Rebels in White Gloves

by Miriam Horn

  Again, such victories were easily mocked. In March 1968, four Princeton boys wrote the Wellesley News regarding the “recent history of growing student disobedience and immorality at Wellesley as evidenced by radical changes in parietals and dress … oh Wellesley, no longer may America look upon you as an impregnable bastion against drugs, booze, atheism, crime in the streets and pinko Communist libs. Go, we say, abolish your Bible requirements, lock yourselves in your bedrooms with strangers, dress like slovenly hoodlums instead of young ladies of breeding. We will never suffer our daughters to enter your sin-filled portals.”

  Easy targets though they were, the battles fought by the class of ’69 were perhaps not so trivial: The demand for cars on campus seems somewhat less so when one considers how many of these girls’ mothers were literally imprisoned in their suburban homes each day when their husbands took the family’s only car to work, and how enamored the culture then was of the freedom promised by the open road—and the backseat. Nor was it frivolous for these women to seek the same personal freedoms that had always been allowed college men: Even in the 1990s, campus rules serve symbolically for the fundamental question of whether a woman can take responsibility for herself, alone with a man, without a chaperone. “We were determined to be treated not as girls but as adults,” says Nancy Gist. The radical freedom for which they ultimately fought was to control their own sexual behavior at a time of immense upheaval in social mores.

  Good Girls and Bad

  As with marriage, the messages about sex were, in those years, profoundly mixed. These women had grown up well aware that an American tragedy awaited the girl who went all the way. Women who had sex before marriage, like Dorothy Devine, were damaged, used up, even criminally delinquent. “There were good girls and bad girls, and bad girls did things good girls wouldn’t,” Ann Sherwood Sentilles, ’69, recalls. “You didn’t smoke or drink or go beyond petting. My father, who was a surgeon in Geneva, Ohio, would come home every so often and say, ‘Another one of your friends is in trouble. I don’t want to be embarrassed by that. Don’t do anything that would bring shame on the family.’ We all knew what happened if you got pregnant. You were disappeared—sent away to a home for wayward girls to have the baby under cover of night and give it up for adoption. That sort of thing didn’t happen to a Wellesley girl. We were good girls. That’s how we got there in the first place.”

  And yet. Something changed between freshman year, when Ann Landsberg, ’69, was “shocked” to find birth control pills in a senior’s room, and junior year, when she lamented that she was one of the last virgins on campus. The senior yearbook, designed by Alison “Snowy” Campbell, ’69, flaunted the girls’ new sexually knowing ways. Making a lewd pun on ’69 in what she looks back on as “the naughtiest thing I ever did in my life,” the angel-faced, willowy girl with soft brown eyes and white-blond hair put an acid-pink and green Mae West—in the psychedelic Art Nouveau style common to rock posters—right side up on the front cover, upside down on the back. (One of the many cheers for this class includes the line: “upside down, right side up, one-nine-six-nine Wellesley,” though that was before oral-sex jokes became a source of public torment for Hillary.) A picture meant for the yearbook frontispiece was pulled at the last moment by the college administration: It featured the bare-assed figures of Snowy and Eldie and two other girls standing atop their dorm roof surveying the lush landscape. With a self-importance typical of their generation, they left the frontispiece blank but for a small, somber note about censorship by official powers. Yet for all their bravado, an innocence lingered at the marriage lecture in their senior year, which, against the wishes of the dean, addressed the subject of sex both inside and outside of marriage. The invited speaker, Carola Eisenberg of MIT’s department of psychiatry, advised the girls that “if intercourse does occur, it is usually at first disappointing, often horrifying.” The many young women in the audience who wanted to know what an orgasm was were chastised. “This is a medical question and will not be answered here. Go to the infirmary.”

  Like everything else, the sexual revolution reached Wellesley on a kind of time delay; elsewhere it had been gaining momentum since the end of World War II. A culture in the thrall of Freud anointed sexual fulfillment the best yardstick for measuring psychic well-being. Talking about sex became an acceptable, even necessary, proof of modern thinking: The Kinsey studies, first published in 1948, became runaway bestsellers with their accounts (however reliable) of rampant sexual experimentation in mainstream America. In 1953, the year the new Playboy magazine offered advice to men on how to outsmart “Miss Gold Digger” and get sex without getting trapped, half of American women said they were having premarital sex; from 1940 to 1961, the number of illegitimate births to mothers under twenty-five increased by 300 percent. “It seems that all America is one big orgone box,” proclaimed a Time magazine cover story in January 1964, referring to the libido-enhancing machine conceived by Freud disciple Wilhelm Reich. “Day and night from screens and stages, advertising posters and newspaper pages it flashes larger-than-life-sized images of sex … with the message that sex will save you and libido make you free.” Everything from “incest to inversion” could be found in novels like Tropic of Cancer, Peyton Place, and Valley of the Dolls, complained Newsweek. In Hollywood, taboos were crumbling, which in 1967 the head of the film production code deemed “the most healthy thing.” Anaïs Nin offered her recipe for happiness: “Mix well the sperm of four men in one day.” Even the leader of the National Council of Churches joined in, urging couples to “conjure up various positions” for their mutual pleasure. And no longer was carnal knowledge the exclusive province of girls of the lower classes. A psychologist at Radcliffe estimated that in the fifteen years after 1950, the proportion of girls having intercourse in college had risen from 25 to 40 percent. Where a generation earlier college boys had of necessity strayed off campus, “today they’re looked down on if they can’t succeed with a coed.”

  Though the sexual revolution is now remembered as a legacy of the sixties, it was not the younger generation that had launched this “orgy of open-mindedness,” in Time’s view, but their elders, “who embrace the Freudian belief that repression, not license, is the great evil … and Ernest Hemingway’s manifesto that ‘what is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.’ ” Cynthia Gilbert, ’69, recalls an unsettling trip to the psychiatrist to deal with crippling bouts of depression during her sophomore year at Wellesley. “I’d just gotten engaged; our family had never been quite the Father Knows Best scenario, and I wanted the ‘real family’ that I hadn’t had. The psychiatrist felt my childhood had been totally repressed and that I should be sleeping with my fiancé. I told her that in my family you simply didn’t have sex, and she said, ‘Why not?’ I told her a story my mother had told me of going to a back alley with her best friends for an abortion in the thirties. She told me I could always go to Mexico if I had to. That psychiatrist’s ‘Why not?’ scenario turned my already upside-down world totally inside out. Maybe a more gradual change would have been more helpful. My father was authoritarian; when I took that psychiatrist’s advice and threw it all over, it was like adding fat to the fire.”

  Even at home, youngsters were pushed toward adult behavior too soon, Time warned in that same 1964 story, “by ambitious mothers who want them to be popular; with padded brassieres for twelve-year-olds and pressure to go steady at an ever younger age.” Nancy Wanderer had balked in junior high at her mother’s insistence that she wear heels and a girdle and makeup; she fought in vain against her mother’s demand that she perm her hair. “She thought I should be more interested in dating, and though I didn’t want to date, I did want to please her. So in eighth grade I had a torrid romance with a guy at my brother’s school, who was three years older than me. He initiated me sexually, though I was so inexperienced, I didn’t even realize it. My mother had never told me what not to do.”

  With her parents’ blessing, Na
ncy and her beau talked about marriage and opened a joint bank account, a serious form of playing house in a decade when one out of every two girls was a teenage bride. But the sex had unnerved Nancy. “I quickly wised up that getting pregnant at thirteen was not the way to a great life. I broke it off, and after that I stayed in control. I just wouldn’t have intercourse. At Wellesley I went out with this guy from MIT, a jazz pianist who was completely full of himself and was always telling me I should trade in my skirts and turtlenecks for something slinkier. Another guy, from Harvard, broke up with me ’cause I wouldn’t have sex with him, then called me later to boast that he was sleeping with a girl at a local trade school. I lost so much valuable time at Wellesley with all my involvement with men. On weekends, the men’s schools would send scouts to campus to pick up as many girls as they could fit in their cars to bring us to parties. It was like going for provisions. I was sick of all the smoothness, sick of the pressure not to be myself, worn-out by the struggle of: Will I have sex? Will I get birth control? I decided the important thing was to settle who would be the best husband. I wanted to get marriage over with, and put to rest all those questions about sex.”

  Useful Women

  If the culture of the late sixties sent these women contradictory messages about marriage and sex, their alternatives—for financial self-sufficiency, professional achievement, worldly adventure—were no clearer. Again, Wellesley offered muddled guidance. The only one of the Seven Sisters to have always had a woman president and a charter mandating female faculty, Wellesley offered in its deans and scholars the first model that many of these girls had encountered of women committed to an intellectual and public life. For all its lingering scent of a finishing school, the college maintained rigorous academic standards and afforded an opportunity for its students to exert leadership without competition from men. Wellesley also had a remarkable history of educating “useful” women. In 1892, the college had graduated twelve doctors and twenty missionaries; by the turn of the century, it was sending substantial numbers of women into social work. Many became heads of settlement houses and trade unions or suffragists. Carolyn Wilson, ’10, covered the First World War for the Chicago Tribune. Marguerite Stitt Church, ’14, went to Congress from Illinois. Madame Chiang Kai-shek, ’17, served as liaison between Nationalist China and the U.S.: In 1943, she went before Congress to plead for help in her nation’s war against Japan, and, ever the Wellesley girl, described the lawmakers as “clodhopping, boorish and uncivilized.” Patricia Lockridge Bull, ’37, landed with the marines at Iwo Jima and was the first woman correspondent to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp. Jocelyn Gill, ’38, was chief of in-flight science at NASA; Selma Gottlieb, ’41, designed helicopters. Madeleine Albright, ’59, would become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the first woman secretary of state. Cokie Roberts, ’64, and Diane Sawyer, ’67, would have spectacular journalistic careers. A 1962 survey of all alumnae found that more than four fifths had been employed, the vast majority in teaching. Though 62 percent had stopped work at marriage, 18 percent had worked for twenty years or more.

  Still, “old maid” professors offered a warning as much as a model to the class of ’69. And in a cultural climate so inhospitable to the education of young women for anything but future domestic roles, Wellesley joined other women’s colleges in actively discouraging professional ambition in its charges. Though the deans consistently assured the girls that they were the cream of the cream, America’s smartest young ladies, in the marriage lecture during their freshman year, the dean of the college advocated that the girls pursue work only as volunteers, to avoid competition—professional or financial—between husband and wife. During a debate over going coed, the director of admissions, Miss Clough, defended their single-sex education on the grounds that it prepared them for a “post-college life in community affairs with mostly women.” An editorial in the college newspaper found “it probable that most Wellesley girls see professional careers, not marriage responsibilities, as the diversion” from their true and ultimate path in life. Jacqueline Kennedy was held out as the ideal: A “certifiable egghead,” multilingual, a painter and art lover, educated at Vassar and the Sorbonne, she had been above all else exquisitely gracious and ornamental at her husband’s side. “Those of us who graduated from Wellesley in the sixties weren’t ever meant to have futures … or opinions,” recalled writer and director Nora Ephron, ’62, “we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect.” Even the campus architecture underscored the message, as classics professor Mary Lefkowitz has noted. The Wellesley library doors are ornamented with two figures: Wisdom is a man; his female companion is Charity, comforting a child.

  In the late sixties, the college newspaper was full of advertisements for engagement rings, padded bras, and pantie girdles, for a new computer dating service at MIT and Princeton tryouts for go-go girls for the Yale game. “Taking your M.R.S.?” asked a regular ad. “Do your cramming with Modern Bride.” Recruitment notices were limited to those for Katherine Gibbs secretarial school (“the best way to get started in any field”); Braniff flight hostesses (“wear world-famous Pucci fashions as you fly in the most fascinating career of women today. You must be under 27, single and weigh less than 135 pounds”); and the CIA.

  Outside of Wellesley, there was little more encouragement. Nearly half the women in America were working in 1965, but three quarters of them held clerical, sales, or household jobs. A report that year by the President’s Commission on the Status of Women detailed widespread wage discrimination and a rapidly declining ratio of women in professional and executive jobs. Though in 1966 NOW condemned the custom that men carry the sole burden of supporting a family—“for a girl as for a boy, education can only be serious when there is an expectation that it will be used in society”—and launched lawsuits against employment discrimination, not until 1973 would the Supreme Court bar help-wanted ads listed by sex. In sum, the working world offered little but frustration to the college girl. As Radcliffe graduate Julie Hayden wrote in a 1965 Atlantic Monthly essay that was excerpted in the Wellesley News: “We wind up the Kafka readers in the typists’ pool, the seekers after truth making coffee.”

  The “experts” were just as discouraging about work as they had been about education, diagnosing a woman with career aspirations as neurotic and unfeminine and a danger to society. The panel of male doctors gathered by Life magazine warned that “the disease of working women leads to children who become juvenile delinquents, atheists, Communists, and homosexuals. Daddy understands business. Mommy understands children.” Even anthropologist Margaret Mead, who inspired numerous feminists with her argument that “personality traits we call masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to gender as are the clothing, manners and form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex,” also argued that a girl’s flickering ambition toward “compensatory achievement” dies down with the certainty of maternity. “It is of doubtful value to enlist the gifts of women if bringing them into fields defined as male frightens the men, and unsexes the women.”

  The popular culture offered few depictions of women at work, except for those unfortunates who had so far failed to snare a man. The secretary setting a trap for the promising young executive was a stock character of the time, in films like The Apartment and stories like John Cheever’s “The Five Forty-Eight.” The “organization bimbo,” Newsweek called her. “Miss B.A., who has failed to catch a husband, is in New York seeking men,” reported Look magazine in 1966. “She will be asked just one thing. ‘How’s your steno, dear?’ Nimble fingers are of more interest than her nimble mind.” Burdened with aspirations stirred up by college, she’ll likely find herself “beaten out for jobs by docile high school grads, who win secretarial desks because college women grow restless too soon.” The lucky ones will “end up typing letters, watering the boss’s rubber plant and earning $65 a week.” But never mind, the editors consoled, defying the conventional w
isdom that a girl educated herself out of the marriage market. “The college girl holds one advantage. While the Katie Gibbs grad lands the higher pay, it’s the B.A. who succeeds with the college man.”

  Even women who had committed to serious work voiced ambivalence at the price. In her essay “Silences,” published in Harper’s Magazine in 1965, Tillie Olsen demonstrated how nearly impossible it was for a woman to do creative work and also be a mother and wife: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf—all had remained childless throughout their lives. Sylvia Plath wrote of her fears that a woman dedicated to creative work would “sacrifice all claims to femininity and family.” Anaïs Nin worried that she would shrivel a man were she to “steal his thunder [and] outshine him.”

  At home, for many of these women, the message was much the same. Mary Day Kent’s mother had dropped out of Wellesley at the end of her junior year, in 1945, to get married, and she made it clear to her daughter that the aim of college was not to prepare herself for work but “to be a more interesting person to meet a more interesting husband.” Marilyn Hagstrum’s mom urged her daughter to focus less on her grades and more on her bridge: She, too, was at Wellesley “to fit in socially, to meet somebody nice with good prospects and get married.”

  The Wellesley girls took such admonitions to heart. The majority of seniors in the class of ’69, like most women in college that year, expected to work only until they married or had their first child. Few graduated with professional goals and plans. Most still believed it best for men to be breadwinners and women to be wives.