Rebels in White Gloves (22 page)

In 1980, Elizabeth was hit by a car that shattered both her legs. Though one healed askew and required surgery, she delayed the procedure for months rather than neglect her medical students and patients. In this case, it was her “female socialization” that she believed ill served her. “As women, we’re taught an empathy that requires we not think
about ourselves. I was harming myself to do the right thing for others.” When she finally had the operation, Elizabeth quit medicine. In chronic physical pain, she found herself consumed with childhood memories and the enduring mystery of her mother’s disappearance—and persuaded of the therapeutic necessity to confront those memories. “The gift of my accident,” she wrote to her classmates in 1989, “was that it forced me to face my child abuse honestly; this work has been painful but has freed me from a prison of shame.” Writing poetry and doing yoga and studying “bioenergetics,” which she describes as “psychotherapy that includes body work,” Elizabeth nonetheless could not escape the depression brought on by her belated attending to her past. Overcoming the wariness of drugs she’d developed as witness to her mother’s unhappy fate, she joined the 10 percent of her class that has taken antidepressants. “Prozac helped me make good decisions for myself. I finally faced the fact that I didn’t like working in the hospital, being responsible for people who might die. After my accident I was working with victims of child abuse, and realized I couldn’t endure that either. For the first time in my life I felt able to say, ‘I don’t have to expose myself to everything horrible that’s happening to people.’ ”

Yet again displaying the ambivalence common among her classmates, from a critical scrutiny of her own socialization into feminine self-sacrifice, Elizabeth slips into an almost mystical understanding of her woman-ness. Though she describes her husband as a wonderful and devoted father, she believes that carrying and birthing and nursing a baby give a woman an organic connection to others not possessed by a man. “There are things my husband doesn’t think about that are always in my consciousness. When the kids were little, he wouldn’t think whether they were hungry. I would—which, I think, is a natural outgrowth of nursing. It’s a way of feeling into another person’s life. In medicine that translates to listening more. Rather than simply seeing them as an array of symptoms, women doctors are more sensitive to how patients carry emotions in their bodies and how illness affects the whole structure of their lives.”

The view of women doctors as more holistic, patient, humble, collaborative, and gentle seems to be widely held in the Wellesley class of ’69. Forty-three percent of these women have switched to female doctors in the years since graduating; in their life stories, unhappy encounters with
male doctors are a recurrent theme. And the same qualities claimed by these women in law and medicine—an ecological sensitivity to relationships and systems, a willingness to share information and find common ground—are held up by many as their distinctive gifts in business and politics and diplomacy as well. Christian Scientist Cherry Watts, ’69, who calls God “she” because Cherry believes divine love is unconditional and therefore “maternal,” is the first woman to run her three-generation-old family business and has introduced an “egalitarian, cooperative, feminine” organization. Hillary Clinton’s relationship with her aides, nearly all of whom are women, is invariably described in similar terms: anti-hierarchical, mutually supportive, informal, intimate, inclusive of all views—habits described by her former chief of staff Maggie Williams as “sex-linked traits.” Adrienne Germain, ’69, president of the International Women’s Health Coalition, recently took part in a seminar at the Council on Foreign Relations on the “women’s lens in foreign policy,” proposing that from “different values and different views” would come new policy. (In the staff portrait in her organization’s brochure, secretaries and top officers stand side by side, recalling the picture of the Watergate impeachment committee in which Hillary Rodham refused to stand in front with the other lawyers, calling it elitist, and instead stood in back with her friends on the support staff.) Jan Piercy, U.S. executive director at the World Bank, believes that “women on the whole have a more highly developed capacity for finding win-win solutions, reconciling diverging interests rather than trouncing the opposition. You see it in the different language men and women use when talking about comparative positions in international negotiations.” Betty Demy, who raised $400,000 from Democratic women in New Jersey for Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, also believes women seek consensus over “win-lose” situations. “Otherwise, you just erode relationships. It’s what we learn by being so focused on our families, where you love one another and have to live with one another over time.”

A whole literature has emerged defending this “woman’s way” as better suited to the requirements of a global economy and the information age. Books with titles like
America’s Competitive Secret: Utilizing Women As a Management Strategy
argue that women’s team-building and ability to assimilate information coming from many directions at once give them an advantage over territorial and single-minded men in the new
decentralized, high-tech economy. Women-owned businesses, which now employ far more people than all of the Fortune 500 combined, are held up as models of flexibility and “nurturing” management styles. Though he does not make the gender link explicit, Daniel Goleman argues in
Emotional Intelligence
that success is no longer best predicted by a person’s IQ or credentials but by his or her capacity for empathy, cooperation, and consensus building—those same “feminine” skills. At Harvard Medical School, the “New Pathway” curriculum puts a premium on “communication, collaboration, and collegiality,” giving “women applicants the edge,” according to a dean for admissions.

The commercial opportunities to tap this blooming fascination with the difference between the sexes have not been missed. The longest-running best-seller in the 1990s has been John Gray’s
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
. In packaging the 1996 Olympics, NBC sought to win female audiences by appealing to women’s “natural empathy” with intimate probings into athletes’ lives. Uncompetitive by nature, women don’t care who wins or loses, sports research director Nicholas Schiavone told
New Yorker
writer David Remnick, but want their heartstrings tugged.

For all the cashing in, however, the often self-contradictory understandings of sexual difference expressed by the women of ’69 mark them as creatures of equally confused times. Though Ruth Bader Ginsburg once argued landmark cases against unequal treatment based on sex, in writing the Supreme Court’s majority opinion forcing the Virginia Military Institute to admit women, she felt it necessary to acknowledge the “ ‘inherent differences’ between men and women,” which “we have come to appreciate remain cause for celebration.” Wellesley tied itself in knots deciding whether to join twenty-six other women’s colleges in filing an amicus brief: VMI’s defense of its “uniquely male” and “adversative” teaching style and its creation of a separate women’s institute using “cooperative methods which reinforce self-esteem” seemed close correlates to the belief in a “woman’s way of knowing” propounded by a number of Wellesley faculty. Even Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting argument that VMI’s exclusionary traditions reflected Virginians’ “shared understandings” seemed almost feminist, echoing Kris Olson Rogers’s defense of context and “local knowledge.”

It is not surprising that the women of ’69 would simultaneously embrace and reject the idea of a distinctly female nature. Even as they lament that “though they are feminists they never intended for women to act like men,” they seem to hear themselves echoing all those postwar experts who warned that a woman who was too logical or ambitious would become “unsexed.” The veneration of women’s different voice, many suspect, is double-edged, restoring honor to such devalued “feminine” qualities as compassion, but also opening the door to the renewed confinement of women in the gentler virtues.

Most treacherous in women’s claim to greater tenderness and rectitude is its essential nostalgia: for an ideology Victorian in origin and carrying deep implications for social and family life. The idea of woman as antidote to the selfishness of man has its roots in the era of political and industrial revolution: The end of feudal dependencies and the splitting of work from home combined to dissolve much of the connective tissue of community life. To preserve social cohesion against the centrifugal forces of liberal capitalism—forces compounded in America by frontier individualism and a particularly fevered commercialism—the Victorians arrived at the ideology of separate spheres, which gave to men the public, material world and to women the private and spiritual. Men could be perfect economic actors, pursuing pure self-interest, only if women preserved interdependence by sustaining their last refuge—the family. Feminist historians have argued that from this sexual division of labor came our modern conception of what is masculine and what is feminine. Men were assigned the traits deemed suitable for their public sphere: reason, will, appetite, a capacity for coldheartedness; women were given feeling, pliancy, self-denial.

First-wave liberal feminism, rooted in eighteenth-century rationalism, protested the persistence of an arrangement still essentially feudal, with responsibilities and privileges distributed in accordance with “innate” differences and “natural” hierarchies. But their efforts to rout the ideology failed. A century later, conservative scholar Alan Bloom would still pine for the days “before feminism freed women from their duty to protect men from their own natures.” Pope John Paul II would invoke women’s “special capacity to care” as justification for “their special role in the family, where the feminine genius can have a humanizing influence against the demands of efficiency and productivity.” Robert Bly
would long for the days when gentle women yielded the iron qualities to men. When the women of ’69 cast themselves as curative to the dog-eat-dog habits of a man’s world—when Hillary Clinton calls women society’s “glue”—these are the forces they join.

The determination of this generation to breach the wall between women’s domestic domain and the world of men was born of the recognition that the persistence of the separate-spheres ideology has important social consequences. It explains why children and families are defined as “women’s issues” and relegated to the political margins; why a “traditional family” is defined as one where fathers go off to work and mothers (at least non-poor mothers) stay home, even though such a family has rarely existed in American history; and why studies of the (detrimental) effects of child care define it not only as day care or baby-sitters but also as care by the children’s fathers.

The lingering ideology has consequences in the workplace as well. Because the domestic sphere remains the primary responsibility even of working women, children trail their mothers into the workplace in ways they rarely trail their fathers, creating child-care traumas and mommy tracks and guilt. Even in choosing their occupation, these women seem attentive to their domestic role: That so many in Hillary Clinton’s class work in health care, child welfare, and education may reflect their inherent inclination to nurture, or it may be a way for them to legitimate their entry into the wider world. Becoming “social housekeepers” is another Wellesley tradition: The college’s progressive founders were in the vanguard of women’s movements to soften or clean up the evils of industrialization and urbanization by founding maternal associations, temperance groups, and campaigns against child labor.

Finally, the persistence of the ideology affects the telling of these women’s lives. Jill Ker Conway has written of biography’s evolution from eighteenth-century accounts of the political and military triumphs of great men to, after Rousseau and the ascendance of the Romantic idea of the inner genius, more personal records of self-creation. For women, the evolution has been reversed. Because she was expected to merge her identity into a man’s and find all meaning in relationships, a woman’s memoirs were invariably about her private (though rarely her intellectual) life; if she had a public life, it was interesting principally for how it disturbed her role as mother and wife. That convention endures. The
Frontline
documentary on the class of ’69 all but ignored the substance of its subjects’ work and focused only on how it conflicted with their personal lives. Once again, the question was whether they could “have it all,” a question almost never asked of a man.

In addressing the question of what measure of sexual difference derives from nature and what from culture, two women in the class of ’69 have rare expertise; both have participated, as few women of previous generations could have, in remaking the scientific and anthropological doctrines that help map female destinies. Ellen Reeder is a classical archaeologist who has taught at Johns Hopkins University and is at present curator of ancient art at Baltimore’s Walters Art Gallery. In 1995, she curated the most comprehensive exhibit ever to explore the depiction of women in fifth-century Greece, the source culture of Western civilization. Martha McClintock is chair of the committee on biopsychology at the University of Chicago and teaches courses on the biological foundations of gender and gender differences. A former student of Harvard entomologist and sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, McClintock has more than once completely upended long-held certainties regarding female biology and behavior with her studies of sex and reproduction in rats and humans.