbrun famously observed that women of the early 20th century had no models for their public lives, no way to learn the “tone of voice in which to speak with authority.” One is reminded of Jean Elshtain's classic study of the tyranny of gender stereotyping as “public” men and “private” women (Elshtain 1981). The mentoring project at APSA invites us, men and women together, to break down the unspoken barrier between our personal stories and our professional persona. As Heilbrun said, we can't be authentic mentors if we don't “tell the truth about (our) own lives” (Heilbrun [1988] 2002, 25). The trouble is that facts are mute. “Facts need testimony to be remembered,” articulate witnesses with sufficient imagination to make the experiences of modern life understandable (Arendt [1969] 1972, 6). Yet to be useful, as well as authentic, imagination must at least attempt to be truthful. Accordingly, please indulge me while I commit an act of public disclosure and do what my mother always said a lady should never do—talk about herself. Doing so is bad manners and, besides, no one really wants to hear it, she said. I plead guilty to the former, but about the latter I have my doubts. Mentoring in political science is based on the premise that other people need to see reflections of their own careers and lives in yours and vice versa. So at least in this specific context, self-referential writing, the dreaded pronoun “I” may be forgiven.

I am a second generation Italian-American born, improbably, in Fort Smith, Arkansas, while my father was a Major in the Corps of Engineers. Both products of CCNY in the late 1930s, my parents were New Yorkers to their core and escaped the alien Southwest as soon as peacetime made it possible to return “home.” As a result, I lived most of my life in the New Jersey suburbs of New York City, went to public high school, and commuted to Barnard College. My American roots radiate out from Ellis Island—Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, and Northern New Jersey. Yes, the New Jersey of Carmella Soprano and the “Jersey Girls,” widows and families of the 9/11 victims who fought the Bush administration to a standstill, got their investigation, and still refuse to fade away. We're a tough bunch, tied to family and tradition, including the old ward-healing faith that government at its best takes care of the least among us, not just the powerful.

My parents laid down two incompatible imprimaturs: put family first and earn a B.A., Ph.D., and a law degree as soon as possible. They expected marriage, kids, and a brilliant career, all before the age of 30. By age 30, I had a husband, a 3-year old, and a Ph.D. from a Scottish university. My mother, a housewife, and my father, a civil engineer, gave me all the love and support I could possibly want, but few usable instructions on how to manage a happy marriage, reproduction, a teaching job, and the time and mental space to write my way to tenure, promotion, and mobility. No woman in my family had done all that before. There were no blue-prints, helpful anecdotes or warning signs. Nor did my parents explicitly elaborate, except by example, on the unwritten truth that in Italian families elderly relatives are cared for by the younger ones, not deposited in nursing homes. Every woman in my mother's immediate family so far, including those in Milan, Italy, have set aside jobs and busy lives to care for their mothers and fathers at home. My mother did the same for hers, and for my father as his brilliant mind degenerated into dementia in his late 80s. My version of the rule means monthly, and with crises more frequent, flights from Michigan to New Jersey, where my mother continues to live in the house I grew up in, to do her shopping, take her to doctor's visits, and lift morale.

I married Douglas, a political scientist of the empirical persuasion, my teenage boyfriend and college sweetheart at Columbia College and the Graduate Faculties. We grew up in the same New Jersey town but escaped as soon as possible, leaving Columbia University for Ann Arbor (ISR Fellowship), then Great Britain (more British research fellowships and an SSRC), before finally arriving back to the U.S. at the height of the War in Vietnam and settling, after a short time back in New Jersey for the birth of our son, in Los Angeles. Doug worked at UCLA, then Rand, and then in automotive private sector public opinion research, while I luckily landed the first and only job I applied for, one of the few available in political theory to which I could commute on the #405 from our home in Santa Monica and get home in time to pick up our son from daycare. I became an assistant professor at California State University, Long Beach, where I stayed until 1989 when, with our second child in tow, we managed a two-career shift to the Midwest. I left a 4x4 teaching load at CSULB to pick up an identical one at Eastern Michigan University. However, I had become a department head in a national search which cut the teaching load but multiplied meeting hours, report writing, and in general ate up the time I had set aside to finish my first book. True, it was another phase of my “brilliant career,” but though I loved the administrative job I missed my vocation. After nearly six years I happily returned to publishing and teaching in political science, as well as to ever more involvement in APSA via the Women's Caucuses at the West and Midwest annual meetings, the Ethics Committee, and, most recently, election to APSA Council.

Why political science? Political science is a natural match between how my mind works and the things about the world that I feel intensely about. Also, practicing political science allows me to meet what my parents always emphasized as a noble goal: public service. My coming-of-political-age was the Civil Rights Movement and the War in Vietnam. Among other images, I will never forget the New York Times picture of my favorite philosophy professor, Sidney Morgenbesser, striding down Broadway in New York City with his head bandaged like a Jewish Minute Man during the American Revolution after a run-in with campus police during the Columbia demonstrations. For my parents, it had been European totalitarianism and World War II. My father had joined ROTC at City College in the late 1930s with war imminent, the only young person in his family of Brooklyn political bigwigs to do so. At a time when Italians were being interned as enemy aliens in Missoula Montana, he was determined to fight this “good war,” even if he ended up shooting Italian fascists. He was one of the few young first lieutenants at CCNY with a 12-letter last name ending in a vowel. My family had discovered America from New York City, and were very grateful to both. So while his uncles became City and federal officials, he became an officer, eventually a major, stuck out in Texas and Arkansas sandbagging the Arkansas River and serving his country. His eyesight was too weak to be sent overseas, though he tried every trick in the book.

As I grew up in New Jersey, my parents and I debated politics and ideas at the table every night, and when Douglas became part of our boisterous tribe he joined in. I wasn't a lawyer? Well, a Ph.D. might be an acceptable substitute, my parents acceded. Besides the family was already stuffed with lawyers, doctors, and, running like a unexpected wild streak of brilliant color through the family genes, artists—my father and cousin in their spare time, and our son in his career at the Art Institute of Chicago. Our daughter, not to be outdone, finished a degree in Medieval History at Columbia and is now training at Second City in Chicago. Italians are all latent performers, one way or another.

However, though my family provided careers of all stripes, I still lacked mentors in my profession. Not until I found the courage to join in WCPS activities, give papers at conferences, and ask questions did I find continuing mentors in political science. Returning from Britain with degree in hand, and children in process, my ties to my Columbia cohort had been cut. My first job found me in California, in a congenial department where I was, and remained until I left, the only tenure track woman and the only colleague trained in the “history of political thought.” And, of course, I was the only faculty from the East Coast. Raising children, commuting, and trying to cope with the teaching load devoured the years. I struggled to figure out how to establish a research agenda, finally managing to marry my Columbia education with the Scottish research skills learned at the University of Strathclyde. By sheer chance, something Heilbrun accuses women of overusing in explaining their successes, I discovered an untapped archive of unpublished manuscripts, letters, lecture notes, and public speeches left behind by Hannah Arendt in the Library of Congress. Pace Heilbrun, it was indeed an accident, produced by the prodigious reading habits of my husband. A footnote in an article that Douglas had read at Rand remarked in passing that Arendt had written her dissertation on St. Augustine. Since my education had combined Medieval political thought with Contemporary ideologies, notably Marxism, I was naturally curious as to how and why this very modern woman had written about a Catholic Saint. Arendt was a constant theme in my courses at Barnard and Columbia, and an equally constant physical presence on the Upper West side, the stuff of urban legends. All of my doctoral thesis research on the Marxist literary revisionists Andre Malraux and Milovan Djilas had focused on their penchant for the radical use of historical sources, including the Marxist classics which by the middle decades of the 20^th century were already part of “the tradition.” My Master's research had focused on another radical deconstructor of received wisdom, Marsilius of Padua. It was relatively easy to transfer the same research strategies to studying 20^th-century Moderns who ransacked the past to make a political point about the present. All along the way serendipity reigned, and what was required of me then as now is the ability to adapt quickly. As my mother wisely says, life is what happens to you while you are making plans.

Like my educated, successful immigrant family, I have a debt to repay. To America, New York City, and New Jersey, and to the profession of political science which has opened the world to my eager inspection and has given me a voice with which to explain it to my students and readers. Becoming a mentor is by way of partial repayment. The mentoring project, launched on a wing and a prayer by Kristen Monroe, has taken off as the sort of enterprise we all knew we needed but no one but Kristen and her dedicated band had the diligence to put together. She has done for our national discipline what the late, much lamented, Suzanne Jacobitti set up for the Midwest Women's Caucus. On the shoulders of our sisters, and mothers, we are building a kinder, gentler discipline where all our voices are welcomed.

Editor's Note: Earlier columns have focused on the particular issues affecting scholars, especially women, of African-American descent. But gender and race are not the only factors that influence professional development. In the following article, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott, a political theorist who writes on Hannah Arendt and 20th century political culture, a member of the APSA Council, a former Nominating Committee member, and a member of the Women's Caucus for Political Science, tells how she forged a meaningful research and teaching agenda while juggling the demands of her personal life.