by Miriam Horn
Their mothers’ renaissance has often helped these women make peace with their parents and their past. After a long estrangement, Dorothy found her chance to reconnect with her family when her father fell ill; as his only daughter, she went home to help her mother take care of him. In twenty-five years, father and daughter had never reconciled; he could never forgive her for her years in Cuba and the SDS. But he developed Alzheimer’s “and forgot that he was angry,” and by the end the family was integrated again. Like Nancy Young, Dorothy developed empathy in midlife for the struggles her parents had endured. “Looking back, I realize that my father’s breadwinning role isolated him, that he was connected to his children in only the most tenuous way, which was why the ideological splits broke the family apart. If he’d been more involved in raising us, we would have been more people to him. He would have understood better the choices we made.” Her view of her ex-husband and his radical colleagues also softened. “A lot of what we did, like trashing Cambridge, I look back on as a sad waste. Aggression breeds aggression; by being radical we just made everything polarized. People hated their kids; kids hated their parents. But I don’t anymore think that all men are spiritually lacking and dangerous and have ruined the world. My experience since has taught me that there’s violence in men, but in women, too.”
The once homeless Dorothy now holds a job that could seem the proper punch line for the most radical member of the class: She is a graphic designer, creating images for a management consulting firm. She has not, however, abandoned her political commitments. In fact, in midlife she has resumed her activism, though her concerns are now more local and small-scale. Living on a pond in Peace Dale, Rhode Island, where “it’s wonderful to come home from work and launch the canoe at the bottom of the back yard and follow the herons, glossy ibis, kingfishers, ducks, and swans around the pond as the day cools and the sun sets,” she has joined a neighborhood group trying to protect that environment. Having once tried to remake the world and bring down the enemy, she now believes that change happens only bit by bit, and by finding common cause. “As kids, we staked out the margins and became marginalized. Now, if my neighbors join me in my concern for the pond, I’m not going to test them on abortion or gay rights. It’s not a compromise of principle to try and make things better, a little better, where you are. That’s the kind of real work that has been done by women all along, at the church and the PTA. Though to say that it is up to women to clean things up in the world, well, that’s like saying it’s housework. I believe anyone can learn to be ecologically sensitive and nurturant.”
Dorothy’s peacemaking extends even to her own mistakes. “I wasted my twenties. I was in pain for a long time. I’m only now coming into my own. But I learned things. Ten years of living on less than ten thousand dollars a year, that makes you understand more kinds of people. My mother is liberal, but when she talks about welfare mothers … well, if you spend your whole life protected, you don’t understand. Our generation didn’t want to be just safe and meet people only like us. Because I walked in more dangerous places, I can understand what it is to feel trapped and out of control.”
As in their prior life stages, the way these women see their own midlife has been strongly shaped by—and has also shaped—the many studies and books that invariably follow in their generation’s broad wake. Many of these have focused on the body—the fading of beauty, the onset of menopause—and most have been determinedly cheering, painting the end of the reproductive years as another rejuvenating passage, a liberation from the need to attract and please men, a time when women can become demanding, unruly, politically and spiritually bold. Jan Mercer wrote to her classmates that she “welcomed the freedom from the hormonal ebbs and flows.” Nancy Wanderer sees her “warm flashes” as a “sign of ripening.” Betty Demy thinks it “might be fun to just break out. On my kindergarten report card, my teacher wrote, ‘Betty is a happy conformist’; it was true then and ever since. Now is my chance to be eccentric.”
Some are enjoying a new sense of matriarchal responsibility to younger women. When Ann Landsberg’s stepdaughter had a miscarriage, “I felt catapulted into my new generational slot, became acutely aware that I am the mother of this clan. I had a grown daughter to deal with. I had to draw on my own experience with childbearing to bring her empathy and support and wisdom, even though it was only eight years since my son was born.” When, after her mother’s death, Ann’s father began calling to ask how to cook this dish or get out that stain, she realized that “my mom’s history and everything she knew is gone. I am the bearer of whatever she passed on.”
Others have set out to reclaim for “the old woman” her premodern stature as venerable, visionary, wise. Dorothy Devine’s goddess group marks a woman’s entry into menopause by seating her upon a “throne,” garlanding her with flowers, and rubbing her with fragrant oils. Then they all “sit humbly at the crone’s feet and say, ‘Please tell us your wisdom.’ It’s a counterweight to the Madison Avenue culture that says you’re old and ugly and your husband will leave you. It will be a fabulous experience when my sisters do that for me.”
Not all are aging so happily. Their twenty-fifth-reunion book is striking in the number of women describing serious illness, such as Epstein-Barr virus or chronic fatigue syndrome. This may reflect the emergence of new viruses and environmental insults to the immune system, or it may provide these women a legitimate reason to finally take care of themselves, or even justify stasis or middling success. A great many women in the class are consumers and practitioners of New Age therapies: Cynthia Gilbert-Marlow still works as a flight attendant but suffered an injury on the right side of her neck and back, “where you store anger.” The wife of her acupuncturist, she was glad to discover, does telepathic psychology: “We get in harmony with the universe. Then she senses my body’s responses. She’ll ask yes or no questions, and her body moves with the answers.” Menopause has given some a difficult time. Kathy Ruckman suffered hot flashes and interrupted sleep, and was anxious to get estrogen. Her doctor started hormone therapy but then stopped it when she began bleeding, and “wanted at the drop of a hat to do a D and C.” Others are more suspicious of hormone replacement, worrying that it perpetuates the view, well known to their mothers, that menopause is a deficiency disease requiring treatment so that women remain supple and desirable for men.
Though most in the class are aging “naturally” and are, like Louise Carter, “not very depressed by my older face and streaks of gray hair,” the altered face in the mirror does dispirit a few. Susan Alexander finds much to celebrate about midlife. She describes an abundant creative life, writing novels and musicals and films, directing theater, performing professionally on violin, piano, and flute, growing herbs on her balcony, loving and valuing her friends. She speaks rapturously of her son, “tall, handsome and athletic like his dad [with] a wonderful capacity for friendship with women.” She has reconnected with the Church, helping the Presbytery of New York City create an Internet site, which she hopes will serve as a platform for some of the poorer churches and social service organizations. She appreciates her matured confidence, the sure knowledge that she can survive anything. All of it makes for what she calls an “intense core of joy at the center of my being, [that] runs from finding delight in small things to the borders of spiritual ecstasy.” The “lengthy and arduous process” required to uncover it, she says, was “a most wonderful journey.”
At the same time, Susan “loathes and struggles against aging.” She hates “the gray hair and bags, the sagging, wrinkling hagdom, the feeling that there’s so much more I want to do and that time is slipping away and my vitality is waning. It sucks to be fifty. I have ulcers and am overweight. And ageism, let me tell you, is lots worse than sexism. For women it’s death. Men may tolerate thirty-year-old competent females, because they like to have them around, but fifty-year-olds—forget it. Aging women are even less valued than mothers and wives.” She “burns with resentment” that her justice-minded gener
ation does not resist more fiercely the relegating of women to the category of “old cow.” “The men I know who turned fifty threw spectacular bashes and invited everyone they knew to party the night away. The women took trips to Italy, quietly, by themselves.”
TV correspondent Martha Teichner has felt as much as anyone in the class the punishments meted out to aging women. “After nearly seventeen years at CBS and almost that many wars, I was reduced to the ‘woman’s page,’ [covering] royals and fashion for the morning news.”
Martha wrote that to her classmates twenty years out of school, one of a thousand messages these women have sent to each other over the years. Indeed, of all the public supports they have found for their individual searches and transformations and painful declines, none have mattered for Hillary’s classmates more than their friendships with women. Their devotion to one another is utterly unlike the wary distance often maintained by their mothers and earlier generations, who were schooled to see other women principally as rivals, battling to be the fairest of them all. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes about coming across the revolutionary sentence “Chloe liked Olivia” in a contemporary novel by a woman. “Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia.”
Even where friendships among women had existed, they had been at best what Carolyn Heilbrun has called “societies of consolation”: Women soothed one another as they waited for their men, who had gone forth to the world. Only recently, Heilbrun writes, have women’s friendships become what they were for men, a bond that “comprehended details of a public life and the complexities of the pain found there.”
More and more, as the years have passed, Hillary’s classmates have become protectors and teachers to other women. Pam Colony, who for so long fought the male scientists barring her way at university, works nights at a community college, teaching “older women who were intimidated early on but have come back bolder.” Within the class, they have forged ties stronger than at any time since their years together at Wellesley. Jan Mercer is grateful for her classmates’ candor, “a consequence, I think, of our age. Wellesley was where I learned how valuable female friendships were to me, as important as my family. But even ten years ago there would have been prevarication, more effort to put the gloss on things. By now we realize that everyone’s been knocked around.” Their youthful commitment to consciousness-raising, to speaking publicly of their struggles in order to discover which are shared and might be fixed together, is fulfilled now as it could not be when they were more callow and preening. Ann Sentilles “was haunted for years by the sense that other people were managing it all. Now I’m aware of everybody’s compromises, everyone whose marriage has failed, people struggling with their kids and illness and alcoholism. We all realize we made choices at times blithely and that there’s a cost at every turn. If there’s recrimination, it’s more of ourselves than of our parents or the world. We all recognize our extraordinary privilege, most of it unearned. For most of us now the quest is for some secure inner meaning. We’re no longer just collecting gold stars.”
Hillary Rodham Clinton has been an important center of gravity in this coming together. For many, she represents the larger effort they are part of, that river of history to which each has been tributary. “Thanks for being me—in a higher place,” Jayne Baker Abrams wrote to Hillary in a public forum in the alumnae magazine. “Having you there validates me … my nonprofit work, my concern for children.” Sue Barnard wrote: “Every increment of respect you garner will increase the leverage the rest of American women have in their marriages, families, and the larger world. If Bill Clinton and other important men can be less defensive in their relationships with women, maybe other men will be less likely to resort to violence and intimidation.”
Most have taken heart from Hillary and continue to admire her for her grace and unflinching strength and for her complex understanding of human character and life. They dismiss, for the most part, evidence of her ethical lapses and fall silent “so as not to add to her pain,” on the matter of her long sufferance of her husband’s infidelities and her own public humiliations. A few, however, have openly cringed at her choice to go on protecting her husband even as he engaged in what one called the “most callous, exploitative treatment of women.” They have worried about the message sent to girls about what they should put up with and to boys about what powerful men do. Most of all, they mourn the dissipation of so much of the possibility they’d imagined for their gifted classmate. “Hillary has the whole world,” says Nancy Young, “but she can’t use what she has. She’s cornered. What little spontaneity she ever had is gone. She has become just robotic, a cardboard person. And every time I hear her say my husband, I shudder. It’s degrading for her, and she’s not acknowledging the degradation. She’s so compromised having to play this role; it makes her harden or empty herself. He, on the other hand, should be more guarded. I was shocked at our reunion dinner; at one point, he and I happened to cross the room at the same time, and walked past each other. When he looked at me, the overwhelming sense I had was of his availability. I thought, ‘This is the president; he should not be so available.’ ”
Nancy Wanderer has, she says, always measured herself against Hillary. “On the whole, I’ve felt I haven’t come through the way she has. I still agonize. What if I hadn’t gotten married senior year? What if Hillary and I had run against each other for college government and what if I’d won? What if I had gone to Yale Law School instead of waiting until I was thirty-eight and going to the University of Maine? I would have been in that early group of lawyers who had the chance to be seasoned. It took me twenty years to get back to where I was in 1968.”
Nancy’s regret at losing the competition gives way quickly, however, to the more self-comforting notion that she merely chose a different balance between her personal and political life. “I think Hillary’s idea was to get to the top of the power structure as quickly and securely as she could. She felt she had important work to do. For that, she was able to accept dissonant chords in her life with Bill, to look the other way, put it aside, put up with it. I think passionate relationships are not the center of her life, as they are for me, which is why I didn’t end up where Hillary is. She’s done a lot; those White House appointments of women wouldn’t have happened if she weren’t there. Yes, she had the entrée. I turned my back on that with Thomas, and I’m glad that whatever I achieve I’ll have done on my own. But I’m not going to make a national difference and I’m not going to criticize Hillary for how she got there.”
As a practical matter, Hillary has also been a unifying force in the class. Among the guests in the Lincoln Bedroom have been many from Wellesley ’69: Johanna Branson, Jinnet Fowles, Susan Graber, Connie Shapiro. When the First Lady hosted a twenty-fifth reunion for her class at the White House, 305 of the 430 graduates gathered. They were herded through metal detectors, “overseen, startlingly, by a big, brightly smiling photograph of Hillary,” in Lindsay Miller’s account, and entertained by Kathy Ruckman’s kids, performing a string quartet.
For three days during that reunion, Hillary hung out happily with her classmates—listening attentively to their symposia, participating in the Sunday morning service performed by the pastors in the class, bringing her husband along to the Saturday dinner at the Mayflower Hotel. Nancy Wanderer sat next to Hillary at dinner. They talked for an hour about how they were cutting back on meat, coping with menopause, and worrying about osteoporosis. Hillary asked if she could touch Nancy’s nearly crew-cut hair and said, “Maybe I’ll get a haircut like this and really shock everyone.” She seemed fascinated by Nancy’s information that the Meyers-Briggs personality chart would categorize Hillary as an introvert but her husband as an extrovert, “talking to clarify his thinking and soak up energy.” She wanted to know all about Nancy’s partner, Susan—how they met, what she does for a living. “She was curious to know what kind of person I’d wanted to make my life with.” Recalling how cha
rmed she’d been by Nancy’s mom in the Frontline documentary, particularly Marge’s recollection of how she’d wished she could have stopped Hillary’s disruptive commencement speech, Hillary wrote Marge a message on the back of Nancy’s meal ticket, commending her courage in sticking by her daughter. At one point, Nancy snapped a picture of a scene that amused her: Hillary was huddled with a bunch of women, and all were ignoring Bill, who idly looked about the room for diversion. The class took obvious pleasure when their own president, Karen Williamson, kept Bill Clinton waiting for the microphone while she instructed them to put out their little ticket saying if they wanted the chicken, though many also told me later of the heady moment when he’d locked onto their eyes. He was, many said, the sexiest man they’d ever seen.
The transformation of the personal into the political undertaken by these women—moving from wholly domestic to partly public lives; publicizing issues that had once been considered private; scrutinizing the politics within the home—has had complicated and mixed effects. Most are obscured in the usual attacks: that these women, and their entire generation, have settled into one long confessional whine; that they have abdicated personal responsibility by blaming all their problems and failings on social causes; that they have turned the mysterious realm of relations between women and men, a realm where the erotic imagination and inarticulate feeling could live, into a starkly lit, rule-bound world.
