Rebels in White Gloves (10 page)

Nancy’s first big fight with her parents was about the war. “All of their friends’ kids had managed to get out of serving. They were proud that their son-in-law had gone, and insisted he was there out of patriotism, fighting for his country. I was ashamed he was there, and felt like our friends scorned us for not standing on our principles, that we lacked the courage of our convictions.”

Nancy’s rift with her family was a common one in the class. Most of these girls had arrived at Wellesley in 1965 with conservative politics, a reflection of their overwhelmingly Republican elders. A survey that year found that the majority supported U.S. policy in Vietnam and, having grown up with civil defense drills and the McCarthy hearings on television, fervently believed that Communism had to be stopped. Only a quarter felt the war to be morally wrong, less than 10 percent thought a U.S. withdrawal feasible, and only 5 percent said they would go to jail in protest. Two years later, confirming many of their parents’ fears that their daughters would fall under the sway of “pinkos” in the radical Northeast, just 20 percent of the Wellesley juniors supported the Johnson administration and feared Communism. Half now called the war morally wrong, and 22 percent said they would go to jail in protest. By 1968, with 538,000 American troops in Vietnam and 30,000 Americans dead, a majority of the class were “clean for Gene” (McCarthy) and 91 percent favored immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam.

Counterculture
would, nonetheless, be too strong a word to describe life at Wellesley in the late sixties. The girls did try to get hip in the Wellesley newspaper: The Beatles movie
Help!
was reviewed as “crispy fab.” And in an interview with Country Joe McDonald, Chris Franz, ’69, reported that the guitarist “felt hassled by the commercial music circuit” and sought “inner happiness joined to self-actualized living in a Maharishi cum Maslow ideal.” In April 1966, Hillary Rodham wrote home to her minister, Don Jones, to say how exciting college was because it enabled her to try out different identities. In what she described as “an orgy of decadent indulgence—as decadent as any upright Methodist can become,” she had gone “hippie,” painting a flower on her arm.

The young ladies’ venture into recreational drugs was likewise tame, though how tame is somewhat hard to judge, since substance abuse—both their own and their parents’—is the subject about which these women are most circumspect. A junior-year poll found that 37 percent of the class had smoked pot and 58 percent would do so if given the opportunity. The Junior Show was full of knowing references to “grasses and acids and a whole pot of Ashbury juice” dispensed by Poppadoc (played by Fran Rusan), the tribal witch doctor. (At the 1995 White
House reunion Hillary hosted for her classmates, all joined in on a reprise of one of the show’s numbers: “You’ll soon be communicating, commence hallucinating, on the grassroots level.”)

A certain avant-garde academic credibility had recently been bestowed on drugs by the LSD experiments of Harvard’s Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Baba Ram Dass), both of whom regularly spoke on Boston-area campuses, and by Aldous Huxley and R. D. Laing, whose books many of the Wellesley women read. Conventional normalcy, Laing argued, was “the condition of being asleep”; chemicals could “break the ego,” opening it to the transcendental that sometimes breaks through in psychosis. The idea that a deeper truth might be found in drugs or madness was popularized in such best-sellers as the highly romantic account of schizophrenia
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
(1964) and Carlos Castaneda’s accounts of his trips on hallucinogenic mushrooms with the visionary Indian Don Juan.

One Wellesley student did a hundred acid trips for a course in Christian Ethics, and said she saw God. Another, now a health professional in the Bible Belt, remembers swallowing whole bottles of Robitussin DM, a cough medicine, to achieve “a zombielike state.” She went to Woodstock the summer after graduation but remembers little beyond dropping cellophane acid and learning to meditate with hippies from a commune in the Carolinas called the Farm. Acid was a revelation for the art history major: “In the fifties, what you were supposed to feel and say was so stilted. What you became aware of on acid is that 80 percent of communication is nonverbal. I would get intense creative urges. LSD lifted my inhibitions and liberated a whole new style.” At the same time, she believes that smoking lots of pot helped defeat her aspirations to get a medical degree. “I thought that to be a doctor would be class collaborationist. And I was afraid. I think drugs had something to do with that. Drugs tend to magnify whatever feelings you have. If you don’t know if you can get into med school and no one’s encouraging you and it’s all scary, marijuana magnifies your fear.”

For some students, their classmates’ rebellious adventures were tedious or grating. Charlynn Maniatis, who describes herself as a Goldwater girl to this day, “lived in my own little hermit world. We were the nerds. We knew Vietnam was going on, but we were more concerned with, What do we do tonight? I never even went into Boston for the first
year. It was just like being at home, the same four walls; I’d come home and do my homework, eat dinner, and go to bed. I was afraid to go to mixers, and I certainly wasn’t interested in the wider world. I was living in a dreamworld, with four or five other dreamers, at the Wellesley of the proper gloves and hats and teas. Civil rights and feminism were beyond our horizon.” Virginia Blankenhorn found her classmates’ orthodoxy oppressive. “Wellesley was a place for me to study Renaissance music, Chaucer, medieval history. I loved it. Hillary Rodham and I might have been on different planets. I didn’t have time for politics, and I loathed the political correctness of some of my classmates, the rigidity of thought and language that went into some of their positions. I recall being castigated by one classmate, who insisted that music was simply not a ‘relevant’ thing to be doing.” Kathy Smith was embarrassed to announce her engagement senior year to medical student Roger Ruckman, a serious young man from a wealthy Delaware family, and still more reluctant to admit to her classmates that motherhood was her dream. “By the end of Wellesley I felt burned-out and was looking for comfort, the comfort of having a baby. But feminism devalued anything related to caring for children.”

More often, however, the women of ’69 found Wellesley insufferably tame, their classmates too much the good girls, patronizing or timid in their commitments to social change. Senior year, the class published a twenty-page critique of the college. “Our good students are well-disciplined automatons who play by the rules,” wrote Marilyn Hagstrum. “The good deedism of the motto is condescending and inadequate,” added Jan Krigbaum. Students wrote to the newspaper with scorn for “housewives putting in time, superficial and risk averse” or suffering from a “rich girl complex, at this prissy finishing school.… To assuage the guilt there are threats of hunger strikes. Is Wellesley an intellectual community or an extension of Junior League?” When a student strike to protest the war in April 1968 was only feebly honored, Hillary Rodham lamented the “large gray mass” of the uninvolved. To Professor Marshall Goldman’s belittling suggestion that the girls make a real sacrifice and give up a weekend mixer instead, she responded: “I’ll give up my date Saturday night, Mr. Goldman, but I don’t think that’s the point. Why do these attitudes have to be limited to two days?” In fact, many of her classmates lay at Hillary Rodham’s feet credit, or perhaps blame, for the genteel
nature of their protests. Typical was her response as college government president to California governor Ronald Reagan’s March 1969 demand for a federal investigation of student protesters and order for the arrest of nearly two hundred San Francisco State demonstrators. Hillary stayed up all night to talk students out of staging a protest “that would embarrass our college.” She would “co-opt the real protest,” in one classmate’s words, “by creating an academic one.”

Returning from her tenth reunion in 1972, Nora Ephron wrote a derisive account in
Esquire
of her alma mater. What Wellesley wants for its graduates, Ephron wrote, is “for us to avoid the extremes, to be instead that thing in the middle: an example to the community, a Samaritan.… How marvelous it would have been to go to a women’s college that encouraged impoliteness, rewarded aggression, encouraged argument. Women by the time they are eighteen are so … tyrannized out of behaving in all the wonderful outspoken ways unfortunately characterized as masculine.… A college must do remediation, force young women to define themselves before they abdicate the task and become defined by their husbands.… We all tend toward tiny little rebellions, harmless nips at the system. We will never make any real trouble. Wellesley helped see to that.”

In “Silences,” Tillie Olsen had lamented the near impossibility for a woman, trained always to please, to believe in the right to speak her mind or the importance of what she might have to say. Mary Day Kent recalls a lecture attended by five hundred Wellesley women and five male guests: Three of the visiting men asked questions; not one of the young women said a word.

For girls so deeply ingrained with the feminine habits of silence and docility, the audacity of Hillary Rodham’s speech on graduation day was unimaginably liberating.

Few anticipated her bold performance. Hillary had always been a great practitioner of procedures and rules, undaunted by long meetings and complex policy wrangling; she had won the admiration of faculty and administrators, even more than students, for her skills at conciliation, damping unruly passions by finding common ground among divided
campus factions. But if Hillary had already proven her political skill, on that sunny spring afternoon she revealed a capacity more electrifying to the gathered young ladies. Massachusetts Republican senator Edward Brooke had spent his long-winded speech praising Richard Nixon and America’s “strength abroad,” and scolding the assembled girls for their generation’s resort to “coercive protest,” calling it a perversion of democratic privilege. It would be tragic, he said, if they adopted dissatisfaction as a way of life.

The gathered parents were still nodding their assent when Hillary Rodham, the first student speaker in the history of Wellesley graduation ceremonies, stepped to the podium. Enraged by Brooke’s speech, she set aside her prepared remarks and proceeded extemporaneously to upbraid the senator. Her 420 classmates, who had chosen Hillary to be class speaker, felt their pulses race and their parents turn to stone. “I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while,” she began, her voice ringing. “For too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible. The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.”

That she had plowed through her course reading lists was evident in the echoes of Kierkegaard and Heidegger throughout her speech: In Kierkegaard’s warning that the “despair at not willing to be oneself” was the first form of “sickness unto death”; and in Heidegger’s description of the “inauthenticity” that comes from fleeing the terrifying necessity for self-creation by “allowing others to direct my life … when I surrender to ‘them,’ ” Hillary found her vocabulary and philosophy. “Our love for this place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions,” she told a stunned crowd of two thousand, among them Nina Nitze’s father, Paul, and Eldie Acheson’s grandfather, Dean. “I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see.… To be educated, the goal must be human liberation, enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity to create.… We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living. So our questions about our institutions, our college, our churches, our government, continue. Every protest, every dissent, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age.” She read a poem by
her classmate Nancy Scheibner: “And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle/For all those myths and oddments/Which oddly we have acquired/And from which we would become unburdened/To create a newer world/To transform the future into the present./We have no need of false revolutions/In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds/And hang our wills up on narrow pegs./It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives./And once those limits are understood/To understand that limitations no longer exist./Earth could be fair. And you and I must be free.” She called on her fellow students to emulate the protesting French students whose slogans covered the walls of the Sorbonne. “Be realistic, they say. Demand the impossible. We will settle for nothing less.” And she acknowledged the generational breach opening up before her. “Yesterday I was talking to an older woman who said that she wouldn’t want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn’t want to look ahead, because she’s afraid.”

When Hillary finished, her classmates rose to their feet and for seven minutes stood and cheered her defiant words. Or most did: Ann Sherwood sat still, “terrified that my father would be furious with me that one of my classmates had the temerity to rebut an adult, much less a U.S. senator.” Mary Day Kent also cast a cautious sidelong glance at her father, who had before that day never seen an Afro or a miniskirt, and was in shock well before Hillary opened her mouth. Charlynn Maniatis recalls her father whispering furiously, “What a disrespectful young lady,” and feeling the same way, “I was cringing.” “I would have liked to have stopped her,” Marge Wanderer told
Frontline
. “I’m sure her mother would have liked to have stopped her, but her class absolutely encouraged her.”

That a speech which was often incoherent and meandering could be so galvanizing and polarizing said much about the way these girls had been raised. “When we were growing up, it was unseemly to have confidence if you were a girl; it was considered insolence. I remember times I felt great about something I’d done, and my parents would cut me down,” Jan Dustman Mercer recalls. Hillary’s speech “was brash, it was brilliant, it was unplanned, and it was disrespectful to Senator Brooke. And I can remember squirming in my seat at the same time the inner me was saying, ‘All right!’ ”