Rebels in White Gloves Read Online Free PDF Page B

they don’t stand out. They are simply wholesome creatures, unencumbered by the world’s woes, who make normal, well-adjusted housewives.”
    Wellesley had in fact taken pains to be certain that Hillary and her classmates would grow up to be normal housewives, preserving traditionslong jettisoned elsewhere. Like their mothers and grandmothers, the women of ’69 would be “finished” as ladies. Among their required courses were figure training (instruction in how to stay shapely and pert) and fundamentals of movement, which included learning how to get out of the backseat of a car while wearing high heels. Wednesday afternoons, they practiced the proper pouring of tea. A good portion of the campus guidebook was devoted to appropriate attire: Suits were ideal for dates; “one cocktail dress is usually all you’ll need until Christmas.” Skirts were mandatory at dinner—“a good incentive to neaten up and make the table more attractive.” For after-dinner demitasse and trips into town, the girls were to add white gloves to the ensemble. Their girlish purity was often on display as they paraded in green beanies, sang hymns on the chapel steps, or donned the gossamer white gowns of “tree maidens” to form a
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, sing the alma mater, and skip and dance across Severance Green. A helpful “Wellesley lexicon” focused on what its author assumed was the girls’ principal preoccupation: “A ‘caller’ is an eligible male at the Bell Desk. A ‘visitor’ is a father-image caller or a lady. ‘Harvard’ is not strictly part of Wellesley. We share it with the ’Cliffies. The pavilions around Waban Lake are ‘spoonholders,’ because they hold spooners. ‘Gracious living’ is what we all aspire to.”
    Girls of good breeding, many of them descended from several generations of Wellesley women, were being cultivated to marry and rear the men who would run America. That they were in fact being groomed for breeding was not always subtly expressed. When Rusty Steele’s mom graduated from Wellesley in 1943, she and her classmates had been told: “You are the cream of the crop. If we want to improve the species, it is your job to go out and reproduce.” By the time Rusty was a freshman in 1965, that message had been muted, but it had hardly disappeared. The annual “marriage lecture”—which offered guidance on such matters as how to converse with your husband’s boss and how long to let the baby cry—was still mandatory. The psychology department offered a curriculum heavy on abnormal child psychology and its roots in maternal failure. Seniors still rolled giant hoops down a hill on May Day in a race to see who would be the first to marry. And, in a strange exercise with links to the eugenics movement, the girls were required to have a posture picture taken soon after they entered school. Wearing only her underwear, with reflective stickers marking her spine, each freshman was put in asmall pitch-black closet and told to stand very still. When the doors flew open, a flash of light captured on film her shivering form, then the doors slammed abruptly shut—presumably to protect her from prying eyes. The pictures were then scrutinized to see how well each young lady’s figure and posture conformed to the ideal, which, according to guidelines put out by the college’s department of hygiene, was characterized by “the buttocks being neither unduly prominent nor having that ‘about to be spanked’ look.” Like similar pictures taken at elite colleges around the country, the pictures were later sought by a man of questionable science intent on determining what physiognomy signified the superior genetic material possessed by these girls. Wellesley, to its credit, was one of the few colleges that refused his request.
    Few of the young ladies protested Wellesley’s efforts to polish them into choice mothers and wives. Accustomed to doing what they were told, reared on
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