Rebels in White Gloves Read Free Page A

tragically dismantled by the nihilistic assault in the sixties on traditional values. In this view, selfish ambition and wanton pleasure-seeking triumphed over a spartan sense of responsibility, precipitating the family’s demise: Since the nurturance and moral education of family is traditionally the responsibility of women, it follows that they bear the greatest share of blame for this tragedy. It was for men to shoulder the burdens—and honor—of work and civic life. When women insisted on stepping into the public arena as well, they betrayed their calling as the keepers of a domestic haven in a heartless world.
    When my brief portrait of five women of Wellesley ’69 (U.S. attorney Kris Olson Rogers, Dr. Lonny Laszlo Higgins, and management consultant Janet McDonald Hill—all married working moms; Susan Alexander, a divorced working mom; and Kathy Smith Ruckman, a married full-time mom) appeared in
U.S. News & World Report
on the occasion of their twenty-fifth reunion, the letters received by the magazine reflected this sense of betrayal. A military man stationed in Europe wrote: “I submit that Kathy Ruckman, who got married, had children and stayed home, is the most successful career woman of the bunch. It’s also a good bet her children aren’t high school dropouts, drug addicts, unwed mothers, gang members, or in some other way a burden on society.… This is what the rest of these ‘gifted women’ … have given us.” A woman in Hitchcock, Oklahoma, charged that “the group rebelled against more than the traditional family. Hillary and classmates rebelled against the Ten Commandments.” To another woman, from Newton, New Jersey, Hillary’s generation of women was the reason “we are in big trouble today—the most important word in their vocabulary is ‘mine.’ Look at how many are divorced. [Their parents made sacrifices in the armed services] so these ungratefuls could live, and now they are trying to destroy this great country.”
    They have destroyed the family and ruined America’s children, defied the divine order and sabotaged morality, replaced self-sacrifice and duty with arrogant self-absorption and greed. That is the charge made against this generation of women. They have torn down American values, or sold out to them. In the process, they have ruined their own lives and created a nightmare for their daughters. A 1994
Frontline
documentaryon Hillary’s class depicted these women as badly damaged by feminism: the career woman condemned to barren spinsterhood and remorse; the full-time mom to humiliation; the working mom to hyperorganized hyperactivity and her own daughter’s disavowal of her hectic life.
    These are the familiar condemnations and cautionary tales. “You know the rules,” Hillary Rodham Clinton told the 1992 graduates of Wellesley. “If you don’t get married, you’re abnormal.… If you get married and have children but then go work outside the home, you’re a bad mother. If you get married and have children but stay home, you’ve wasted your education.” The “baby busters” may lament their generation’s absence of a galvanizing identity, but their mothers suffer the opposite burden, as an endlessly caricatured generation.
    Such caricatures well serve crusaders out to whittle history into a sharp ideological stick, but they are of little use for anyone wanting to understand another actual human being. Lives rendered as moral parable—whatever the agenda—are inevitably drained of the density and ambiguity and complexity and mystery of real life in favor of the broad strokes of social realism. “Generalities clank when wielded,” Eudora Welty once wrote. “They make too much noise for us to hear what people might actually be trying to say. They are fatal to tenderness and are in themselves nonconductors of any real, however modest, discovery of the writer’s own heart.”
    Those caricatured pay their own price. For Hillary’s classmates, the recipe of