Rebels in White Gloves (13 page)

A mother “saddles her child with her own destiny,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “a way of proudly laying claim to her own femininity and also a way of revenging herself for it.” The mothers of the class of ’69 bequeathed to their daughters their dreams of domesticity to affirm the worth of their own busy lives, and sometimes to squelch the girls’ threatening aspirations. But they did so, also, as a gesture of love: A brilliant marriage seemed the only route to success for their beloved girls. And if the older women were themselves unhappy in the sort of lives they were championing, it was not because they found family life unrewarding, but only because they were excluded from everything else. In a country that celebrates nothing so much as money and independence, they were unpaid
or barely paid and wholly dependent. Gallup polls in the early sixties found a majority of women rating motherhood the chief joy of womanhood but also wanting their daughters to have more education and to marry later.

There were numerous external barriers that kept these mothers from stepping into the world on their own: The lapse of the 1943 Lanham Act brought an end to federally funded child care; colleges were filled up with men on the GI Bill; most jobs and credit, even FHA mortgages, were available only to men. But it was the internal barriers that were most powerful. Even if their own experience contradicted the “feminine mystique’s” message—that a reliable breadwinner and babies and a sparkling linoleum floor were all a woman needed for perfect bliss—postwar women could not easily resist the newly powerful opinion-making machine.

Between 1945 and 1960, advertising in America increased 400 percent. Perfect homemaking was vital, Madison Avenue’s new advertising wizards told the young postwar mom; like a scientist in a laboratory, she must bring her expertise to the fight against unhealthy germs and unsightly “ring around the collar.” Her children would be tragically deprived if she was not home every minute. The dinner she gave the boss was crucial to her husband’s career. Above all, shopping was the answer: Buying things would win her neighbors’ envy, recapture her husband’s attention, fill the unnameable emptiness.

The entertainment media joined forces with advertisers in purveying the feminine mystique. Harriet flipped Ozzie’s pancakes on the Hot-point stove the show was devised to sell. For a decade, the most popular daytime show was
Queen for a Day
, which social historian Susan Douglas calls “a monument to the glories of female martyrdom: Its message is that there is nothing more admirable in a woman than suffering, no tragedy that couldn’t be fixed by a Naugahyde recliner and a year’s supply of Rice-a-Roni.” In prime time, the top show was
Father Knows Best
, which regularly found Dad sharing his higher wisdom with little Kathy: “The worst thing you can do is try to beat a man at his own game. You just beat the women at theirs.” Women’s magazines ran articles asking: “Are You Training Your Daughter to Be a Wife?” and “Do Women Have to Talk So Much?” Pop music produced hits like “I Will Follow Him.” And the master of fantasy, Disney, set beautiful young paragons of selflessness
against old and powerful stepmothers or queens. “Cinderella was abused, humiliated, and forced to become a servant in her own house,” that movie begins, “and yet she was ever gentle and kind.”

When the women of Hillary’s class describe their mothers, they return again and again to images of confinement and suffocation. They speak of women squelched, trapped, controlled, stunted, childlike; collectively, they conjure an image of bubbling springs stopped up, silenced. Such language might suggest daughters still wallowing in adolescent grievance, except that most of these women have in midlife developed a mutual regard and intimate understanding with their mothers, and tell their childhood stories more in sorrow than in anger. Rather, such images of a swaddled existence reflect the radical shrinking in the fifties of a woman’s responsibilities and domain. As the extended family disappeared and as such domestic arts as clothes making and baking were increasingly outsourced to commercial enterprises, housework was reduced to its least creative parts: vacuuming, scrubbing toilets, doing the laundry. The moral work of the 1950s household was also badly attenuated. Though the postwar family resembled its Victorian predecessor in delegating to Father the Hobbesian world and to Mother the tender dependencies of home, in the Victorian notion of “True Womanhood” mothers were not just moral guardians of their nests but also of society, expected to soften the ruthlessness of capitalism by sustaining churches, orphan asylums, and settlement houses. In the fifties, those broader social and religious functions of the home eroded. Volunteerism and national women’s organizations dwindled: The League of Women Voters was by 1960 half the size it had been in the 1920s. A woman squirreled away in suburbia increasingly labored only for the personal comfort of her husband and children. Without the more expansive understanding of “family” that had once defined her responsibilities, a suburban matron found herself living in a very small world.

While the world of the Wellesley girls’ mothers shrank, critical scrutiny of them grew. Shadowed by the Freudian specter of the bad mother, the most idealized figure of the period also became a scapegoat. Full-time mothering was essential, they were told, but one false step could mean disaster: Behind every psychopathic, delinquent, sissy, or impotent man—and behind every frigid or promiscuous female—was a
repressed or shrewish or rejecting or overprotecting mother. In
The Bell Jar
, Esther’s mother is certain that she is to blame when her daughter lands in a mental hospital, because the doctors ask her a lot of questions about Esther’s toilet training. Lectured on the latest “scientific principles” of child rearing, mothers discovered another competition to divide them; they compared their children as if discussing the new furniture in the den.

As a very small child, Nancy Young lived with her family in her maternal grandparents’ triple-decker home. She was, she says, fortunate to get out of there at a tender age. Her grandfather, a Polish immigrant factory worker and truck farmer, was a “tyrannical presence,” a volatile and paranoid man. He ringed his house with chain-link fences and a pack of vicious German shepherds to guard his extended clan. Outsiders were barred from the property. Inside, all lived in constant fear of enraging him. Nancy’s mother didn’t work, but fled the house nearly every day, leaving her children in the care of aunts and cousins. She hated being there, hated being tied down by kids.

As a young girl, Nancy scorned her mother. “I thought she had no interest outside of what was on sale in the stores,” she says. “Her life was my model of what not to have.” It was her auto-mechanic father that the girl emulated and admired. A fervent Democrat who read serious books, he avidly discussed politics with his bright little girl. When Nancy became a teenager, that relationship changed. Now her father would talk to her only of her mother’s failings; he repeatedly complained to Nancy that her mother wasn’t interested in sex. He also worried out loud about money. In an effort to move up in the world, Nancy’s father had quit fixing cars and taken over a photo business from one of his mother’s ex-husbands. But he hated managing people and glad-handing customers, and chronically struggled in his new enterprise. “He had five people to house and clothe and feed. It was a terrible burden for one person to bear all the responsibility for earning the family’s keep.”

Like her grandfather, Nancy’s father believed in rough demonstrations of his authority. “I got away with being a tomboy as a kid. But by the time I was in high school, my father made it a point, regularly, to put
me in my place. He told me all the time that my strides were too long, that I was too noisy when I ate, that I was unladylike. He saw me as too big for my britches. I was supposed to be obedient and well behaved. We couldn’t wear red or dance, because that was for whores. He would tolerate no challenge to his rule.”

Paternal authority often fell harshly on the women of ’69; the much vaunted respect for their elders of these postwar kids often seemed a sentiment more akin to fear. Still, many of Hillary’s classmates would look to their fathers as a model for their lives, rather than to their hypervigilant or underdeveloped mothers. Betty Demy fell in love with classical archaeology, a field to which she has recently returned, at the family dinner table. Her father, “a real intellectual, who reveled in teaching us and in the sheer joy of knowledge,” thrilled her with tales of Troy. When Nancy Wanderer played house with her best friend, both insisted on dressing up in jackets and ties. One would play Uncle, and the other, Father. “Neither of us wanted to be the mom. I knew I was smart, and I guess that seemed like my dad.”

Charlynn Maniatis was named after her grandfather Charles. Her father, disappointed that he had no sons, had determined to raise his daughters as boys. Charlynn never had dolls. Her father taught her to shoot skeet and took her to World War II movies and Yale football games and pushed her hard at school. Every day, she was required to come right home and do her homework; if she dawdled, he smacked her. “I was afraid of him, but I accepted it as the way life was supposed to be. I knew how to stay out of trouble. I knew I could please him with my straight A’s. Once I came home with a C in physical education, which was so unheard of that the principal called my father. I was never rebellious. I was very staid.”

Charlynn’s father had fought the Communists in Korea with the marines. Stern and still military in demeanor, “he was very patriotic,” says Charlynn, “with great respect for authority and politics to the right of Genghis Khan.” He forbade his daughter to go to Radcliffe with “that bunch of hippies,” wanting her under the watchful eyes of Wellesley housemothers. In the fearful atmosphere of the Cold War, Dr. Maniatis wanted his wife and daughter safe, within domestic or at least wholly female bounds, well away from dangerous influences. He flatly refused his wife permission to learn to drive. Though he gave Mrs. Maniatis a weekly
household allowance of twenty dollars, he went along with her to the grocery store in their Connecticut hometown to ensure that she spent his money on cube steak instead of sirloin. “He had a parental relationship with her,” says Charlynn. “All her social life came through him. She didn’t dare not be there when he came home. In my life, she was kind of a zero. Whatever my father said, she agreed. My mother is a very timid woman. Until the day he died, she didn’t ever want to leave the house.”

A surgeon, Dr. Maniatis encouraged his daughter to pursue her schooling, though at Wellesley he forbade her to study such “liberal nonsense” as political science or economics or art. Just sixteen when she went to college—she had finished high school in three years—Charlynn then skipped a year of college and graduated at nineteen. The Harvard Law degree she had by the age of twenty-one didn’t satisfy her father. So she enrolled in Johns Hopkins Medical School, graduating with a master’s in public health and an M.D. at age twenty-five, while also serving as a commander in the naval reserve and running her own real estate company in New York.

Dr. Lonny Laszlo Higgins’s father filled his daughter’s imagination with tales of practicing medicine in far-off places. For months at a time when Lonny was small, her father would vanish into Africa to provide medical care and practice a kind of anthropology—exchanging medicines with indigenous healers and documenting puberty rites, clitoral excisions, and birthing practices. Home in Connecticut, he took his daughter along on house calls, letting her carry his mysteriously powerful black bag.

Lonny’s mother had been a gifted artist as a girl, but was pressed to abandon her study of sculpture at eighteen to marry the dashing Hungarian Dr. Laszlo, fourteen years her senior. From then on, her life was that of a doctor’s wife. “I saw resentment in her thwarted ambitions; she preached adventure but stayed home,” says Lonny. “My father was a fist slammed on the table. My mother was passive and remote. I never felt she’d earned the right to discipline me. She seemed like another child. After the death of my father, when I was fourteen, I left home. My hero had been snatched. The wrong one died.”

If most of the Wellesley girls had either to turn away from their mothers or embrace the feminine mystique, not all did. Their mothers were not all quiescent. Nor were they all white middle-class suburban housewives.

The very rich were sheltered by their coterie of servants from the postwar compulsion for homemaking, though money did not buy them perfect freedom from conventional women’s roles: The world of private clubs and girls’ boarding schools had its own narrow horizons and rigid rules. Alison Campbell’s mother was beautiful and stylish and classically educated; as a girl, she was tutored in Latin and Greek, and she finished a year at Vassar before dropping out at nineteen to marry. “My mother was a person who should have done something,” says Alison (who has shed the nickname Snowy, along with the other vestiges of her high-WASP youth). “But there wasn’t a lot that women like her felt free to do, except organize charity balls. My father provided well for his family; that was the mark of a good husband. He always believed that money equals success, and worked long hours. Mother was bored out of her mind and terribly lonely. But women simply didn’t have the choice of combining career and family. My aunt Scilla chose a career, but married late and never had children. She was a Bryn Mawr graduate, nearly blind—the brilliant, awkward one, while my mother was the gorgeous, graceful one, though that does justice to neither.” Author of a 1977 biography of the Oswalds,
Marina and Lee
, Soviet historian Priscilla Johnson McMillan [Aunt Scilla] has made a brilliant career: She has taught at Harvard, and was one of the few women to make it onto Nixon’s enemies list. When Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, defected to the U.S., Aunt Scilla hid her at Alison’s grandfather’s “posh Long Island estate,” as
The New York Times
described it, where she received such “gentleman callers” as George Kennan, Harrison Salisbury, and George Ball. “I was sent to Bergdorf’s to buy Svetlana a size 16 navy-blue suit, to set off her red hair and blue eyes. I loaned her hair curlers and took her shoe shopping one day, to Lord and Taylor. Scilla wanted us to avoid anywhere too expensive, too … capitalist, I guess.”