An Anthropologist's Arrival: A Memoir

We’re Going to Live This Year

211 We’re Going to Live This Year i’m ninety-eight years old. Well, I suppose I’m ready to be snuffed out.* I would rather not be, of course. I would love to know what’s going to happen in the next century. I wish I could. On the other hand, maybe I would rather just be gone and not have to live through all this readjustment we’re going to have. Oh, what a bother it’s going to be! Change is a good thing, but it’s so, so tiresome, such hard work. Yes, I think I’ve had enough change in my lifetime. • Looking back, I know that I didn’t want a family. I really didn’t. The amount of self-sacrifice that I saw my mother doing was something I decided I would never do. She just didn’t exist in the presence of her children. Whatever her husband and her children needed, she would just die to produce it. I decided I didn’t want to do that. I think I would have done it for a man I really loved, but I didn’t find the one whom I thought was the kind I’d like. Now, of course, having children is a perfectly wonderful thing, and so many women who do it don’t come up to the requirements. They don’t teach their children how to live at all. We ought to, if we could fix things, set it up so that such women who choose not to have children could go off and really make something out of their lives. That would be a third sex, I suppose, a human who does not add to the earth’s population. I would like to belong to such a sex. I didn’t * Shortly after Underhill’s death in 1984, her longtime secretary, Mary Cohen, said the cause of death was “old age—she just finally wore out.” Eicher, Daiane. 1984. Ruth Underhill, Noted Writer, Dies. The Denver Post. 16 August: 6A. Figure 34. Ruth in her final years, 1977. We’re Going to Live This Year 213 have to have children and nourish them and feed them. I didn’t want to do that, goodness knows, although I do like them when they get to be a little intelligent. I’m amazed at what those Indian women I’ve met do. They don’t seem to feel the tremendous subjection that white women feel. They have their part; they have to do it. They cook the meals and scrub the huts and burn the rubbish and all that, and the men get the fame. One time I was talking to a group of Cherokee women who were cleaning up the huts and cooking the meals, and the men were praying all the time. “Why aren’t you in there praying?” I said. “You have just as big a right as they have.” “Oh, we don’t have to pray,” they replied. “What makes you think we have to? Why, the men pray to get power, but we have power.” I met so many Indian women, and they are pleasant, nice old things. They’re calm and gentle. They’re not struggling for power at all. They just know they already have it. • It’s quite a while since I really felt that the Christian religion explained things very much for me. It didn’t seem to me a reasonable picture at all. So I had to give up the Christian religion. I recently dreamed that I’d had it out with God himself. I didn’t want to just leave him without words. It was so impolite. I wanted to meet with God and tell him why I gave him up. So I did. I went to heaven. He allowed nonbelievers to come to heaven. If you were a good thinker he was glad to know you. So he invited me to come and have an interview. We sat on a great long bench made of one log, the kind you see at little stops for trolleys, only it was made of gold. We sat on this gold bench, and he was a very handsome person. I liked him immensely. We got to talking, and I explained to him that I just couldn’t take all this stuff he gave the Hebrews. “Well, my dear,” he said...