Rebels in White Gloves (6 page)

Several of their battles with Wellesley authorities centered on fashion. In 1968, the girls won permission to wear slacks to cafeteria meals, as long as they were wool, and overturned the requirement that long hair be wound in a bun for graduation. An official history of the college written that year recognized a genuine protest. “A generation brought up by TV … became distrustful of words and images. Students appeared in the dean’s office with bare feet, cutoff jeans and an old shirt tied around the midriff.… This seeming lack of respect was in reality an inchoate attempt to express the very sincere belief that appearance did not matter and that what was important was the inner man.”

For the five black women in the class, hair was loaded with yet another layer of political meaning. Fran Rusan and Nancy Gist both adopted Afros. “A lot of black women decided there was no longer a need to have the long, flowing locks that were the cultural ideal until 1968,” says Nancy. “I had a long flip, but I cut my hair and stopped straightening it. Only, I forgot to tell my mother. When I got home to Chicago for the summer, she almost died. I had not been at all politicized when I left for school, at sixteen. My parents had bought me a
first-class airplane ticket. They were so proud I was going off to Wellesley. It seemed to validate all their expectations of my success, so it mortified them to see me return with a headful of kinky Angela Davis hair. Symbolically, my mother was losing control of me. She is fair-skinned and has pretty straight hair. The whole straightening biz was to suggest that I’d inherited that. I said, ‘Ma, I got kinky hair and I like it.’ I understood that I could put aside all that was involved in the pretense of straight hair, that I could reject that other standard. But even twenty-six years later, when I told my mother that [Attorney General] Janet Reno had asked to meet with me [regarding a job as director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, for which Nancy was later confirmed], the first thing she said is, ‘I hope you’ll do something nice with your hair.’ ”

Men, of course, also rebelled in the sixties against what Eldridge Cleaver called “their old crew-cut elders who don’t dig their caveman mops.” If in the fifties hair had to stay in its place, in the sixties its uncut unruliness would symbolize freedom. But for women such a rebellion was both more precedented and more charged: A woman’s appearance has always been her most vital currency in the world and fraught with social meaning.

Women’s rebellions against the constraints of fashion are also more likely to boomerang and do them harm. To invest questions of manners and dress with too much attention, even rebellious attention, can drain a woman’s energy and keep her trapped in self-consciousness; in Simone de Beauvoir’s words, such a preoccupation “rivets her to the ground and to herself.” It is the danger ever present in a politics focused too concertedly on the personal—of self-trivialization, the neglect of larger questions, the squandering of whole books on whether lipstick is feminist.

A preoccupation with fashion also makes women easy targets for mockery, providing more evidence, as historian Anne Hollander has written, of a “distinctively female superficiality and moral weakness.” The 1963
New York Review of Books
parody of
The Group
made just that point: “squinty, pink-cheeked Maisie,” having just been deflowered on a tacky flowered couch (“Mother would have minded the couch somehow more than the event”), puts on her “Lord and Taylor bias-cut cocktail dress (all the rage this year, just as Hitler was threatening to reoccupy the Rhineland) and slips out.”

Whatever social rebellion women might have thought they were engaged
in, politics would wind up a mere footnote to fashion, attention to their clothes and looks eclipsing all else. Coverage of the early women’s movement inevitably lingered over Gloria Steinem’s “long blond-streaked hair falling just so above each breast” or wrote off Kate Millett as an ugly woman who hated men because they never asked her out. “Poor Betty,”
The New York Times Magazine
said of Friedan in 1970. She would “happily have traded 30 points on the IQ scale for a modicum of good looks.”

The Wellesley rebels fared little better. In a
Boston Herald
story on a rally led by Hillary Rodham protesting course distribution requirements, the reporter linked female disobedience with that other great threat to the American way, ignoring the substance of their complaint and noting only that “they looked like the Bolshevik women’s auxiliary, in their fur caps and high boots, conspiring.” When the young women joined a national student hunger strike in 1967 to protest the war in Vietnam, young men calling themselves “frequenters of the campus” wrote a letter to the college newspaper lauding their initiative. “We like you nubile; we like you fresh. A bit of fasting tones the flesh.”

“Protest boxy suits,” urged ads in the
Wellesley News
for Nehru jackets and paper dresses adorned with peace signs, appropriating the groovy new language of dissent in a tactic that would soon be standard on Madison Avenue. “Protest big ugly shoes!”

In 1968, the
Wellesley News
vented the students’ frustration at such frivolous treatment, lambasting
The New York Times
for its regular items on the “clinging Ivy” League, which perpetuated “the revoltingly cute and socially serene image society editors have long assigned to us, all blondes and bustlines, dates and debs.”

These women were, in fact, behind the times. The fight for “student power” had begun much earlier on most campuses, inspired by the 1963 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley; while many of their peers had moved on to planting bombs and barricading buildings, Hillary and her classmates were requesting, nicely, that the college eliminate parietals. The young ladies overturned a rule restricting male guests in dorms to Sunday afternoons only, with the door kept open, as well as an 11
P.M
. curfew, a prohibition against cars, and an official admonition to married seniors not to reveal to the younger students any “secrets of married life.”

Again, such victories were easily mocked. In March 1968, four Princeton boys wrote the
Wellesley News
regarding the “recent history of growing student disobedience and immorality at Wellesley as evidenced by radical changes in parietals and dress … oh Wellesley, no longer may America look upon you as an impregnable bastion against drugs, booze, atheism, crime in the streets and pinko Communist libs. Go, we say, abolish your Bible requirements, lock yourselves in your bedrooms with strangers, dress like slovenly hoodlums instead of young ladies of breeding. We will never suffer our daughters to enter your sin-filled portals.”

Easy targets though they were, the battles fought by the class of ’69 were perhaps not so trivial: The demand for cars on campus seems somewhat less so when one considers how many of these girls’ mothers were literally imprisoned in their suburban homes each day when their husbands took the family’s only car to work, and how enamored the culture then was of the freedom promised by the open road—and the backseat. Nor was it frivolous for these women to seek the same personal freedoms that had always been allowed college men: Even in the 1990s, campus rules serve symbolically for the fundamental question of whether a woman can take responsibility for herself, alone with a man, without a chaperone. “We were determined to be treated not as girls but as adults,” says Nancy Gist. The radical freedom for which they ultimately fought was to control their own sexual behavior at a time of immense upheaval in social mores.

As with marriage, the messages about sex were, in those years, profoundly mixed. These women had grown up well aware that an American tragedy awaited the girl who went all the way. Women who had sex before marriage, like Dorothy Devine, were damaged, used up, even criminally delinquent. “There were good girls and bad girls, and bad girls did things good girls wouldn’t,” Ann Sherwood Sentilles, ’69, recalls. “You didn’t smoke or drink or go beyond petting. My father, who was a surgeon in Geneva, Ohio, would come home every so often and say, ‘Another one of your friends is in trouble. I don’t want to be embarrassed by that. Don’t do anything that would bring shame on the family.’ We all knew what happened if you got pregnant. You were
disappeared—sent away to a home for wayward girls to have the baby under cover of night and give it up for adoption. That sort of thing didn’t happen to a Wellesley girl. We were good girls. That’s how we got there in the first place.”

And yet. Something changed between freshman year, when Ann Landsberg, ’69, was “shocked” to find birth control pills in a senior’s room, and junior year, when she lamented that she was one of the last virgins on campus. The senior yearbook, designed by Alison “Snowy” Campbell, ’69, flaunted the girls’ new sexually knowing ways. Making a lewd pun on ’69 in what she looks back on as “the naughtiest thing I ever did in my life,” the angel-faced, willowy girl with soft brown eyes and white-blond hair put an acid-pink and green Mae West—in the psychedelic Art Nouveau style common to rock posters—right side up on the front cover, upside down on the back. (One of the many cheers for this class includes the line: “upside down, right side up, one-nine-six-nine Wellesley,” though that was before oral-sex jokes became a source of public torment for Hillary.) A picture meant for the yearbook frontispiece was pulled at the last moment by the college administration: It featured the bare-assed figures of Snowy and Eldie and two other girls standing atop their dorm roof surveying the lush landscape. With a self-importance typical of their generation, they left the frontispiece blank but for a small, somber note about censorship by official powers. Yet for all their bravado, an innocence lingered at the marriage lecture in their senior year, which, against the wishes of the dean, addressed the subject of sex both inside and outside of marriage. The invited speaker, Carola Eisenberg of MIT’s department of psychiatry, advised the girls that “if intercourse does occur, it is usually at first disappointing, often horrifying.” The many young women in the audience who wanted to know what an orgasm was were chastised. “This is a medical question and will not be answered here. Go to the infirmary.”

Like everything else, the sexual revolution reached Wellesley on a kind of time delay; elsewhere it had been gaining momentum since the end of World War II. A culture in the thrall of Freud anointed sexual fulfillment the best yardstick for measuring psychic well-being. Talking about sex became an acceptable, even necessary, proof of modern thinking: The Kinsey studies, first published in 1948, became runaway bestsellers with their accounts (however reliable) of rampant sexual
experimentation in mainstream America. In 1953, the year the new
Playboy
magazine offered advice to men on how to outsmart “Miss Gold Digger” and get sex without getting trapped, half of American women said they were having premarital sex; from 1940 to 1961, the number of illegitimate births to mothers under twenty-five increased by 300 percent. “It seems that all America is one big orgone box,” proclaimed a
Time
magazine cover story in January 1964, referring to the libido-enhancing machine conceived by Freud disciple Wilhelm Reich. “Day and night from screens and stages, advertising posters and newspaper pages it flashes larger-than-life-sized images of sex … with the message that sex will save you and libido make you free.” Everything from “incest to inversion” could be found in novels like
Tropic of Cancer, Peyton Place
, and
Valley of the Dolls
, complained
Newsweek
. In Hollywood, taboos were crumbling, which in 1967 the head of the film production code deemed “the most healthy thing.” Anaïs Nin offered her recipe for happiness: “Mix well the sperm of four men in one day.” Even the leader of the National Council of Churches joined in, urging couples to “conjure up various positions” for their mutual pleasure. And no longer was carnal knowledge the exclusive province of girls of the lower classes. A psychologist at Radcliffe estimated that in the fifteen years after 1950, the proportion of girls having intercourse in college had risen from 25 to 40 percent. Where a generation earlier college boys had of necessity strayed off campus, “today they’re looked down on if they can’t succeed with a coed.”

Though the sexual revolution is now remembered as a legacy of the sixties, it was not the younger generation that had launched this “orgy of open-mindedness,” in
Time
’s view, but their elders, “who embrace the Freudian belief that repression, not license, is the great evil … and Ernest Hemingway’s manifesto that ‘what is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.’ ” Cynthia Gilbert, ’69, recalls an unsettling trip to the psychiatrist to deal with crippling bouts of depression during her sophomore year at Wellesley. “I’d just gotten engaged; our family had never been quite the
Father Knows Best
scenario, and I wanted the ‘real family’ that I hadn’t had. The psychiatrist felt my childhood had been totally repressed and that I should be sleeping with my fiancé. I told her that in my family you simply didn’t have sex, and she said, ‘Why not?’ I told her a story my mother had told
me of going to a back alley with her best friends for an abortion in the thirties. She told me I could always go to Mexico if I had to. That psychiatrist’s ‘Why not?’ scenario turned my already upside-down world totally inside out. Maybe a more gradual change would have been more helpful. My father was authoritarian; when I took that psychiatrist’s advice and threw it all over, it was like adding fat to the fire.”

Even at home, youngsters were pushed toward adult behavior too soon,
Time
warned in that same 1964 story, “by ambitious mothers who want them to be popular; with padded brassieres for twelve-year-olds and pressure to go steady at an ever younger age.” Nancy Wanderer had balked in junior high at her mother’s insistence that she wear heels and a girdle and makeup; she fought in vain against her mother’s demand that she perm her hair. “She thought I should be more interested in dating, and though I didn’t want to date, I did want to please her. So in eighth grade I had a torrid romance with a guy at my brother’s school, who was three years older than me. He initiated me sexually, though I was so inexperienced, I didn’t even realize it. My mother had never told me what not to do.”