Rebels in White Gloves Read Free

corporate structures that had to be challenged by women in solidarity with one another. Personal testimony became a political act; speaking out was a way to join and sustain the sisterhood. “The personal is political” also meant that there was a politics, a power relationship, in the family and that therefore such public values as justice and equality had to be taken home. It meant that all sorts of seemingly intimate choices—what kind of underwear one wore, whether and how and with whom one had sex—were political as well as personal, a way of confronting social rules as to how a lady behaved and of interrogating the complicated relationship between power and sexual consent. “The personal is political” meant that disputes traditionally treated as domestic and therefore private—acts of forced sex or of violence against one’s family members—would no longer be immune from public scrutiny. It meant that you had to “walk the talk,” align how you lived in the world—earned your money, disposed of your trash—with the values you professed. It meant, as well, that the political is personal: that the public realm of work and law had to be tempered with such “womanly” values as nurturance and compassion.
    The dissolution of the hard boundary that once separated the private from the public has had mixed consequences, and those consequences are the central subject of this book. Co-opted by commercial culture, the confessional impulse has grown grotesque on TV talk shows (though as David Halberstam points out in
The Fifties
, it was
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
, the show that has come to stand for all the marvelous family values America subsequently lost, that first took “what was most private”—the lives of the couple’s two sons—“and made it terribly public”). In politics, the idea that the personal behavior of a senator or president is a legitimate measure of his political character has often degraded civic discourse into scandalmongering. Hollywood has seized upon the openness toward sex and intimate violence as license to make them both staples of popular entertainment. Excessively shielded as girls from harsh realities, the women of ’69 have raised children excessively exposed. They have also sometimes lost their way on the “twelve-step” path. “The personal is political” has sometimes degenerated into the notion that personal revelation and transformation are politics enough.
    Yet it remains true that these women have taken great sustenance, like many women before them, from speaking truth to one another—it is a tradition still enacted at their class reunion meetings. The women of ’69 have come out as debutantes. They have also come out as lesbians, as victims of domestic abuse, as alcoholics. At the same time, they have remained possessed of the manners and dutiful habits instilled at Wellesley—a wonderful combination for any biographer attempting to retrace their lives. So Dorothy Devine, ’69, was not only able to promptly find and send me the 1970 report to the House Judiciary Committee on her subversive activities in the New Left and in Cuba—as well as snapshots of herself with bare-breasted celebrants at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and wreathed with laurel at a menopause rite. She also accompanied it all with a gracious note on flowered stationery in a lovely hand.
    “Why do we have all these problems we didn’t have in 1955?” Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich asked in a speech in 1994. “Because a long pattern of counterculture belief … has undervalued the family.” Nostalgia for the childhood world these women lost or abandoned, and disavowal of their generation’s “revolution” as a destructive spasm, are central tenets of political discourse in the 1990s. In the presentrendering of postwar history, the fifties marked the last golden moment of centuries of stable and happy families, a world of order and restraint