What Lies Ahead

When I was about seven or eight, I went to the bank with my mother. She needed to open an account, which — as bizarre as it may now seem — wasn’t then the easiest thing to do as a newly divorced woman.

I can still picture the clerk at the shopping centre branch: small, bearded, haughty. Several times he emphasized her married name —“Mrs. Dunsky”— and asked whether “Mr. Dunsky” was aware of this new account.

Finally, my mother had had enough and snapped, “It’s Dr. Dunsky.” (Eventually she dropped her married name entirely.) My mother never lorded her academic achievement over anyone. She never hung her doctorate on the wall of her office — a rite of passage for professionals of her vintage. She never even framed it; I finally did that for her years later.

To contemporary ears, the story may not sound like much. But in the mid-1970s, when the title “Ms.” was still controversial, that episode became a kind of encapsulation to me for what it...