Rebels in White Gloves (40 page)

“Irwin was supportive, but I don’t think he got it with Sarah. He felt that I could handle it if I’d just stop crying and do what the counselor said. He still hasn’t disengaged from the dance. He pressed Sarah to apply for a Rhodes. It meant more to him than it should, and in the past Sarah would have felt tremendous pressure to please her daddy. He still wants his perfect daughter. I have to let her be imperfect with me. Sarah has recovered, and I feel safe she won’t ever starve herself again. But, like alcoholism, it’s something she’s going to live with the rest of her life.

“Irwin is very much a product of the sixties, caught on the cusp himself.
He might have liked to do public service law, but we could not have put our kids through school on that income. Dallas is ostentatious; you can live and die by what you spend. We try not to be part of that, but you still press your jeans. It’s a reality Hillary has had to contend with. Bill wasn’t making money, and if you want to be a player, you have to have money. So Irwin supported my career and always said the right things, but he was too busy to act on them. He just handed over his pay and left me to run the household. He didn’t take for granted that the domestic chores got done, but he didn’t do them. He’d scrape the plate but leave it in the sink instead of the dishwasher. Not anything to draw battle lines over, though his daughters have been less tolerant than I am. They refuse to go to his club, because it discriminates against women and minorities; he says he doesn’t participate in discriminatory acts himself and needs a place to play.”

Interviewed on
Frontline
, Irwin looks the heavy. “I thought we had talked about what we were doing,” he says, “but I probably didn’t listen as much as I should have to where Ann was. Raising kids takes a lot of time, and that’s always been a priority for us. Ann is the one who has executed that priority.” From off camera comes a question: “Do you think that’s what she wanted, to stay home with the kids?” Irwin squirms. “That’s a hard question.”

Ann does not blame her husband for her frustration. “When I was so unhappy after our move to Dallas, I felt that because I’d given up so much, it was Irwin’s responsibility to make me happy. I finally realized I wasn’t taking responsibility for my own choices. I had avoided that responsibility by subsuming myself to everybody else’s needs.

“Sarah’s illness was the beginning of the reawakening of myself, my sleeping self that had been shelved when I got married and had children. I realized how invested I was in being a good mother. To have it blow up in my face, to realize that I had failed, which is how it felt then, was excruciating, striking at the core of who I said I was. I would sit at the soccer field, the only representative of a fully intact family, the only one who cooks dinner every night, and feel: This is not fair. I’m finally letting go of the blame and guilt, and feel a certain freedom and excitement, as if I’d lived in a small quadrant of a square and am finding a whole cube out there. It’s scary doing that when you’re almost fifty. It’s hard, having trained a whole family to expect Mom to take care of everything,
to pull back and say, ‘No, you’re going to have to take care of that yourself.’ ”

In 1994, Ann wrote to her classmates that “between PMS and HRT” she was shedding the “fantasies I grew up believing” and wanting “to earn money and status in a real job.” The next year, she became editor of
Dallas Family Magazine
. “My kids liked having their mother home, but they also like seeing me published. And I hope that out of my confusion they learned something. My daughters experienced my ambivalence, and also my ability to remedy mistakes. I hope they know that even though motherhood is demanding, it’s a job of finite duration, and there’s got to be a person underneath.

“Like my mother, I have three girls and a boy. Like my mother, I gave up my career to be a full-time mom and community volunteer. She was on the school board; I’ve been active in my kids’ schools. There are tremendous parallels. It’s amazing how powerful that model is; it’s unspoken, but it’s the most powerful model you’ve got. As much as I admired my mother, she is not who I wanted to be. I wanted and demand much more from my life. My mother spent a lifetime keeping my father happy, taking care of his mother, doing all the parenting. She has always been taking care of someone else. As my parents have grown older, I’ve thought about moving them here, and then I feel myself suffocating under that feeling of, Oh my God, I’m going to do again what my mother did. I’m not going to do it. My mother is an utterly selfless person. It took me a long time to see that the word
selfless
cuts both ways.”

CHAPTER EIGHT
 
 
On Their Own

S
elfless. Self-effacing: gone over with a rubber eraser until just a few traces remain. Long-suffering. Eating what’s left when everyone else has had theirs. Eating nothing at all. Doubting herself when the ridicule begins. Searching her own faults when her lover or husband is unhappy or unfaithful or cruel. If only she wouldn’t provoke him. Keeping her looks, biting her tongue, smoothing things over. Giving attention, giving him space.

Of all the confusions descended upon these women in their reinvention of a woman’s role, none has been so brambled as the question of how to measure the claims of love. Many would find in love the richest of all life’s satisfactions. But many would also discover that love could weaken and humiliate them. For love, they squandered hours in such helpless trivialities as waiting for the phone to ring, or sifted obsessively through the faintest ebbs and flows of romance—and its wreckage—with their friends. To keep men from leaving them, they acquiesced in arguments, made no demands; not knowing when to stand up for themselves, they swallowed and swallowed until poisoned with their own bile, or they burst with rage, another kind of helplessness, then slumped into fear and regret. They loathed their own cowardice: Abby van Alstyne, ’69, a civil rights lawyer living in Alabama, actually bent her head in shame as she recalled an evening, a decade earlier, when her husband had dropped a whole bowl of spaghetti on the floor just as she and a friend were rushing out to the theater. He stood and watched as she got down on her knees to clean it up. Though she would be late to the theater, she put up no fight. Abby was not, as she told the story, a victim: Though she saw herself acting out her girlhood training to always be
good and make things right, she blamed herself, only herself, for remaining so thoroughly tamed. Later divorced, she reflected on how her timidity had eroded herself and her marriage.

As the daughters of martyrs, these women suspected love and its sacrifices for another reason: They knew that a woman’s selfless attentions were not always a freely given gift but could be a trap, a demand, a means of surveillance and manipulation. Self-abnegating and deprived, a woman might extort an offering of guilt. Long-suffering, she might claim moral superiority. (Hillary Clinton, many have suggested, long ruled Bill by being the righteous one while he was the fuckup.)

To resist collapsing in the name of love, it wasn’t enough for these women to know that they didn’t, in fact, need a saving prince as their mothers truly had. The belief that they needed protection had been too ingrained, the fairy tale ran too deep to be so easily exorcised; they would have to learn, through willful effort, to trust their own powers. For that they turned, as they so often had, to other women; together they could dash cold water on one another’s faces, talk up their courage, persuade one another that they were not damsels but roaring women. Feminism gave them acid aphorisms like Gloria Steinem’s (“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”) and Shulamith Firestone’s (“Love is the pivot of women’s oppression”). A new genre of self-help books, like Colette Dowling’s 1980 best-seller
The Cinderella Complex
, scolded them for their childish dependency and warned them not to love too much. In their consciousness-raising groups, they cultivated their anger as an alternative to self-suppression and self-blame: They would quit pleasing him, give as little as they got, stop being a doormat, throw the bastard out. When Alison Campbell Swain read of rumors that Hillary Clinton had hurled things at Bill, she thought: Good for her. Better that than bottle it up.

Asked for their twentieth-reunion book what they strive to teach their daughters, the Wellesley women of ’69 spun variations on these themes: “not to depend financially, psychologically, emotionally—on a man.” “… that relationships with men are not the most important or reliable thing.” “… to take risks, question, speak up for herself, be neither perfect nor obedient nor compliant nor concerned with appearances and what others think.” “… to have the courage to act by herself, without fear of being alone.” Barbara Furne Simmons, who remarried in desperation
immediately after being left by her first husband, and ten months later divorced, once “desired to surrender, to be swept away by someone. After a while, I began to wonder how much of me there was left to sweep away. Maybe just swept under. Now I know I can handle life, that I don’t need to grab for someone to save me.”

Catherine Shen has suffered none of her classmates’ romantic helplessness or excessive docility. Her voice is startlingly free of sentimentality or apology. Divorced twice, Catherine has concluded that she is too selfish to be married. “I don’t like to live with someone and have to share. My most successful relationship was with a man eight years younger than me. I was thirty and he was twenty-two when we met, which was great, because he was totally malleable. I could make all the decisions. I need to get my own way. It’s difficult for me when the other person is equal. I find the Clinton marriage interesting because I know from classes I had with Hillary how smart and strong-willed and outspoken she is and I’m curious how two such strong people manage a partnership. The only person in the world I’ll sacrifice for is my son, Benjamin.”

Catherine never liked or wanted children—“I hadn’t ever been in a panic I wouldn’t have kids, but a few times I was panicked that I would”—but when she got pregnant at forty-one she decided to have the child. She had met Benjamin’s father when she was features editor at the
San Francisco Chronicle;
they romanced long distance when she moved to Washington, D.C., to be an editor at
USA Today
and then to Honolulu to be publisher of that city’s daily. “I had the baby because, theoretically, the time was ripe; I was the age my mother was when she had me. We got married and I left the paper and moved back to California. I went back to work when Benjamin was four months. Then I discovered that once you have a child, a marriage is renegotiated from scratch. My husband and I split the four hundred dollars a week for a nanny, but he was not one with the idea of a fifty-fifty split as far as keeping house or caring for the kid. Neither of us would compromise. We stick out in the same places, so instead of meshing, we poked into each other. I wasn’t going to give, so two years after we got married, we got a divorce.

“I dote on my son; I can’t wait to get home to see him, and would have happily stayed home from work much longer when he was born.
But my career has been drastically slowed. I would have gone to the
Los Angeles Times
, but the job required midnight hours, which as a single mother I couldn’t do. That’s fine after so many years doing exactly what I wanted to do, but I can’t imagine making that choice at twenty-eight. Now, like it or not, the next twelve years are centered on my child. I have fewer choices now, which is rarely a better circumstance to be in, in this world.”

Divorce is somewhat less common in the Wellesley class of ’69 than it is in the nation as a whole. Still, one in three of those who have married has also divorced, and a majority of those divorces have involved children. The causes have been varied. A very few were, like Catherine, motivated to leave their marriage by an admittedly “selfish” insistence on having things their own way. Many more struck out on their own for more inescapable reasons: Some decided, like Ann Landsberg, that a hellish family was more destructive to themselves and their children than the alternative. Some fled physical danger. Some were left by their husbands, despite all pleadings that they stay.

Betty Demy met her future husband at a Harvard Law School mixer. She was attracted to him because he was fiercely smart, like her father. She was also moved by an unhappiness she thought she might ease. It is, for some women, an irresistible combination: a man of accomplishment who is also wounded and in need.

“My husband had lived an impoverished childhood, financially and emotionally,” says Betty. “He’d been very heavy as a boy, an odd duck, without many friends. There was a sad yearning in him that I responded to. I didn’t think I’d change him, but I thought that I could give him the things he’d always wanted and then he would be happy and his good qualities would prevail.”

Betty had every reason to believe in the happiness promised by married life. Her parents were those “rare, lucky people” with a good marriage, a real partnership sustained by lasting love. “They traveled and had interesting friends and were involved in the community and politics and had wonderfully passionate conversations about ideas. My mother was not frustrated; she didn’t wish she were something else. I grew up wanting to have just what she had. And I thought it inevitable that I would grow into her life, that I would have a contented family and become
Cub Scout leader and join the PTA.” Right on schedule, Betty was married a week after graduation in her parents’ New Jersey backyard, then moved with her husband to the Midwest for his service in the JAG Corps. “Like Bill Clinton and every other college boy I knew, my husband made a deal to stay out of Vietnam.” They soon had a baby girl, Rebecca, and a boy, Doug.