Rebels in White Gloves (31 page)

Janet was a senior at Wellesley when she met Calvin, an honors student in history and star running back at Yale, at a party at Harvard after the Ivy League championship game. Janet was one of the few black girls at the postgame mixer. She was leaning awkwardly against the wall “trying to figure out what to do with my arms” when Cal, who had just been recruited by the Dallas Cowboys, walked into the room. “Every head turned,” she remembers, “as if a spotlight had switched on.” Janet didn’t know that Cal had been injured in the game: In a fall, he’d badly split his tongue. Though nervousness churned her stomach as he crossed the room to ask her to dance, her flutterings ceased the moment he opened his mouth: All he could manage was inarticulate mumbling. To the amazement of everyone looking on, Janet coolly turned him down. He called a month later, mostly to prove, Janet says, that he could in fact speak.

For two years, the couple dated long distance while Janet got a master’s in math at the University of Chicago and Calvin attended Perkins Theological Seminary—and also made Rookie of the Year with the Cowboys and the cover of
Time
magazine. In 1971, they were married by the black Catholic bishop of New Orleans before four hundred guests, including Cowboys’ quarterback Roger Staubach; Janet wore a floor-length white gown and was attended by six bridesmaids. Two days later, she started teaching public school. She quit after a year, twenty-three and pregnant, and stayed home with Grant for the next four years, grateful for an option that her own working mother had never had. “I could only do it because of Cal’s income. I didn’t love teaching; frankly, saying I wanted to stay home with my kid was an out.” When Calvin was traded to the Washington Redskins, the family moved to Virginia and Janet resumed work, doing research for the Pentagon before launching her consulting firm.

Lonny and David Higgins set sail aboard the
Deliverance
, which served as both nursery for their two small children and floating medical clinic. (
Courtesy of Ilona Laszlo Higgins
)

Lonny and David celebrated her fortieth birthday at midnight on Arno Atoll in the Marshall Islands when the women attending Lonny’s health clinic woke them up bearing gifts of shells and basketry. (
Courtesy of Ilonal Laszlo Higgins
)

Lonny’s youngest son, Tucker, was born in 1996 when Lonny was almost fifty years old. (
Courtesy of Ilona Laszlo Higgins
)

Hillary Rodham, 1969. Her impassioned calls to political activism were a counterpoint to ads in the
Wellesley News
that urged women to “Protest boxy suits!” and “Protest big ugly shoes!” (
Lee Balterman, courtesy of
Life
Magazine and Time Warner, Inc
.)

Kathleen Smith married Roger Ruckman on August 9, 1969. Her mother had warned her against going to Wellesley, since “a smart girl would scare boys off.” (
Courtesy of Kathleen Smith Ruckman
)

Rob, Karen, Stephen, and Jonathan Ruckman, Kathy’s “string quartet.” As a full-time stay-at-home mom, Kathy found herself in a distinct minority among her Wellesley classmates. (
Courtesy of Kathleen Smith Ruckman
)

Roger and Kathy Ruckman in July 1998. Kathy and her husband joked that “I should go to my twenty-fifth [Wellesley] reunion barefoot and pregnant with him following me around with a whip.” (
Courtesy of Kathleen Smith Ruckman
)

Thanksgiving with the Young family in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, circa 1957. (
Courtesy of Nancy Young
)

Nancy Young’s self-portrait in 1970 at age twenty-two. She described Wellesley as “the worst four years of my life.” She felt scorned as a “scholarship girl” by upper-class princesses obsessed with maids, bridge, and the perfect Villager blouse. (
Courtesy of Nancy Young
)

In 1998, at age fifty, Nancy graduated from Boston College’s School of Social Work. Her battle with cancer has sparked a spiritual search. (
Courtesy of Nancy Young
)