by Miriam Horn
Eventually, Nonna moved all three into nursing homes. When her father realized that his independent life had come to an end, he looked at her and said, “I guess the ball game’s over, huh?,” which left Nonna unspeakably sad. She still faces mountains of mail each day: their medical bills and financial affairs. She shops for their clothes and diapers. She hasn’t had a vacation in five years; to go away for two weeks isn’t possible. On weekends she cooks “vegetables and stuff” to take to them and spends a day visiting them. Sometimes, she takes her father out with her to the store or the park and listens to his ceaseless, senseless talk.
Nonna has been for the most part alone with her responsibilities. When her mother collapsed, the man she was involved with helped her through the worst; his mother had a stroke at the same time, so they helped each other. Her closest friends have been gay men who know what it’s like to watch people they love waste away. As her other friends had children, those friendships faded away: “They’re so wrapped up; they don’t have time to hang around.” When her parents both fell ill, she found her support network still more broken down. “People who haven’t been through it don’t understand. They’d ask, ‘Does your father drive?’ Does he drive? He doesn’t know where he is or how to get from here to the bathroom. And people get squeamish, or spooked. They’ll entertain you, and a few real gems will help with responsibilities. But not many people will visit an old folks’ home. My greatest source of renewal has been church, but I’m a liberal Catholic and most churches leave me muttering angrily in the back row. I like to go to the black Catholic church and hear the gospel choir, but it takes three hours to go to mass, which now I don’t very often have.”
If there is any bitterness in Nonna, it is well concealed. “This is what I do every weekend. I feel like I have my caseload. These things drain you. But I had a charmed life for twenty-five years. I was carefree. I traveled the world. My parents were good to me when I was a child. So I don’t resent it. It’s shocking to watch sometimes, unbelievable really, and I often wonder which is harder—to lose somebody suddenly or to watch them slip away and lose their personality. It’s probably easier when it happens fast, but I’m glad to have them around, grateful for this chance to nurture them a bit. This is the closest experience to parenting I’ll ever have. They are my children.” Here is another of these women who, though they have never had a child, have experienced loyalties and loves as consuming and irrevocable as maternity. They have made homes worthy of Robert Frost’s description—that place that when you have to go there, they have to let you in.
CHAPTER NINE
Spiritual Journeys
In discussions of ethics and faith, a common metaphor is concentric circles. Each larger circle represents a higher level of moral development. The smallest circle is the self; those caught within that circle, concerned only with the self, are the most stunted of spirit. The next-larger circle is the family, then community, and finally—the highest good, embodied in such beings as the Bodhisattva and Christ—a universal love and concern. The metaphor is complicated. One can advance toward the largest circle by gradually enlarging one’s commitments: moving from the personal to the political. But one can also reach the largest circle by traveling inward, finding through meditative and spiritual practices an essential unity of the self with all things, a sense that any need or suffering or joy in the world is one’s own. Both paths have been traversed by the women of Wellesley ’69.
For many in the class, the spiritual search began in childhood: Nancy Young yearned to be a Catholic nun; Chris Osborne secretly rendezvoused with Alan Watts and Zen. Many more began their quest for the transcendental in the sixties: Matilda Williams’s ordination as a Thai Buddhist nun and Alison Campbell Swain’s sojourn among the sprites at Findhorn were only slightly more dramatic than the Himalayan treks and sustained meditations in Zen monasteries undertaken by numerous of their classmates. Some sought their spiritual home in the established church, though almost never without difficulty; others have preferred the “New Age.” For an increasing proportion of the class, the search is at the center of their lives.
In the Church
After graduating from Wellesley, Susan Alexander, ’69, did brilliantly at Princeton Theological Seminary and swept easily through her ordination exams. But then Susan couldn’t get a job. To become a minister, she had to get “a call” from a congregation, which in the Presbyterian church demonstrates God’s approval of a new shepherd for His flock. No matter how many doors she knocked on, her call to service failed to come. “Most congregations were not into the idea of a woman minister. I got more than one letter from a church telling me that it was clear to them that it was not God’s will that a woman should serve in that role. After a while, I began to think they were on to something. I certainly found it difficult to convince God to change His mind.”
Instead, in the midst of the 1973 recession, Susan found herself dismally unemployed. Her lowest moment came when she was turned down for a part-time Christmas sales position at Saks Fifth Avenue, New York. She ended up a temp at an engineering firm sending out Christmas cards. “An appropriate job, I thought, for a graduate of divinity school.”
Despairing of her prospects in the ministry, Susan began working on a doctorate in psychotherapy and training as a pastoral counselor. Through her work with alcoholics and the recently deinstitutionalized mentally ill at a Bowery mission in New York City, she managed finally to be ordained. At thirty-one, it appeared her life was at last secure. She married a “handsome, charming, romantic” man, a chef ten years her senior, from a big Boston Irish Catholic family, who had been a minor league baseball player and a sailor and a cowboy. They settled on Long Island. In their suburban congregation, she even got a call.
Eighteen months later, Susan was pregnant, which turned out to be more than her new congregation could bear. “The women, who were largely homemakers, had problems with the idea that their minister would be a mother who worked.” They asked Susan to resign. Though the Presbyterians had been one of the more progressive denominations—ordaining women earlier than most and championing the exercise of individual conscience in interpreting scripture—“no church always lives up to its own ideals,” says Susan. “The institution gets involved in keeping itself going, and sabotages its own higher purposes. And people in churches are like people everywhere. You can’t blame it on God.”
Though only a handful of women in the class of ’69 have become clergy, the church is the institution class members most often name as the most important in their lives; they are as a group both religious and churchgoing. Fifteen percent describe themselves as “strictly” observant; another 30 percent describe religion as “very important.” So though few would have to contend, like Susan, directly with the “stained-glass ceiling,” many would endure discordances between the demands of their faith and their politics and professional lives.
With the possible exception of science, the church has been for much of its history the most rigid of all authorities on the question of woman’s nature and role. Though Jesus and his earliest followers seem to have espoused a radical egalitarianism, from the time the church became aligned with the politically powerful, that early equality was set aside. Augustine described woman as sinful and “naturally subject” to man’s higher reason. Aquinas anticipated Freud in naming her a “misbegotten male,” who benefits when she performs the role to which her lower capacities are suited. Nineteenth-century clergymen met feminism’s first wave with exhortations to pious men to contain their unruly wives and daughters, quoting a passage of the Gospels lately resurrected by the evangelical men’s group the Promise Keepers: “Even as Christ is head of the church, the husband is the head of the wife.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton responded with a denunciation of the church’s patriarchal structure and of its teachings that women brought sin and death into the world. She created her own “woman’s Bible,” for which she was excoriated even by her feminist sisters. As Susan Alexander would discover a centu
ry later, the patrolling of woman’s place in the religious community has often been led not by the male clergy but by the female congregation.
Indeed, little had changed by the time Susan and her classmates were finding their way into the church. While Susan was in college, the Vatican pronounced Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex a forbidden text; after the publication of The Church and the Second Sex (1968), feminist theologian Mary Daly was fired (briefly) from the faculty of Boston College: She had questioned the notion of God the Father and challenged the usurpation of the sacred feminine power embodied in “the hag, the crone, the amazon and goddess.” Radical politics were infiltrating the church from the left, with clergy leading civil rights marches and third world liberation movements and burning draft board files, but also from the right, with evangelical ministers preaching against the Equal Rights Amendment as a “satanic attack” upon the home and warning that wife beating would continue as long as women refused to submit to men. (In 1998, the denomination to which Hillary Rodham Clinton’s husband belongs—the Southern Baptist Convention—would officially declare that a woman should “graciously submit” to her husband.)
The day after Susan gave birth to her son, her family was evicted. Her husband was, as usual, out of work. And the family was broke: What little money Susan was able to bring in, he spent on drink, which made him turn miserable and mean. Four months from completing a doctorate on which she had already spent four years, Susan had to quit her graduate program. “I was an emotional basket case and in terrible financial trouble. And then it got worse. I’d get up at five in the morning on weekends to go to New Jersey to preach, and my mom would take care of my son. One Sunday, my husband beat her up. Another time he came in with a gun at 4 A.M. and was going to shoot us all. For a while I tried going to AA meetings for help, but I couldn’t afford a baby-sitter. And the situation was clearly dangerous. I may make bad choices for relationships, but my child didn’t make this choice. I finally had to tell my husband he couldn’t be in the house any longer. It was a horrible thing to have to do. I loved him, but I had to fight this terrible battle to get him to go, and still he hung around the neighborhood. He died within a year after leaving, before our son was two years old.”
Susan’s story contains age-old themes: a wife impoverished and shamed by her husband’s drunkenness; a woman chastised by the church for failing to conform to its conception of the good mother; a mother whose choices are narrowly circumscribed by the urgent need to secure the physical and financial safety of her child. Variations on it have played out in the lives of many in the class: 10 percent report having been abused or battered; one in three has been involuntarily unemployed.
But Susan’s story is also a new one. Alone and out of work, with a nine-month-old baby, she went back again to a temp agency. Able to type eighty-five words a minute, she qualified as a “superior” secretary and on her first day was sent to Wall Street, to Kidder Peabody’s new interest-rate-futures division. In short order, her supervisors had spotted her talents for mathematical analysis and writing and promoted her into a position that she quickly came to love. That a secretary could break so quickly into a high-powered, high-stakes job was evidence of a rapid transformation of the financial markets, and also of how feminism had altered the world. Four years later, having hit a glass ceiling at Kidder, Susan went to Oppenheimer as vice-president in charge of commodities research; she found it a company free of sexism that “judged you entirely on what you did.”
The largely female world of social service had been demoralizing for Susan: “Everything was all dingy and broken-down, and nothing worked; it was not an environment particularly reinforcing to my self-esteem.” But she loved the ways of Wall Street, strange as it was to be so content in a world she had once despised. “You dress powerfully, you take private cars, your whole environment bespeaks power.” Overcome by a sense of powerlessness at home, Susan was rejuvenated at work by the same trappings of power that have sustained many a man. And while in one sense, she seemed to have abandoned her social commitment, for a battered, impoverished woman to move from terrified helplessness to a conviction of her own competency and self-sufficiency could itself be seen as an act of social progress.
Susan did continue to conduct Sunday services at churches too poor to support a full-time minister. “I would go to places that scared me to death, where the church was the only building that hadn’t been burned down. It was a fantastic experience. The church mattered so much to people as shelter from their harsh environment.
“I suffered at leaving a life in the church, and never imagined I would end up where I did. But I came to believe that not serving the church in an official way didn’t mean that I was failing to live up to my ideals. There’s nothing that’s really pure. And I had a child to raise, and knew I could do a lot of damage. I had grown up thinking you worked to improve the world. By this time, I understood that work was what you had to do to earn a living; it was how I would support my son.
“When you’re young, you have great contempt for the lives people end up living. You think people have more choices than they have. Now I admire people who’ve paid the mortgage, sent kids to college, maintained a relationship, no matter how pedestrian that all is.”
For many years, Katherine Shepeluk Loutrel ’69 found refuge in Pentecostal Christianity from monstrous family miseries. Her father was a steelworker, frequently out of work and dependent on his wife’s income as a nurse. Katherine, one of ten children, grew up caring for her siblings and shielding them from her father’s drunken rages. She found some protection for herself in her accomplishments at school and her dutifulness at home: “They were the only things that pleased my dad, and exempted me from some of the punishments my siblings were subjected to. He wouldn’t hurt me if I kept the house clean.” Still, the pain in her family reached gothic proportions. One sister was manic-depressive. Another killed herself at twenty-one, leaving behind a young child. Three siblings became alcoholics. The oldest sibling suffered his dad’s worst beatings yet remained living with him until his death, unable to drive, unemployed, and “not knowing how to live a life except one of being abused.” Another brother died of unknown causes; both dead children were discovered by their mother in her home. Katherine herself has been diagnosed in the last decade with multiple sclerosis and depression, and has continued to deal with alcoholism and attempted suicide in her family.
Katherine survived, she believes, only because of her strong faith. “My mother and I both had a life-changing experience when I was fourteen. After hearing a preacher preach that Jesus died in my place because I was a sinner and that I needed to acknowledge that and repent and then I would have a new life, I would be born again, my mother and I made that commitment.” Katherine loved the “noisy ecstasy” of services, where worshipers danced and sang in the spirit and spoke in tongues. While her classmates testified to one another in consciousness-raising meetings, she testified before her congregation and God. “I told God that my life belonged to Him. Then at the end of my freshman year at Wellesley, I was at a church in Boston and felt God challenge me to go into medicine; I said, ‘I’ll try the doors and if they open, I’ll know that’s what you want me to be.’ I didn’t feel or anticipate any great conflict between my science and my faith, though I did feel that Creation should have been taught as well as evolution, which I consider merely a theory that I don’t personally hold.”
Katherine was accepted to medical school on a full scholarship. Her father was “so proud that I was doing what he might have done if he’d gone to high school.” At the same time, after many dry years, he began drinking again. “My mother began having to hide from him in the closet and finally had to leave. I was twenty-eight years old, but it was still painful. I believe divorce is not what God wants, but we have to deal with sinful people and can’t always do what God wants. My mother had been a marvelous wife: self-effacing, quiet, caring, and giving. She worked hard and suffered long.”
Just be
fore starting medical school, Katherine met her future husband, Lou, at a summer camp where Pentecostal Christians led street meetings to share their faith. They were married, and on the eve of her genetics final, Katherine gave birth to their first child. During her internship, Lou worked to support the family, but as soon as Katherine started her residency and was earning money, Lou decided “someone needed to care for the kids” and became a househusband, which he has been ever since. He didn’t mind giving up work, though his dad, a vice-president of Sherwin Williams, thought it a waste of his education, Katherine says, “which I realized was just what had always been said about the foolishness of educating women just to stay home.”
The Pentecostal church, clear in its policy that men were not to permit their wives to work, could not accept the arrangement at all. “When I was doing my rounds one evening, I visited a deacon who was a patient in the hospital, and he told me I was violating God’s will by being in medicine. I knew I was fulfilling God’s call. But soon after that, I was told to leave the church because the powers that be thought women should be at home.”
Katherine has remained, nonetheless, a believer in the church’s higher authority. After her expulsion from the Pentecostals, her family joined a Baptist church. In 1993, her daughter Becky made front-page news in Champaign-Urbana as salutatorian in her public high school graduating class. She thanked God at the end of her speech, acknowledging His sovereignty in her life and asking that He care for the students who were graduating. “Needless to say, this mother was very proud.”
Their collisions with the church have led some members of the Wellesley class of ’69 into active efforts to create a larger space there for women. Pam McLucas Beyers became an elder of her Presbyterian church and helped “call” a woman as their new pastor. She also chaired a task force on homosexuality and the Christian faith, believing that “the ordination of gays is an issue of justice and inclusiveness—surely central themes in Jesus’s message.” Rachel Gorn Tedesco served on the board of the Massachusetts Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Elizabeth Nordbeck, the first woman in 154 years to join the faculty of the Lancaster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, taught the history of women in the church and was later named dean; in 1990 she became the first female dean in 183 years at Andover Newton Theological School. Still, she finds “sexism alive and well even in ‘enlightened’ places,” as she wrote to her classmates. “I’ve considered alternatives ranging from becoming an herbalist to shooting myself.”