the likes of which we, in our cut-and-paste world, have never seen. She saved her appointment letters, like the one from Johns Hopkins in 1961 offering her $9,500 per year for a teaching position, a rate she learned later was considerably lower than what her male counterparts were paid. She rectified the situation by confronting the dean directly.
I had only a few days at the archive, so I spent most of my time scanning her letters onto my hard drive so I could study them later. But it was hard not to linger over the details.
Ten years after she’d married Len, then traveled to London for his studies, and then reluctantly accompanied him to Uganda for his work, the marriage came to an end. The divorce, in 1960, came as a life-changing rupture for Mary, which she called a “personal disaster…culminat[ing] in an eight-year psychoanalysis experience.” Later she wrote that psychoanalysis—the reflective experience of becoming present with her own state of mind—might have been “the most important positive influence on my career.” As she wrote to her friend and colleague Chris Heinicke in a letter dated November 15, 1962:
Briefly to bring you up to date about me. I’ve been in Baltimore since autumn 1955, and at Hopkins since spring of 1956. It is a good little department here…I have been given a 3-year grant from FFRP to undertake research on the development of infant-mother interaction during the first twelve months of life. I’ll get started on this as soon as I have finished the first complete draft of my book on African babies. Personally, these last seven years have not been easy. The difficulties culminated in a divorce in the summer of 1960. My almost immediate response to this crisis was to enter analysis, which, I guess I had wanted to do for a long time anyhow. So I’ve joined the club, and things have been getting progressively better ever since.
The stories of Len are few and roundly unflattering. They include Mary saying, “Perhaps I could just say I was the first of four wives.” And there is the story told by her student Mary Main of when Len “inexplicably disappeared at [a] dinner” he and Mary were having with “a very correct British gentleman”—Dr. John Bowlby—and how Len never returned, much to Bowlby’s “dismay, distress and great embarrassment for his friend Mary.”
But as difficult as the divorce was, Mary loved her psychoanalysis; she delighted in the experience of being with the difficulty, of getting to know herself in this new way. It seems as though it was a refuge for her, a time to see herself clearly and to let her guard down. As Main writes, “From the first weeks of analysis forward, she felt energized in her work, and began working daily (and into the night) with tremendous enthusiasm, leaving whatever troubles might otherwise have impeded her work to her daily hour with her analyst.”
Main continues:
With respect to infancy, Ainsworth emphasized that a secure infant typically moves out from the parent to explore and play within the immediate environment, then returns to its “secure base” (often showing or emotionally sharing the results of its explorations), then moves out again, and then returns—a characteristic which is seen in happy adult relationships as well, in which the day is discussed, and its pleasures and unpleasures revealed to the partner, before a new day and a new temporary leave-taking takes place. It is evident enough here that Mary Ainsworth had the capacity to fully enjoy her days and nights of work immediately upon finding a daily source of security [her analyst] with whom to discuss it.
These were good years for Mary. She lived with her cat Nnyabo in half of a Victorian house on a hill, the work of her favorite artist, Herman Maril, on the walls—beautiful, bold, abstract scenes of boats in the harbor or gulls on the beach. Her piles of books and files and letters and papers sat in her study, behind the closed door. The rest of the house was pretty, decorated with rugs and comfortable silk-covered chairs and sofas, ready for entertaining grad students or colleagues, playing cards, or watching tennis on TV. Once or twice a week, she cooked