Rebels in White Gloves (8 page)

Though a few of her Spence classmates had working moms—modeling tycoon Eileen Ford, actress Kitty Hart—Lorna could not imagine a life “except the kind my mother had, supported by an incredibly rich man. Though it always struck me as bizarre that you would put that kind of money into private school for your daughter so she could be accomplished, but at nothing in particular. I was a reflection of them, part of the furniture. Here is my perfect house, my perfect wife, my perfect child.”

The surest escape for such a princess was into the rough arms of the wrong man. Most in the class fled from their safe, respectable destinies only in their fantasies—falling for Elvis or James Dean, dangerous boys from the wrong side of the tracks. Lorna arrived at Wellesley, “and the
second I was sprung, I went wild. I hitchhiked to Rolling Stones and James Brown concerts. And I discovered that the sexual revolution was just my cup of tea. There were many overnights not recorded by Mrs. Jones of Cazenove Hall. I was into roulette, making up for my previous seventeen years of abstinence.”

After so sheltered an upbringing, however, Lorna was poorly equipped to handle such freedom. “I was not very wise about people, and about men in particular. Going to girls’ schools my whole life had left me somewhat naive. I ended up getting pregnant sophomore year. He was twenty-seven, in the middle of a divorce, and broke—his wife had split with their kid and all the furniture. He was at Wellesley working as the stableman.”

Six years before
Roe
v.
Wade
, Massachusetts state laws on sexual behavior, birth control, and abortion were the most conservative in the nation. An unmarried woman could not spend the night in a man’s room “even if he was her uncle.” Though the pill had come on the market in 1960 and 6 million American women were by then using it, the pope’s encyclical
Humanae Vitae
in 1968 explicitly prohibited the use of contraceptives. In predominantly Catholic Massachusetts, contraceptives could be distributed only by physicians and only to married women; anyone prescribing birth control to an unmarried woman under twenty-one could be prosecuted for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Abortion, except to save the life of a woman, was a felony punishable by life imprisonment. Even a doctor who gave a gynecological exam to a girl under eighteen could be prosecuted for statutory rape. So while pamphlets circulated on campus quoting Masters and Johnson on “the myth of the vaginal orgasm” and urging coeds to learn to masturbate, others warned girls not to try to abort themselves by inserting objects in the vagina, falling down stairs, swallowing quinine or lead, or douching with gasoline, vinegar, potassium permanganate, or kerosene.

Still, a third of the women in the class have had abortions, many of them before
Roe
v.
Wade
. They would pass secret knowledge from dorm to dorm, of gas stations in New Jersey where five hundred dollars—cash—would buy them an operation. In a motel room. Without anesthesia.

A girl from Sutton Place had better alternatives. “I felt trapped and not strong enough to make any decision on my own, so I told my parents.
They wanted to know who it was. I lied.” Lorna’s father made all the arrangements. “In New York, if you’re rich, you can find people. My father was a very pragmatic man. He also had his own checkered sexual history, though I didn’t know that at the time. Being of the generation where they never admitted mistakes, my parents didn’t say, ‘We know how it can be.’ They did what they had to do to spare themselves embarrassment, then punished me with their scorn. Looking back, I’m struck by the incredible hypocrisy of their disdain.”

At spring break, Lorna’s father took her to Puerto Rico. They drove to a small pink adobe building, where she was led upstairs to a spare, clean room. “I didn’t see anyone else; we were all kept separate and concealed. A male doctor and two nurses put me on a table and, with a shot, induced labor. I was awake for hours through incredibly painful contractions. I remember throwing up from the pain. Afterwards, I didn’t think about it much. I couldn’t afford to. It was just something that had to be done. All my parents said to me was, ‘We were going to send you to Europe for graduation. Too bad we spent that money on your abortion.’ ”

Lorna didn’t tell anyone at Wellesley where she’d been or what she’d done. And though she continued to visit Neil at the stables, she wouldn’t have sex with him again. The next January, however, she succumbed. Four weeks later, when she went to get birth control pills, she learned she was pregnant. “This time I didn’t tell my parents, not till it was too late, in June. I did call somebody in a Boston back alley, but it sounded so iffy and weird that I chickened out.

“I began to think I should just have the baby. This was spring of my junior year, but I had no goals and couldn’t imagine what my degree would do for me. I’d wanted to be a vet, but then decided that was out of reach after a discouraging conversation with the dean. My father would say every summer, ‘Why don’t you take typing so you can always be a secretary?’ I didn’t want to be a secretary, or a teacher. Both seemed like being a wife and mother, with none of the perks. I was undirected. Neil wanted to marry me. I thought it’d be neat to have a baby. I had no other plans.”

Jamey was born September 20 of what would have been Lorna’s senior year. “I don’t know why my parents didn’t say, ‘You will finish college.’ I needed less than a year.” Instead, Lorna dropped out of school and got married. She wore a white and yellow dress she’d bought at
Filene’s Basement and carried yellow roses. About ten people from the Wellesley stables came; they chipped in to buy her an A-line wool coat as a wedding present. A forty-year-old nurse from the Wellesley infirmary was her matron of honor. Jamey was with the baby-sitter, so they all went out to dinner afterwards.

“When Neil and I presented my parents with a fait accompli, they were horrified. My mom just told me not to come home, and hung up the phone.”

For a while the couple lived in upstate New York, where Lorna stayed home with Jamey. But after a falling-out between her husband and his genteel bosses, they had to move, as they would have to move many more times. They landed finally in Kentucky, where Lorna went to work at a racehorse farm, leaving Jamey with a girl who had no schooling beyond the fourth grade. Lorna worked mucking out stalls and taking care of mares and foals, earning ten dollars extra a week because she could read and write.

If many of the rich girls found Wellesley unpleasantly familiar, those students who were not wealthy, Protestant, and white—or those with working moms or families that otherwise departed from the norm—often felt like utter misfits at the school. The cultivation of “traditional” feminine graces and aspirations, they discovered, was not the only way in which Wellesley worked to preserve the postwar social order; the college also persisted far longer than most in a 1950s conception of class, religion, and race.

For most of the poor girls, the years at Wellesley were an exercise in humiliation. The college had only recently discontinued the practice of having scholarship girls wait on their social betters. “In the first week of school, they gave us a trash can and red rain boots,” recalls Kathy Smith Ruckman, ’69, “a gesture of charity that I found insulting. And we were continually reminded that the administration looked on us as lower-class and thought we should be endlessly grateful for all they’d done.”

Nancy Young, ’69, the daughter of an auto mechanic from the shabbiest corner of Boston’s north shore, “really, really, hated” Wellesley. “There is almost no way to describe how bad it was for me. It was the
worst four years of my life. I was unprepared for how isolated and inadequate I would feel. And angry. It’s all very well to bring in people like me and give us scholarships and say, Aren’t we doing wonderful things—but not if you don’t give us the tools to catch up. My classmates were refined and cosmopolitan; they’d been to Florence and had season tickets to the symphony. I’d never been anywhere in my life. I was just a local girl with none of the clothes and polish. My freshman roommate, who’d lived all over the world, was mortified to be rooming with the likes of me. She would constantly correct my pronunciation. I dumped her midyear, she was so scornful of me. But I couldn’t escape it. I remember a discussion with my best friend—who was all hung up on her coat of arms and her family’s descent from Charlemagne—and a bunch of other girls at dinner about whether you should ask your maid to wash out your underwear or was that too intimate and should you wash it yourself. I said, ‘Don’t you understand that there are people at this table who do not have personal maids?’ I thought there should have been understanding that for the great bulk of humanity this is not an issue. Wellesley was a bastion of privilege without people understanding that they were privileged, that there was another world out there. I felt immense anger at being thrust into their value system; I always felt I had to represent the oppressed classes.”

Nancy’s father had not wanted her to go to Wellesley. “It was my idea, and anything that was my idea he wanted to squelch just for the sake of it.” He had ignored her achievements in high school, paying attention just long enough to criticize her “unfeminine” aggressive style. When she won debate competitions and made valedictorian, he told her she was “mouthy.” Asked to contribute a paragraph to her college application, he wrote one sentence: “Nancy is impatient, impulsive, and inconsiderate.” “It stayed with me forever,” says Nancy, “that he would say such a damning thing.” At Sophomore Father’s Day, Nancy got a glimpse of the reasons for her father’s scorn. Mr. Young turned to Nancy and said, “You know, these [other] men all went to college.” It was clear, says Nancy, “that he was terribly embarrassed, mortified.” Still, when Nancy grew desperate to leave Wellesley, her father would not let her go. “He said, ‘I will never see you again. I will give you no support.’ He had no expectations of me, but wanted to make sure I would not be a financial burden. I think he thought that at Wellesley I
had the best chance of marrying someone successful and being well fixed. He finally told me he’d give me a thousand dollars if I’d stay and finish senior year. I took the deal.”

Eager to get away from Wellesley, Nancy “split” from campus as often as she could. She began acting in Boston with professional theater groups, rehearsing every night—a kind of revenge on her father, who had hated his actress mother for her neglect of him and what he imagined to be her “promiscuity.” Nancy was also the first unmarried girl permitted to live off campus on her own, though she had to produce a psychiatrist’s report to win that freedom. “I wanted to be in the city, not in this stupid suburb with all these stiffs in the Villager look, these Johnny Appleseed prim, flowered blouses. Everywhere else everyone was getting groovy. At Wellesley, they were playing bridge all afternoon. Except for the fact that they had more money, these women were like my mother, without curiosity about the world. What am I saying? Hillary was in that class. But even then I thought she was way too mainstream, talking the language of the administration, co-opted, all about politics and visibility. I thought, Why are you talking to these people? We should do everyone a favor, burn this college down.

“I tried to find other women who I could be friends with, but the only thing I ever had in common with any of them was that we were on the fringes. I was a working-class Catholic; they were overweight or unattractive or Jewish. That set us outside the in crowd. The tone of my life was set by that time. I felt alienated, and that feeling has stayed with me ever since.”

As archaic on matters of religion as it was on class, in the late sixties Wellesley housed Jews in dorm rooms with Jews and Catholics with Catholics, offering the rationale that such an arrangement would make it easier for the girls to go together to synagogue or mass. In 1967, the
Amherst Guide
reported that Wellesley maintained a Jewish quota of 12 percent. Such a policy was by then sufficiently unacceptable that Hillary’s mentor, Professor Alan Schechter, was called upon to make a public denial. Yet the following year Wellesley was still struggling with its “Jewish problem.” Worried about persistent public perceptions that Wellesley was a “Jewish school,” chairman of the board John Quarles publicly affirmed that “Wellesley was founded for the glory of God and service of the Lord Jesus Christ” and that “with a view to maintaining
the Christian purpose of this college … the faculty, administration and trustees should be predominantly Christian.” The statement outraged students and alumnae; under pressure from both, the college finally altered its stance. By Nancy Young’s senior year, Bible class was eliminated as a requirement. Religion professors no longer had to be Protestant. Quarles announced that a Catholic was joining the faculty, and promised to add a Hindu and a Jew.

The question of race proved less susceptible to appeasement. During the four years these women were at Wellesley, the civil rights movement radicalized: Roxbury erupted in riots, one of fifty-eight urban ghettos to do so: Eldridge Cleaver issued his violent manifesto
Soul on Ice;
assassins murdered Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. The fight on campus for racial equality served as the first political education for many of the women of Wellesley ’69, with the five black class members exerting an influence on their white classmates out of all proportion to their numbers. Though all of the black women came from middle-class families, their personal histories were otherwise different enough from the white students’ to have developed in them a much bolder female voice. All had educated, working mothers, reflecting the norm: Black women have been better educated than black men since the Civil War, and in 1965, 70 percent of black mothers of school-age children worked for wages. All were already initiated into political activism—and in alliance with, rather than in opposition to, their parents. And all had inherited a different historical legacy, one that included female heroes, from Sojourner Truth to Rosa Parks, but excluded women from the gilded cage. While white women’s ostensible fragility had been invoked to justify keeping them home, black women had been granted no such weakness. The consequence, novelist Toni Morrison has written, was that “aggression was not as new to black women as it was to white women. Black women seem able to combine the nest and the adventure. They are both safe harbor and ship.”