Rebels in White Gloves (4 page)

Like reluctant seafarers, one foot aboard ship, the other still reaching for familiar ground, the women of the Wellesley class of ’69 spent their years at college poised precariously across a chasm between two worlds. Lagging a breath behind the rest of America’s campuses, physically isolated and archaic in its traditions, Wellesley inhabited at the end of the decade an odd crease in time, where everything meant by
the fifties
and all that would come to be called
the sixties
existed for a moment side by side.

Parents with traditional notions of femininity had sent their shining girls into pastoral quietude to be cultivated into graceful mothers and wives. In this “hothouse for purebred flowers,” as Kris Olson, ’69, remembers it, the girls would chastely await the arrival of their Ivy prince. Their campus guidebook neatly summarized centuries of feminine destiny. “We are the sought, rather than the seekers. How do we begin being sought?”

At the same time, even high in their Gothic towers, the young women of Wellesley could not help but hear the countervailing messages in the culture. Already in the decade of their girlhood, the civil rights movement
had insisted on a broadened definition of equality and demonstrated a grassroots mechanism for social change; by the late sixties, its principles and practices had been embraced by the movement for women’s equality. The joys of sex were being publicly celebrated as never before in advertising, Hollywood, and rock ’n’ roll. And though few would feel the sting of tear gas, most of these girls admired the rebellion under way against their parents’ values by antiwar activists, student protesters, New Left intellectuals, consciousness expanders, Whole Earthers, humanist psychologists, spiritual pilgrims, sexual adventurers—all promising a doorway out of what Hillary Rodham would call in her graduation speech “inauthentic reality” and into “a more penetrating … existence.” The Wellesley college newspaper regularly covered Timothy Leary’s lectures at Harvard, in which he urged all his “well-adjusted” young students to jettison their “parochial psychic stability,” drop acid, and complicate their ways of seeing and experiencing the world.

In the odd crease in time Wellesley inhabited, such radical injunctions inevitably took on a pastel hue. Reporting on her interview with Frank Zappa junior year, Wellesley
News
correspondent Chris Franz, ’69, duly reported the rock star’s standard advice: “Freak out, Suzy Creamcheese. Drop out of school before your brain rots.” What Zappa meant, Chris reassured her readers, was merely that the “supersocialized product of the education system should cast off outmoded and restrictive thinking and etiquette.” His call to drop out, she wrote in a profile tucked into the paper between an ad for Brooks Brothers clothiers and a notice for the collegiate queen competition, “was aimed at students in public school.” And the Mothers of Invention, she added, were all exceedingly “well mannered and clean.”

Living on the cusp between the age of the feminine mystique and the age of feminism, it is characteristic of this class that its most radical member, Dorothy Devine, borrowed her politics from her boyfriend, like a letter sweater or a fraternity pin. It is characteristic of the times that her rebellion was taken seriously only when it impinged on sex, marriage, and home. There would be many deep estrangements between the women of ’69 and their mostly Republican moms and dads. Nearly all would erupt over domestic concerns. At their root was a fundamental question: What is a woman’s essential nature, her proper place and role?

In the late forties, when the women of Wellesley ’69 were born, the answer to that question was being radically re-formed. In the two decades after the war, sex roles temporarily loosened by the first wave of feminism, the Depression, and the demands of the war economy were circumscribed again within bounds as narrow as any in the century. Freud’s Victorian conceit—that anatomy is destiny—recovered, in the fifties, its status as Truth. At the same time, Freud’s descendants in the social sciences ruled femininity a fragile possession. True womanhood—fecund, nurturing, compliant—did not exist simply by virtue of being female: It required protection and cultivating and could easily be jeopardized by excess independence or a too-willful mind. Masculinity, too, could be readily deformed, if Father was a Milquetoast and Mother too strong; man’s God-given superior strength existed only by the grace of female weakness.

If, as the experts attested, passivity and domesticity were fundamental to female identity, then education—the right to which the first-wave feminists had fought their earliest battles—could only be damaging. The women who entered Wellesley in 1965 were America’s best little girls: 90 percent had been their high school newspaper editor, student body president, or valedictorian. Yet in the odd moment they inhabited, the pursuit of higher education for a woman could itself be regarded defiant. In a short story entitled “Revelation,” published in 1965, Flannery O’Connor captured how grotesque a studious girl then seemed to much of the world. In the waiting room of a doctor’s office, a fat, ugly girl “blue with acne” wearing Girl Scout shoes and heavy socks “scowls into a book called Human Development … annoyed that anyone should speak while she tried to read.” The girl smirks and glares with dislike, “her eyes fixed like two drills” on the country wives who surround her, making a loud ugly noise through her teeth. “Mary Grace goes to Wellesley,” her ladylike mother apologizes to the increasingly discomfited women around them. “Just reads all the time, a real bookworm.… I think it’s too much. I think she ought to get out and have fun.”

When Kathy Smith, ’69, of Wilmington, Delaware, came home from high school with a perfect report card, as she never failed to do, she knew she would have to face her mother’s fury. “Mom thought I should be like my sister, who was a majorette and not much of a student and wildly popular and married her high school sweetheart. All the women
in her bridge club ever wanted to know was, Doesn’t Kathy have a boyfriend yet? I was supposed to look attractive to men at all times, but my mother always told me that I was not attractive, that I was a failure on that score, and it was a matter of great concern. When I applied to Wellesley, she told me that I didn’t belong with those kinds of people, that I’d get my head filled with fancy ideas and come back thinking I was better than the rest of the family. She was very clear: My job was to find a husband, and a smart girl would scare boys off.”

In her concern that education would jeopardize her daughter’s future, Mrs. Smith echoed the most estimable psychologists and doctors of the day. A passionate intelligence, the experts advised, was distinctly unfeminine; if encouraged, it would certainly condemn a girl to a life “unsexed.”
Redbook
and
Ladies’ Home Journal
were full of cautionary parables about the too-clever young lady who loses her young man to a helpless, charmingly addle-brained creature in need of his protection. Even if she avoided the tragedy of spinsterhood, the educated woman would become “masculinized,” in the words of a standard 1950s text, with “enormously dangerous consequences to the home, the children dependent on it and to the ability of the woman, as well as her husband, to obtain sexual gratification.”
Brain
was an epithet, applied to a girl: Hillary Rodham’s high school newspaper predicted she would become a nun, called Sister Frigidaire.

Spinsterhood and frigidity were not the only lurking dangers. The near-certain consequence of education was dissatisfaction for a girl with her place—ordained by God and science—as mother and wife. Medical experts cautioned against thwarting what a group of male doctors told
Life
magazine was a healthy woman’s “primitive biological urge toward reproduction, homemaking and nurturing. She deeply wants to be able to submit to her husband.” In 1960,
The New York Times
scolded the presidents of women’s colleges who “maintain, in the face of complaints, that sixteen years of academic training is realistic preparation for wifehood and motherhood.… The road from Freud to Frigidaire, from Sophocles to Spock, has turned out to be a bumpy one.” Like those who argued against educating the Negro lest it confuse him as to his proper place—fomenting restlessness and menacing the social order—the critics of women’s education couched their warnings in benevolent terms. “To urge upon her a profession in the man’s world can adversely affect a
girl,” wrote a Yale psychologist, advising against the admission of women to the college. “She wants to be free of guilt and conflict about being a fulfilled woman.” A Harvard psychiatrist, also opposed to coeducation, saw social dangers: “Only when women enter upon motherhood with a sense of fulfillment shall we attain the goal of a good life and a secure world.” Still others warned against wasting resources: The education that girls would not use as housewives was urgently needed by boys to do the work of the atomic age. In 1971, Radcliffe president Matina Horner described the consequence of this relentless message: A “double bind” entraps a bright young woman, she wrote. “If she fails, she is not living up to her own standard; if she succeeds, she is not living up to societal expectations about the female role.”

Concerned for their survival, some women’s colleges attempted to appease the experts and allay parental fears, instituting curricula in family life and urging girls into home economics degrees. By the time Friedan published
The Feminine Mystique
, Mills College had adopted a slogan: “We are not educating women to be scholars, but to be wives and mothers.” Rather than promote such masculine and “vastly overrated” qualities as creativity and individualism, the college’s president promised, Mills would nurture the feminine talent for “relationship.”

In the midst of this debate, Wellesley was singled out for praise among the Seven Sisters for managing not to disturb the serenity of the young women in its charge. Wellesley girls, said Princeton’s 1965 guide to coeds, remain “strikingly traditional.” The class of ’69 looked like a group of “nice young future den mothers” to a Harvard critic’s eyes. While the rest of the campus world was going “madly mod,” the
Boston Globe
reported, “Les Wellesley Femmes go blithely on with the basics.” They are not given “to the long hair, bulging book bags and breathless brilliance found at Radcliffe … or the compulsive egalitarianism of Barnard students,”
Time
magazine wrote of Hillary’s entering class, adding what, at a time when “adjustment” to one’s given life role was counted the highest form of mental health, could only be read as glowing praise. “Their distinguishing characteristic is that they don’t stand out. They are simply wholesome creatures, unencumbered by the world’s woes, who make normal, well-adjusted housewives.”

Wellesley had in fact taken pains to be certain that Hillary and her classmates would grow up to be normal housewives, preserving traditions
long jettisoned elsewhere. Like their mothers and grandmothers, the women of ’69 would be “finished” as ladies. Among their required courses were figure training (instruction in how to stay shapely and pert) and fundamentals of movement, which included learning how to get out of the backseat of a car while wearing high heels. Wednesday afternoons, they practiced the proper pouring of tea. A good portion of the campus guidebook was devoted to appropriate attire: Suits were ideal for dates; “one cocktail dress is usually all you’ll need until Christmas.” Skirts were mandatory at dinner—“a good incentive to neaten up and make the table more attractive.” For after-dinner demitasse and trips into town, the girls were to add white gloves to the ensemble. Their girlish purity was often on display as they paraded in green beanies, sang hymns on the chapel steps, or donned the gossamer white gowns of “tree maidens” to form a
W
, sing the alma mater, and skip and dance across Severance Green. A helpful “Wellesley lexicon” focused on what its author assumed was the girls’ principal preoccupation: “A ‘caller’ is an eligible male at the Bell Desk. A ‘visitor’ is a father-image caller or a lady. ‘Harvard’ is not strictly part of Wellesley. We share it with the ’Cliffies. The pavilions around Waban Lake are ‘spoonholders,’ because they hold spooners. ‘Gracious living’ is what we all aspire to.”

Girls of good breeding, many of them descended from several generations of Wellesley women, were being cultivated to marry and rear the men who would run America. That they were in fact being groomed for breeding was not always subtly expressed. When Rusty Steele’s mom graduated from Wellesley in 1943, she and her classmates had been told: “You are the cream of the crop. If we want to improve the species, it is your job to go out and reproduce.” By the time Rusty was a freshman in 1965, that message had been muted, but it had hardly disappeared. The annual “marriage lecture”—which offered guidance on such matters as how to converse with your husband’s boss and how long to let the baby cry—was still mandatory. The psychology department offered a curriculum heavy on abnormal child psychology and its roots in maternal failure. Seniors still rolled giant hoops down a hill on May Day in a race to see who would be the first to marry. And, in a strange exercise with links to the eugenics movement, the girls were required to have a posture picture taken soon after they entered school. Wearing only her underwear, with reflective stickers marking her spine, each freshman was put in a
small pitch-black closet and told to stand very still. When the doors flew open, a flash of light captured on film her shivering form, then the doors slammed abruptly shut—presumably to protect her from prying eyes. The pictures were then scrutinized to see how well each young lady’s figure and posture conformed to the ideal, which, according to guidelines put out by the college’s department of hygiene, was characterized by “the buttocks being neither unduly prominent nor having that ‘about to be spanked’ look.” Like similar pictures taken at elite colleges around the country, the pictures were later sought by a man of questionable science intent on determining what physiognomy signified the superior genetic material possessed by these girls. Wellesley, to its credit, was one of the few colleges that refused his request.