Rebels in White Gloves (29 page)

Though some young “postfeminists” claim to be breaking new ground by enjoying and exploiting their sexuality in their public dealings with men, in fact numerous women—from Lola Montez to Clare Booth Luce to Pamela Harriman—have used sexual allure to rise above their origins; those who lived before this century have even been made heroines by recent feminist biographers. A
Fortune
magazine article in 1996 profiled seven successful businesswomen, noting that they all knew how to “skillfully exploit” their sexuality; among them was Ogilvy and Mather executive Charlotte Beers, Wellesley, ’57. Madeleine Albright, Wellesley ’59, is also a recognized master at flattering powerful men.

Michelle Lamson, ’69, has always used her exceptional beauty without qualms. A cheerleader and runner-up for homecoming queen as a girl in Des Moines, she was “spoiled silly by my daddy,” who sold road-building equipment and ran a giant mobile-home park and made lots of money and bought her show horses and ballet classes and Afghan hounds. Modeling couture in Paris after graduation, appearing on the cover of
Women’s Wear Daily
and in French
Vogue
while also attending the Institut des Sciences Politiques, Michelle knew that some thought her a bimbo. “I just made use of that perception. I think it’s fun if I’m having trouble changing a tire to play the weak silly woman to get some man to do it for me. I was never one to grow the hair under my arms because
I was becoming an object. Should I quit wearing perfume? Perfume is one of life’s wonders. Should I make myself ugly to prove that I’m smart? The fact is, I dominate men all the time. Women are harder to seduce. But with men you can be so obvious and they never see through it.”

Married, but then left by her husband for another woman soon after her modeling career came to an end, Michelle worked as a freelance translator but grew lonely and became manager of a hunt shop in Paris, selling jodhpurs, bridles, and guns. “When some guy storms into the shop demanding to see the manager and is met by a tall, green-eyed blonde looking down on him, he’ll generally drool and stammer and forget his complaint. I don’t flirt. Never in my professional life have I felt they misinterpreted my actions. I simply use whatever weapons I have at my disposal to carve out a life for myself and my son.”

As yet, the prospect of losing her power to mesmerize men as she ages has not worried Michelle too much. “I don’t have the skin anymore. I don’t have quite the body I had. I’m not going to put a glass bell over myself to protect myself from getting older, or worry if I have a chipped nail. But I still get attention on the street, and like it. I always return it with a smile. Though now when the boys whistle, I say, ‘Thanks, I could be your mom,’ and they say, ‘I wish you were.’ ”

That the competition for men’s approval has historically divided women also does not concern Michelle. “It’s not my problem that I’m prettier than Mrs. A but that Mrs. B is prettier than me. There’s always somebody uglier and prettier. And I’m not using my beauty to be an object for men’s consumption—I’m using it to get my own way. I was the opposite of what we were all supposed to be at that time. I guess I still am.”

CHAPTER SIX
 
 
Balancing Work and Family

W
hen it was first published in 1899, Kate Chopin’s novel
The Awakening
was branded a threat to woman’s virtue and the nation’s good. “Too strong drink for moral babes,” one critic wrote, “should be labeled poison.” Now revered as an early classic of feminist literature, the novel tells the story of a married woman with two young sons who finds her creativity awakened outside of her marriage and struggles between her responsibility to others and her imperative to be true to herself. “Think of the children,” the heroine is told by the “good mother” of the novel. And Edna Pontellier does think of the children, understanding that “wanting my own way is wanting a great deal when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others.” In the end, she decides that her “husband and children could not possess her body and soul,” and steps out of the shelter of her husband’s home and into the wider world, a rebellion against convention clearly admired by the author. Finally, being a creature of a less-tolerant century, Edna walks into the sea.

Whether a woman can fulfill herself within the family; whether she ought even to seek her own fulfillment; what it might mean to “think of the children”—a century after
The Awakening
, these questions remain unresolved. They are not, strictly speaking, only women’s questions: The tension between freedom and responsibility is the central American story. But for a woman, that tension has been felt most often at home, because it is within the family that she has been expected to work out her destiny.

The analysis of the family has therefore been from the beginning a core preoccupation of feminism. Even while drafting the Declaration on
the Rights of Woman demanding suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton avowed that “the whole question of women’s rights turns on the marriage relation.” The remaking of family life was necessary not only to secure women equality at home, but also as an essential precedent and template for the remaking of power relations between men and women in the world. “The public and the private worlds are inseparably connected,” wrote Virginia Woolf. “The tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.”

While feminists undertook to reinvent the family, their alarmed detractors saw them out to destroy it. Their warnings grew particularly vehement when Hillary Clinton first stepped onto the national stage. Christian leader Pat Robertson preached that “feminism encourages women to leave their husbands and kill their children” (and also to “practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”). Others of slightly more temperate mind cast Hillary and the women she stood for as man-haters who “throw away marriages like paper towels,” sanction illegitimacy, devalue the role of fathers, and disparage cookie-baking moms. Critics found in the recent abundance of memoirs and novels and self-help treatises propaganda against the family as a site of violence and incest and little more. They saw these women suckering their young, impressionable sisters into turning their backs on the joys of hearth and home in favor of the ultimately barren satisfactions of career. In her 1994 memoir of infertility,
Motherhood Deferred
, Anne Taylor Fleming cursed “the old haranguing chorus … aping the cultural dismissal of women, femaleness, motherhood, our mothers … Hey Hey. Gloria! Germaine! Kate! Tell us, how does it feel to have ended up without babies?… I want to crawl back into my female sex … where oh where do I go to trade a byline for a baby?”

In fact, far from scorning maternity, first- and second-wave feminists more often rhapsodized what Marguerite Duras called “the colossal swallowing up … the only opportunity offered a human being to experience a bursting of the ego.” By virtue of her capacity to bear children, many claimed, a woman had a depth of heart and moral authority superior to man’s, better equipping her to manage economic and political power. Because she knows “the months of weariness and pain while bones were shaped within, [the] hours of anguish and struggle that breath might be,” as Olive Schreiner wrote, a woman could not look
upon slain soldiers except as “so many mothers’ sons.” Were she to govern alongside man, she would bring an end to war: “she knows the history of human flesh; she knows its cost; he does not.” Marxist feminists argued that the “unpaid labors of reproduction” should be rewarded; antiwar marchers in the sixties flew banners announcing “
ANOTHER MOTHER FOR PEACE
.” Feminists led the fight for prenatal care, nutrition, and health-care programs for mothers and children, protection against discrimination against pregnant women and mothers, child care in the workplace, and parental leave.

Some feminists did renounce family outright, pessimistic that it could be transformed enough to permit women the same autonomy and creativity granted within it to men. Susan B. Anthony, who never married, believed that “a woman who will not be ruled must live without marriage.” Long before the class of ’69 arrived at Wellesley, the college’s more radical faculty had been advancing the view that like a nun taking vows, a woman bent on an intellectual career must remain unwed. “How many women of rare capacity have blotted themselves out,” asked Professor Vida Scudder, who had trained at Oxford with John Ruskin, “from a mistaken sense of duty?”

While some turned against marriage and motherhood because they promised to swallow a woman whole, others focused their critique on the ideology: They fought against the narrowing of women’s dreams, the confining idea that maternity was the only way for them to be happy and real. For some women, it surely was. For others, the “recipe for happiness” contained some other mixture. The women of ’69 knew well that not all women love motherhood: Raised by women with no other acceptable destiny, many had seen firsthand how chilly and miserable an unmotherly mother could be.

Yet even in its most antimaternal moments (“stop rocking the cradle and start rocking the boat”), the whole feminist chorus was still only the faintest chime against the massed voices of parents and experts and fairy tales and Wellesley College exhorting girls to seek safety and satisfaction with a successful husband and babies. Certainly, for all that the feminist harangue caught them full in their young faces, the class of ’69 still pursued marital bliss in the same proportions that women had for a century. Eighty-eight percent have married (a proportion typical for college-educated women in their age group, though lower then the 93
percent of Americans in their overall age group). One in three who married also divorced, but most of those have remarried. Three quarters of the graduates have children. Half of the ones who don’t, wish they did. The vast majority of those who have children have also tried to combine motherhood with paid work, in all manner of arrangements.

Jan Dustman Mercer’s dream of a literary life lasted as long as it took to get her first job offer as an “editorial assistant,” which she soon discovered meant she would do secretarial work for almost no pay. She quickly changed course and entered management training in marketing at a large Boston bank. It was the only division where women could rise beyond clerical positions. “It didn’t occur to me to be angry about that. It was just a fact that we all accepted.”

For thirteen years, Jan was “gung ho” in her career. “I felt like a pioneer, forging new territory. It was great, but also uncomfortable at times.” She endured the usual hazings: the appalled stares when she first set foot in the officers’ dining room—a grand, formal club until that moment open only to men—the constant and explicit sex talk by a senior officer. “He would get himself titillated. He was clearly repressed; pathetic, really. And he wasn’t the only one. I was once at a dinner with my husband, Tom [who also worked at the bank], and another guy, also very senior, was fondling my legs under the table. I didn’t know what to do short of leaving. If I offended him, he was in a position to hurt both my and Tom’s career. Nobody really knew what the ground rules were; we were all floundering. It was the first time that men and women were doing things like traveling together for business. Was it acceptable to have a drink with the married men you were traveling with? There were a lot of illicit relationships going on: Women may have realized what power they had and that it could be used to their advantage, or feared the consequences if they didn’t. Anyway, at that dinner I finally just left the table. He visited me in my department after that, and invited me for drinks. I rebuffed his advances, which I don’t think had negative consequences. But I did not tell Tom until many years later, because he respected this guy and I knew he would get angry. I carried it around by myself.”

The insurmountable obstacle for Jan turned out to be pregnancy, an event she had postponed for several years. “All through my twenties I’d thought I’d have my first child at twenty-eight. Then I got to be twenty-eight
and thought, Nah. In the early seventies it was very unusual for a woman to have a baby and continue working, and I didn’t want to quit working. But when I was thirty-one, Tom and I were struck with this powerful yearning.” They stopped using birth control, and Jan got pregnant right away. She also was promoted to vice-president. “It was a wonderful year. Here I was the youngest female VP in the bank’s history and I had this baby growing inside of me. But I thought, Oh my word, I wonder if they know I’m pregnant. I was certain that if they had known, I would never have been promoted. But I knew I was in uncharted territory anyway, and I figured that this extra little glitch—it wasn’t exactly a glitch—this glitch was going to have some unknown effect on me and my career. Little did I know how much of an effect.”

Having never before had a pregnant vice-president, the bank had no policy for officers taking maternity leave; when Jan finally broke the news, her supervisors proved totally inflexible. The senior officers agreed that Jan could take unpaid leave for six months. When, after two months, she wanted to come back two days a week and ease up from there, they said no. At the same time, one officer who was running the United Way campaign asked her to help from home. She felt obligated to say yes because he had influence over her career. “But I resented the immense amount of time I had to spend calling on people when they wouldn’t let me come back to work part-time.”