Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 198

Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing," by Merve Emre:

When Chauncey invited Isabel to present her work to his all-male staff in the winter of 1957, neither she nor he could have anticipated the ridicule that would await her upon her arrival in Princeton. She came with her hair up, her glasses on, and one sleeve rolled up, wearing a sling from a recent operation she had undergone to remove a suspicious lump in her arm—an early sign of the metastatic cancer that was to kill her over two decades later. The invitation from ETS was “just manna from heaven,” she told a friend. “I thought it dropped from the skies.” The staff looked her up and looked her down. She was wearing her blue nylon dress, dotted with pink flowers, and awkward but functional shoes. After determining her age (somewhere in the midfifties, they guessed) and hearing about her various occupations (mystery writer, housewife, inventor, entrepreneur), they could not bring themselves even to feign enthusiasm for her ideas. 

She was unperturbed by the coolness of their reception. The second-guessing of her abilities was nothing new to her. The only man whose opinion mattered was Chauncey, for he controlled ETS’s research agenda and its purse strings. With the same breathless, thrilling voice she had once deployed when she spoke about the secret to a good mystery novel or the key to a successful marriage, she enthralled Chauncey with the story of how she and Katharine had dedicated their lives to adapting Jung’s type theory; how their calling had overridden all other personal and professional goals; how, like a modern-day Lewis and Clark, she and her family had traversed the United States to spread the gospel of type. Whatever she lacked in statistical training or theoretical rigor, she made up for with the ardency of her storytelling.