Rebels in White Gloves

by Miriam Horn

  One Wellesley student did a hundred acid trips for a course in Christian Ethics, and said she saw God. Another, now a health professional in the Bible Belt, remembers swallowing whole bottles of Robitussin DM, a cough medicine, to achieve “a zombielike state.” She went to Woodstock the summer after graduation but remembers little beyond dropping cellophane acid and learning to meditate with hippies from a commune in the Carolinas called the Farm. Acid was a revelation for the art history major: “In the fifties, what you were supposed to feel and say was so stilted. What you became aware of on acid is that 80 percent of communication is nonverbal. I would get intense creative urges. LSD lifted my inhibitions and liberated a whole new style.” At the same time, she believes that smoking lots of pot helped defeat her aspirations to get a medical degree. “I thought that to be a doctor would be class collaborationist. And I was afraid. I think drugs had something to do with that. Drugs tend to magnify whatever feelings you have. If you don’t know if you can get into med school and no one’s encouraging you and it’s all scary, marijuana magnifies your fear.”

  For some students, their classmates’ rebellious adventures were tedious or grating. Charlynn Maniatis, who describes herself as a Goldwater girl to this day, “lived in my own little hermit world. We were the nerds. We knew Vietnam was going on, but we were more concerned with, What do we do tonight? I never even went into Boston for the first year. It was just like being at home, the same four walls; I’d come home and do my homework, eat dinner, and go to bed. I was afraid to go to mixers, and I certainly wasn’t interested in the wider world. I was living in a dreamworld, with four or five other dreamers, at the Wellesley of the proper gloves and hats and teas. Civil rights and feminism were beyond our horizon.” Virginia Blankenhorn found her classmates’ orthodoxy oppressive. “Wellesley was a place for me to study Renaissance music, Chaucer, medieval history. I loved it. Hillary Rodham and I might have been on different planets. I didn’t have time for politics, and I loathed the political correctness of some of my classmates, the rigidity of thought and language that went into some of their positions. I recall being castigated by one classmate, who insisted that music was simply not a ‘relevant’ thing to be doing.” Kathy Smith was embarrassed to announce her engagement senior year to medical student Roger Ruckman, a serious young man from a wealthy Delaware family, and still more reluctant to admit to her classmates that motherhood was her dream. “By the end of Wellesley I felt burned-out and was looking for comfort, the comfort of having a baby. But feminism devalued anything related to caring for children.”

  More often, however, the women of ’69 found Wellesley insufferably tame, their classmates too much the good girls, patronizing or timid in their commitments to social change. Senior year, the class published a twenty-page critique of the college. “Our good students are well-disciplined automatons who play by the rules,” wrote Marilyn Hagstrum. “The good deedism of the motto is condescending and inadequate,” added Jan Krigbaum. Students wrote to the newspaper with scorn for “housewives putting in time, superficial and risk averse” or suffering from a “rich girl complex, at this prissy finishing school.… To assuage the guilt there are threats of hunger strikes. Is Wellesley an intellectual community or an extension of Junior League?” When a student strike to protest the war in April 1968 was only feebly honored, Hillary Rodham lamented the “large gray mass” of the uninvolved. To Professor Marshall Goldman’s belittling suggestion that the girls make a real sacrifice and give up a weekend mixer instead, she responded: “I’ll give up my date Saturday night, Mr. Goldman, but I don’t think that’s the point. Why do these attitudes have to be limited to two days?” In fact, many of her classmates lay at Hillary Rodham’s feet credit, or perhaps blame, for the genteel nature of their protests. Typical was her response as college government president to California governor Ronald Reagan’s March 1969 demand for a federal investigation of student protesters and order for the arrest of nearly two hundred San Francisco State demonstrators. Hillary stayed up all night to talk students out of staging a protest “that would embarrass our college.” She would “co-opt the real protest,” in one classmate’s words, “by creating an academic one.”

  Returning from her tenth reunion in 1972, Nora Ephron wrote a derisive account in Esquire of her alma mater. What Wellesley wants for its graduates, Ephron wrote, is “for us to avoid the extremes, to be instead that thing in the middle: an example to the community, a Samaritan.… How marvelous it would have been to go to a women’s college that encouraged impoliteness, rewarded aggression, encouraged argument. Women by the time they are eighteen are so … tyrannized out of behaving in all the wonderful outspoken ways unfortunately characterized as masculine.… A college must do remediation, force young women to define themselves before they abdicate the task and become defined by their husbands.… We all tend toward tiny little rebellions, harmless nips at the system. We will never make any real trouble. Wellesley helped see to that.”

  In “Silences,” Tillie Olsen had lamented the near impossibility for a woman, trained always to please, to believe in the right to speak her mind or the importance of what she might have to say. Mary Day Kent recalls a lecture attended by five hundred Wellesley women and five male guests: Three of the visiting men asked questions; not one of the young women said a word.

  Hillary Rodham Versus the Washington Establishment

  For girls so deeply ingrained with the feminine habits of silence and docility, the audacity of Hillary Rodham’s speech on graduation day was unimaginably liberating.

  Few anticipated her bold performance. Hillary had always been a great practitioner of procedures and rules, undaunted by long meetings and complex policy wrangling; she had won the admiration of faculty and administrators, even more than students, for her skills at conciliation, damping unruly passions by finding common ground among divided campus factions. But if Hillary had already proven her political skill, on that sunny spring afternoon she revealed a capacity more electrifying to the gathered young ladies. Massachusetts Republican senator Edward Brooke had spent his long-winded speech praising Richard Nixon and America’s “strength abroad,” and scolding the assembled girls for their generation’s resort to “coercive protest,” calling it a perversion of democratic privilege. It would be tragic, he said, if they adopted dissatisfaction as a way of life.

  The gathered parents were still nodding their assent when Hillary Rodham, the first student speaker in the history of Wellesley graduation ceremonies, stepped to the podium. Enraged by Brooke’s speech, she set aside her prepared remarks and proceeded extemporaneously to upbraid the senator. Her 420 classmates, who had chosen Hillary to be class speaker, felt their pulses race and their parents turn to stone. “I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while,” she began, her voice ringing. “For too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible. The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.”

  That she had plowed through her course reading lists was evident in the echoes of Kierkegaard and Heidegger throughout her speech: In Kierkegaard’s warning that the “despair at not willing to be oneself” was the first form of “sickness unto death”; and in Heidegger’s description of the “inauthenticity” that comes from fleeing the terrifying necessity for self-creation by “allowing others to direct my life … when I surrender to ‘them,’ ” Hillary found her vocabulary and philosophy. “Our love for this place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions,” she told a stunned crowd of two thousand, among them Nina Nitze’s father, Paul, and Eldie Acheson’s grandfather, Dean. “I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see.… To be educated, the goal must be human liberation, enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity to create.… We’re searching for more immediate
, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living. So our questions about our institutions, our college, our churches, our government, continue. Every protest, every dissent, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age.” She read a poem by her classmate Nancy Scheibner: “And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle/For all those myths and oddments/Which oddly we have acquired/And from which we would become unburdened/To create a newer world/To transform the future into the present./We have no need of false revolutions/In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds/And hang our wills up on narrow pegs./It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives./And once those limits are understood/To understand that limitations no longer exist./Earth could be fair. And you and I must be free.” She called on her fellow students to emulate the protesting French students whose slogans covered the walls of the Sorbonne. “Be realistic, they say. Demand the impossible. We will settle for nothing less.” And she acknowledged the generational breach opening up before her. “Yesterday I was talking to an older woman who said that she wouldn’t want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn’t want to look ahead, because she’s afraid.”

  When Hillary finished, her classmates rose to their feet and for seven minutes stood and cheered her defiant words. Or most did: Ann Sherwood sat still, “terrified that my father would be furious with me that one of my classmates had the temerity to rebut an adult, much less a U.S. senator.” Mary Day Kent also cast a cautious sidelong glance at her father, who had before that day never seen an Afro or a miniskirt, and was in shock well before Hillary opened her mouth. Charlynn Maniatis recalls her father whispering furiously, “What a disrespectful young lady,” and feeling the same way, “I was cringing.” “I would have liked to have stopped her,” Marge Wanderer told Frontline. “I’m sure her mother would have liked to have stopped her, but her class absolutely encouraged her.”

  That a speech which was often incoherent and meandering could be so galvanizing and polarizing said much about the way these girls had been raised. “When we were growing up, it was unseemly to have confidence if you were a girl; it was considered insolence. I remember times I felt great about something I’d done, and my parents would cut me down,” Jan Dustman Mercer recalls. Hillary’s speech “was brash, it was brilliant, it was unplanned, and it was disrespectful to Senator Brooke. And I can remember squirming in my seat at the same time the inner me was saying, ‘All right!’ ”

  That a young woman would contradict a man of authority was also, in 1969, front-page news. SENATOR BROOKE UPSTAGED AT WELLESLEY COMMENCEMENT read the Boston Globe the next day, adding that Dean Acheson was sufficiently impressed that he had sent Hillary a note requesting a copy of her speech, an excerpt of which was published in Life magazine. A handful of parents were equally cheered: Jesse Branson, whose daughter, Johanna, was Hillary’s roommate at Wellesley and an attendant at her wedding and remains one of her closest friends, “thought what Hillary was saying was great. I didn’t want to stop her; I was unhappy with Brooke myself. We were just startled that she had the courage.” Vern Branson remembers that Hugh Rodham—who had come alone to graduation in the family Cadillac while his wife, Dorothy, stayed home with Hillary’s brothers—was altogether unfazed, talking that evening with great enthusiasm about “blue onions,” his best-selling textile design.

  “I will never forget it,” Marge Wanderer told Frontline, “because Nancy said to me at the end of graduation, ‘Take a good look at her. She will probably be the president of the United States someday.’ And that shook me up.… It kind of frightened me, the whole group frightened me, because this was the beginning of a whole new era, and these women were going to go out and take over the world. Not my daughter, because my daughter was very safely married. I thought she was going to be home sweeping the floor and taking care of the babies, so I wasn’t going to worry about her. But I worried about the other ones, because they were so sure, they were so sure of themselves, and that is something that Wellesley instills in these women. I just hope that they are all successful and happy. No, I’m going to restate that. I just hope that they’re happy.”

  In the pursuit of happiness, few of these women would in fact ever reject so entirely Marge’s dreams; many more have swept floors and taken care of babies than have taken over the world. But from the vantage of a smart, ambitious girl in 1969, the fifties did not look anything like the wholesome paradise of 1990s political memory. To the degree these women allied themselves with their generation and against their parents, it was not out of a desire to destroy traditional American values but because those values seemed to them to have been betrayed—by “faceless bureaucrats” drained of a sense of personal responsibility for their political actions, by a suburban existence that the Christian Century described as a “handkerchief soaked in chloroform on the mind and spirit,” by a willful blindness to immense social injustices. “My country right or wrong” seemed less noble to most than what Senator Fulbright called “a higher form of patriotism,” the insistence that their country, and each one of them as a citizen, live up to its ideals. There was hubris in this generation, certainly, in the notion that they would utterly remake home and family and politics, that their morality was unlike the shabby stuff of most men and women. But there was no nihilism. “Men with dreams” had shaped their consciousness, Hillary said in her speech, “men in the space program, the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps.” Earlier that year, she had given her boyfriend, Jeff Shields, a copy of Thoreau’s Walden, one of the earliest American testaments to the idea that a person’s political integrity is measured by how he lives each day in his own home and by whether he dissents when his government fails to honor its stated principles. “There’s a strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left collegiate protests that I find intriguing, because it harkens back to a lot of the old virtues,” Hillary said in her speech. “We feel that our prevailing acquisitive and competitive corporate life is not the way of life for us.” These women’s political convictions and personal aspirations began, before all else, in an immensely ambivalent rejection of their girlhood world.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mothers and Daughters

  A woman is her mother. That’s the main thing.

  —ANNE SEXTON, “Housewife”

  What Nancy Wanderer loved best were the car trips each summer from Pittsburgh to her father’s childhood home in Illinois farm country. Stretched out in the Chrysler’s big backseat with her small blond head nestled in her mother’s lap, Nancy would close her eyes and listen contentedly for hours as Marge recounted stories Nancy had heard a thousand times. Marge told of her own visits as a girl to her grandmother’s house in the “Germantown” of St. Louis, with “Aunt Elsie and the whole family, those first-generation immigrant women who weighed three hundred pounds, babies running around, everyone out on their porches on hot summer nights with big, foaming pitchers of root beer.” Hearing her mother’s strong, exuberant voice, feeling her link to all the women in her past, Nancy says, “I felt very well loved.”

  New Kensington, just outside of Pittsburgh, was a slightly down-at-the-heels, gritty mill town. But dads were securely employed at Alcoa Aluminum, moms were always home, front doors were open, and grandmas and big brothers were nearby. No one ever had a baby-sitter. The kids clambered over fences and front porches, went in and out of one another’s houses, raided refrigerators, played in the woods over the hill with never a thought of danger. “All my best friends lived on my street. My mother knew that any place I was, somebody’s mom would be around. Even our dads seemed close by. When we walked home from school for lunch every day, in our kneesocks and letter sweaters, we’d stop to salute as the Alcoa trucks went by.” Nancy and her big brother and her mom and dad always sat down together for breakfast and dinner; Mrs. Wanderer would set out a spaghetti casserole with Velveeta cheese, or pot roast and potatoes, then take off her apron and smooth her skirt before joining her husband and children at the table. S
he did her cooking and cleaning in a dress and heels, her hair just done at the beauty parlor. On weekends, Nancy’s dad would putter about the house or cut the grass, and then they’d all go to a potluck dinner with friends.

  Nancy and Marge were rarely separated. A pillar of the church and president of the PTA, Marge became a Girl Scout leader when Nancy was in the third grade, and every one of the twenty-two girls in Nancy’s class joined the troop. They met Thursday evenings for knitting competitions and learned to bake chicken potpies and put on spirited performances: A picture of a twelve-year-old Nancy playing Curly in Oklahoma!, in a red plaid shirt and cowboy hat, with her freckled snub nose and mop of blond curls and jubilant grin, is pure sweet-corn Americana.

  Marge’s family had been hit badly by the Depression; her memories of poverty left her determined that her tomboy daughter would learn the proper feminine graces and marry well. She sent Nancy to get “polished up” at a private high school, scrimping money out of the household budget and going back to work in the classroom she’d left when she got married. “Sometimes I was a bit embarrassed by her,” says Nancy. “She had a big, loud laugh, and always a funny story to tell. But she has a kind of inner class; there is nothing money could buy that she didn’t already have. In my eyes she was the ideal woman—really out there, getting people excited. I wanted to be just like her, a leader. She is like the sun; she has such warmth and energy. That’s why when she turned her back on me later it was so cold.”