Rebels in White Gloves Read Free Page B

the glass slipper and Betty Crocker domesticity on which they were raised remained enormously powerful, no matter how many countertales feminism told. More than a few have struggled to sort out their own dreams and experience from the dreams fed them by the common culture. Nonna Noto, ’69, wrote every five years to her classmates of her enduring hopes for a husband and children and was wistful at her bad luck. But she now wonders whether she and some of her fellow childless classmates in fact chose the life they wanted but could not admit that choice even to themselves—whether they failed, as Hemingway put it, to “feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel.” Those who deviated from the feminist recipe for happiness—at times just as fixed and tyrannical as the old pattern—have also frequently felt scorned or abnormal, equally mismatched with what Phyllis Rose calls the “limited and limiting plots” we impose on our ownlives. “If I were to overcome the conventions, I should need the courage of a hero,” Virginia Woolf once wrote, “and I am not a hero.”
    The women of Wellesley ’69 are overwhelmingly feminists: 80 percent readily describe themselves that way. Are they, then, anti-men, anti-sex, anti-family, anti-motherhood, anti-religion? Have they been burned out and embittered by the changes wrought by feminism?
    The aim of this book is not to supplant malicious caricatures with their opposites but rather to reflect the immense variety of these four hundred women, a variety that is itself the most dramatic legacy of feminism. Almost any adventure imaginable in the past fifty years can be found somewhere among their number: They have dropped acid, cheated on their husbands, had abortions, struggled to get pregnant, run away with the stableman, run away to be a Buddhist nun, made fortunes, lost fortunes, taken Prozac, started menopause, pushed a stroller through their twenty-fifth-reunion parade. In the sheer diversity and idiosyncrasy of their lives, the women of ’69 resist the taxonomist. How does one type a Pentecostal Christian creationist physician with a house-husband? How make a cautionary tale of Catherine Parke, a college professor and poet whose late baby has not “stolen my time to write nor scattered my attention nor left me tired or overwhelmed nor damaged my career or sex life or self-esteem”?
    To fairly reflect their diversity, I have gathered a larger cast than the usual three, four, or five characters typical of social histories. I have not, however, attempted to represent the class in any demographic sense: I did not divide the book among married and divorced, black and white, happy and unhappy, in proportional reflection of the class. Ultimately, I followed the stories that interested me most. If they are sometimes exceptionally dramatic, traversing what Oliver Sacks calls “the arctics and tropics of human existence,” they are also the stories that the women of ’69 tell each other and themselves. Having sailed into unmapped waters—and before the recent great surge in women’s biography and fractured fairy tales and female picaresques—these women have frequently turned for inspiration to one another’s often epic lives: to Lonny Laszlo Higgins’s ten years at sea raising her family and training Micronesian public health workers; to Dr. Nancy Eyler’s marriage to an uneducated cowboy and move to Montana; to Alison Campbell Swain’srejection of the ease she could have bought herself with her family fortune in favor of a life of ceaselessly taking care of other people.
    Though each chapter charts a season or theme in their lives, their sagas are rarely linear. Motherhood, still, is the great track-switcher: For all their efforts to share with their husbands housekeeping and child-rearing responsibilities, the demands of family have almost always upended their lives more radically than they have unsettled their husbands’. So three