Rebels in White Gloves (56 page)

The marriage of the personal and the political has had other good consequences. These women have made enduring alliances. They have found new ways to understand their lives and, from those new stories, the capacity for renewal and change. Most have at least partly sustained their vow to live their political convictions in their personal lives. Some have even tried to make their families into an alliance engaged together in civic life rather than a retreat from the world or a substitute for those larger obligations. If their kids have been heavily dosed with reality, they have also been given the capacity to see through the stories that bind them. Mary Day Kent recalls how her ten-year-old daughter analyzed her fourth grade class: She told her mom that the teacher does not call on girls, how her books are full of boys and have no black people in them, things Mary couldn’t see till she was thirty. Mary also marvels at seeing her daughter, a talented soccer player, discover what it feels like to be a hero in front of the world. “Sometimes I sit in a gym full of people cheering for my daughter and think: What would I have been like if as a girl I’d had a whole crowd counting on me to make the goal? Not just to be a cheerleader but to be the one to plunge in and kick the ball?”

In discussing her hope to keep other sick people company while they die, Nancy Young quotes Meister Eckehart, a thirteenth-century Dominican mystic. “To the extent that all creatures who are gifted with reason go out from themselves in all that they do, to that same extent they go into themselves.” In its largest sense, the dissolution of the boundary between the private and the public is the resolution Nancy describes, the making of binding relations with the widest circle of human beings.

The women of Wellesley’s Class of ’69 are avid readers whose lives and self-understanding have been deeply shaped by books. In trying to make sense of their world, I was greatly helped by reading a number of the books that have had meaning for them, as well as others that helped me understand the history of feminist thought and women’s lives in the last fifty years. Following is a highly selective list of those books I found most helpful or most revealing about these women.

Beauvoir, Simone de.
The Second Sex
(1949). New York: Random House, 1990.

Friedan, Betty.
The Feminine Mystique
. New York: Dell, 1963.

Millett, Kate.
Sexual Politics
. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Woolf, Virginia.
A Room of One’s Own
(1929). San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1991.

_____. Three Guineas
(1938). San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1993.

Conway, Jill Ker.
Written By Herself: Autobiographies of American Women: An Anthology
. New York: Vintage, 1992.

Heilbrun, Carolyn.
Writing a Woman’s Life
. New York: Ballantine, 1988.

Malcolm, Janet.
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Moers, Ellen.
Literary Women
. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1977.

Olsen, Tillie.
Silences
. New York: Dell, 1965.

Wagner-Martin, Linda.
Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography
. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Welty, Eudora.
One Writer’s Beginnings
. New York: Warner Books, 1991.

Bateson, Mary Catherine.
Composing a Life
. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.

Chesler, Phyllis.
Women and Madness
. New York: Doubleday, 1972.

Chodorow, Nancy.
The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Dinnerstein, Dorothy.
The Mermaid and the Minotaur
. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.

Garber, Marjorie.
Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life
. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Gilligan, Carol.
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development
. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Keller, Catherine.
From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self
. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Tannen, Deborah.
Gender and Discourse
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Boston Women’s Health Book Collective.
Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century: A Book by and for Women
. New York: Touchstone, 1998.

Keller, Evelyn Fox, ed.
Reflections on Gender and Science
. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Keller, Evelyn Fox, and Helen E. Longino.
Feminism and Science
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Okin, Susan Moller.
Justice, Gender, and the Family
. New York: Basic Books, 1989.

Showalter, Elaine.
Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture
. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Baruch, Elaine Hoffman.
Women, Love, and Power: Literary and Psychoanalytic Perspectives
. New York: New York University Press, 1991.

Breines, Wini.
Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties
. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

Coontz, Stephanie.
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trip
. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Grant, Linda.
Sexing the Millennium: Women and the Sexual Revolution
. New York: Grove Press, 1994.

Rose, Gillian.
Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life
. New York: Schocken Books, 1996.

Daly, Mary.
Gyn/Ecology
. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.

Dijkstra, Bram.
Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood
. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Lefkowitz, Mary.
Women in Greek Myth
. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Murphy, Cullen.
The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Reeder, Ellen.
Pandora: Women in Classical Greece
. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Sontag, Susan.
Illness as Metaphor
. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

Warner, Marina.
From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994.

_____. Six Myths of Our Time
. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Douglas, Susan.
Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media
. New York: Times Books, 1994.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Dierdre English.
For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women
. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1978.

Eyer, Diane.
Motherguilt: How Our Culture Blames Mothers for What’s Wrong with Society
. New York: Times Books, 1996.

Faludi, Susan.
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
. New York: Doubleday, 1996.

Lasch, Christopher.
Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
. New York: Norton, 1991.

Lord, M. G.
Forever Barbie
. New York: William Morrow, 1994.

Davison, Jane, and Lesley Davison.
To Make a House a Home
. New York: Random House, 1994.

Hollander, Anne.
Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress
. New York: Kodansha Globe, 1994.

Peiss, Kathy.
Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture
. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998.

Yalom, Marilyn.
A History of the Breast
. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Bair, Dierdre.
Anaïs Nin: A Biography
. New York: Viking Penguin, 1996.

Ginzburg, Carlo.
The Cheese and the Worm: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

Holmes, Richard.
Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage
. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Lee, Hermione.
Virginia Woolf: A Biography
. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Rose, Phyllis.
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages
. New York: Random House, 1984.

Anderson, Terry.
The Movement and the Sixties
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Costello, Cynthia, Shari Miles, and Anne Stone, eds.
The American Woman 1999–2000
. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.

Maraniss, David.
First in His Class
. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Palmieri, Patricia Ann.
In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley
. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Agonito, Rosemary, ed.
The History of Ideas on Woman
. Berkeley: Perigee Books, 1977.

Davidson, Cathy, and Linda Wagner-Martin, eds.
Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Pollitt, Katha.
Reasonable Creatures
. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Schneir, Miriam, ed.
Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings
. New York: Vintage, 1994.

_____. Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present
. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Tierney, Helen, ed.
Women’s Studies Encyclopedia
. New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1991.

Craig, Patricia, ed.
Oxford Book of Modern Women’s Stories
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Chopin, Kate.
The Awakening
. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Jewett, Sarah Orne.
The Country of the Pointed Firs
. New York: Modern Library, 1995.

McCarthy, Mary.
The Group
. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1991.

O’Connor, Flannery.
Everything That Rises Must Converge
. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965.

Plath, Sylvia.
The Bell Jar
. New York: Bantam, 1983.

Wasserstein, Wendy.
Unconventional Women and Others
. New York: Dramatists Play, 1978.

DIVIDED LIVES
by Elsa Walsh

Despite the large number of books devoted to women’s issues in the last twenty years,
Washington Post
reporter Elsa Walsh felt that the literature was missing a crucial element—the voices of women themselves. Setting out to probe the myriad layers of women’s lives and to illuminate the interior struggles women face at work and at home, Walsh spent over two years interviewing three highly successful women—
60 Minutes
correspondent Meredith Vieira, conductor and first lady of West Virginia Rachel Worby, and Dr. Alison Estabrook, chief of breast surgery at the country’s second largest hospital—about their lives.

Women’s Studies/0-385-48447-X

THE HIDDEN WRITER
by Alexandra Johnson

No other document quite compares with the intimacies and yearnings, the confessions and desires, revealed in the pages of a diary. Presenting seven portraits of literary and creative lives, Alexandra Johnson illuminates the secret world of writers and their diaries, and shows how over generations these writers have used the diary to solve a common set of creative and life questions.

Women’s Studies/Literary Criticism/0-385-47830-5

MINDING THE BODY
by Patricia Foster

A multicultural anthology of fiction and nonfiction literary narratives which addresses the psychological and political aspects of a woman’s body in today’s culture. An important and much-needed book for women who seek to understand their bodies and find independent, imaginative ways to cope with aging, beauty expectations, and ethnic comparisons.

Women’s Studies/0-385-47167-X

WILD WOMEN DON’T WEAR NO BLUES
by Marita Golden

Bringing together fourteen African American women, Marita Golden has compiled saucy and spicy essays that serve as an exploration into the contemporary black female psyche. Ranging in style from Audre Lorde’s classic polemic on eroticism to Miriam DeCosta Willis’s deeply moving essay on her husband’s last years, “every single one of these essays is terrific.” (
The Washington Post
)

Women’s Studies/African American Studies/0-385-42401-9

WHOREDOM IN KIMMAGE
The Private Lives of Irish Women
by Rosemary Mahoney

Before the phenomena of Frank McCourt’s
Angela’s Ashes
and Thomas Cahill’s
How the Irish Saved Civilization
, Rosemary Mahoney traveled to Ireland in response to the growing feeling that changes were taking place, and that those changes directly involved women. Written with the art of a skilled fiction writer whose ear for Irish bluster is pitch-perfect,
Whoredom in Kimmage
tells the tale of contemporary Irish women through a series of brilliantly animated scenes.

Women’s Studies/0-385-47450-4

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