by Miriam Horn
Memory, of course, has its own agenda: To the extent that these are self-portraits, they preserve both the kind and unkind cuts that enterprise invariably entails. In recounting their histories, each of these women has made a story of her life, finding with hindsight the fruit born of chaos and pain, mapping cause and effect, discerning motifs, imbuing events with symbolic and prophetic portent. They have rationalized misdeeds and also lacerated themselves with criticism; romanticized youthful adventures, swelling them to grand proportions, but also flattened their own past into anecdote.
They have not, however, kept many secrets. Reared in the tenets of consciousness-raising, most of the women of Wellesley ’69 have been candid about their lives to an almost unsettling degree. To break the silence that prevailed in their childhood on such matters as sexuality and marital unhappiness and substance abuse, most believe, has a moral purpose. Though Hannah Arendt herself was hostile to feminism, her recognition that “if we do not know our history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate” was developed by feminists into a central principle of the movement. The feminist insight that “the personal is political” meant that some seemingly solitary struggles were in fact shared, rooted in family, social, and corporate structures that had to be challenged by women in solidarity with one another. Personal testimony became a political act; speaking out was a way to join and sustain the sisterhood. “The personal is political” also meant that there was a politics, a power relationship, in the family and that therefore such public values as justice and equality had to be taken home. It meant that all sorts of seemingly intimate choices—what kind of underwear one wore, whether and how and with whom one had sex—were political as well as personal, a way of confronting social rules as to how a lady behaved and of interrogating the complicated relationship between power and sexual consent. “The personal is political” meant that disputes traditionally treated as domestic and therefore private—acts of forced sex or of violence against one’s family members—would no longer be immune from public scrutiny. It meant that you had to “walk the talk,” align how you lived in the world—earned your money, disposed of your trash—with the values you professed. It meant, as well, that the political is personal: that the public realm of work and law had to be tempered with such “womanly” values as nurturance and compassion.
The dissolution of the hard boundary that once separated the private from the public has had mixed consequences, and those consequences are the central subject of this book. Co-opted by commercial culture, the confessional impulse has grown grotesque on TV talk shows (though as David Halberstam points out in The Fifties, it was The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, the show that has come to stand for all the marvelous family values America subsequently lost, that first took “what was most private”—the lives of the couple’s two sons—“and made it terribly public”). In politics, the idea that the personal behavior of a senator or president is a legitimate measure of his political character has often degraded civic discourse into scandalmongering. Hollywood has seized upon the openness toward sex and intimate violence as license to make them both staples of popular entertainment. Excessively shielded as girls from harsh realities, the women of ’69 have raised children excessively exposed. They have also sometimes lost their way on the “twelve-step” path. “The personal is political” has sometimes degenerated into the notion that personal revelation and transformation are politics enough.
Yet it remains true that these women have taken great sustenance, like many women before them, from speaking truth to one another—it is a tradition still enacted at their class reunion meetings. The women of ’69 have come out as debutantes. They have also come out as lesbians, as victims of domestic abuse, as alcoholics. At the same time, they have remained possessed of the manners and dutiful habits instilled at Wellesley—a wonderful combination for any biographer attempting to retrace their lives. So Dorothy Devine, ’69, was not only able to promptly find and send me the 1970 report to the House Judiciary Committee on her subversive activities in the New Left and in Cuba—as well as snapshots of herself with bare-breasted celebrants at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and wreathed with laurel at a menopause rite. She also accompanied it all with a gracious note on flowered stationery in a lovely hand.
“Why do we have all these problems we didn’t have in 1955?” Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich asked in a speech in 1994. “Because a long pattern of counterculture belief … has undervalued the family.” Nostalgia for the childhood world these women lost or abandoned, and disavowal of their generation’s “revolution” as a destructive spasm, are central tenets of political discourse in the 1990s. In the present rendering of postwar history, the fifties marked the last golden moment of centuries of stable and happy families, a world of order and restraint tragically dismantled by the nihilistic assault in the sixties on traditional values. In this view, selfish ambition and wanton pleasure-seeking triumphed over a spartan sense of responsibility, precipitating the family’s demise: Since the nurturance and moral education of family is traditionally the responsibility of women, it follows that they bear the greatest share of blame for this tragedy. It was for men to shoulder the burdens—and honor—of work and civic life. When women insisted on stepping into the public arena as well, they betrayed their calling as the keepers of a domestic haven in a heartless world.
When my brief portrait of five women of Wellesley ’69 (U.S. attorney Kris Olson Rogers, Dr. Lonny Laszlo Higgins, and management consultant Janet McDonald Hill—all married working moms; Susan Alexander, a divorced working mom; and Kathy Smith Ruckman, a married full-time mom) appeared in U.S. News & World Report on the occasion of their twenty-fifth reunion, the letters received by the magazine reflected this sense of betrayal. A military man stationed in Europe wrote: “I submit that Kathy Ruckman, who got married, had children and stayed home, is the most successful career woman of the bunch. It’s also a good bet her children aren’t high school dropouts, drug addicts, unwed mothers, gang members, or in some other way a burden on society.… This is what the rest of these ‘gifted women’ … have given us.” A woman in Hitchcock, Oklahoma, charged that “the group rebelled against more than the traditional family. Hillary and classmates rebelled against the Ten Commandments.” To another woman, from Newton, New Jersey, Hillary’s generation of women was the reason “we are in big trouble today—the most important word in their vocabulary is ‘mine.’ Look at how many are divorced. [Their parents made sacrifices in the armed services] so these ungratefuls could live, and now they are trying to destroy this great country.”
They have destroyed the family and ruined America’s children, defied the divine order and sabotaged morality, replaced self-sacrifice and duty with arrogant self-absorption and greed. That is the charge made against this generation of women. They have torn down American values, or sold out to them. In the process, they have ruined their own lives and created a nightmare for their daughters. A 1994 Frontline documentary on Hillary’s class depicted these women as badly damaged by feminism: the career woman condemned to barren spinsterhood and remorse; the full-time mom to humiliation; the working mom to hyperorganized hyperactivity and her own daughter’s disavowal of her hectic life.
These are the familiar condemnations and cautionary tales. “You know the rules,” Hillary Rodham Clinton told the 1992 graduates of Wellesley. “If you don’t get married, you’re abnormal.… If you get married and have children but then go work outside the home, you’re a bad mother. If you get married and have children but stay home, you’ve wasted your education.” The “baby busters” may lament their generation’s absence of a galvanizing identity, but their mothers suffer the opposite burden, as an endlessly caricatured generation.
Such caricatures well serve crusaders out to whittle history into a sharp ideological stick, but they are of little use for anyone wanting to understand another actual human being. Lives rendered as moral parable—whatever the agenda—are
inevitably drained of the density and ambiguity and complexity and mystery of real life in favor of the broad strokes of social realism. “Generalities clank when wielded,” Eudora Welty once wrote. “They make too much noise for us to hear what people might actually be trying to say. They are fatal to tenderness and are in themselves nonconductors of any real, however modest, discovery of the writer’s own heart.”
Those caricatured pay their own price. For Hillary’s classmates, the recipe of the glass slipper and Betty Crocker domesticity on which they were raised remained enormously powerful, no matter how many countertales feminism told. More than a few have struggled to sort out their own dreams and experience from the dreams fed them by the common culture. Nonna Noto, ’69, wrote every five years to her classmates of her enduring hopes for a husband and children and was wistful at her bad luck. But she now wonders whether she and some of her fellow childless classmates in fact chose the life they wanted but could not admit that choice even to themselves—whether they failed, as Hemingway put it, to “feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel.” Those who deviated from the feminist recipe for happiness—at times just as fixed and tyrannical as the old pattern—have also frequently felt scorned or abnormal, equally mismatched with what Phyllis Rose calls the “limited and limiting plots” we impose on our own lives. “If I were to overcome the conventions, I should need the courage of a hero,” Virginia Woolf once wrote, “and I am not a hero.”
The women of Wellesley ’69 are overwhelmingly feminists: 80 percent readily describe themselves that way. Are they, then, anti-men, anti-sex, anti-family, anti-motherhood, anti-religion? Have they been burned out and embittered by the changes wrought by feminism?
The aim of this book is not to supplant malicious caricatures with their opposites but rather to reflect the immense variety of these four hundred women, a variety that is itself the most dramatic legacy of feminism. Almost any adventure imaginable in the past fifty years can be found somewhere among their number: They have dropped acid, cheated on their husbands, had abortions, struggled to get pregnant, run away with the stableman, run away to be a Buddhist nun, made fortunes, lost fortunes, taken Prozac, started menopause, pushed a stroller through their twenty-fifth-reunion parade. In the sheer diversity and idiosyncrasy of their lives, the women of ’69 resist the taxonomist. How does one type a Pentecostal Christian creationist physician with a house-husband? How make a cautionary tale of Catherine Parke, a college professor and poet whose late baby has not “stolen my time to write nor scattered my attention nor left me tired or overwhelmed nor damaged my career or sex life or self-esteem”?
To fairly reflect their diversity, I have gathered a larger cast than the usual three, four, or five characters typical of social histories. I have not, however, attempted to represent the class in any demographic sense: I did not divide the book among married and divorced, black and white, happy and unhappy, in proportional reflection of the class. Ultimately, I followed the stories that interested me most. If they are sometimes exceptionally dramatic, traversing what Oliver Sacks calls “the arctics and tropics of human existence,” they are also the stories that the women of ’69 tell each other and themselves. Having sailed into unmapped waters—and before the recent great surge in women’s biography and fractured fairy tales and female picaresques—these women have frequently turned for inspiration to one another’s often epic lives: to Lonny Laszlo Higgins’s ten years at sea raising her family and training Micronesian public health workers; to Dr. Nancy Eyler’s marriage to an uneducated cowboy and move to Montana; to Alison Campbell Swain’s rejection of the ease she could have bought herself with her family fortune in favor of a life of ceaselessly taking care of other people.
Though each chapter charts a season or theme in their lives, their sagas are rarely linear. Motherhood, still, is the great track-switcher: For all their efforts to share with their husbands housekeeping and child-rearing responsibilities, the demands of family have almost always upended their lives more radically than they have unsettled their husbands’. So three decades after they graduated from Wellesley, some are senior partners in major law firms and some are recent graduates from law school. Alongside women at the top of careers pursued unremittingly are women who have dedicated their principal energies to their children and are only now entering graduate school or the workforce, or reentering after a long time. Some have grown children, born as early as December 1969; one is caring for a toddler, born in 1997. The fluidity of their lives has not been without limits: The biological clock imposes its imperatives, as does the premium on youth in the workplace. But theirs are complicated intertwinings of work and marriage and motherhood and daughterhood, with interruptions and distractions and divided attention and necessary new beginnings. The boundaries between chapters therefore sometimes blur.
The confusion of realms presented a dilemma as to what to call these women throughout the book. In the 1950s, the use of first names generally indicated a subordinate status: A secretary was Betty or Carol; her boss was Mr. Thompson or Dr. Smith. That changed with the mixing by the sixties generation of personal and public life. The current president is referred to by his first name more than any of his predecessors because of the familiarity he has invited with public talk of such matters as his underwear, and because his presidency has seemed to be more novelistic than most. The phrase “Friends of Bill” is a perfect example of how intimacy and organized politics have become intertwined; another is the political controversy stirred by Hillary Rodham’s youthful decision to carry her maiden name forward into her marriage. Like Bill, Hillary is often just “Hillary” in the conversations of ordinary people, including, of course, her classmates. For that reason, and because their stories weave in and out so often between private and public life, I have for the most part referred to Hillary and the rest of the women of Wellesley ’69 by their first names. The one exception is in Chapter Four, where I deal at length with the work of two women in the class virtually in isolation from their private lives; in that case, it seemed appropriately formal to use their last names.
Chapter One looks at their years together at Wellesley, their first experience away from the domestic cocoon, and their first taste of loyalties divided between the world they grew up in and the new possibilities then emerging for women. Chapter Two goes backward, then, for a closer look at the circumstances of their girlhood and the nature of the imprint left upon them by their mothers’ lives. Chapter Three focuses on those who dove deep into “the sixties,” shaking radically loose from their past with all manner of political and personal transgressions of their parents’ rule. Chapter Four—the first of three chapters on their lives at work—looks at how their encounters with a “man’s world” reinforced or reshaped their ideas of what it means to be a woman and how, in turn, they have remade their professions. Chapter Five recognizes their struggles as pioneers—the lone woman in her medical school, the first vice-president at her bank—recalling the barriers present thirty years ago for women and the battles required to bring them down. Chapter Six takes on the subject that is both most discussed and most susceptible to ideological distortion—the dilemmas of balancing work and family. Chapter Seven looks at those in the class who have stayed home to raise their kids; and Chapter Eight, at those who have wound up single—by choice or luck. Chapter Nine is given over to two women whose journeys toward an authentic identity and life have been particularly arduous and wild. Chapter Ten focuses on the quest that increasingly defines these women’s lives, for spiritual knowledge and serenity. And Chapter Eleven looks at how they are facing the mortal struggles of midlife—empty nests, erratic hormones, aging parents, aging selves.
Mary Catherine Bateson has argued that the constant improvisations and sustained peripheral vision required by the interrupted female life are not crippling to a woman’s life and work but creative. She proposes “the knight errant as a better model for our times than the seeker of the grail.” Dorothy Devine,
’69, offers another model: She has taken up a classic woman’s craft—needlework. “A patchwork quilt is like a kaleidoscope of your life; you’re making something harmonious of all the disparate pieces.”
Richard Holmes, biographer of Coleridge and Shelley, believes that a biographer should find a subject “that actually puts him on guard in the most extreme and delicate way—that, as it were, throws down a challenge.” As a woman exactly ten years younger than my subjects, I have often felt that there was much at stake for me in their answers to my questions. There is no formula to derive here: The marrieds are not categorically happier than the unmarrieds—nor are the professionals or those with children or those without. Their happiness, where it exists, cannot be dissected or hunted with a map like buried treasure; it is not a destination arrived at ever after but one fleetingly won and lost. Though these lives defy the attempt to craft a certain recipe for a fruitful life, to listen to these women is nonetheless cheering. They are, for the most part, “in love with daylight,” in Wilfrid Sheed’s lovely phrase. “When I say a prayer,” says the orphaned, unmarried, childless, too often celibate, more than once heartbroken Chris Osborne, ’69, “it is a prayer of thanks.”
CHAPTER ONE
The Wellesley Years
At Christmas break of her senior year, Dorothy Devine got married in a white tulle veil and a moiré silk wedding gown with a high Victorian collar and a micro-miniskirt, daisies in her hair.
