What does it mean to "misbehave"?

That's the question that was posed to me this week by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the Harvard history professor whose quote is the subtitle for this site.

My first, brief response was to say that I think all of the women I know in the technology field have felt that to get where they are they've had to break rules, to behave in ways that the men--and women--around them deemed inappropriate.

There were a series of events today, though, that led me to giving this topic a little more thought. First, there was Halley's excellent post on women and (mis)behavior. Then on the cross-country flight from Dulles to SFO I read a New Yorker profile of Hillary Clinton. And finally, right now I'm listening to Christine Lavin's wonderful song Getting In Touch With My Inner B*tch. (I'm adding that asterix not because I have a problem with the word, but because I don't want this site to be tagged by filtering software, which did happen to my personal weblog.)

Some people have an inner child
Some people hear an inner voice
Some people have inner calm (good for them)
But me, I got no choice

Some people have an inner cop
Some people hear an inner clown
But I got me an inner b*tch
And it's hard to keep that inner b*tch down.

What does it mean to misbehave? On the simplest level, to me it means behaving in a way that doesn't please the people around you, particularly "the powers that be"--wherever you may be. Do I misbehave? Not all the time. But often enough that there's usually somebody who's not happy with my behavior. Should I misbehave more? I don't think so.

When I look at the women who've changed our world--the women who've broken barriers, who've taken a stand, who've done more than simply rail against injustices--I tend to see some balance. The profile of Hillary Clinton talked about how much she's accomplished in the senate by learning to play by the rules, work within the system, defer to senior members. And in many ways, I think, learning to do that without losing your self and your ideals is much harder than always being in an outraged (or outrageous) mode. I don't for one minute think Hillary enjoys having to defer to many of her senior colleagues in the Senate--but she does it, knowing that it will afford her opportunities down the road.

So I'm not too worried about this weblog, or the women writing in it, being "too well behaved." I've seen every one of these women misbehave when the situation called for it. Most of the women I know and respect, in and out of the technology field, have the battle scars to show for their misbehavior. But at the end of the day, you have to learn to pick your battles. And how to work within the system, not attack it from the outside. As John Perry Barlow wrote recently in his inspired essay on Burning Man and political activism, "If we beleaguered bohemians really care about the moments to come that our children will inhabit, we'd better show up for it. This means that, painful as it sounds, we're probably going to have to act like grown-ups some of the time until things quit being so weird."