Rebels in White Gloves (46 page)

Susan’s story contains age-old themes: a wife impoverished and shamed by her husband’s drunkenness; a woman chastised by the church for failing to conform to its conception of the good mother; a mother whose choices are narrowly circumscribed by the urgent need to secure the physical and financial safety of her child. Variations on it have played out in the lives of many in the class: 10 percent report having been abused or battered; one in three has been involuntarily unemployed.

But Susan’s story is also a new one. Alone and out of work, with a nine-month-old baby, she went back again to a temp agency. Able to type eighty-five words a minute, she qualified as a “superior” secretary and on her first day was sent to Wall Street, to Kidder Peabody’s new interest-rate-futures
division. In short order, her supervisors had spotted her talents for mathematical analysis and writing and promoted her into a position that she quickly came to love. That a secretary could break so quickly into a high-powered, high-stakes job was evidence of a rapid transformation of the financial markets, and also of how feminism had altered the world. Four years later, having hit a glass ceiling at Kidder, Susan went to Oppenheimer as vice-president in charge of commodities research; she found it a company free of sexism that “judged you entirely on what you did.”

The largely female world of social service had been demoralizing for Susan: “Everything was all dingy and broken-down, and nothing worked; it was not an environment particularly reinforcing to my self-esteem.” But she loved the ways of Wall Street, strange as it was to be so content in a world she had once despised. “You dress powerfully, you take private cars, your whole environment bespeaks power.” Overcome by a sense of powerlessness at home, Susan was rejuvenated at work by the same trappings of power that have sustained many a man. And while in one sense, she seemed to have abandoned her social commitment, for a battered, impoverished woman to move from terrified helplessness to a conviction of her own competency and self-sufficiency could itself be seen as an act of social progress.

Susan did continue to conduct Sunday services at churches too poor to support a full-time minister. “I would go to places that scared me to death, where the church was the only building that hadn’t been burned down. It was a fantastic experience. The church mattered so much to people as shelter from their harsh environment.

“I suffered at leaving a life in the church, and never imagined I would end up where I did. But I came to believe that not serving the church in an official way didn’t mean that I was failing to live up to my ideals. There’s nothing that’s really pure. And I had a child to raise, and knew I could do a lot of damage. I had grown up thinking you worked to improve the world. By this time, I understood that work was what you had to do to earn a living; it was how I would support my son.

“When you’re young, you have great contempt for the lives people end up living. You think people have more choices than they have. Now I admire people who’ve paid the mortgage, sent kids to college, maintained a relationship, no matter how pedestrian that all is.”

For many years, Katherine Shepeluk Loutrel ’69 found refuge in Pentecostal Christianity from monstrous family miseries. Her father was a steelworker, frequently out of work and dependent on his wife’s income as a nurse. Katherine, one of ten children, grew up caring for her siblings and shielding them from her father’s drunken rages. She found some protection for herself in her accomplishments at school and her dutifulness at home: “They were the only things that pleased my dad, and exempted me from some of the punishments my siblings were subjected to. He wouldn’t hurt me if I kept the house clean.” Still, the pain in her family reached gothic proportions. One sister was manic-depressive. Another killed herself at twenty-one, leaving behind a young child. Three siblings became alcoholics. The oldest sibling suffered his dad’s worst beatings yet remained living with him until his death, unable to drive, unemployed, and “not knowing how to live a life except one of being abused.” Another brother died of unknown causes; both dead children were discovered by their mother in her home. Katherine herself has been diagnosed in the last decade with multiple sclerosis and depression, and has continued to deal with alcoholism and attempted suicide in her family.

Katherine survived, she believes, only because of her strong faith. “My mother and I both had a life-changing experience when I was fourteen. After hearing a preacher preach that Jesus died in my place because I was a sinner and that I needed to acknowledge that and repent and then I would have a new life, I would be born again, my mother and I made that commitment.” Katherine loved the “noisy ecstasy” of services, where worshipers danced and sang in the spirit and spoke in tongues. While her classmates testified to one another in consciousness-raising meetings, she testified before her congregation and God. “I told God that my life belonged to Him. Then at the end of my freshman year at Wellesley, I was at a church in Boston and felt God challenge me to go into medicine; I said, ‘I’ll try the doors and if they open, I’ll know that’s what you want me to be.’ I didn’t feel or anticipate any great conflict between my science and my faith, though I did feel that Creation should have been taught as well as evolution, which I consider merely a theory that I don’t personally hold.”

Katherine was accepted to medical school on a full scholarship. Her
father was “so proud that I was doing what he might have done if he’d gone to high school.” At the same time, after many dry years, he began drinking again. “My mother began having to hide from him in the closet and finally had to leave. I was twenty-eight years old, but it was still painful. I believe divorce is not what God wants, but we have to deal with sinful people and can’t always do what God wants. My mother had been a marvelous wife: self-effacing, quiet, caring, and giving. She worked hard and suffered long.”

Just before starting medical school, Katherine met her future husband, Lou, at a summer camp where Pentecostal Christians led street meetings to share their faith. They were married, and on the eve of her genetics final, Katherine gave birth to their first child. During her internship, Lou worked to support the family, but as soon as Katherine started her residency and was earning money, Lou decided “someone needed to care for the kids” and became a househusband, which he has been ever since. He didn’t mind giving up work, though his dad, a vice-president of Sherwin Williams, thought it a waste of his education, Katherine says, “which I realized was just what had always been said about the foolishness of educating women just to stay home.”

The Pentecostal church, clear in its policy that men were not to permit their wives to work, could not accept the arrangement at all. “When I was doing my rounds one evening, I visited a deacon who was a patient in the hospital, and he told me I was violating God’s will by being in medicine. I knew I was fulfilling God’s call. But soon after that, I was told to leave the church because the powers that be thought women should be at home.”

Katherine has remained, nonetheless, a believer in the church’s higher authority. After her expulsion from the Pentecostals, her family joined a Baptist church. In 1993, her daughter Becky made front-page news in Champaign-Urbana as salutatorian in her public high school graduating class. She thanked God at the end of her speech, acknowledging His sovereignty in her life and asking that He care for the students who were graduating. “Needless to say, this mother was very proud.”

Their collisions with the church have led some members of the Wellesley class of ’69 into active efforts to create a larger space there for women. Pam McLucas Beyers became an elder of her Presbyterian church and helped “call” a woman as their new pastor. She also chaired
a task force on homosexuality and the Christian faith, believing that “the ordination of gays is an issue of justice and inclusiveness—surely central themes in Jesus’s message.” Rachel Gorn Tedesco served on the board of the Massachusetts Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Elizabeth Nordbeck, the first woman in 154 years to join the faculty of the Lancaster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, taught the history of women in the church and was later named dean; in 1990 she became the first female dean in 183 years at Andover Newton Theological School. Still, she finds “sexism alive and well even in ‘enlightened’ places,” as she wrote to her classmates. “I’ve considered alternatives ranging from becoming an herbalist to shooting myself.”

A few in the class have made equally deep commitments to other established faiths. Phyllis Magnus Sperber married an Orthodox Jewish rabbi and is raising ten children in Jerusalem. Sarah Larabee spent years in Hindu ashrams. Priscilla Raymond Gates Heilveil and her husband are raising ten children, many of them adopted from Asia. “Our family includes Buddhist, Unitarian, and Jewish speakers of Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, and pidgin English—you cannot imagine the holidays we celebrate.”

A growing number, however, have turned away from established religions, finding greater spiritual satisfaction in the mix of Native American, mystical, and Eastern traditions that has come to be called the New Age. The goddess movement in particular boasts a surprisingly high number of acolytes in Hillary Clinton’s class: Finding the two great female characters of the Bible—the fallen and corrupting Eve; the chaste and martyred Mary—uneasy role models for their paragons of female strength and justice, many have turned instead to “woman-centered” traditions and mythologies. On their bookshelves one finds such New Age best-sellers as Jean Auel’s
Clan of the Cave Bear
novels, set in an Ice Age matriarchy, as well as the works of Starhawk, “teacher of witchcraft and licensed minister of the Covenant of the Goddess,” and Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s
Women Who Run with the Wolves
. Estes, a Latina Jungian analyst and storyteller, aims to awaken her disciples’ “Wild Woman” with recountings of myths and folktales about bold and cunning females
drawn from multicultural sources: pre-Christian European, Egyptian, Tibetan Buddhist, African. Starhawk seeks to “heal the estrangement from the earth that began with the Bronze Age shift from matrifocal to patriarchal cultures.” These female spirit guides describe ancient matriarchal cultures as models of a more peaceable and ecological alternative to the destructive technologies of men. They urge a return to the worship of female fertility as a source of power and of greater sensitivity to the life-bearing earth. They offer tales of female heroines and divinities, concerned less with recounting woman’s history as a victim of oppression than in offering a proud heritage of woman’s wisdom and courage and power.

A number of Hillary’s classmates actively participate in rituals meant to evoke such matriarchal traditions. A decade after leaving her husband and their radical collective, Dorothy Devine joined a circle of women who each year gather at solstices and equinoxes and other “pagan holidays” to “celebrate the goddess” in each of them. “Some people also have a patriarchal religion; they might go to the Episcopal church. But as women we come together at somebody’s house or in a meadow. In the fall, as the days dwindle, we celebrate Demeter and Persephone. At the winter solstice, we light a hundred candles. If someone is suffering we chant or sing and hug her and tell her positive things and wash her feet. We raise energy for a troubled part of the world or a cure for AIDS, then we feast. Some people wear robes in symbolic colors. At Hallowmass everyone comes as an animal. We’ve done menstruation rites for daughters, involving a ritual bath and gifts of grown-up jewelry, and also commitment ceremonies between women and rites of menopause. When we part, we say to each other, ‘Go with the goddess.’ ”

Kris Olson has fulfilled her “powerful spiritual longing” by studying for years with the elders of the Warm Springs tribe, learning their language to better understand their cosmology. She has also, in her professional capacity, fought numerous battles on behalf of Northwest Indians seeking to shield their sacred life from predation, most recently arguing against scientists seeking to overturn the Native American Repatriation Act so that they can study the remains of the nine-thousand-year-old Kennewick Man. Though Kris is “wary of wannabes, of the Anglo appropriation of native religions,” her Episcopalian upbringing disappointed her: “For my church camp play I was cast once as Joan of Arc.
Getting burned at the stake did not seduce me into the faith.” Scattered about her home are various objects of “spirit art” from South Asia and Africa; her office is ornamented with an array of wooden and ceramic turtles given to her by the Zuni as her totem. In the nineteenth century, she explains, the turtle symbolized female endurance: Its heart, legend says, beats even when its brain is bashed. In the twentieth century, the turtle stands for risk taking: She makes progress only when she sticks her neck out and makes herself vulnerable. In the twenty-first century, the creature who carries her own house about and manages life on both water and land will be for Kris “an emblem of versatility and self-sufficiency.”