Rebels in White Gloves

by Miriam Horn

  “Sarah’s illness was the beginning of the reawakening of myself, my sleeping self that had been shelved when I got married and had children. I realized how invested I was in being a good mother. To have it blow up in my face, to realize that I had failed, which is how it felt then, was excruciating, striking at the core of who I said I was. I would sit at the soccer field, the only representative of a fully intact family, the only one who cooks dinner every night, and feel: This is not fair. I’m finally letting go of the blame and guilt, and feel a certain freedom and excitement, as if I’d lived in a small quadrant of a square and am finding a whole cube out there. It’s scary doing that when you’re almost fifty. It’s hard, having trained a whole family to expect Mom to take care of everything, to pull back and say, ‘No, you’re going to have to take care of that yourself.’ ”

  In 1994, Ann wrote to her classmates that “between PMS and HRT” she was shedding the “fantasies I grew up believing” and wanting “to earn money and status in a real job.” The next year, she became editor of Dallas Family Magazine. “My kids liked having their mother home, but they also like seeing me published. And I hope that out of my confusion they learned something. My daughters experienced my ambivalence, and also my ability to remedy mistakes. I hope they know that even though motherhood is demanding, it’s a job of finite duration, and there’s got to be a person underneath.

  “Like my mother, I have three girls and a boy. Like my mother, I gave up my career to be a full-time mom and community volunteer. She was on the school board; I’ve been active in my kids’ schools. There are tremendous parallels. It’s amazing how powerful that model is; it’s unspoken, but it’s the most powerful model you’ve got. As much as I admired my mother, she is not who I wanted to be. I wanted and demand much more from my life. My mother spent a lifetime keeping my father happy, taking care of his mother, doing all the parenting. She has always been taking care of someone else. As my parents have grown older, I’ve thought about moving them here, and then I feel myself suffocating under that feeling of, Oh my God, I’m going to do again what my mother did. I’m not going to do it. My mother is an utterly selfless person. It took me a long time to see that the word selfless cuts both ways.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  On Their Own

  Selfless. Self-effacing: gone over with a rubber eraser until just a few traces remain. Long-suffering. Eating what’s left when everyone else has had theirs. Eating nothing at all. Doubting herself when the ridicule begins. Searching her own faults when her lover or husband is unhappy or unfaithful or cruel. If only she wouldn’t provoke him. Keeping her looks, biting her tongue, smoothing things over. Giving attention, giving him space.

  Of all the confusions descended upon these women in their reinvention of a woman’s role, none has been so brambled as the question of how to measure the claims of love. Many would find in love the richest of all life’s satisfactions. But many would also discover that love could weaken and humiliate them. For love, they squandered hours in such helpless trivialities as waiting for the phone to ring, or sifted obsessively through the faintest ebbs and flows of romance—and its wreckage—with their friends. To keep men from leaving them, they acquiesced in arguments, made no demands; not knowing when to stand up for themselves, they swallowed and swallowed until poisoned with their own bile, or they burst with rage, another kind of helplessness, then slumped into fear and regret. They loathed their own cowardice: Abby van Alstyne, ’69, a civil rights lawyer living in Alabama, actually bent her head in shame as she recalled an evening, a decade earlier, when her husband had dropped a whole bowl of spaghetti on the floor just as she and a friend were rushing out to the theater. He stood and watched as she got down on her knees to clean it up. Though she would be late to the theater, she put up no fight. Abby was not, as she told the story, a victim: Though she saw herself acting out her girlhood training to always be good and make things right, she blamed herself, only herself, for remaining so thoroughly tamed. Later divorced, she reflected on how her timidity had eroded herself and her marriage.

  As the daughters of martyrs, these women suspected love and its sacrifices for another reason: They knew that a woman’s selfless attentions were not always a freely given gift but could be a trap, a demand, a means of surveillance and manipulation. Self-abnegating and deprived, a woman might extort an offering of guilt. Long-suffering, she might claim moral superiority. (Hillary Clinton, many have suggested, long ruled Bill by being the righteous one while he was the fuckup.)

  To resist collapsing in the name of love, it wasn’t enough for these women to know that they didn’t, in fact, need a saving prince as their mothers truly had. The belief that they needed protection had been too ingrained, the fairy tale ran too deep to be so easily exorcised; they would have to learn, through willful effort, to trust their own powers. For that they turned, as they so often had, to other women; together they could dash cold water on one another’s faces, talk up their courage, persuade one another that they were not damsels but roaring women. Feminism gave them acid aphorisms like Gloria Steinem’s (“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”) and Shulamith Firestone’s (“Love is the pivot of women’s oppression”). A new genre of self-help books, like Colette Dowling’s 1980 best-seller The Cinderella Complex, scolded them for their childish dependency and warned them not to love too much. In their consciousness-raising groups, they cultivated their anger as an alternative to self-suppression and self-blame: They would quit pleasing him, give as little as they got, stop being a doormat, throw the bastard out. When Alison Campbell Swain read of rumors that Hillary Clinton had hurled things at Bill, she thought: Good for her. Better that than bottle it up.

  Asked for their twentieth-reunion book what they strive to teach their daughters, the Wellesley women of ’69 spun variations on these themes: “not to depend financially, psychologically, emotionally—on a man.” “… that relationships with men are not the most important or reliable thing.” “… to take risks, question, speak up for herself, be neither perfect nor obedient nor compliant nor concerned with appearances and what others think.” “… to have the courage to act by herself, without fear of being alone.” Barbara Furne Simmons, who remarried in desperation immediately after being left by her first husband, and ten months later divorced, once “desired to surrender, to be swept away by someone. After a while, I began to wonder how much of me there was left to sweep away. Maybe just swept under. Now I know I can handle life, that I don’t need to grab for someone to save me.”

  Catherine Shen has suffered none of her classmates’ romantic helplessness or excessive docility. Her voice is startlingly free of sentimentality or apology. Divorced twice, Catherine has concluded that she is too selfish to be married. “I don’t like to live with someone and have to share. My most successful relationship was with a man eight years younger than me. I was thirty and he was twenty-two when we met, which was great, because he was totally malleable. I could make all the decisions. I need to get my own way. It’s difficult for me when the other person is equal. I find the Clinton marriage interesting because I know from classes I had with Hillary how smart and strong-willed and outspoken she is and I’m curious how two such strong people manage a partnership. The only person in the world I’ll sacrifice for is my son, Benjamin.”

  Catherine never liked or wanted children—“I hadn’t ever been in a panic I wouldn’t have kids, but a few times I was panicked that I would”—but when she got pregnant at forty-one she decided to have the child. She had met Benjamin’s father when she was features editor at the San Francisco Chronicle; they romanced long distance when she moved to Washington, D.C., to be an editor at USA Today and then to Honolulu to be publisher of that city’s daily. “I had the baby because, theoretically, the time was ripe; I was the age my mother was when she had me. We got married and I left the paper and moved back to California. I went back to work when Benjamin was four months. Then I discovered that once you have a child, a marriage is
renegotiated from scratch. My husband and I split the four hundred dollars a week for a nanny, but he was not one with the idea of a fifty-fifty split as far as keeping house or caring for the kid. Neither of us would compromise. We stick out in the same places, so instead of meshing, we poked into each other. I wasn’t going to give, so two years after we got married, we got a divorce.

  “I dote on my son; I can’t wait to get home to see him, and would have happily stayed home from work much longer when he was born. But my career has been drastically slowed. I would have gone to the Los Angeles Times, but the job required midnight hours, which as a single mother I couldn’t do. That’s fine after so many years doing exactly what I wanted to do, but I can’t imagine making that choice at twenty-eight. Now, like it or not, the next twelve years are centered on my child. I have fewer choices now, which is rarely a better circumstance to be in, in this world.”

  Divorce is somewhat less common in the Wellesley class of ’69 than it is in the nation as a whole. Still, one in three of those who have married has also divorced, and a majority of those divorces have involved children. The causes have been varied. A very few were, like Catherine, motivated to leave their marriage by an admittedly “selfish” insistence on having things their own way. Many more struck out on their own for more inescapable reasons: Some decided, like Ann Landsberg, that a hellish family was more destructive to themselves and their children than the alternative. Some fled physical danger. Some were left by their husbands, despite all pleadings that they stay.

  Betty Demy met her future husband at a Harvard Law School mixer. She was attracted to him because he was fiercely smart, like her father. She was also moved by an unhappiness she thought she might ease. It is, for some women, an irresistible combination: a man of accomplishment who is also wounded and in need.

  “My husband had lived an impoverished childhood, financially and emotionally,” says Betty. “He’d been very heavy as a boy, an odd duck, without many friends. There was a sad yearning in him that I responded to. I didn’t think I’d change him, but I thought that I could give him the things he’d always wanted and then he would be happy and his good qualities would prevail.”

  Betty had every reason to believe in the happiness promised by married life. Her parents were those “rare, lucky people” with a good marriage, a real partnership sustained by lasting love. “They traveled and had interesting friends and were involved in the community and politics and had wonderfully passionate conversations about ideas. My mother was not frustrated; she didn’t wish she were something else. I grew up wanting to have just what she had. And I thought it inevitable that I would grow into her life, that I would have a contented family and become Cub Scout leader and join the PTA.” Right on schedule, Betty was married a week after graduation in her parents’ New Jersey backyard, then moved with her husband to the Midwest for his service in the JAG Corps. “Like Bill Clinton and every other college boy I knew, my husband made a deal to stay out of Vietnam.” They soon had a baby girl, Rebecca, and a boy, Doug.

  Betty could not, she discovered, make her husband happy. When her new family returned to New Jersey and bought the house she’d grown up in, her husband quickly came to despise it. “Every day he found something new that was wrong. He was the same with our children, constantly disappointed—harsh and judgmental, as his father had been. At the dinner table it was always, ‘Put your napkin in your lap; get your elbows off the table.’ I played referee, but it was an unpleasant place to be. He complained that it undermined him. He was right. It did.”

  An animated woman, plump and pink-cheeked, Betty soon began to feel trapped and isolated. She tried to cheer herself up in a 1979 letter to her classmates—“My life revolves around kindergarten and nursery school, car pools and piano lessons, but I feel less frustrated than I did five years ago. Though some days are filled with trivia, I don’t feel sacrificed on the altar of motherhood.” Three months later she went to work part-time. “I realized it sounded awful to say you were bored raising your kids, but a lot of it was day-to-day drudgery. I needed an outlet outside the house. Mostly, I needed contact with adults besides my unhappy husband. I got a job at the newspaper, where for the first time in a long time I was not somebody’s mother or somebody’s wife. I felt part of the town, which I loved.”

  As for so many of these women, it was Betty’s emergence into the world that gave her the perspective and financial means to alter, or survive alterations, in her private life. “Once I started to regain my self-confidence, I began to realize how unhealthy my marriage was. Every day, our house was growing more filled with tension. It didn’t matter what my husband got—it didn’t assuage his need. He just got more and more angry, which increasingly spilled out on me.”

  Betty did not consider divorce. “I wasn’t going anywhere. I’d made a commitment, and I believe in fulfilling my obligations. I wanted to give my kids the best possible upbringing and thought it best to have two parents and the financial security of a marriage. Oh, in the long run, I knew I couldn’t stay with my husband. But if we had to split, I wanted the kids to be older so I could get a full-time job. Then my husband met somebody else, and I didn’t have a choice anymore. Truly, it was a relief when he left.

  “Divorce is awful, even if you’re getting out of a miserable circumstance. To divorce a lawyer is worst of all—he fought every step of the way.” So did Betty, who happened at the time to be helping a friend write a book about divorce and was alarmed by what she was learning about the way women get burned. Two years into the battle, her own lawyer erupted in anger: “He snapped at me, ‘What you need is a man to put you on your back where you belong.’ ” (He later denied saying any such thing.) By the time it was all over, Betty had won a judgment against him as well. In the end, she believes, she and her kids came out better than most. She had to leave the newspaper for a full-time job in public relations at a local hospital, which she didn’t love. “But it kept me in my community and available to my kids.”

  Since the divorce, Betty’s ex-husband has had almost no relationship with his children. He did not attend his son’s high school graduation. Though he met his financial obligations, for long periods of time, he had no direct contact with his kids, though his office is a mile from the family’s home. “I was finished enough with him that he could no longer hurt me, but what he’s done to my kids has been abominable. It was hardest on Doug, who was eight and idealized his father; he had a tough adolescence. My daughter was eleven, and told me, ‘I’m glad he’s gone. I never liked him.’ The pain hit her later. But I think both, fundamentally, are okay. Doug and I went out to dinner one night before he left for college. He told me that he felt he had to grow up faster than his friends, that he had more responsibility at an earlier age and a more realistic view of life and expectations and that he was glad for that.”

  Between 1960 and 1980, the divorce rate in America rose 250 percent. For that breakdown of the family, many have blamed feminism: Its rhetoric of fulfillment, they claim, subverted women’s natural inclination to place others’ needs above their own and substituted self-gratification, no matter the cost to their children. Feminism has actually promoted and celebrated the dissolution of marriage, in the view of some conservatives: Barbara Dafoe Whitehead finds evidence of a pro-divorce feminist culture in such books as Ivana Trump’s memoirs, which, she argues, commends divorce as a technique for self-improvement, like a poetry course or a trip to the spa.

  The argument is odd, and not only for the obvious reason that Ivana—like many of Hillary Clinton’s classmates—did not elect to be dumped by her husband. It is odd also because divorce is almost never the act of casual self-indulgence the defenders of family values pretend, a fact many must surely recognize from their own broken marriages. In the many sorrowful tales of divorce in the class of ’69, few resemble the cavalier, untroubled gesture that has become the cliché. Most of these women were lonely and wretched for years before leaving, or being left by, their husbands. They were
racked with impossible questions: Could she mend his happiness? What would harm the children least? Was giving herself up to duty a way to avoid responsibility for her own life?

  To see the divorce boom as a consequence of feminism betrays as well a shallow sense of history. From the nation’s beginnings, as rugged individualists lit out for the territories in search of wealth and freedom, America has been “the place where husband and wife often split,” as John Locke wrote at the end of the seventeenth century. The divorce rate has risen for three centuries at a fairly steady pace, doubling at the turn of the twenteith century, as it would again in the sixties.

  It is true that first-wave feminists fought against laws that made a woman her husband’s property and gave him alone the prerogative to sever the contract and claim custody of the children, and that temperance activists fought for a woman’s right to divorce a drunk. It is also true that second-wave feminism helped women secure the financial capacity to leave and raised their consciousness about the limits to forbearance. But the rise in divorce has also been impelled by a commercial culture that continuously stimulates an appetite for the new, and by changes in the economy that have blurred the very purpose of marriage: With ever more domestic services available for purchase, and with most women earning their own wages, men have ceased to need wives to cook their meals or mend their clothes and women have ceased needing husbands to support them. At the same time, as extended families and communities have loosened their ties, marriage has increasingly been expected to fulfill all needs for intimacy and companionship—an impossible, often fatal, burden.

  Feminists have in fact often opposed social changes that made divorce easier, like the no-fault laws that many argued would help impoverish women and children. Most such laws eliminated or radically abbreviated alimony, as if women like Betty Demy could quickly match their husbands’ earning power—even though they had set aside their own career advancement for years to raise kids and even though they had lost their most valuable common property: the joint investment in their husband’s career assets. After divorce, the private inequalities in such marriages become social inequalities, with the husband’s household much richer and the wife’s much poorer.