ABSTRACT
The author is moved to day school and starts to apply herself to studying. It is a way of keeping her emotional life in control. Privately, she swings from deep grief to intense anger. She is accepted to study law at Sydney University but shies away from this because she is too frightened of competing with men. She is in the stage of silence (Belenky et al., 1986) in which women see themselves as mindless and voiceless. Exploration is undertaken as to what led her to feel so inferior, including some childhood experiences both at home and boarding school. Her decision to do a Bachelor of Arts degree causes a rift with her parents because she wants to make a decision for herself (in keeping with Erikson’s notion of identity formation) and go to the university her friends plan to attend. Eventually, she acquiesces to what her parents want, concluding that it would have been better to let her make this decision for herself at this age.
