Rebels in White Gloves Read Online Free PDF Page A

borrowed her politics from her boyfriend, like a letter sweater or a fraternity pin. It is characteristic of the times that her rebellion was taken seriously only when it impinged on sex, marriage, and home. There would be many deep estrangements between the women of ’69 and their mostly Republican moms and dads. Nearly all would erupt over domestic concerns. At their root was a fundamental question: What is a woman’s essential nature, her proper place and role?
    In the late forties, when the women of Wellesley ’69 were born, the answer to that question was being radically re-formed. In the two decades after the war, sex roles temporarily loosened by the first wave of feminism, the Depression, and the demands of the war economy were circumscribed again within bounds as narrow as any in the century. Freud’s Victorian conceit—that anatomy is destiny—recovered, in the fifties, its status as Truth. At the same time, Freud’s descendants in the social sciences ruled femininity a fragile possession. True womanhood—fecund, nurturing, compliant—did not exist simply by virtue of being female: It required protection and cultivating and could easily be jeopardized by excess independence or a too-willful mind. Masculinity, too, could be readily deformed, if Father was a Milquetoast and Mother too strong; man’s God-given superior strength existed only by the grace of female weakness.
    If, as the experts attested, passivity and domesticity were fundamental to female identity, then education—the right to which the first-wave feminists had fought their earliest battles—could only be damaging. The women who entered Wellesley in 1965 were America’s best little girls: 90 percent had been their high school newspaper editor, student body president, or valedictorian. Yet in the odd moment they inhabited, the pursuit of higher education for a woman could itself be regarded defiant. In a short story entitled “Revelation,” published in 1965, Flannery O’Connor captured how grotesque a studious girl then seemed to much of the world. In the waiting room of a doctor’s office, a fat, ugly girl “blue with acne” wearing Girl Scout shoes and heavy socks “scowls into a book called Human Development … annoyed that anyone should speak while she tried to read.” The girl smirks and glares with dislike, “her eyes fixed like two drills” on the country wives who surround her, making a loud ugly noise through her teeth. “Mary Grace goes to Wellesley,” her ladylike mother apologizes to the increasingly discomfited women around them. “Just reads all the time, a real bookworm.… I think it’s too much. I think she ought to get out and have fun.”
    When Kathy Smith, ’69, of Wilmington, Delaware, came home from high school with a perfect report card, as she never failed to do, she knew she would have to face her mother’s fury. “Mom thought I should be like my sister, who was a majorette and not much of a student and wildly popular and married her high school sweetheart. All the womenin her bridge club ever wanted to know was, Doesn’t Kathy have a boyfriend yet? I was supposed to look attractive to men at all times, but my mother always told me that I was not attractive, that I was a failure on that score, and it was a matter of great concern. When I applied to Wellesley, she told me that I didn’t belong with those kinds of people, that I’d get my head filled with fancy ideas and come back thinking I was better than the rest of the family. She was very clear: My job was to find a husband, and a smart girl would scare boys off.”
    In her concern that education would jeopardize her daughter’s future, Mrs. Smith echoed the most estimable psychologists and doctors of the day. A passionate intelligence, the experts advised, was distinctly unfeminine; if encouraged, it would certainly condemn a girl to a life “unsexed.”
Redbook
and
Ladies’ Home Journal
were full of cautionary parables about the