Rebels in White Gloves (17 page)

Of the many adventures and commitments in the larger world that have been recognized to forge male character, few have been more honored than the taking up of arms in service of a passionate cause. Becoming a soldier has been for men the classic coming of age: By risking himself for the common good, a man could transcend himself, join the brotherhood, arrive at the fullness of manhood. In the sixties, violence seemed to some a particularly fertile necessity—to overthrow colonial oppression and resist the vast, bureaucratized military-industrial complex killing hundred of thousands in Vietnam.

With rare exceptions (the Manson girls, the debutante terrorist Patty Hearst), no such feminine, or feminist, romance with violence ever got very far. Feminism, rather, has often been strongly linked to pacifism: The earliest second-wave marches were protests against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War. Some saw violence as a betrayal of female “nature”: Robin Morgan accused those few women in the left who did adopt “the machismo style and violence” with making “a last desperate grab at male approval.” Contemporary eco-feminists have resurrected the idea that women have a more protective, maternal instinct toward living things.

Though the Wellesley women of ’69 would join men in almost every other public activity, doing violence was where all drew the line. Nancy Gist did some work with the Black Panther party after finishing Yale Law School with Hillary. With Bobby Rush, later chairman of the party and a member of Congress, Nancy worked with the People’s Law Office in Chicago on the wrongful-death suit brought against the FBI and Cook County for the December 1969 killing of Chicago Panther party chairman Fred Hampton, murdered by the police in his sleep. It took her a while, Nancy says, “to understand the implications for women of the Panthers’ symbolic statements about black manhood,” a statement best captured in the famous picture of Huey Newton with his spear and gun. “From my particular vantage, I didn’t see the disparity in treatment. There seemed an equal regard for women. Women were central; we always are. We’re the ones with the mimeograph machine in the basement cranking out leaflets, though nobody ever hears of our work. Then we got Stokely Carmichael telling us that ‘the best place for women in the movement is on their backs.’ ”

As her collective prepared for the May Day march in solidarity with
the Panthers, Dorothy grew increasingly scared. “These military, radical men just seemed to be picking a fight and would probably get us hurt. A few of the women, very few, were just as macho. [Weather Underground member] Kathy Boudin came and met with my husband, and said, ‘If you’re a real man, you’ll go and make bombs.’ I didn’t like her at all. Dan never did get a gun; he was afraid to, though that wasn’t something he could admit.” (Dan responds that it was not just fear that kept him from getting a gun but principle, and that he never hesitated to express how scared he often was.) “I resented him for putting us in danger,” Dorothy says.

In middle age, Dorothy is a big, doughy woman with a hesitant, gentle voice, watery, blinking blue eyes, and a nervous habit of running her hand through her fragile cap of wispy brown hair; it is easy to imagine how, as a very young and bewildered woman, her efforts to please her husband, Dan, might have taken her places she never meant to go. “I was in the left because of my boyfriend. I hadn’t thought much beyond ‘War is bad. I’ll work for peace.’ I was neither anti-imperialist nor pro-Communist. I was opposed to violence, and afraid. We all were being followed. The cops would harass us and arrest us for spray-painting on buildings to announce demonstrations, or for smoking pot. And once we staged a demonstration in Lynn, and one guy said to me, ‘Dorothy, you get on the car and speak.’ A panic washed over me. I tumbled out a few words. Then bikers and vets started throwing rocks and bottles at me. I was terrified.”

By June 1970, just weeks after the killings at Kent State made credible all the paranoid fears that armed authorities would gun down dissenters, Dorothy was out the door. “I was leaving, but I didn’t want my parents to know that. I sort of divorced my parents and my husband at the same time. My relationship with my father was completely severed, and it would be a while before I could see my mother as being my family. For two years they had no idea whether I was alive or dead, though then I settled down a bit and let them know where I was. After that, once a year my mother would visit me wherever I was, in a commune or the tepee I sewed to live in, in the woods or, later, in households with uncertain relationships that she didn’t understand. Visiting me cost her dearly in her own marriage.

“I ended my marriage by buying a car with my husband’s money and
going cross-country with three other women who’d gone to Cuba after me on the Brigade; one was a dropout from Wellesley. I had no family, no marriage, no job, no skills, and no money.”

Arriving in Haight-Ashbury, Dorothy “crashed with a bunch of hippies” and her husband’s roommate from Harvard. “We went to the Fillmore and to lectures by Steve Gaskin, who was this spiritual leader and vegetarian farmer, and did a lot of psychedelics. That all felt good and spiritual. But none of it helped me to think I was the kind of person who could get a job.”

She did have one offer to earn money. San Francisco was then home to a counterculture porn industry presided over by the Mitchell brothers, who ran a hands-on sex theater and made counterculture “beaver” movies like
Behind the Green Door
(1971). “A bunch of the people I was hanging out with, including some Wellesley girls, were making soft-porn movies with a guy named Russ Meyer. They tried to persuade me to make them too. ‘You do it stoned. Making love is fun.’ They talked about it like free money. Fortunately, I had just enough self-preservation instincts left to say ‘Naaaah.’ ”

After a few months, Dorothy moved back to Cambridge with a “hippie boyfriend.” Her husband asked her to come back; when she refused, he divorced her for desertion. “I think my husband loved me. I didn’t love him. And I wish young women were taught about what you give away and what you keep. He’d offered me a ready-made identity. He was the professor in Harris Tweeds and a respected leader who knew what he wanted to do. And I didn’t. I was in this intense milieu, but I was drifting. I wasn’t assertive or confident. I believed my dad that I was ruined. I avoided my Wellesley classmates. I was ashamed to be divorced, ashamed I was not successful in anything. It’d been four years since graduation, and I’d never held a job.”

Moving from one commune to another, Dorothy tried to become “more liberated about sex, to have no expectations. In the best places, we were essentially a whole bunch of friends that slept together. I’d come home from a camping trip and jump in the shower and somebody else would jump in with me. It didn’t mean you belonged to them.

“I did have a few boyfriends—long-haired, soft, pretty young things who’d never gone to college. Then I started having girlfriends. It seemed much simpler and less confusing. It took me a few years to learn that
women can be cruel as well. At the time, our community of women with our long skirts and hair and bare feet seemed safer than the movement where people got teargassed and beat up. Instead of picking up rocks and guns, we held hands around the dinner table and drank herbal tea and raised chickens. I took refuge in a softer place.”

Dorothy was not alone among her classmates in seeking a more authentic existence by going “back to the land.” The Wellesley fifth-year reunion book is full of flights from future shock into cooperative vegetarian restaurants and organic farms. Armed with
Small Is Beautiful
and
The Whole Earth Catalog
, class members taught themselves about electricity and plumbing, put up preserves, raised goats, made pottery and quilts.

With two gay men and her lesbian lover, Dorothy moved to Randolph Center, Vermont. “We didn’t last. We had chickens and sold eggs and always had the cigar box of pot on the kitchen table. But none of us could deal with the isolation; in Cambridge we’d had food co-ops and women’s writing groups. Our whole house was on food stamps. My friend was on welfare. She had a baby while we were together, and I was her labor coach. Our neighbors were all hippies but were uncomfortable with us because we were gay. We finally gave it up. Then I ended up homeless for a while, just because I was spacey. I’d been squatting in an apartment in Cambridge and got thrown out, so I slept in the boiler room under Indian bedspreads.

“Here my classmates were networking and going to graduate school. My friend Audrey Melnick, whose values were nearly identical to mine, was working for Dukakis. And I was pretty much unemployed. I didn’t want to pretend I was someone else to get a job, but when people figured out who I’d been married to, it made them uneasy. And none of us had career preparation from Wellesley—I had classmates who were working as typists all over Boston. I was a social worker in a hospital for a while for $2.50 an hour. I’d still wear real hippie clothes on the weekends, but I’d put on costumes for work to look just like everybody else. But I didn’t want to get a real job and become part of the system. I became very bohemian, willfully staying outside the mainstream. We thought that by being bad at managing life we were refusing to be part of the establishment.”

Dorothy’s experiments in the sixties and seventies were among the
wildest in the class. Her foundation was also one of the shakiest, given her estrangement from her parents and her sheltered and undeveloped nature. Her ex-husband believes she was attracted to political activism precisely because “she was unformed, uncertain of who she was, and took up politics as a way of trying on identities, some of which were more militant than I ever was.” Dorothy’s disillusionment, therefore, probably says more about her personal fragility than it does about the sincerity of the movement’s aims or the wisdom of its tactics. Nor was she ever so thoroughly disheartened as she sometimes sounds. Thirty years later, settled in Rhode Island with a full-time job and long-term partner, she boasts in a note that she is “an activist” again, though no longer antagonistic to the system: “Just received a State Senatorial Citation for my work as a river advocate.” Like many of the women of ’69, she is still engaged in the search she began in those years, and even now remains uncertain as to which experiments will prove fruitful, which destructive or barren.

Dorothy’s story illuminates some of the difficulties in trying to recover the real experience of the sixties. Given how polarized the debate remains over the meaning and consequence of that era, it is hard not to fall into one of two camps—either defending the activists and counterculture, or assuming the present chic attitude of ironic detachment and derision, which regards the political and social experiments of those times as frivolous theatrics. The difficulties are compounded by the way these women, like most eyewitnesses, often turn their own histories into yarns, larks, adventures—romantic or foolish but, either way, emptied of the real terror and exhilaration of the times.

Many in the class, of course, kept their distance from “the sixties.” Others, as Nancy Gist says, “dallied with radicalism” but ultimately circled back to their well-adjusted destinies. But many took up tough work, against lots of odds. Cherry Watts worked for the Teachers Corps in Philadelphia, tutoring kids for whom gunfire was a part of daily life, then helped found a rape crisis center in Nashville. Nancy Eyler helped poor people avoid being evicted in New York City, then became a doctor providing care to Native Americans in Montana. Many sustained a deep commitment for years, or a lifetime. When an heiress gives away her fortune, or a girl from Oklahoma takes Buddhist vows and spends years sleeping on the Thai forest floor and begging for alms, those are not
tourist trips but acts of great courage or desperation. These women were alive, they believed, at a moment of great moral danger for the United States, but also at a time when the greatest possibility existed to reinvent the world and transcend themselves. The personal was truly political: How they lived their lives each day was of historic, even cosmic, consequence. And then, from that same small group, there were women like Hillary Rodham—as integrated into the status quo as a girl could be.

Kris Olson, ’69, was the kind of liberal that Dorothy’s Devine’s radical associates would have scorned. In the heart of the heart of the establishment, at Yale Law School with Hillary Rodham, Kris did not shun the system as a corrupt and corrupting fraternity but determined to infiltrate it and undertake its repair. Rather than take to the streets on May Day in solidarity with the Panthers and Bobby Seale, who was then in jail awaiting trial with seven codefendants on kidnapping and murder charges, Kris settled into the courtroom to monitor the proceedings for the American Civil Liberties Union. That experience became the basis for her law school thesis on politically motivated trials: Socrates, Christ, Joe Hill, the Wobblies, the Chicago Seven, Angela Davis—all were prosecuted, the future Clinton-appointed U.S. attorney argued, with faint justification but for the wish of the government of each “to rid itself of a thorn in its side.”