Rebels in White Gloves (55 page)

At the same time, Susan “loathes and struggles against aging.” She hates “the gray hair and bags, the sagging, wrinkling hagdom, the feeling that there’s so much more I want to do and that time is slipping away and my vitality is waning. It sucks to be fifty. I have ulcers and am overweight. And ageism, let me tell you, is lots worse than sexism. For women it’s death. Men may tolerate thirty-year-old competent females, because they like to have them around, but fifty-year-olds—forget it. Aging women are even less valued than mothers and wives.” She “burns with resentment” that her justice-minded generation does not resist more fiercely the relegating of women to the category of “old cow.” “The men I know who turned fifty threw spectacular bashes and invited everyone they knew to party the night away. The women took trips to Italy, quietly, by themselves.”

TV correspondent Martha Teichner has felt as much as anyone in the class the punishments meted out to aging women. “After nearly seventeen years at CBS and almost that many wars, I was reduced to the ‘woman’s page,’ [covering] royals and fashion for the morning news.”

Martha wrote that to her classmates twenty years out of school, one of a thousand messages these women have sent to each other over the years. Indeed, of all the public supports they have found for their individual searches and transformations and painful declines, none have mattered for Hillary’s classmates more than their friendships with women. Their devotion to one another is utterly unlike the wary distance often maintained by their mothers and earlier generations, who were schooled to see other women principally as rivals, battling to be the fairest of them all. In
A Room of One’s Own
, Virginia Woolf writes about coming across the revolutionary sentence “Chloe liked Olivia” in a contemporary novel by a woman. “Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia.”

Even where friendships among women had existed, they had been at best what Carolyn Heilbrun has called “societies of consolation”: Women soothed one another as they waited for their men, who had gone forth to the world. Only recently, Heilbrun writes, have women’s friendships become what they were for men, a bond that “comprehended details of a public life and the complexities of the pain found there.”

More and more, as the years have passed, Hillary’s classmates have
become protectors and teachers to other women. Pam Colony, who for so long fought the male scientists barring her way at university, works nights at a community college, teaching “older women who were intimidated early on but have come back bolder.” Within the class, they have forged ties stronger than at any time since their years together at Wellesley. Jan Mercer is grateful for her classmates’ candor, “a consequence, I think, of our age. Wellesley was where I learned how valuable female friendships were to me, as important as my family. But even ten years ago there would have been prevarication, more effort to put the gloss on things. By now we realize that everyone’s been knocked around.” Their youthful commitment to consciousness-raising, to speaking publicly of their struggles in order to discover which are shared and might be fixed together, is fulfilled now as it could not be when they were more callow and preening. Ann Sentilles “was haunted for years by the sense that other people were managing it all. Now I’m aware of everybody’s compromises, everyone whose marriage has failed, people struggling with their kids and illness and alcoholism. We all realize we made choices at times blithely and that there’s a cost at every turn. If there’s recrimination, it’s more of ourselves than of our parents or the world. We all recognize our extraordinary privilege, most of it unearned. For most of us now the quest is for some secure inner meaning. We’re no longer just collecting gold stars.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton has been an important center of gravity in this coming together. For many, she represents the larger effort they are part of, that river of history to which each has been tributary. “Thanks for being me—in a higher place,” Jayne Baker Abrams wrote to Hillary in a public forum in the alumnae magazine. “Having you there validates me … my nonprofit work, my concern for children.” Sue Barnard wrote: “Every increment of respect you garner will increase the leverage the rest of American women have in their marriages, families, and the larger world. If Bill Clinton and other important men can be less defensive in their relationships with women, maybe other men will be less likely to resort to violence and intimidation.”

Most have taken heart from Hillary and continue to admire her for her grace and unflinching strength and for her complex understanding of human character and life. They dismiss, for the most part, evidence of her ethical lapses and fall silent “so as not to add to her pain,” on the
matter of her long sufferance of her husband’s infidelities and her own public humiliations. A few, however, have openly cringed at her choice to go on protecting her husband even as he engaged in what one called the “most callous, exploitative treatment of women.” They have worried about the message sent to girls about what they should put up with and to boys about what powerful men do. Most of all, they mourn the dissipation of so much of the possibility they’d imagined for their gifted classmate. “Hillary has the whole world,” says Nancy Young, “but she can’t use what she has. She’s cornered. What little spontaneity she ever had is gone. She has become just robotic, a cardboard person. And every time I hear her say
my husband
, I shudder. It’s degrading for her, and she’s not acknowledging the degradation. She’s so compromised having to play this role; it makes her harden or empty herself. He, on the other hand, should be more guarded. I was shocked at our reunion dinner; at one point, he and I happened to cross the room at the same time, and walked past each other. When he looked at me, the overwhelming sense I had was of his availability. I thought, ‘This is the president; he should not be so available.’ ”

Nancy Wanderer has, she says, always measured herself against Hillary. “On the whole, I’ve felt I haven’t come through the way she has. I still agonize. What if I hadn’t gotten married senior year? What if Hillary and I had run against each other for college government and what if I’d won? What if I had gone to Yale Law School instead of waiting until I was thirty-eight and going to the University of Maine? I would have been in that early group of lawyers who had the chance to be seasoned. It took me twenty years to get back to where I was in 1968.”

Nancy’s regret at losing the competition gives way quickly, however, to the more self-comforting notion that she merely chose a different balance between her personal and political life. “I think Hillary’s idea was to get to the top of the power structure as quickly and securely as she could. She felt she had important work to do. For that, she was able to accept dissonant chords in her life with Bill, to look the other way, put it aside, put up with it. I think passionate relationships are not the center of her life, as they are for me, which is why I didn’t end up where Hillary is. She’s done a lot; those White House appointments of women wouldn’t have happened if she weren’t there. Yes, she had the entrée. I turned my back on that with Thomas, and I’m glad that whatever I
achieve I’ll have done on my own. But I’m not going to make a national difference and I’m not going to criticize Hillary for how she got there.”

As a practical matter, Hillary has also been a unifying force in the class. Among the guests in the Lincoln Bedroom have been many from Wellesley ’69: Johanna Branson, Jinnet Fowles, Susan Graber, Connie Shapiro. When the First Lady hosted a twenty-fifth reunion for her class at the White House, 305 of the 430 graduates gathered. They were herded through metal detectors, “overseen, startlingly, by a big, brightly smiling photograph of Hillary,” in Lindsay Miller’s account, and entertained by Kathy Ruckman’s kids, performing a string quartet.

For three days during that reunion, Hillary hung out happily with her classmates—listening attentively to their symposia, participating in the Sunday morning service performed by the pastors in the class, bringing her husband along to the Saturday dinner at the Mayflower Hotel. Nancy Wanderer sat next to Hillary at dinner. They talked for an hour about how they were cutting back on meat, coping with menopause, and worrying about osteoporosis. Hillary asked if she could touch Nancy’s nearly crew-cut hair and said, “Maybe I’ll get a haircut like this and really shock everyone.” She seemed fascinated by Nancy’s information that the Meyers-Briggs personality chart would categorize Hillary as an introvert but her husband as an extrovert, “talking to clarify his thinking and soak up energy.” She wanted to know all about Nancy’s partner, Susan—how they met, what she does for a living. “She was curious to know what kind of person I’d wanted to make my life with.” Recalling how charmed she’d been by Nancy’s mom in the
Frontline
documentary, particularly Marge’s recollection of how she’d wished she could have stopped Hillary’s disruptive commencement speech, Hillary wrote Marge a message on the back of Nancy’s meal ticket, commending her courage in sticking by her daughter. At one point, Nancy snapped a picture of a scene that amused her: Hillary was huddled with a bunch of women, and all were ignoring Bill, who idly looked about the room for diversion. The class took obvious pleasure when their own president, Karen Williamson, kept Bill Clinton waiting for the microphone while she instructed them to put out their little ticket saying if they wanted the chicken, though many also told me later of the heady moment when he’d locked onto their eyes. He was, many said, the sexiest man they’d ever seen.

The transformation of the personal into the political undertaken by these women—moving from wholly domestic to partly public lives; publicizing issues that had once been considered private; scrutinizing the politics within the home—has had complicated and mixed effects. Most are obscured in the usual attacks: that these women, and their entire generation, have settled into one long confessional whine; that they have abdicated personal responsibility by blaming all their problems and failings on social causes; that they have turned the mysterious realm of relations between women and men, a realm where the erotic imagination and inarticulate feeling could live, into a starkly lit, rule-bound world.

If such generalities fail to describe a more complicated reality, the life stories of the women of the Wellesley class of ’69 do reveal the high costs exacted by their generation’s success at having breached the boundaries. There are moments when these women do perhaps say too much, jeopardizing their own dignity and sometimes their families’: As Eudora Welty once warned, “We can and will cheapen all feeling by letting it go savage or parading in it.” There are times when they have misused the public light: Like Princess Diana, who won both sweet revenge and the “love” of a million strangers by publicizing her humiliation and betrayal, Hillary’s classmates have at times gone public out of motives beyond the honorable forging of solidarities. Those solidarities, in turn, have had their own trapdoors. The affiliations, the new shared stories, have sometimes freed them from one box only to become equally limiting, reductive, closed. Resorting to canned language and analysis—of the recovery movement, or the New Age, or even feminism—these women can sometimes wind up erasing their own singularity, inhabiting their caricature, settling for too simplistic explanations of their own lives. They can get caught in the therapeutic trap, letting talk substitute for action, ritually repeating insights but failing to act, letting past damage absorb the best part of their present energies.

Their kids, too, can suffer. Hillary’s protest in her commencement speech against her generation’s “inauthentic” lives was a complaint against a world where too much was hidden or lied about. The children of the class of ’69 also have a sense of inauthenticity, but one that comes from too much being seen and so being hollowed of meaning. Living amid all the skeletons dragged from all the closets, their children have
sometimes become timid, pessimistic, more ironic than idealistic, lost of an innocence they never had. Having witnessed the fracturing of their family life, Nancy Wanderer’s sons are both steering clear of relationships: Andrew sees himself as a perennial bachelor; his closest relationships are with his grandmother and his mom. Many in the class have wavered between the wish to let their kids see “reality” and their equally powerful wish to protect them. Jan Mercer has brought her sons “in on life’s struggles, so they know they happen in all families and you handle them and move on”; she has also spent $300,000 to put them through private schools.

Feminism as a movement has been equally confused by the toppling of the traditional wall around the private sphere. The demand for more public attention—to discriminatory and harassing behavior in the workplace, to domestic assault and sexual crimes, to the needs of mothers and children—can sometimes collide with the demand for more respect for female privacy, to make their own reproductive decisions, to enact their desires. Hillary Clinton has been one of the most politicizing in the class—arguing, for instance, that prenatal care ought to be required for pregnant women to get public benefits. But she has also tried to claim a “zone of privacy” when the charges of sexual misdeeds piled up against her husband, despite the fact that most of the women involved had worked for him, and so raised all the concerns about how men use their power at work to get sex from women. Some feminists have also worried at the paradox that, having fought against the public shamings of women—for promiscuity or unwed pregnancy—they have now turned that same weapon against men. They see the kind of denunciation made by Kris Olson Rogers of her ex-husband, Jeff, as just another scarlet letter, unfortunate whether pinned on a woman or a man.

If these women’s lives have revealed the hazards, however, they have also revealed how much has been gained by breaching the wall. Those gains have been public: invigorating science and medicine and anthropology and law with new perspectives; pressing employers to make room for their workers’ family lives. The gains have also been personal. These women have not, like so many of their mothers, silently suffered cruelties behind closed doors. They have not been paralyzed by the shame that once befell a woman who was sexually misused: Telling her classmates that she had been molested and hit as a child helped free Elizabeth
Michel to do useful work as a doctor, to raise healthy children. Their earnest candor has been, finally, the source of their great resilience. At the end of
Carnal Knowledge
, the character played by Jack Nicholson tells his buddy (Art Garfunkel) that he is a credulous schmuck, “but maybe schmuckiness is what you need to stay open.” The few in the class who have been most brittle and immobile are those, like Charlynn Maniatis, who have lived the most private lives.