by Miriam Horn
If such generalities fail to describe a more complicated reality, the life stories of the women of the Wellesley class of ’69 do reveal the high costs exacted by their generation’s success at having breached the boundaries. There are moments when these women do perhaps say too much, jeopardizing their own dignity and sometimes their families’: As Eudora Welty once warned, “We can and will cheapen all feeling by letting it go savage or parading in it.” There are times when they have misused the public light: Like Princess Diana, who won both sweet revenge and the “love” of a million strangers by publicizing her humiliation and betrayal, Hillary’s classmates have at times gone public out of motives beyond the honorable forging of solidarities. Those solidarities, in turn, have had their own trapdoors. The affiliations, the new shared stories, have sometimes freed them from one box only to become equally limiting, reductive, closed. Resorting to canned language and analysis—of the recovery movement, or the New Age, or even feminism—these women can sometimes wind up erasing their own singularity, inhabiting their caricature, settling for too simplistic explanations of their own lives. They can get caught in the therapeutic trap, letting talk substitute for action, ritually repeating insights but failing to act, letting past damage absorb the best part of their present energies.
Their kids, too, can suffer. Hillary’s protest in her commencement speech against her generation’s “inauthentic” lives was a complaint against a world where too much was hidden or lied about. The children of the class of ’69 also have a sense of inauthenticity, but one that comes from too much being seen and so being hollowed of meaning. Living amid all the skeletons dragged from all the closets, their children have sometimes become timid, pessimistic, more ironic than idealistic, lost of an innocence they never had. Having witnessed the fracturing of their family life, Nancy Wanderer’s sons are both steering clear of relationships: Andrew sees himself as a perennial bachelor; his closest relationships are with his grandmother and his mom. Many in the class have wavered between the wish to let their kids see “reality” and their equally powerful wish to protect them. Jan Mercer has brought her sons “in on life’s struggles, so they know they happen in all families and you handle them and move on”; she has also spent $300,000 to put them through private schools.
Feminism as a movement has been equally confused by the toppling of the traditional wall around the private sphere. The demand for more public attention—to discriminatory and harassing behavior in the workplace, to domestic assault and sexual crimes, to the needs of mothers and children—can sometimes collide with the demand for more respect for female privacy, to make their own reproductive decisions, to enact their desires. Hillary Clinton has been one of the most politicizing in the class—arguing, for instance, that prenatal care ought to be required for pregnant women to get public benefits. But she has also tried to claim a “zone of privacy” when the charges of sexual misdeeds piled up against her husband, despite the fact that most of the women involved had worked for him, and so raised all the concerns about how men use their power at work to get sex from women. Some feminists have also worried at the paradox that, having fought against the public shamings of women—for promiscuity or unwed pregnancy—they have now turned that same weapon against men. They see the kind of denunciation made by Kris Olson Rogers of her ex-husband, Jeff, as just another scarlet letter, unfortunate whether pinned on a woman or a man.
If these women’s lives have revealed the hazards, however, they have also revealed how much has been gained by breaching the wall. Those gains have been public: invigorating science and medicine and anthropology and law with new perspectives; pressing employers to make room for their workers’ family lives. The gains have also been personal. These women have not, like so many of their mothers, silently suffered cruelties behind closed doors. They have not been paralyzed by the shame that once befell a woman who was sexually misused: Telling her classmates that she had been molested and hit as a child helped free Elizabeth Michel to do useful work as a doctor, to raise healthy children. Their earnest candor has been, finally, the source of their great resilience. At the end of Carnal Knowledge, the character played by Jack Nicholson tells his buddy (Art Garfunkel) that he is a credulous schmuck, “but maybe schmuckiness is what you need to stay open.” The few in the class who have been most brittle and immobile are those, like Charlynn Maniatis, who have lived the most private lives.
The marriage of the personal and the political has had other good consequences. These women have made enduring alliances. They have found new ways to understand their lives and, from those new stories, the capacity for renewal and change. Most have at least partly sustained their vow to live their political convictions in their personal lives. Some have even tried to make their families into an alliance engaged together in civic life rather than a retreat from the world or a substitute for those larger obligations. If their kids have been heavily dosed with reality, they have also been given the capacity to see through the stories that bind them. Mary Day Kent recalls how her ten-year-old daughter analyzed her fourth grade class: She told her mom that the teacher does not call on girls, how her books are full of boys and have no black people in them, things Mary couldn’t see till she was thirty. Mary also marvels at seeing her daughter, a talented soccer player, discover what it feels like to be a hero in front of the world. “Sometimes I sit in a gym full of people cheering for my daughter and think: What would I have been like if as a girl I’d had a whole crowd counting on me to make the goal? Not just to be a cheerleader but to be the one to plunge in and kick the ball?”
In discussing her hope to keep other sick people company while they die, Nancy Young quotes Meister Eckehart, a thirteenth-century Dominican mystic. “To the extent that all creatures who are gifted with reason go out from themselves in all that they do, to that same extent they go into themselves.” In its largest sense, the dissolution of the boundary between the private and the public is the resolution Nancy describes, the making of binding relations with the widest circle of human beings.
Bibliography
The women of Wellesley’s Class of ’69 are avid readers whose lives and self-understanding have been deeply shaped by books. In trying to make sense of their world, I was greatly helped by reading a number of the books that have had meaning for them, as well as others that helped me understand the history of feminist thought and women’s lives in the last fifty years. Following is a highly selective list of those books I found most helpful or most revealing about these women.
Classics of First- and Second-Wave Feminism
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex (1949). New York: Random House, 1990.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell, 1963.
Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday, 1970.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (1929). San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1991.
_____. Three Guineas (1938). San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1993.
On Writing Women’s Lives
Conway, Jill Ker. Written By Herself: Autobiographies of American Women: An Anthology. New York: Vintage, 1992.
Heilbrun, Carolyn. Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: Ballantine, 1988.
Malcolm, Janet. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. New York: Knopf, 1994.
Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1977.
Olsen, Tillie. Silences. New York: Dell, 1965.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
Welty, Eudora. One Writer’s Beginnings. New York: Warner Books, 1991.
On Feminist Psychology and Theories of Gender
Bateson, Mary Catherine. Composing a Life. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. New York: Doubleday, 1972.
Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Dinnerstei
n, Dorothy. The Mermaid and the Minotaur. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.
Garber, Marjorie. Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Keller, Catherine. From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.
Tannen, Deborah. Gender and Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
On Women and Science, the Law, and Medicine
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century: A Book by and for Women. New York: Touchstone, 1998.
Keller, Evelyn Fox, ed. Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Keller, Evelyn Fox, and Helen E. Longino. Feminism and Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Okin, Susan Moller. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books, 1989.
Showalter, Elaine. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
On Love, the Sexual Revolution, and the Family
Baruch, Elaine Hoffman. Women, Love, and Power: Literary and Psychoanalytic Perspectives. New York: New York University Press, 1991.
Breines, Wini. Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trip. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Grant, Linda. Sexing the Millennium: Women and the Sexual Revolution. New York: Grove Press, 1994.
Rose, Gillian. Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life. New York: Schocken Books, 1996.
On Theology and Mythology
Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.
Dijkstra, Bram. Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood. New York: Knopf, 1996.
Lefkowitz, Mary. Women in Greek Myth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
Murphy, Cullen. The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Reeder, Ellen. Pandora: Women in Classical Greece. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994.
_____. Six Myths of Our Time. New York: Vintage, 1994.
On Popular Culture and the “Experts”
Douglas, Susan. Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media. New York: Times Books, 1994.
Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Dierdre English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1978.
Eyer, Diane. Motherguilt: How Our Culture Blames Mothers for What’s Wrong with Society. New York: Times Books, 1996.
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
Lasch, Christopher. Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Norton, 1991.
Lord, M. G. Forever Barbie. New York: William Morrow, 1994.
On Home, Fashion, and the Female Body
Davison, Jane, and Lesley Davison. To Make a House a Home. New York: Random House, 1994.
Hollander, Anne. Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress. New York: Kodansha Globe, 1994.
Peiss, Kathy. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998.
Yalom, Marilyn. A History of the Breast. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Exemplary Biographies
Bair, Dierdre. Anaïs Nin: A Biography. New York: Viking Penguin, 1996.
Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worm: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
Holmes, Richard. Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage. New York: Vintage, 1993.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Rose, Phyllis. Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. New York: Random House, 1984.
Historical and Statistical Resources
Anderson, Terry. The Movement and the Sixties. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Costello, Cynthia, Shari Miles, and Anne Stone, eds. The American Woman 1999–2000. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
Maraniss, David. First in His Class. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Palmieri, Patricia Ann. In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
Anthologies
Agonito, Rosemary, ed. The History of Ideas on Woman. Berkeley: Perigee Books, 1977.
Davidson, Cathy, and Linda Wagner-Martin, eds. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Pollitt, Katha. Reasonable Creatures. New York: Knopf, 1994.
Schneir, Miriam, ed. Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings. New York: Vintage, 1994.
_____. Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Tierney, Helen, ed. Women’s Studies Encyclopedia. New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1991.
Fiction and Plays
Craig, Patricia, ed. Oxford Book of Modern Women’s Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.
Jewett, Sarah Orne. The Country of the Pointed Firs. New York: Modern Library, 1995.
McCarthy, Mary. The Group. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1991.
O’Connor, Flannery. Everything That Rises Must Converge. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Bantam, 1983.
Wasserstein, Wendy. Unconventional Women and Others. New York: Dramatists Play, 1978.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM ANCHOR BOOKS
DIVIDED LIVES
by Elsa Walsh
Despite the large number of books devoted to women’s issues in the last twenty years, Washington Post reporter Elsa Walsh felt that the literature was missing a crucial element—the voices of women themselves. Setting out to probe the myriad layers of women’s lives and to illuminate the interior struggles women face at work and at home, Walsh spent over two years interviewing three highly successful women—60 Minutes correspondent Meredith Vieira, conductor and first lady of West Virginia Rachel Worby, and Dr. Alison Estabrook, chief of breast surgery at the country’s second largest hospital—about their lives.
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The Private Lives of Irish Women
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