Rebels in White Gloves (44 page)

Like the mothers in the class, the single and childless women have been whipped this way and that by the media and experts, measuring their happiness and telling them how they ought to behave. When they were girls, they saw “spinsters” painted as a sorry lot:
Time
magazine wrote of “lives of quiet desperation punctuated by pathetic sorties to dating clubs.” To remain childless was the worst fate that could befall a woman: Erik Erikson, whose work on identity helped make it a central preoccupation and pursuit, advised that a woman who did not fulfill her “innate need to fill her uterus with embryonic tissue was likely to be frustrated or neurotic.”

By the early seventies, that story had been upended, a reflection in great measure of the gallivantings of their generation.
Newsweek
proclaimed singlehood “glamorous.” Hollywood celebrated the slow discovery of unfettered pleasures by
An Unmarried Woman
and opened the
dark
Diary of a Mad Housewife
. By the eighties, when Hillary Clinton’s classmates were in their thirties and watching their biological clocks wind down, the story reversed once more: Single women were again depicted as lonely, depressed, and desperate, both reflecting and shaping how the women of this generation perceived their lives. Typical of those years was
Newsweek’s
famous warning to women over thirty-five that they were more likely to take a terrorist bullet than find a husband. Even
Cosmo
, that longtime friend of the sexy single girl, offered up sketches from an unmarried life: “Her will to date replaced by a will to eat” she is “sitting on her huge butt in front of
Kojak
eating injudicious amounts of ice cream. She will have similarly plump pals with whom she’ll discuss only one subject. ‘Why are all the attractive men either gay or married?’ ” In the nineties, that story persists. Arianna Huffington has called Gloria Steinem “a pathetic woman who pretends she didn’t want a man or child, because she couldn’t get one.” Easy to see why Pat Sinclair might feel freakish.

Several women in the class have grappled consciously with how this story of the pitiable barren woman has weighed on their lives. Virginia Blankenhorn has wished at times that she hadn’t wanted to get married, “since I would have had more freedom … but I did want to—or maybe it was social pressure, the feeling that I was finally doing what I was
supposed
to be doing. The nine months of my pregnancy represented the longest period of my life where I could unequivocally approve of myself, because I knew that everybody else (i.e., my mother) could find no fault with me at last.”

Louise Carter entered Wellesley believing she would have a romantic life, get married, and let a man take care of her, “maybe even be rich.” Then she dated moneyed Harvard men and found them dull and realized that “life in the suburbs, sitting by the pool and just having kids to raise, would be a nightmare.” As with so many of these women, her own mother’s frustration lingered too freshly in her mind. Having once aspired to work in medicine, Louise’s mother had dropped out of college when she fell ill during her first pregnancy. She had “no patience for children. She was constantly losing it with us and telling us how much she hated being a mother.”

Instead of marrying rich, Louise moved in with a student she met in Cambridge and followed him into graduate school in psychology. They
married and she finished her doctorate and began teaching, but soon became unhappy with her work and family life. In an article in the 1990 alumnae magazine, she wrote: “I had a decent husband, an interesting job, a house that rumbled with helpful appliances,” but felt “I’d wandered into the wrong lifeplan.… Silently, I admonished myself for ungratefulness. I zapped my doubts and slipped back into the updraft of success. I maintained the purposeful flutter for a couple of years, but my dissatisfaction grew.” In conversation, Louise elaborated: “My career had taken off, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I was on a zooming locomotive and had to leap off. My path was a different path and maybe a dirt path.” In the alumnae magazine, she quoted Kurt Vonnegut: “ ‘You are who you pretend to be, so you better watch out who you pretend to be.’ I hadn’t noticed when the roles I’d played had begun to define me, distancing me from my True Self.”

Louise began to write fiction again in 1978. In 1979, her husband went away to a conference, and Louise found herself writing with a new kind of freedom. When he came back, she told him that she wanted to live by herself for a while. After a year apart, she didn’t feel like moving back in. “He wanted me to come back and have kids. I felt like if we had kids, it would all be on me, like everything else had been. Ending that relationship was the hardest thing I ever had to do. I would visit him and drive away and think, I could turn back right now and he would be so happy. And I could never do it. I wanted to get to my own home. I haven’t seen him since 1981. He got involved with a student of mine, a woman I introduced him to. They got pregnant that summer, so in September, I said, ‘I guess it’s time for us to get a divorce.’ ”

From the alumnae magazine: “At thirty-two, I left my husband, moved to an apartment without a dishwasher, started writing again, quit my job. I’d given up a secure job, marriage, plans for children. I wasn’t sure I wanted those things, but I wondered if someday I’d regret not having them. Magazine covers screamed warnings about the man shortage, a contemporary horror story about educated, independent women forever deprived of their chance to live the American dream. I bundled all my fears into a Thanksgiving fantasy, and played it over and over in my imagination … a New England saltbox, chubby-fingered cherubs clutching at daddy, mommy smiling in the kitchen, while her childless sister sits in a darkened city apartment.”

Home alone on her fortieth birthday, Louise got a phone call from a cemetery, wondering if they might interest her in purchasing a burial plot. Unnerved, she put on her shoes and went out for a run. “I realized with pleasure that age … is the antidote to pretending. I could relax.” Since 1980, she has lived with a man who has made it plain that he is not interested in having kids. “I know lots of women who have just conveniently forgotten to use birth control. I couldn’t do that. And I’ve been ambivalent; I blamed him, but I also wasn’t bringing it up. I’ve always loved the unpredictability in my life, and I don’t think children deal with that well. At the grocery store, I see these women with their well-put-together kids and their full grocery carts and I don’t envy them. I do have a close relationship with a number of children of family and friends. I also have a cat, and I’m an incredibly overprotective doting mother and I sometimes think, Oh no, I’m turning into one of those cat ladies. I’m sometimes sad, but feel mostly at peace with it.”

It was, for Louise, the story she had to get over more than the fact of not having children. It makes one wonder whether in a place that afforded them a more honorable role, women without children might not feel so miserable. In fact, there are childless women in the class for whom that seems to be the case.

In the twentieth-reunion book, Chris Osborne wrote to her classmates of “an experiment with engagement” that had recently “blown up in my face.” It was 1986 and she was living in Chicago. He was a lawyer, about to make partner, when he got the call from God to be a minister and quit the firm. “He was the finest person I’d ever met, and I can make myself very in love with a person based on their values. I find it inspiring when someone appreciates right and wrong on even the smallest things. He was brilliant and holy and sweet and I loved him very much.

“The problem was, well, he wouldn’t fuck me. I thought, We’ll just get counseling, but he wouldn’t. I think he had some weird problem that went deeper than anything he was willing to talk about. I went myself and after two sessions thought, I don’t need this. That was it. Twice before that I had lived with men, but I never wanted to marry them, either. I think marriage happens when you’re convinced you want a family, and I’ve never been someone who had to have a baby. I would never get married just for that reason, and that took some of the energy in that direction away.

“For a while the biological clock bothered me; then I read about it
and thought, Oh, that’s what I had. It’s nothing I’m going to regret. I would have had children if circumstances had been right and I could have given them a good life. Maybe that’s a legacy of my mother’s work at Planned Parenthood: I believe you create a loving home first and then have a child. I would never have done it alone. When I was growing up, my dad may have been in the basement working on his model trains and avoiding my mother, but he was always there. I would have wanted to be home when my kids were little, and since I’ve always had to support myself, that wouldn’t have been possible.

“I am really happy to be single and free and independent. I love exploring new cities, building new nests, making new friends. I also adore being alone. I’ve always been self-sufficient. I love to read and write and garden, all kinds of solitary activities. Even when I’m unhappy, I’m better alone. The last thing I want is to talk to someone else. I’ve created a beautiful home for myself, where I find all the solace I need.”

Like her classmates who chose to stay at home with their children, Chris at times seems to need to persuade her fellows that she is happy in her chosen life. “I hate to go out,” she wrote to them fifteen years out of school. “I come home to my cat Gary, build a fire and pull out the current journal. The collected works now number some sixty volumes, a compendium of thoughts, gripes, dialogues, spleen, prayers, lists, oracles and nasty stuff about other people, all of which must be destroyed upon my death.” In the twentieth-reunion book, she was intentionally confusing: “I don’t get lonely. Clean air, homegrown catnip and neighboring fish have turned Harry and Ernie into big, strapping boys. We’re all digging our first yard, featuring real trees, live flowers and actual birds, rabbits, toads and squirrels.”

Chris’s comic account of her life at times seems almost a parody of her classmates’ candor; she is armored by wit even at her most startlingly uninhibited. At the White House reunion, she paused after saying goodbye to me, then suddenly blurted: “There’s something I want to tell you, which I’m hesitant to say for fear in some weird way it might hurt Hillary. I’ve smoked dope every day since 1965. I’m a responsible taxpayer and a responsible doper, and think it should be legalized. If I’m going to be true to the cause, I need to come clean.”

She is still less the “good girl” on the subject of sex. “I don’t mind not having someone living with me. Guys around the house are great for changing lightbulbs and fixing things; it’s amazing how they can do that
stuff. I had one like that once, but he was such a shit head, I’m happy to go without. I’d rather pay Tim the handyman, even though he goes at the pace of a retarded snail and is usually cranky. I do mind not having sex once in a while. It’s tough, because sex is so problematic these days. I don’t even date anymore, because I don’t want to get into that. That’s why my idea for a vibrator store is so good. I ordered mine by mail from Eve’s Garden. It’s a Hitachi, about the size of a washing machine, very useful. But there could be something like ‘The Sharper Image,’ something that sexless, except they would sell nothing but vibrators. Not a sleazy place. Everyone should be comfortable going there. I’m just waiting for financing. I’ve made millions of dollars for my clients, but I’ve not made my own million yet. This could be it: There’s so many people who feel like they can’t have sex with other people anymore.”

Certainly, in the class of ’69 the level of sexual dissatisfaction is high. A third of the women, both married and unmarried, report a disappointing or inactive sex life. One in three married women in the class has been unfaithful. Others have every reason to be: An anonymous correspondent to the twentieth-reunion book wrote, “I have been faithful all my marriage, but my husband and I always had too little sex for me, 2x a month and now there has been none for nine months or so.”

Like the others in the class without children, Chris Osborne knows she will have to fend for herself in old age. She also knows that “just because you have children doesn’t mean you’ll be taken care of. I don’t see me taking care of my mother. And she seems kind of a lost soul, a bright woman who after years of raising kids and not being out in the world is unhappy most of the time.” Chris feels neither such isolation nor such sorrow. “There’s plenty of us spinsters and also generous women comfortable enough in their marriages that they don’t mind setting a place for a single woman. I think in our sixties and seventies we spinsters, widows, and divorcees will link up more and more. In the meantime, I mother my friends and they mother me; one friend celebrates Mother’s Day just with friends.”

Finding ways to mother—to care deeply for children not their own or for people just as dependent as children—has been for some of these
women a way out of the sense of freakishness suffered by Pat Sinclair or the loneliness endured by Charlynn Maniatis, a loneliness which seems less a consequence of childlessness than of a more universal isolation. Before she had a child of her own, Jan Piercy became guardian to classmate (and single parent) Jinnet Fowles’s two children, which through Jan’s thirties was the “closest I thought I would come to having children.” Lindsay Miller has been a Lamaze coach for a single mom. Dorothy Devine assisted her first woman lover through labor and delivery, and remained close to that child, who is now grown and married. After she broke up with her second serious lover, a wealthy woman who squired her to debutante balls, Dorothy discovered that she missed “suppertime, people coming home, kids, and family life.” Since 1983, she has helped raise her lover’s two sons while their mother has gone to night school and traveled on business.

For her tenth reunion, Nonna Noto wrote to her classmates: “No family yet; still looking!” On her fifteenth, in the line asking her present name, she wrote, “Still single.” At her twentieth, she wrote again that she was still single, adding, “I hold great respect for those of you who have managed to combine a successful marriage, motherhood, and working.”