Rebels in White Gloves Read Online Free PDF

too-clever young lady who loses her young man to a helpless, charmingly addle-brained creature in need of his protection. Even if she avoided the tragedy of spinsterhood, the educated woman would become “masculinized,” in the words of a standard 1950s text, with “enormously dangerous consequences to the home, the children dependent on it and to the ability of the woman, as well as her husband, to obtain sexual gratification.”
Brain
was an epithet, applied to a girl: Hillary Rodham’s high school newspaper predicted she would become a nun, called Sister Frigidaire.
    Spinsterhood and frigidity were not the only lurking dangers. The near-certain consequence of education was dissatisfaction for a girl with her place—ordained by God and science—as mother and wife. Medical experts cautioned against thwarting what a group of male doctors told
Life
magazine was a healthy woman’s “primitive biological urge toward reproduction, homemaking and nurturing. She deeply wants to be able to submit to her husband.” In 1960,
The New York Times
scolded the presidents of women’s colleges who “maintain, in the face of complaints, that sixteen years of academic training is realistic preparation for wifehood and motherhood.… The road from Freud to Frigidaire, from Sophocles to Spock, has turned out to be a bumpy one.” Like those who argued against educating the Negro lest it confuse him as to his proper place—fomenting restlessness and menacing the social order—the critics of women’s education couched their warnings in benevolent terms. “To urge upon her a profession in the man’s world can adversely affect agirl,” wrote a Yale psychologist, advising against the admission of women to the college. “She wants to be free of guilt and conflict about being a fulfilled woman.” A Harvard psychiatrist, also opposed to coeducation, saw social dangers: “Only when women enter upon motherhood with a sense of fulfillment shall we attain the goal of a good life and a secure world.” Still others warned against wasting resources: The education that girls would not use as housewives was urgently needed by boys to do the work of the atomic age. In 1971, Radcliffe president Matina Horner described the consequence of this relentless message: A “double bind” entraps a bright young woman, she wrote. “If she fails, she is not living up to her own standard; if she succeeds, she is not living up to societal expectations about the female role.”
    Concerned for their survival, some women’s colleges attempted to appease the experts and allay parental fears, instituting curricula in family life and urging girls into home economics degrees. By the time Friedan published
The Feminine Mystique
, Mills College had adopted a slogan: “We are not educating women to be scholars, but to be wives and mothers.” Rather than promote such masculine and “vastly overrated” qualities as creativity and individualism, the college’s president promised, Mills would nurture the feminine talent for “relationship.”
    In the midst of this debate, Wellesley was singled out for praise among the Seven Sisters for managing not to disturb the serenity of the young women in its charge. Wellesley girls, said Princeton’s 1965 guide to coeds, remain “strikingly traditional.” The class of ’69 looked like a group of “nice young future den mothers” to a Harvard critic’s eyes. While the rest of the campus world was going “madly mod,” the
Boston Globe
reported, “Les Wellesley Femmes go blithely on with the basics.” They are not given “to the long hair, bulging book bags and breathless brilliance found at Radcliffe … or the compulsive egalitarianism of Barnard students,”
Time
magazine wrote of Hillary’s entering class, adding what, at a time when “adjustment” to one’s given life role was counted the highest form of mental health, could only be read as glowing praise. “Their distinguishing characteristic is that