Rebels in White Gloves (2 page)

NOW’s demand for a wholesale remaking of marriage, child rearing, education, work, politics, law, medicine, religion, psychology, and sexuality has been in the brief lifetime of these women to a remarkable degree fulfilled. In the 1950s, when the women of ’69 were girls, half of all women married as teenagers, and a third had their first child before age twenty; the average age of first marriage and motherhood dropped to the youngest in U.S. history and all but 7 percent of women eventually became mothers, typically raising three or four children. Only a fifth of students then in college were women; two out of three of those dropped out, and only 6 percent of all women completed their degrees. Fewer still went on to advanced degrees and professions. By 1966, women’s share of college faculty positions was lower than in 1910 and women accounted for only 0.5 percent of engineers, 3 percent of lawyers, and 6 percent of physicians; throughout the workforce the gender wage gap was widening. A century’s gains in women’s education and employment were in fact reversed with the end of World War II as a million women were pushed out of jobs or into pink-collar ghettos to make room for 12 million returning GIs. Fewer than one in ten mothers with children under six worked full-time; in the suburbs, just 3 percent did so. Unless she was nonwhite or poor, marriage and child-rearing were a woman’s lifetime career.

By the time the women of ’69 were launching their own daughters into the world, all that had changed. In 1998, just 3 percent of families corresponded to the perfect portrait of the traditional nuclear family—dad bringing home the bacon to two kids and a stay-at-home mom. With women waiting longer to wed, and with half of all marriages ending in divorce, a woman today can expect to be married less than half her adult life. Child rearing, too, occupies a smaller portion of her adulthood: Though the number of children raised by single mothers has
quadrupled since the 1950s to 24 percent, Hillary Clinton’s generation has had fewer children than any previous generation of American women. With longer life expectancies, they will spend many more years in an empty nest. Twenty percent have never had children.

The shifts in family structure followed dramatic changes in women’s education and employment. Women are now the majority among students pursuing higher education, and have made tremendous gains in high-earning professions. By 1990, a third of all attorneys, doctors, professors, and business managers were women. The median income of women in their forties has increased 31 percent over three decades, while men’s remained nearly unchanged. Fifty-seven percent of women with children under six and 68 percent of women with school-age children are now in the workforce (though a third of those with children under eighteen work part-time); 48 percent of married women provide half or more of their family income; 18 percent are the sole providers, and 10 percent of husbands now describe themselves as homemakers. In 1992, those shifts were mirrored, somewhat belatedly, in the First Family: Barbara Bush, a grandmother of twelve who dropped out of college to marry and never again held a paying job, yielded America’s most symbolic hearth and home to an attorney with a six-figure income and one child.

Having been girls in one world, the women of Wellesley ’69 became women in another. They were “split at the root,” in poet Adrienne Rich’s phrase. Though they are more educated and less poor than average—as of 1994, 58 percent had an advanced degree—their lives mirror the new national norm to a remarkable extent: Just 5 percent are traditional homemakers; 42 percent of those who are married provide half or more of their household income; 12 percent have never married; 23 percent have no children.

Women’s colleges have often provided a useful window into the present state of womanhood. Researching
The Second Sex
(1949), Simone de Beauvoir interviewed women “from Mary Guggenheim to Mary McCarthy to the many anonymous Marys who were students at Vassar, Sweet Briar and the women’s campus of Tulane.”
The Feminine Mystique
began with a fifteenth-reunion survey of Betty Friedan’s own class of 1942 at Smith College—a group exactly the generation of the mothers of the class of ’69. Mary McCarthy’s cruel roman à clef
The Group
mocked her classmates of Vassar ’33–and, by implication, their progressive descendants in 1963, the year of its publication; Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel
The Bell Jar
, about a Smith student in the 1950s, held out a dark warning to the young women of the sixties.

All of these authors exploited the high degree of self-consciousness common among these well-schooled women. It is a quality particularly apparent in the hordes of baby boomers who came of age in the sixties: Theirs was a generation that imagined it would reinvent the world. Self-conscious iconoclasts and pioneers, the women of ’69 would experiment boldly with sex and work and family and religion and politics. They would also develop the habit of seeing their own lives in historic terms. Having been analyzed endlessly by experts of every stripe, from psychologists and sociologists to marketers and gender theorists (some drawn from their own ranks), the way they are talked about is also the way they often talk about themselves. In their voices, one hears echoes of the diverse vocabularies of linguist Deborah Tannen and developmental psychologist Carol Gilligan, of New Age guru Clarissa Pinkola Estes and child-rearing expert Penelope Leach, of the New Left and the women’s health movement and feminist jurisprudence. The women of ’69 recognize themselves as characters in the present drama over the meaning of gender, over family structure and the rearing of children, over the relationship between the self and society, between the private and public realms.

The accounts of their lives offered here are more memoir than biography. Though I interviewed mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, husbands and lovers and friends, I was concerned most with what the women themselves make of their lives, what choices they celebrate or regret as they look back from the vantage of midlife. Where possible, I have tried to provide some context for their metamorphoses. These women, alert consumers of culture, are like slightly bent satellite dishes: They pick up most of the intellectual currents of the day, but the signal is frequently broken up or overlapped by contrary signals. Rather than impose coherence, I have tried to summarize the ideas they have absorbed while also preserving the idiosyncratic ways in which they have understood them. For the sake of narrative flow, I have sometimes knitted together several conversations, which can throw into relief the human habit of self-contradiction.

Memory, of course, has its own agenda: To the extent that these are self-portraits, they preserve both the kind and unkind cuts that enterprise invariably entails. In recounting their histories, each of these women has made a story of her life, finding with hindsight the fruit born of chaos and pain, mapping cause and effect, discerning motifs, imbuing events with symbolic and prophetic portent. They have rationalized misdeeds and also lacerated themselves with criticism; romanticized youthful adventures, swelling them to grand proportions, but also flattened their own past into anecdote.

They have not, however, kept many secrets. Reared in the tenets of consciousness-raising, most of the women of Wellesley ’69 have been candid about their lives to an almost unsettling degree. To break the silence that prevailed in their childhood on such matters as sexuality and marital unhappiness and substance abuse, most believe, has a moral purpose. Though Hannah Arendt herself was hostile to feminism, her recognition that “if we do not know our history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate” was developed by feminists into a central principle of the movement. The feminist insight that “the personal is political” meant that some seemingly solitary struggles were in fact shared, rooted in family, social, and corporate structures that had to be challenged by women in solidarity with one another. Personal testimony became a political act; speaking out was a way to join and sustain the sisterhood. “The personal is political” also meant that there was a politics, a power relationship, in the family and that therefore such public values as justice and equality had to be taken home. It meant that all sorts of seemingly intimate choices—what kind of underwear one wore, whether and how and with whom one had sex—were political as well as personal, a way of confronting social rules as to how a lady behaved and of interrogating the complicated relationship between power and sexual consent. “The personal is political” meant that disputes traditionally treated as domestic and therefore private—acts of forced sex or of violence against one’s family members—would no longer be immune from public scrutiny. It meant that you had to “walk the talk,” align how you lived in the world—earned your money, disposed of your trash—with the values you professed. It meant, as well, that the political is personal: that the public realm of work and law had to be tempered with such “womanly” values as nurturance and compassion.

The dissolution of the hard boundary that once separated the private from the public has had mixed consequences, and those consequences are the central subject of this book. Co-opted by commercial culture, the confessional impulse has grown grotesque on TV talk shows (though as David Halberstam points out in
The Fifties
, it was
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
, the show that has come to stand for all the marvelous family values America subsequently lost, that first took “what was most private”—the lives of the couple’s two sons—“and made it terribly public”). In politics, the idea that the personal behavior of a senator or president is a legitimate measure of his political character has often degraded civic discourse into scandalmongering. Hollywood has seized upon the openness toward sex and intimate violence as license to make them both staples of popular entertainment. Excessively shielded as girls from harsh realities, the women of ’69 have raised children excessively exposed. They have also sometimes lost their way on the “twelve-step” path. “The personal is political” has sometimes degenerated into the notion that personal revelation and transformation are politics enough.

Yet it remains true that these women have taken great sustenance, like many women before them, from speaking truth to one another—it is a tradition still enacted at their class reunion meetings. The women of ’69 have come out as debutantes. They have also come out as lesbians, as victims of domestic abuse, as alcoholics. At the same time, they have remained possessed of the manners and dutiful habits instilled at Wellesley—a wonderful combination for any biographer attempting to retrace their lives. So Dorothy Devine, ’69, was not only able to promptly find and send me the 1970 report to the House Judiciary Committee on her subversive activities in the New Left and in Cuba—as well as snapshots of herself with bare-breasted celebrants at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and wreathed with laurel at a menopause rite. She also accompanied it all with a gracious note on flowered stationery in a lovely hand.

“Why do we have all these problems we didn’t have in 1955?” Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich asked in a speech in 1994. “Because a long pattern of counterculture belief … has undervalued the family.” Nostalgia for the childhood world these women lost or abandoned, and disavowal of their generation’s “revolution” as a destructive spasm, are central tenets of political discourse in the 1990s. In the present
rendering of postwar history, the fifties marked the last golden moment of centuries of stable and happy families, a world of order and restraint tragically dismantled by the nihilistic assault in the sixties on traditional values. In this view, selfish ambition and wanton pleasure-seeking triumphed over a spartan sense of responsibility, precipitating the family’s demise: Since the nurturance and moral education of family is traditionally the responsibility of women, it follows that they bear the greatest share of blame for this tragedy. It was for men to shoulder the burdens—and honor—of work and civic life. When women insisted on stepping into the public arena as well, they betrayed their calling as the keepers of a domestic haven in a heartless world.

When my brief portrait of five women of Wellesley ’69 (U.S. attorney Kris Olson Rogers, Dr. Lonny Laszlo Higgins, and management consultant Janet McDonald Hill—all married working moms; Susan Alexander, a divorced working mom; and Kathy Smith Ruckman, a married full-time mom) appeared in
U.S. News & World Report
on the occasion of their twenty-fifth reunion, the letters received by the magazine reflected this sense of betrayal. A military man stationed in Europe wrote: “I submit that Kathy Ruckman, who got married, had children and stayed home, is the most successful career woman of the bunch. It’s also a good bet her children aren’t high school dropouts, drug addicts, unwed mothers, gang members, or in some other way a burden on society.… This is what the rest of these ‘gifted women’ … have given us.” A woman in Hitchcock, Oklahoma, charged that “the group rebelled against more than the traditional family. Hillary and classmates rebelled against the Ten Commandments.” To another woman, from Newton, New Jersey, Hillary’s generation of women was the reason “we are in big trouble today—the most important word in their vocabulary is ‘mine.’ Look at how many are divorced. [Their parents made sacrifices in the armed services] so these ungratefuls could live, and now they are trying to destroy this great country.”

They have destroyed the family and ruined America’s children, defied the divine order and sabotaged morality, replaced self-sacrifice and duty with arrogant self-absorption and greed. That is the charge made against this generation of women. They have torn down American values, or sold out to them. In the process, they have ruined their own lives and created a nightmare for their daughters. A 1994
Frontline
documentary
on Hillary’s class depicted these women as badly damaged by feminism: the career woman condemned to barren spinsterhood and remorse; the full-time mom to humiliation; the working mom to hyperorganized hyperactivity and her own daughter’s disavowal of her hectic life.