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Authors: Miriam Horn
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lives. Sylvia Plath wrote of her fears that a woman dedicated to creative work would “sacrifice all claims to femininity and family.” Anaïs Nin worried that she would shrivel a man were she to “steal his thunder [and] outshine him.”
At home, for many of these women, the message was much the same. Mary Day Kent’s mother had dropped out of Wellesley at the end of her junior year, in 1945, to get married, and she made it clear to her daughter that the aim of college was not to prepare herself for work but “to be a more interesting person to meet a more interesting husband.” Marilyn Hagstrum’s mom urged her daughter to focus less on her grades and more on her bridge: She, too, was at Wellesley “to fit in socially, to meet somebody nice with good prospects and get married.”
The Wellesley girls took such admonitions to heart. The majority of seniors in the class of ’69, like most women in college that year, expected to work only until they married or had their first child. Few graduated with professional goals and plans. Most still believed it best for men to be breadwinners and women to be wives.
The Ruling Class
Inevitably entangled with the question of work were matters of money and social class, issues as complicated in the sixties as all the questions regarding women’s proper role. Only a fraction of this Wellesley class anticipated that they might actually
need
to make money: the quarter who were on financial aid knew that they would need to support themselves if they failed to marry well, and even a middle-class girl like Rhea Kemble, ’69, was advised by her father that since a woman who was smart might not be a social success, she should prepare herself at Wellesley for “self-supporting spinsterhood.”
For most, however, money had never been a concern in their lives.Though by the late sixties Wellesley had shed some of what Nora Ephron, ’62, called its “hangovers” from an earlier era, “when it was totally a school for the rich as opposed to now when it is only partially so,” of the 470 freshmen who entered the class of 1969, a fifth were legacies—daughters or granddaughters of alumnae, beneficiaries of the most enduring form of affirmative action in higher education—and 40 percent were from private schools. Most of those were eager to take their certain place as matrons of society, passed from rich daddy to rich husband.
But the late sixties were also a time of strong antimaterialist sentiments, with personal wealth viewed by many as politically suspect: Fortunes were too often made through exploitation, leftist critics argued, and were in any event obscene in a world where so many were poor. Many in the class would renounce their inherited or anticipated privilege and join in their peers’ denunciation of the hollow pursuit of the dollar. “Money was what the military-industrial complex was about,” recalls Susan Alexander, ’69. “We were interested in higher things.” For some, that repudiation would be temporary: Susan would become a Presbyterian minister in her twenties, and then, a decade later, a Wall Street trader. For others, their moral doubt about being members of the ruling class would have lifelong consequences.
Alison “Snowy” Campbell had grown up in Oyster Bay, Long Island, with Rockefellers and Bouviers, but had little desire to return there and would eventually turn her back on that world for good. “I had ideas besides marrying some promising trust lawyer and going to cocktail parties. That’s probably a stupidly egocentric thing to say. I just knew that I was definitely not attracted to people living off their ancestors’ earnings, playing golf, clipping their stock coupons, and drinking like fish.” Having gone to Wellesley against the wishes of her grandmother, who would have preferred to see her among the older, more traditional money at Vassar or Smith, Snowy was thrilled to find what seemed to her “a melting pot” after her years at
At home, for many of these women, the message was much the same. Mary Day Kent’s mother had dropped out of Wellesley at the end of her junior year, in 1945, to get married, and she made it clear to her daughter that the aim of college was not to prepare herself for work but “to be a more interesting person to meet a more interesting husband.” Marilyn Hagstrum’s mom urged her daughter to focus less on her grades and more on her bridge: She, too, was at Wellesley “to fit in socially, to meet somebody nice with good prospects and get married.”
The Wellesley girls took such admonitions to heart. The majority of seniors in the class of ’69, like most women in college that year, expected to work only until they married or had their first child. Few graduated with professional goals and plans. Most still believed it best for men to be breadwinners and women to be wives.
The Ruling Class
Inevitably entangled with the question of work were matters of money and social class, issues as complicated in the sixties as all the questions regarding women’s proper role. Only a fraction of this Wellesley class anticipated that they might actually
need
to make money: the quarter who were on financial aid knew that they would need to support themselves if they failed to marry well, and even a middle-class girl like Rhea Kemble, ’69, was advised by her father that since a woman who was smart might not be a social success, she should prepare herself at Wellesley for “self-supporting spinsterhood.”
For most, however, money had never been a concern in their lives.Though by the late sixties Wellesley had shed some of what Nora Ephron, ’62, called its “hangovers” from an earlier era, “when it was totally a school for the rich as opposed to now when it is only partially so,” of the 470 freshmen who entered the class of 1969, a fifth were legacies—daughters or granddaughters of alumnae, beneficiaries of the most enduring form of affirmative action in higher education—and 40 percent were from private schools. Most of those were eager to take their certain place as matrons of society, passed from rich daddy to rich husband.
But the late sixties were also a time of strong antimaterialist sentiments, with personal wealth viewed by many as politically suspect: Fortunes were too often made through exploitation, leftist critics argued, and were in any event obscene in a world where so many were poor. Many in the class would renounce their inherited or anticipated privilege and join in their peers’ denunciation of the hollow pursuit of the dollar. “Money was what the military-industrial complex was about,” recalls Susan Alexander, ’69. “We were interested in higher things.” For some, that repudiation would be temporary: Susan would become a Presbyterian minister in her twenties, and then, a decade later, a Wall Street trader. For others, their moral doubt about being members of the ruling class would have lifelong consequences.
Alison “Snowy” Campbell had grown up in Oyster Bay, Long Island, with Rockefellers and Bouviers, but had little desire to return there and would eventually turn her back on that world for good. “I had ideas besides marrying some promising trust lawyer and going to cocktail parties. That’s probably a stupidly egocentric thing to say. I just knew that I was definitely not attracted to people living off their ancestors’ earnings, playing golf, clipping their stock coupons, and drinking like fish.” Having gone to Wellesley against the wishes of her grandmother, who would have preferred to see her among the older, more traditional money at Vassar or Smith, Snowy was thrilled to find what seemed to her “a melting pot” after her years at
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