Rebels in White Gloves (21 page)

Though Kris was never radical, her thorough integration into “the system” has caused her, in various public settings, to recite the guilty refrain of her generation: that in her life perhaps expediency has too often won over principle, that the price she has paid for power has sometimes been too great. “When I was young, I played at radical chic, but all along I preserved my conventional options. I went to demonstrations but also to an Ivy League law school. I did drugs and experimented sexually but quit both when I married Jeff.” As a prosecutor, Kris says, she has been to some degree “co-opted” by power. “I censor myself a lot, bide my time, package things in more palatable terms. My environmental work is in large part a way to appease my guilt over having to defend the Forest
Service in its destructive logging practices. And there are prosecutions that make me cringe: When we’ve got real down-and-out defendants, up for robbery or drugs, I know we’re putting them away so that as a society we don’t have to face our racial and economic problems.” At such times, law enforcement ceases to seem to her “a moral calling.”

Against those self-inflicted charges, Kris has in turn defended herself in public forums with the claim that she has used her power as a prosecutor to temper the rigid values of the law with a kind of womanly empathy. She has challenged, for instance, mandatory sentences as contravening a higher justice, which “requires the consideration of particular human beings and their circumstances. We shouldn’t be operating from abstract theory but from local knowledge and experience.”

The notion of a law less impersonal in its enforcement is one of the central tenets of feminist jurisprudence, which Kris taught at Lewis and Clark. So is her belief that the law should reach beyond defining rights to impose a duty of mutual care, like that understood to be a part of family life. In her speeches, Kris has called “cold” the provision in tort law that absolves a stranger of the duty to rescue a drowning child, lest the good Samaritan incur liability. Rather than forgiving the self-protective refusal to help another, she believes the law ought to “forgive the consequences of trying to do the right thing.”

Kris is uneasy calling her approach to law enforcement feminine: “I reject the dichotomy that associates the jurisprudence of rights with men and the jurisprudence of care with women.” But she does, in fact, credit women—with their deeper access to the heart, their stronger ties to the hearth—with a moral advantage in the struggle to reconcile power and conscience. Like Hillary Clinton, she often turns to Native Americans for models of societies in which women are the moral guardians. “Woman elders in Indian tribes can say things others cannot say,” she told the Oregon Women Lawyers in a speech in early 1994. “Among the Iroquois, the matron chose and could impeach the chief. Among the Cherokee, it was up to ‘the beloved woman’ to decide questions of war and peace, of punishment and pardon. Nine of the fourteen western U.S. attorneys in the Clinton administration are women; the top layer of the department is all female. Our role is to hold the feet of male law enforcement officers to the fire and bear witness to our leaders’ shortcomings.”

Kris has borne such witness against her White House patrons: When Janet Reno helped derail the appointment of Portland’s former chief of police, Tom Potter, to head a community-based policing project because of his advocacy of gay rights, Kris gave an interview to the local paper saying the department had lost sight of its principles. She has also been openly critical of her friend Bill Clinton for dumping their old Yale Law classmate Lani Guinier and “for bowing to conventional wisdom and trying to out-tough his political opponents. It is time for the profession to stand up and condemn timid leaders pandering to a public whipped into a hysteria about crime.

“Woman in ancient society was the truth sayer, the one who strips away hypocrisy, the keeper of the collective conscience. Her presence inhibited the puffing of others’ vanities. If that means saying the emperor has no clothes, so be it.”

In the early seventies, when the women of ’69 first began to work, most shared the aspirations then central to feminism: the end of discrimination and the securing of opportunities for women in every way equal to men’s. Many pursue those aims still: Janet McDonald Hill’s consulting firm helps corporations bring blacks and women into upper management, above the glass ceiling; Cynthia Gilbert-Marlow has played a key role in organizing stewardesses; Catherine Ravinski works as a judge to “defend the underdog.”

But if equity remains a prime motive for most of the working women in the class, many have also moved in step with feminism toward more complex ambitions. Simply securing a place in the public arena, it turned out, was not enough: Too often in their role as pioneers, these women felt misfitted to the “man’s world” they had joined, insufficiently swaggering or detached or bold. Some assimilated, becoming one of the boys. Others left. The great majority, however, became, like Kris Olson Rogers, persuaded of the possibility of bringing a “woman’s way” to medicine and business and law, a way they advance as more cooperative, empathetic, flexible. From the simple pursuit of equal representation in the professions, they set out to redefine the problems addressed in Congress and research laboratories and then, further still, to question the
“man-made” methods and values and languages of those cultures. Far from fulfilling the experts’ predictions that the world of work would “masculinize” them, many would have their consciousness of themselves as female heightened by work. Their sex would cease to be a constraint to be transcended and become the basis on which to claim moral advantage. Here was the key to resolving their generation’s central dilemma—how to take hold of the world’s levers while also holding fast to their personal ideals.

At its extreme, the debate over sexual difference sets culture against nature: Those who believe that there are no essential female traits but only socially constructed differences—the product of historical circumstances and acculturation—stand opposite those who believe that real and profound differences were forged by nature or God and are the source of the sexual divisions of labor and behaviors found across cultures and throughout history. A few in the Wellesley class of ’69 take the second position, that women are eternally and essentially different from men: Fundamentalist Christian Dr. Katherine Shepeluk Loutrel financially supports her children and husband but considers her stay-at-home husband the unquestioned head of the family—as the Bible commands. A few take the first stance: Janet Hill says, “I simply don’t know what a female attribute is.” Most, however, believe in some measure of difference, seeing aspects of their femininity as learned but speaking also of woman’s distinct nature.

The women of ’69 have been influenced by the work of such feminist psychologists as Dorothy Dinnerstein, Nancy Chodorow, and Carol Gilligan, who see the construction of sexual identity as a process that begins in infancy, and as crucially shaped by the primacy of maternal care. Because boys must split from their mother to establish their masculine identity, they succeed well at individuation and autonomy but fare less well at intimacy. Girls, experiencing no such abrupt separation from their mother, develop less distinct ego boundaries. While better at empathy and close relations, they remain weaker in their sense of self, more inclined to shoulder blame, to doubt their convictions, to accommodate and appease. Involving men fully in parenting infants, these developmental psychologists propose, would alter both men’s and women’s capacities for power and love. Gilligan has extended those arguments to claim for women a different moral calculus, less abstract and adversarial,
more personal and particularist and concerned with reconciling conflicting interests to preserve relationships over time. Deborah Tannen, a favorite of Hillary Clinton’s, describes a similar gender gap in communication: Men talk to affirm status and hierarchy; women, to offer support, share information, and fortify connection.

Because it deals directly with questions of equality, the law has been a particular focus of analyses based on the difference between women and men. Critical legal theorists began the process, challenging the faith that the law as written embodies timeless principles of justice and contending rather that “all law is politics,” serving the powerful and disserving the powerless—including women. The courtroom, too, has been deemed biased for want of a woman’s point of view. Stanford political scientist Susan Okin complains that because judges are often recruited from among partners in prestigious law firms or from academic law—both of which make their greatest demands during child-rearing years and so “discriminate against those who participate in parenting”—there is a built-in “absence of mothers” among those making judicial decisions regarding abortion, rape, divorce, and sexual harassment. Legal education is similarly challenged: Not long after Kris Olson Rogers’s speech there, Yale Law School formed a committee on the status of women in response to a law review article by Lani Guinier indicting the Socratic method for sabotaging women with their “more deliberative” habits of learning and public speech.

Law school was a misery for many of the lawyers in the Wellesley class of ’69. Rhea Kemble, who would become the first woman chief prosecutor of narcotics and organized crime in New York City, felt completely shut down at Harvard Law, where at the time less than 10 percent of the students were women. “Unless I had something extraordinarily meaningful to say, there was no point in saying anything. I would be rolled over by the professor or would hear snide comments from classmates. I felt alienated and eventually just disengaged. I now regret I wasn’t more of a feminist. I could have resisted better had I spent more time with other women.”

Worse was the sense of displacement many felt once they entered a firm. In a law journal article in 1978, Priscilla Fox, ’69, wrote of the struggles she faced in her first years after graduating from Stanford University Law School. She began with a critical assessment of her own learned
timidity as a woman. That she had been “socialized to avoid conflict … to be weak, dependent, more passive than my male peers” was a handicap in court, she wrote, noting with dismay the long exclusion of women from the bar on the grounds, as an 1875 ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court put it, that the “tender susceptibility, purity and delicacy” of a woman disqualified her for “forensic strife.”

Having denounced such stereotypes, however, Priscilla went on to describe herself growing overwhelmed and depressed in her work on child abuse cases seemingly because of just such a “tender susceptibility.” “I tended to become too emotionally involved in the cases … felt a looming sense of responsibility, strong sympathy for many of the so-called ‘child neglecting’ families, who were inevitably plagued by a constellation of problems.… Emotion (except in a highly stylized, controlled form), compassion and altruism are out of place in the world of courtroom lawyers.… The skills one needs to win are typically male ways of behaving: bluffing, strutting, subtle verbal put-downs.” Priscilla concluded that she had none of that ruthlessness and too much of the “female qualities of understanding and nurturing.” Those qualities might not get her very far in litigation, she wrote. “But deep down I simply do not want to lose that part of my humanity that feels terrible when someone I care about loses one of life’s battles.” She wondered: “What would happen if women stopped adopting male models of behavior … stopped playing the game by the men’s rules?” Priscilla left her job and went to work for the Massachusetts Public Health Department investigating the use of pesticides, lead paint, food safety, and housing standards. She has since moved with her family to Vermont and joined a goddess group, joining with other women to celebrate pre-Christian female deities.

Priscilla’s complicated relationship to her “female qualities” is not uncommon among the women in her graduating class. Having rebelled as girls against their schooling in tender selflessness, many of these women have grown increasingly ambivalent about what to discard and what to keep. They have come to see their “feelingness,” whether innate or learned, as an admirable quality, better shared with men than shed. Many have groped toward some version of androgyny, though often conceived in terms that reversed the assimilationist effort to “turn women into men,” as Kathy Smith Ruckman puts it. “I would like my
sons to gain some qualities of women: nurturing, enjoying family, spiritual things.”

One of twenty women in her class at Yale Medical School, Elizabeth Michel was criticized by her professors for not being aggressive enough. “I could see the other students developing a coldness, which was what we were taught. [Professor] Bernie Siegel talked about patients as real people with lives affected by their illness, but that was different from the way most of our teachers talked about patients, as essentially anonymous hosts to what was really interesting—their disease. Doctors would talk about patients right in front of them, a lot of the time just to show off to their colleagues. I didn’t have the temperament for it at all. I was involved in the women’s movement—it was my consciousness-raising group that gave me the courage to go to medical school—and as a woman living from a feeling level, I would not go along with their socialization.”

Elizabeth did not, at any rate, believe assimilation a winning strategy. Articulating a classic double bind, she recalls that the aggressive qualities her professors valued in a doctor were not the same qualities they admired in a woman. “If a woman is forceful, she’s called a bitch. If you’re outspoken, you’re unfeminine. What I did was just try my best to be invisible. I dressed in tailored, neutral clothes, did nothing to bring attention to the fact that I was a woman. For me, being seen was a setup for being humiliated.”

The tender, holistic impulse was not, in Elizabeth’s eyes, a “strictly male-female thing.” Her husband, a fellow medical student, was as distressed by the reigning culture of medicine as she. The couple had their first child halfway through their residencies, “because we both felt emotionally barren,” and did volunteer work at every possible turn. Treating survivors of a coal-mining accident in Appalachia from which many bodies were never recovered, Elizabeth, whose vanished mother had never been found, recognized the anguish of women unable to cease grieving until they knew their story’s end.