"What Do You Want From Me?: Women Mentoring Women"

One reason many baby-boomer women like myself flinch when asked point blank to mentor younger women is because it seems like just yesterday when we too were starting out. "Have I been doing this that long that I've become a senior executive?" asked a friend of mine who is vice president of human resources at her corporation. "Don't let the gray hair fool you," another colleague chuckled,"I may be older, but that doesn't mean I've figured it all out." As the first generation of women in our families to attain some measure of success in our professions many of us feel still too new to our successes and accomplishments to be confident about taking on the role of mentor to anyone. But then women tend to be modest about their accomplishments. We're often the last to toot our own horns. We're far more likely to view our success as the result of luck, timing, or the providence of God (none of which is to be underestimated, mind you!!). When pressed to explain to a young person looking on how we got to where we are, we're reluctant to give ourselves credit for being smart, for working hard, for working longer hours, and, by the way, for being darn good at what we do.

While there are no shortage of examples in the bible of men mentoring men, it takes some digging around to find parallel stories of women advising or guiding other women on how to be successful at something. From as far back in time as when Moses reassured Joshua before leaving him that the same God who'd stood by him (Moses) was the same one who would stand by Joshua in his new role as Israel's leader to Eli the priest perceiving God's call upon Samuel's life instructed the boy in what to say to God and what it meant to be a priest, from Jesus' handpicking twelve male disciples as part of his inner circle to Paul beckoning Timothy his "beloved son" to visit him soon as his days as missionary were numbered under Nero's reign, the rules and expectations governing men mentoring men are assumed and taken for granted in much of scripture.

Stories like those of Ruth and Naomi and Mary and Elizabeth (the latter of which I've written about in Showing Mary) offer us our most sustained look at the female mentor and female protege relationship. As popular as these two stories may be, one is forced to admit the glaring differences between them and the stories of their male counterparts. In male stories a senior man, or one possessing unusual charismatic characteristics, handpicks a younger male version of himself to succeed him in the public world of prophecy, politics, or missions. Joshua follows in Moses' footsteps as leader, Samuel replaces Eli as priest and prophet, the disciples succeed in taking Jesus' message beyond the borders of Judea, and Timothy proves himself a worthy missionary after his mentor Paul passes off the scene.

Largely excluded from the public domain of work, whatever advice and counsel wise women of the bible offered other women centered largely on family, love, and domestic matters. No public office awaited Ruth for following Naomi back to Bethlehem and for following the older woman's counsel to the tee on how to win the respect and attention of Boaz. All Elizabeth had to offer Mary was advice on how to celebrate a miracle pregnancy and how to rise above the gossip and derision of other women. These are stories that reinforce for us the importance of having someone to advise you. But when you're the one being sought out for advice, when you're the one who's viewed as having experience and wisdom worth passing along, you may find, like I, that you have to look elsewhere in scripture for illumination. The story of Elijah and Elisha in 2 Kings 2 is one, I believe, that gives a thicker and fuller portrait of what it means to open your life up for inspiration to others.

After days of crisscrossing the countryside to get from one assignment to the next and having this day safely navigated crossing the treacherous waters of the Jordan the older man Elijah turns and asks his young apprentice a question that deserves closer attention. "Tell me what I can do for you before I'm taken from you?" is the way it's translated in the NIV. "Ask what I shall do for thee, before I be taken away from thee?" is the KJV's translation of the same verse. It sounds on the surface like a pretty harmless question, doesn't it? But is it? Anyone familiar with the web of anxieties that plague the young and inexperienced knows that Elijah's question can take on a number of meanings.

Because I am one for reading against the grain I find myself wondering about other ways to interpret Elisha's question. Consider the possibility that Elijah was more annoyed than we've typically assumed. Might Elijah have been just a little put off by Elijah's pushiness and persistence? "What else do you want from me?" I hear Elijah asking his young apprentice in exasperation. "I've given you everything I know to give." Is it possible that the young acolyte was wearing Elijah thin with his desire to succeed and soar as a prophet? I imagine there were moments when Elijah resented Elisha whose curiosity and zeal were constant reminders to the older man of his own mortality and limitations.

Picture this: At the end of that particular day the older man finds himself a bit weary of his young attendant's insistence upon studying his every move, following his every step, querying him about his method for doing things, pestering him for more advice, functioning ostensibly as the older man's attendant and apprentice, but in fact exhausting his mentor with his ambition. Elisha's drive to succeed was getting the best of the older man. The younger man's eagerness before to be Elijah's understudy was once flattering to the older man's ego. But now his insistence upon tagging along every where Elijah went had become an irritation. Staying close to Elijah and showing up everywhere the older man ministered assured Elisha's place as heir apparent to the aging prophet's soon-to-be vacant post as "the man of God."

The prophets Elijah and Elisha come to mind whenever young ambitious, career-focused women write, phone, or come up and ask me point blank to be their mentor. I have to resist the urge to bolt out the door. Other female contemporaries of mine have confessed to the same urge when approached by younger women in their professions. To say that we are selfish, insecure women who are afraid of being vulnerable, afraid to share our power and knowledge with other women, and unwilling to face the fact that our power and influence is not forever is to believe the stereotypes about women in power. The truth is never as simple as the rumor.

After years of perfecting our craft and mastering our disciplines, working to prove that we're equal to and better than any man in the field, after recovering from being picked over for lesser men with less training, after postponing or forgoing marriage and family altogether for the sake of our calling and our careers, now in our late thirties, forties and fifties, and sixties, we've finally climbed to ranks of senior, successful women in our professions -- whether as senior professors, senior editors, senior writers, senior lawyers, senior ministers, senior executives, senior athletes. But how do you make Elisha understand that despite the way things appear on the surface, for many women it's seniority in many cases without acceptance. Despite the awards lining our office walls, many of us still feel like newcomers, outsiders, apprentices, acolytes, and upstarts in our professions. As long as we continue to have to battle to be taken seriously, and as long as we're made to feel as though we're somehow abnormal and unfeminine for some of the choices we made to succeed in our fields, then requests to be mentors will always feel to some of us like a mockery. Who wants to pass along to Elisha strategies for being tolerated? When you feel yourself like an outsider, imposter, a wanna-be, in a patriarchal game that never fully shows its hand, it's difficult to think of any strategies for succeding as a woman worth passing along.

The stories of women mentoring women into professions, training their successors, deftly guiding acolytes through the maze of obligations and expectations, eagerly taking on female apprentices in the hopes of insuring continual female presence in the field and as a way of continuing our own influence in our professions -- these sorts of stories are still being written. Many of us started out in our professions without any female mentor to advise us, kept afloat only by our own daydreams and the rhetoric of the feminist movement that we were as capable as any man (more capable, in fact). And we managed as women to blaze new trails having to invent and reinvent ourselves along the way, patching together pieces of a self from a hodgepodge of images snipped and traced along the way. For sure, there were the men we looked up to and the few who reluctantly took us under their wings (because we were the best man for the job). And, if you were like me, there were the women I read about, but never met: women whose lives I researched in magazines and in history books (e.g., the nineteenth century black suffragette who earned a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne, Anna Julia Cooper; the incomparable Zora Neale Hurston, folklorist/writer; and Pauli Murray, first black woman ordained an Episcopal priest). These were a few of my role models. I admired them from afar, though younger women these days crave and insist upon flesh-and-blood role models. They come up to me and others fully expecting us to be willing to open up our lives to them, share deep, personal wounds and secrets with the hope of entering into a close, intimate, mutually sharing, ongoing relationshipwith us. All because they asked: "Will you be my mentor?" I am sometimes embarrassed by their hunger, their deprivation, their mother loss. Like Elijah I am exasperated sometimes by their need. But I understand, even when I have to refuse most requests.

Despite my sometimes ambivalence about being a mentor, I must admit that taking the time to share and advise those women I do feel led to mentor has been rewarding. Mentoring reminds you of all the things you never knew you knew. By stepping back and talking about your own journey, retracing old wounds, relishing past victories, musing over quiet triumphs, pointing out the danger spots, revisiting the journey that brought you here, you remind yourself that you're not an imposter after all. "Passing on to others that which was passed on to me" (as Ella Baker once said) reminds you of the investment you and others have made in your accomplishments and the battles you fought and won, with God's help, to get here. From time to time an Elisha comes along, seeking advice or insight, who reminds you of a younger self. She offers you a chance to experience how it good it feels to stop and celebrate you as an individual achiever, as part a generation of women who have come to this moment for such a time as this, as part of a long procession of women in history who are lifting as we climb.

Renita J. Weems, Ph.D.