Rebels in White Gloves (7 page)

With her parents’ blessing, Nancy and her beau talked about marriage and opened a joint bank account, a serious form of playing house in a decade when one out of every two girls was a teenage bride. But the sex had unnerved Nancy. “I quickly wised up that getting pregnant at thirteen was not the way to a great life. I broke it off, and after that I stayed in control. I just wouldn’t have intercourse. At Wellesley I went out with this guy from MIT, a jazz pianist who was completely full of himself and was always telling me I should trade in my skirts and turtlenecks for something slinkier. Another guy, from Harvard, broke up with me ’cause I wouldn’t have sex with him, then called me later to boast that he was sleeping with a girl at a local trade school. I lost so much valuable time at Wellesley with all my involvement with men. On weekends, the men’s schools would send scouts to campus to pick up as many girls as they could fit in their cars to bring us to parties. It was like going for provisions. I was sick of all the smoothness, sick of the pressure not to be myself, worn-out by the struggle of: Will I have sex? Will I get birth control? I decided the important thing was to settle who would be the best husband. I wanted to get marriage over with, and put to rest all those questions about sex.”

If the culture of the late sixties sent these women contradictory messages about marriage and sex, their alternatives—for financial self-sufficiency, professional achievement, worldly adventure—were no clearer. Again, Wellesley offered muddled guidance. The only one of the Seven Sisters to have always had a woman president and a charter mandating female faculty, Wellesley offered in its deans and scholars the first model that many of these girls had encountered of women committed to an intellectual and public life. For all its lingering scent of a finishing school, the college maintained rigorous academic standards and afforded an opportunity for its students to exert leadership without competition from men. Wellesley also had a remarkable history of educating “useful” women. In 1892, the college had graduated twelve doctors and twenty missionaries; by the turn of the century, it was sending substantial numbers of women into social work. Many became heads of settlement houses and trade unions or suffragists. Carolyn Wilson, ’10, covered the First World War for the
Chicago Tribune
. Marguerite Stitt Church, ’14, went to Congress from Illinois. Madame Chiang Kai-shek, ’17, served as liaison between Nationalist China and the U.S.: In 1943, she went before Congress to plead for help in her nation’s war against Japan, and, ever the Wellesley girl, described the lawmakers as “clodhopping, boorish and uncivilized.” Patricia Lockridge Bull, ’37, landed with the marines at Iwo Jima and was the first woman correspondent to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp. Jocelyn Gill, ’38, was chief of in-flight science at NASA; Selma Gottlieb, ’41, designed helicopters. Madeleine Albright, ’59, would become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the first woman secretary of state. Cokie Roberts, ’64, and Diane Sawyer, ’67, would have spectacular journalistic careers. A 1962 survey of all alumnae found that more than four fifths had been employed, the vast majority in teaching. Though 62 percent had stopped work at marriage, 18 percent had worked for twenty years or more.

Still, “old maid” professors offered a warning as much as a model to the class of ’69. And in a cultural climate so inhospitable to the education of young women for anything but future domestic roles, Wellesley joined other women’s colleges in actively discouraging professional ambition in its charges. Though the deans consistently assured the girls that
they were the cream of the cream, America’s smartest young ladies, in the marriage lecture during their freshman year, the dean of the college advocated that the girls pursue work only as volunteers, to avoid competition—professional or financial—between husband and wife. During a debate over going coed, the director of admissions, Miss Clough, defended their single-sex education on the grounds that it prepared them for a “post-college life in community affairs with mostly women.” An editorial in the college newspaper found “it probable that most Wellesley girls see professional careers, not marriage responsibilities, as the diversion” from their true and ultimate path in life. Jacqueline Kennedy was held out as the ideal: A “certifiable egghead,” multilingual, a painter and art lover, educated at Vassar and the Sorbonne, she had been above all else exquisitely gracious and ornamental at her husband’s side. “Those of us who graduated from Wellesley in the sixties weren’t ever meant to have futures … or opinions,” recalled writer and director Nora Ephron, ’62, “we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect.” Even the campus architecture underscored the message, as classics professor Mary Lefkowitz has noted. The Wellesley library doors are ornamented with two figures: Wisdom is a man; his female companion is Charity, comforting a child.

In the late sixties, the college newspaper was full of advertisements for engagement rings, padded bras, and pantie girdles, for a new computer dating service at MIT and Princeton tryouts for go-go girls for the Yale game. “Taking your M.R.S.?” asked a regular ad. “Do your cramming with
Modern Bride.”
Recruitment notices were limited to those for Katherine Gibbs secretarial school (“the best way to get started in any field”); Braniff flight hostesses (“wear world-famous Pucci fashions as you fly in the most fascinating career of women today. You must be under 27, single and weigh less than 135 pounds”); and the CIA.

Outside of Wellesley, there was little more encouragement. Nearly half the women in America were working in 1965, but three quarters of them held clerical, sales, or household jobs. A report that year by the President’s Commission on the Status of Women detailed widespread wage discrimination and a rapidly declining ratio of women in professional and executive jobs. Though in 1966 NOW condemned the custom that men carry the sole burden of supporting a family—“for a girl as for a boy, education can only be serious when there is an expectation that it
will be used in society”—and launched lawsuits against employment discrimination, not until 1973 would the Supreme Court bar help-wanted ads listed by sex. In sum, the working world offered little but frustration to the college girl. As Radcliffe graduate Julie Hayden wrote in a 1965
Atlantic Monthly
essay that was excerpted in the
Wellesley News:
“We wind up the Kafka readers in the typists’ pool, the seekers after truth making coffee.”

The “experts” were just as discouraging about work as they had been about education, diagnosing a woman with career aspirations as neurotic and unfeminine and a danger to society. The panel of male doctors gathered by
Life
magazine warned that “the disease of working women leads to children who become juvenile delinquents, atheists, Communists, and homosexuals. Daddy understands business. Mommy understands children.” Even anthropologist Margaret Mead, who inspired numerous feminists with her argument that “personality traits we call masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to gender as are the clothing, manners and form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex,” also argued that a girl’s flickering ambition toward “compensatory achievement” dies down with the certainty of maternity. “It is of doubtful value to enlist the gifts of women if bringing them into fields defined as male frightens the men, and unsexes the women.”

The popular culture offered few depictions of women at work, except for those unfortunates who had so far failed to snare a man. The secretary setting a trap for the promising young executive was a stock character of the time, in films like
The Apartment
and stories like John Cheever’s “The Five Forty-Eight.” The “organization bimbo,”
Newsweek
called her. “Miss B.A., who has failed to catch a husband, is in New York seeking men,” reported
Look
magazine in 1966. “She will be asked just one thing. ‘How’s your steno, dear?’ Nimble fingers are of more interest than her nimble mind.” Burdened with aspirations stirred up by college, she’ll likely find herself “beaten out for jobs by docile high school grads, who win secretarial desks because college women grow restless too soon.” The lucky ones will “end up typing letters, watering the boss’s rubber plant and earning $65 a week.” But never mind, the editors consoled, defying the conventional wisdom that a girl educated herself out of the marriage market. “The college girl holds one advantage. While the
Katie Gibbs grad lands the higher pay, it’s the B.A. who succeeds with the college man.”

Even women who had committed to serious work voiced ambivalence at the price. In her essay “Silences,” published in
Harper’s Magazine
in 1965, Tillie Olsen demonstrated how nearly impossible it was for a woman to do creative work and also be a mother and wife: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf—all had remained childless throughout their lives. Sylvia Plath wrote of her fears that a woman dedicated to creative work would “sacrifice all claims to femininity and family.” Anaïs Nin worried that she would shrivel a man were she to “steal his thunder [and] outshine him.”

At home, for many of these women, the message was much the same. Mary Day Kent’s mother had dropped out of Wellesley at the end of her junior year, in 1945, to get married, and she made it clear to her daughter that the aim of college was not to prepare herself for work but “to be a more interesting person to meet a more interesting husband.” Marilyn Hagstrum’s mom urged her daughter to focus less on her grades and more on her bridge: She, too, was at Wellesley “to fit in socially, to meet somebody nice with good prospects and get married.”

The Wellesley girls took such admonitions to heart. The majority of seniors in the class of ’69, like most women in college that year, expected to work only until they married or had their first child. Few graduated with professional goals and plans. Most still believed it best for men to be breadwinners and women to be wives.

Inevitably entangled with the question of work were matters of money and social class, issues as complicated in the sixties as all the questions regarding women’s proper role. Only a fraction of this Wellesley class anticipated that they might actually
need
to make money: the quarter who were on financial aid knew that they would need to support themselves if they failed to marry well, and even a middle-class girl like Rhea Kemble, ’69, was advised by her father that since a woman who was smart might not be a social success, she should prepare herself at Wellesley for “self-supporting spinsterhood.”

For most, however, money had never been a concern in their lives.
Though by the late sixties Wellesley had shed some of what Nora Ephron, ’62, called its “hangovers” from an earlier era, “when it was totally a school for the rich as opposed to now when it is only partially so,” of the 470 freshmen who entered the class of 1969, a fifth were legacies—daughters or granddaughters of alumnae, beneficiaries of the most enduring form of affirmative action in higher education—and 40 percent were from private schools. Most of those were eager to take their certain place as matrons of society, passed from rich daddy to rich husband.

But the late sixties were also a time of strong antimaterialist sentiments, with personal wealth viewed by many as politically suspect: Fortunes were too often made through exploitation, leftist critics argued, and were in any event obscene in a world where so many were poor. Many in the class would renounce their inherited or anticipated privilege and join in their peers’ denunciation of the hollow pursuit of the dollar. “Money was what the military-industrial complex was about,” recalls Susan Alexander, ’69. “We were interested in higher things.” For some, that repudiation would be temporary: Susan would become a Presbyterian minister in her twenties, and then, a decade later, a Wall Street trader. For others, their moral doubt about being members of the ruling class would have lifelong consequences.

Alison “Snowy” Campbell had grown up in Oyster Bay, Long Island, with Rockefellers and Bouviers, but had little desire to return there and would eventually turn her back on that world for good. “I had ideas besides marrying some promising trust lawyer and going to cocktail parties. That’s probably a stupidly egocentric thing to say. I just knew that I was definitely not attracted to people living off their ancestors’ earnings, playing golf, clipping their stock coupons, and drinking like fish.” Having gone to Wellesley against the wishes of her grandmother, who would have preferred to see her among the older, more traditional money at Vassar or Smith, Snowy was thrilled to find what seemed to her “a melting pot” after her years at the excruciatingly elite Miss Porter’s School: One of her Wellesley dormmates grew pot in their dorm; another married a black man and was disowned by her parents. An incandescently beautiful girl (classmate Catherine Shen remembers her as “a vision, a Caucasian vision”), with no trace of the brittle sophistication and hard sexiness that often hung about the boarding-school girls, Snowy was relieved
to “quit the competition on looks and makeup and clothes.” After a brief romance with a Green Beret, she began spending her time with a band of hippie poets and computer pioneers at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, gingerly breaking propriety’s rules. “They were taking acid trips by the dozens. I experimented a little to be polite, but I was too sensitive. Drugs made me feel yucky. And though I was glad that ‘free love’ took the fallen-woman onus off a girl enjoying her body, I was uncomfortable that my boyfriend wanted to have an open relationship. I was loyal and old-fashioned and monogamous. He was a poet, and kept trying to persuade me that I was hung up. He would say I was laying my trips on him.”

Less timid was Lorna Rinear, ’69, who, a decade after the publication of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, chose the surest means to escape the constraints of her class. Raised by a nurse and nanny on Manhattan’s exclusive Sutton Place, dressed at her mother’s insistence like a doll with long, golden Shirley Temple ringlets, Lorna was forbidden in high school to venture into the streets except with the family chauffeur, who took her each morning to the Spence School. “While my brother had complete freedom, I made exactly one decision in my life—and that was whether I was going to have braces. My parents knew where I was every minute of the day. It was a typical WASP family. No one talked about anything: I didn’t know that my mother was my father’s fourth wife until I got involved in genealogy at Wellesley and discovered half-sisters I’d never known existed. And no one ever touched. When my mother died years later, my uncle gave me a tap on the shoulder to express his sympathy.”