Rebels in White Gloves (3 page)

These are the familiar condemnations and cautionary tales. “You know the rules,” Hillary Rodham Clinton told the 1992 graduates of Wellesley. “If you don’t get married, you’re abnormal.… If you get married and have children but then go work outside the home, you’re a bad mother. If you get married and have children but stay home, you’ve wasted your education.” The “baby busters” may lament their generation’s absence of a galvanizing identity, but their mothers suffer the opposite burden, as an endlessly caricatured generation.

Such caricatures well serve crusaders out to whittle history into a sharp ideological stick, but they are of little use for anyone wanting to understand another actual human being. Lives rendered as moral parable—whatever the agenda—are inevitably drained of the density and ambiguity and complexity and mystery of real life in favor of the broad strokes of social realism. “Generalities clank when wielded,” Eudora Welty once wrote. “They make too much noise for us to hear what people might actually be trying to say. They are fatal to tenderness and are in themselves nonconductors of any real, however modest, discovery of the writer’s own heart.”

Those caricatured pay their own price. For Hillary’s classmates, the recipe of the glass slipper and Betty Crocker domesticity on which they were raised remained enormously powerful, no matter how many countertales feminism told. More than a few have struggled to sort out their own dreams and experience from the dreams fed them by the common culture. Nonna Noto, ’69, wrote every five years to her classmates of her enduring hopes for a husband and children and was wistful at her bad luck. But she now wonders whether she and some of her fellow childless classmates in fact chose the life they wanted but could not admit that choice even to themselves—whether they failed, as Hemingway put it, to “feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel.” Those who deviated from the feminist recipe for happiness—at times just as fixed and tyrannical as the old pattern—have also frequently felt scorned or abnormal, equally mismatched with what Phyllis Rose calls the “limited and limiting plots” we impose on our own
lives. “If I were to overcome the conventions, I should need the courage of a hero,” Virginia Woolf once wrote, “and I am not a hero.”

The women of Wellesley ’69 are overwhelmingly feminists: 80 percent readily describe themselves that way. Are they, then, anti-men, anti-sex, anti-family, anti-motherhood, anti-religion? Have they been burned out and embittered by the changes wrought by feminism?

The aim of this book is not to supplant malicious caricatures with their opposites but rather to reflect the immense variety of these four hundred women, a variety that is itself the most dramatic legacy of feminism. Almost any adventure imaginable in the past fifty years can be found somewhere among their number: They have dropped acid, cheated on their husbands, had abortions, struggled to get pregnant, run away with the stableman, run away to be a Buddhist nun, made fortunes, lost fortunes, taken Prozac, started menopause, pushed a stroller through their twenty-fifth-reunion parade. In the sheer diversity and idiosyncrasy of their lives, the women of ’69 resist the taxonomist. How does one type a Pentecostal Christian creationist physician with a house-husband? How make a cautionary tale of Catherine Parke, a college professor and poet whose late baby has not “stolen my time to write nor scattered my attention nor left me tired or overwhelmed nor damaged my career or sex life or self-esteem”?

To fairly reflect their diversity, I have gathered a larger cast than the usual three, four, or five characters typical of social histories. I have not, however, attempted to represent the class in any demographic sense: I did not divide the book among married and divorced, black and white, happy and unhappy, in proportional reflection of the class. Ultimately, I followed the stories that interested me most. If they are sometimes exceptionally dramatic, traversing what Oliver Sacks calls “the arctics and tropics of human existence,” they are also the stories that the women of ’69 tell each other and themselves. Having sailed into unmapped waters—and before the recent great surge in women’s biography and fractured fairy tales and female picaresques—these women have frequently turned for inspiration to one another’s often epic lives: to Lonny Laszlo Higgins’s ten years at sea raising her family and training Micronesian public health workers; to Dr. Nancy Eyler’s marriage to an uneducated cowboy and move to Montana; to Alison Campbell Swain’s
rejection of the ease she could have bought herself with her family fortune in favor of a life of ceaselessly taking care of other people.

Though each chapter charts a season or theme in their lives, their sagas are rarely linear. Motherhood, still, is the great track-switcher: For all their efforts to share with their husbands housekeeping and child-rearing responsibilities, the demands of family have almost always upended their lives more radically than they have unsettled their husbands’. So three decades after they graduated from Wellesley, some are senior partners in major law firms and some are recent graduates from law school. Alongside women at the top of careers pursued unremittingly are women who have dedicated their principal energies to their children and are only now entering graduate school or the workforce, or reentering after a long time. Some have grown children, born as early as December 1969; one is caring for a toddler, born in 1997. The fluidity of their lives has not been without limits: The biological clock imposes its imperatives, as does the premium on youth in the workplace. But theirs are complicated intertwinings of work and marriage and motherhood and daughterhood, with interruptions and distractions and divided attention and necessary new beginnings. The boundaries between chapters therefore sometimes blur.

The confusion of realms presented a dilemma as to what to call these women throughout the book. In the 1950s, the use of first names generally indicated a subordinate status: A secretary was Betty or Carol; her boss was Mr. Thompson or Dr. Smith. That changed with the mixing by the sixties generation of personal and public life. The current president is referred to by his first name more than any of his predecessors because of the familiarity he has invited with public talk of such matters as his underwear, and because his presidency has seemed to be more novelistic than most. The phrase “Friends of Bill” is a perfect example of how intimacy and organized politics have become intertwined; another is the political controversy stirred by Hillary Rodham’s youthful decision to carry her maiden name forward into her marriage. Like Bill, Hillary is often just “Hillary” in the conversations of ordinary people, including, of course, her classmates. For that reason, and because their stories weave in and out so often between private and public life, I have for the most part referred to Hillary and the rest of the women of Wellesley ’69 by their first names. The one exception is in Chapter Four, where I deal
at length with the work of two women in the class virtually in isolation from their private lives; in that case, it seemed appropriately formal to use their last names.

Chapter One looks at their years together at Wellesley, their first experience away from the domestic cocoon, and their first taste of loyalties divided between the world they grew up in and the new possibilities then emerging for women. Chapter Two goes backward, then, for a closer look at the circumstances of their girlhood and the nature of the imprint left upon them by their mothers’ lives. Chapter Three focuses on those who dove deep into “the sixties,” shaking radically loose from their past with all manner of political and personal transgressions of their parents’ rule. Chapter Four—the first of three chapters on their lives at work—looks at how their encounters with a “man’s world” reinforced or reshaped their ideas of what it means to be a woman and how, in turn, they have remade their professions. Chapter Five recognizes their struggles as pioneers—the lone woman in her medical school, the first vice-president at her bank—recalling the barriers present thirty years ago for women and the battles required to bring them down. Chapter Six takes on the subject that is both most discussed and most susceptible to ideological distortion—the dilemmas of balancing work and family. Chapter Seven looks at those in the class who have stayed home to raise their kids; and Chapter Eight, at those who have wound up single—by choice or luck. Chapter Nine is given over to two women whose journeys toward an authentic identity and life have been particularly arduous and wild. Chapter Ten focuses on the quest that increasingly defines these women’s lives, for spiritual knowledge and serenity. And Chapter Eleven looks at how they are facing the mortal struggles of midlife—empty nests, erratic hormones, aging parents, aging selves.

Mary Catherine Bateson has argued that the constant improvisations and sustained peripheral vision required by the interrupted female life are not crippling to a woman’s life and work but creative. She proposes “the knight errant as a better model for our times than the seeker of the grail.” Dorothy Devine, ’69, offers another model: She has taken up a classic woman’s craft—needlework. “A patchwork quilt is like a kaleidoscope of your life; you’re making something harmonious of all the disparate pieces.”

Richard Holmes, biographer of Coleridge and Shelley, believes that a
biographer should find a subject “that actually puts him on guard in the most extreme and delicate way—that, as it were, throws down a challenge.” As a woman exactly ten years younger than my subjects, I have often felt that there was much at stake for me in their answers to my questions. There is no formula to derive here: The marrieds are not categorically happier than the unmarrieds—nor are the professionals or those with children or those without. Their happiness, where it exists, cannot be dissected or hunted with a map like buried treasure; it is not a destination arrived at ever after but one fleetingly won and lost. Though these lives defy the attempt to craft a certain recipe for a fruitful life, to listen to these women is nonetheless cheering. They are, for the most part, “in love with daylight,” in Wilfrid Sheed’s lovely phrase. “When I say a prayer,” says the orphaned, unmarried, childless, too often celibate, more than once heartbroken Chris Osborne, ’69, “it is a prayer of thanks.”

CHAPTER ONE
 
 
The Wellesley Years

A
t Christmas break of her senior year, Dorothy Devine got married in a white tulle veil and a moiré silk wedding gown with a high Victorian collar and a micro-miniskirt, daisies in her hair.

A moon-faced, mild, middle-class girl from Winnetka, Illinois, Dorothy had never felt fully at home at Wellesley. The academic demands overwhelmed her, and she had made few friends among the sleek New York debs and midwestern heiresses in their cashmere sweater sets and gold circle pins. By sophomore year, she was spending much of her time across the river in Cambridge, where, at a meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society, she met Dan Gilbarg, an intense young radical with curly hair and a scraggly mustache. Though just a senior at Harvard, Dan was teaching “Socialist Critiques of American Society” with New Left political philosopher Herbert Marcuse and Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Dan upended Dorothy’s fearful certainty of the “domino theory” of Communist hegemony. At his urging, she began writing for
The Liberation News
, covering “community work in the ghettos, third world revolutions, police brutality, and the truth of events in Havana and Hanoi.” Together they painted placards and staged sit-ins in Harvard Square.

Dorothy had never had a date in high school, never even been kissed. So when she told her mother junior year that she had a boyfriend and was on the pill, her Catholic father “went bonkers.” The first time she brought Dan home to meet the family, her father told her that he had hidden his navy sword to avoid killing the young man who’d compromised his only daughter. Mr. Devine wrote her twenty-page letters every day, telling her she was a ruined woman. He went to the dean of the college
in a rage, excoriating her for failing to meet her responsibility to keep his daughter a virgin. “Wellesley was this castle in the woods full of princesses,” says Dorothy. “My father was angry because the tower wasn’t tall enough.”

To punish Dorothy for her immoral behavior, her father took away all her money and demanded she get married if she hoped for any further support. “I had no idea what I wanted to do and how I would support myself. I believed I needed a man to get money. And marrying the future professor—that seemed like something to do with my life. So I married Dan. Then my father refused to come to graduation, because we were Communists. When Dan and I moved into a radical collective, he cut ties completely. That hurt a lot, because I felt harried into my marriage. It was not a particularly happy day. And my mother couldn’t really intervene. She was always under my father’s thumb. He ran the house, and you were either a patriot or traitor, right or wrong. Here I’d done what I was supposed to do: I had married the Ivy League man and set up housekeeping. But I got punished for it. The Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, it just completely pulled us apart. There was this huge, unbridgeable gap between generations.”