Rebels in White Gloves (27 page)

If these women have contended with barriers both external and internal, however, they have also recognized their immense advantages. The first was Wellesley. Women’s colleges consistently turn out graduates successful in arenas traditionally underpopulated by women: One third
of the female board members of Fortune 1000 companies and half of all female math and engineering Ph.D.’s are graduates of women’s colleges, even though they constitute less than 4 percent of total graduates in the country. And Wellesley has been particularly strong. In 1995,
The New York Times
reported that “more than any other college, Wellesley has groomed women who shatter the glass ceiling … and hold more seats in executive suites and corporate boardrooms. Of 390 women directors of the Fortune 5000, including the presidents of Colgate North America and the Seagram Beverage Group, seventeen went to Wellesley, more than any other college.”

The second advantage these women had was the timing of their entry into the professional world. The Vietnam War was their first perverse stroke of luck. When in 1967 military deferments were eliminated for male graduate students, it became vastly easier for women to get into top graduate schools. It became easier still in the early seventies when women began winning the first big sex-discrimination suits against universities and such companies as
Newsweek
and AT&T, with the consequence that both schools and firms felt significant pressure to let women in. At medical schools, quotas that capped female admissions were ruled illegal. Elsewhere, female quotas were imposed. Nonna Noto, ’69, was admitted to Stanford’s graduate school of economics, she says, only because the Ford Foundation had given the school money on the condition that it admit five women. She credits affirmative action with getting her a first job as well. No group, in fact, has benefited more from affirmative action than women like these—mostly white and headed for the professions. A very few in the class resent that fact. Charlynn Maniatis, M.D., L.L.D., entered the Navy Reserves as a lieutenant thanks to affirmative action but regrets that she “was not held to the same standard as men. I believe men are discriminated against when employers are forced to meet a female quota. I take offense at unqualified women who use the fact that they are women to advance. I have a colleague at New York Hospital, who sued when they advanced a man far more qualified [in their field]. People like that insult people who really are discriminated against.”

As a vanguard, these women have had yet one more advantage. During her months in the White House contending with “people’s ambition at its most raw, power play in its most aggressive form,” Jan Piercy
quickly learned some of the necessary arts of politics. Her most useful discovery in the game was that she could exploit that vestige of the ideology of separate spheres which grants women superior virtue. “Women’s voices can have exceptional weight. Because of our rarity, when women do take a position with conviction, we carry a special moral authority, an authority that can have a disarming effect. That’s been especially true at the [World] Bank. Much more than it would for a man, the office makes me appear larger, like a magic wand has been waved.”

Janet McDonald Hill and Eldie Acheson have both helped women make it into the upper ranks of corporate and political power, and both have made it there themselves, though with differing degrees of ambivalence toward their bounty. Both are also, unlike most of the women in the class of ’69, fairly reluctant to discuss their private lives. Some of that reticence is no doubt a consequence of their both having lived in families that are in the public eye. It may also come from their having been reared with the habit of public activism: For these women, the political is the political, and so they are less needful of the self-revelation that for many classmates is their form of public activism.

Janet is unapologetic about her personal success. The aspirations instilled in her as a girl in New Orleans—her father’s lessons in piano and money counting; her mother’s insistence on her attending a fancy northern school—remain intact. Advanced education, professional skills, and economic achievement, she believes, are the only reliable sources of safety and improvement—for blacks and for women: Social change happens not principally in the public sector but in the corporate world. Since 1980, Janet has owned a consulting firm with former EEOC chairman Clifford Alexander, advising such clients as IBM and Major League Baseball on bringing women and minorities into management’s top ranks.

The language Janet speaks to her clients is devoid of moral appeals. She counsels companies to boost women over the glass ceiling—not because it’s right, but because it’s smart to seek out talent beyond the 35 percent of the population that is male and white. A high earner herself, and a woman whose husband, Calvin, and son, Grant, have both made
millions as professional athletes, Janet calls herself “a capitalist who appreciates and understands money.” Those at the bottom, she says, are “not my thing.” A thoroughly assimilated believer in assimilation, Janet understands personal identity as something to be defined not by standing against society but rather by full integration and “excellence.” Though she regards racism and sexism as America’s gravest problems, she suspects social rationales for personal failure. Taught by her parents that no amount of contempt from others can diminish a person’s dignity, Janet does not support such multiculturalist innovations as diversity training, believing that “the treatment and expectations of blacks and women should be indistinguishable from those for white men.”

Eldie Acheson, who has spent her whole life in the land of privileged and powerful progressives, is both more self-conscious (where Janet was schooled not to count herself less, Eldie was taught not to count herself better) and more unconscious about her status. Her father, David Acheson, was Washington, D.C., U.S. attorney in the sixties and helped elect John Kennedy president. Her mother publicly tangled with Washington’s posh private schools over their exclusionary admissions. Though the family summered at Eldie’s maternal grandparents’ hunting camp in Canada and spent weekends at grandfather Dean Acheson’s Harewood Farm in Maryland and winter retreat in Antigua, Eldie describes her upbringing as essentially Calvinist. “There were cocktails and cigarettes, of course—it wasn’t grim Calvinism—but my parents conveyed the message that life is not frivolous, that you can’t coast on who you’re related to and on your money. Mother insisted we live ‘downtown’ in Woodley Park, rather than in some elite white suburb. I did have a coming-out party at sixteen and we all went to private school, but I remember in sixth grade at Potomac School fighting with my classmate Sandra Auchincloss over her stepfather Carleton Putnam’s neosegregationist tracts; she was spouting his theories about black inferiority while I spouted my parents’ views on equality. Mother was adamant that we not belong to a country club—Chevy Chase, Kenwood, they all discriminated—and she took a dim view of us even going with a friend; she would send us off with a lecture about the injustice of social barriers.”

Urged on by her prominent grandfather, Eldie graduated from George Washington Law School in 1973 and, after a year clerking for a federal judge in Maine, became one of the first women partners at the
white-shoe Boston law firm Ropes and Gray. In her nineteen years there, Eldie coordinated the firm’s pro bono activities and served as a trustee of Roxbury Community College, a fund-raiser for the Clinton campaign, and a board member of Women, Inc., a nonprofit treatment center for women drug addicts and their children. She also drafted the firm’s parental-leave policy, a task in which her aristocratic origins proved useful: While many women of her generation were so grateful just for admission into the “old boys’ club” that they wouldn’t dare ask anything more, Eldie had been born to a sense of entitlement that overwhelmed any hesitancy to make demands. That she did not have children herself also made it easier for her to fight on behalf of the women in the firm who did; her efforts on that front contradict the conventional scenario of wars at work between childless women and moms.

Eldie’s most persistent crusade at Ropes and Gray was to recruit and advance women and minorities. She set out to demonstrate to the clubbiest of the old boys that diversity was not bitter medicine. “It’s just bullshit that you don’t see qualified women or Hispanics or African-Americans, especially in law, which doesn’t exactly take a rocket scientist. It takes people skills, the ability to form a relationship that makes a client feel secure; as our clients become increasingly diverse, it only makes more sense for a firm to have a diverse group of attorneys. And if the federal government is truly discredited as a values leader, as it seems to be in many people’s eyes, then the private sector has to step up to it.”

In 1993, Eldie joined four of her Wellesley classmates in the Clinton administration, becoming associate attorney general in charge of the Office of Policy Development, which screens candidates for positions as federal judges and U.S. attorneys. Again, she has used her power to advance equality: Half of the several hundred appointments she has shepherded have been women or minorities or both, almost twice the proportion among those chosen by President George Bush.

Eldie’s appointment to the Justice Department was nearly derailed because of an episode that illustrates the slippery slope of assimilation into the old boys’ club. In a perplexing moment of forgetting the link between the personal and the political, Eldie had joined the Country Club of Brookline. The club had no black members and a history of discriminating against women, a fact which Eldie had to have known, since just a year earlier a group from Ropes and Gray that included a black
woman had been denied access to the men’s grill. “All my male tennis and golf buddies were urging me to join the club, and I thought, Okay, this fits into the image of a partner at Ropes and Gray.” Again, being a woman muddled the issue: Was it progress for her to make it into a place traditionally walled against women, or co-optation? Such clubs, after all, like the fabled “men’s room,” stood for all the places from which women were barred. “Somehow, I didn’t hear my mother’s voice echoing. It ended up being a Wellesley friend of mine, Cindy Stebbins, [’67] who got pissed off and pressed the club to abolish its segregated facilities. But if not for Carol Moseley-Braun, I don’t think I would have ever understood the ‘sin’ of my joining. What then Senator Braun objected to, rightly, is that social lines are drawn. Business gets done in a place and way that keeps outsiders out.”

If a few in the class of ’69 have focused on securing women’s access to the highest positions and perks, less than a fifth are in the classic yuppie professions: business, finance, advertising. The greatest number work in teaching, followed by law and government, not-for-profit work, and medicine. (In the class of ’94, by contrast, a third of all graduates headed into business and only 13 percent went into education.) More than half earn less than $50,000, and just 7 percent earn more than $150,000—compared to 36 percent earning over $150,000 in Harvard ’69 (though of course many of the Wellesley class married high-earning men—more than half have household incomes over $100,000). Asked why they work, only a handful deem status and power “vitally important”; most name personal fulfillment, earning a basic livelihood, and service as their principal motivations.

A remarkable number are, thirty years later, engaged in just the kinds of good works sanctioned in their idealistic youth. Mary Murtagh, ’69, is the first woman executive director of the nonprofit Ecumenical Association for Housing in California, building homes for low-income elderly and disabled persons; previously, she directed the renovation of a hotel in San Francisco to house recovering alcoholics. Adrienne Germain, ’69, was director of all Ford Foundation programs in Bangladesh before becoming president of the International Women’s Health Coalition,
a nongovernmental organization working for reproductive and sexual health and rights for women in Asia, Africa, and South America. Jan Krigbaum Piercy also worked in Bangladesh, for Family Planning International and the Grameen Bank, the latter a pioneering lending organization founded in 1976 to make small seed loans to microenterprises, most of them founded by women. In the 1980s she brought that model of community investment back to the U.S. to create Southshore Development Bank in Chicago, then helped the Clintons take the same model to Arkansas, raising capital for the Southern Development Bank. Now one of three women out of twenty-four executive directors at the World Bank, she has helped push through $3.5 billion for assistance programs to women, including $200 million in a new microcredit program. A friend of Hillary Clinton’s ever since working on her campaign for student government office at Wellesley, Jan has had a significant influence on Hillary: In her husband’s second term, the First Lady has often focused on providing microloans for women and importing to inner cities the development lessons learned abroad.

If many of these women have worked on behalf of women poorer and less powerful than they, few have actually worked at the kinds of jobs most women hold: Just 20 percent of Wellesley ’69 work in pink-collar ghettos and earn less than $20,000, as 75 percent of all working women do. Some in the class have wondered, as they’ve rapped at glass ceilings, whether it was enough that their success trickled down (winning, for instance, job protection for all women who became pregnant) or whether their main achievement has been merely, as radical black feminist bell hooks charges, “achieving for white women of privileged classes social and economic equality with men of their class,” ultimately strengthening a system that ill serves poor women.

Rhea Kemble Neugarten Brecher Dignam (she married in 1989 for the third time—in her first church wedding and first white gown) has the lank hair and big wire-rim glasses of a New England college girl circa 1969. As the first woman ever to be chief federal narcotics prosecutor in Manhattan and chief of the public corruption unit (she was a protégée of U.S. attorney Robert Fiske, who would later investigate her classmate
Hillary’s involvement in the Whitewater real estate development deal), Rhea frequently depended on testimony from unsavory witnesses. She tried the first case in which Nicky Barnes, dubbed “Mr. Untouchable” in the narcotics trade, agreed to testify as a government witness after being handed life imprisonment without parole. “It was always a question whether the jury would accept such a witness. So I wore my standard trial outfit, which I called my parochial school uniform—a plaid skirt below the knee, a black blazer, and a white blouse with a little black bow. A common defense technique is to argue that the government framed the defendant. But it’s hard for the defense to make that argument if the government representative comes across as though she couldn’t possibly tell a lie. So I played a young girl who would never engage in tricks and shenanigans. It’s a wonderful way to present a scuzzy witness. You can’t vouch for him, but it’s an undercurrent. Women lawyers on the defense side, of course, had a different strategy. They needed just one juror to hang the jury. I knew one who intentionally wore flashy clothes, with one too many buttons unbuttoned—anything to win that one guy. I was always Miss Prim and Proper, never wore pants in court, always had high necklines. I didn’t want to make any waves with the jury. And it just never bothered me to dress a part.”