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Authors: Miriam Horn
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the excruciatingly elite Miss Porter’s School: One of her Wellesley dormmates grew pot in their dorm; another married a black man and was disowned by her parents. An incandescently beautiful girl (classmate Catherine Shen remembers her as “a vision, a Caucasian vision”), with no trace of the brittle sophistication and hard sexiness that often hung about the boarding-school girls, Snowy was relievedto “quit the competition on looks and makeup and clothes.” After a brief romance with a Green Beret, she began spending her time with a band of hippie poets and computer pioneers at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, gingerly breaking propriety’s rules. “They were taking acid trips by the dozens. I experimented a little to be polite, but I was too sensitive. Drugs made me feel yucky. And though I was glad that ‘free love’ took the fallen-woman onus off a girl enjoying her body, I was uncomfortable that my boyfriend wanted to have an open relationship. I was loyal and old-fashioned and monogamous. He was a poet, and kept trying to persuade me that I was hung up. He would say I was laying my trips on him.”
Less timid was Lorna Rinear, ’69, who, a decade after the publication of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, chose the surest means to escape the constraints of her class. Raised by a nurse and nanny on Manhattan’s exclusive Sutton Place, dressed at her mother’s insistence like a doll with long, golden Shirley Temple ringlets, Lorna was forbidden in high school to venture into the streets except with the family chauffeur, who took her each morning to the Spence School. “While my brother had complete freedom, I made exactly one decision in my life—and that was whether I was going to have braces. My parents knew where I was every minute of the day. It was a typical WASP family. No one talked about anything: I didn’t know that my mother was my father’s fourth wife until I got involved in genealogy at Wellesley and discovered half-sisters I’d never known existed. And no one ever touched. When my mother died years later, my uncle gave me a tap on the shoulder to express his sympathy.”
Though a few of her Spence classmates had working moms—modeling tycoon Eileen Ford, actress Kitty Hart—Lorna could not imagine a life “except the kind my mother had, supported by an incredibly rich man. Though it always struck me as bizarre that you would put that kind of money into private school for your daughter so she could be accomplished, but at nothing in particular. I was a reflection of them, part of the furniture. Here is my perfect house, my perfect wife, my perfect child.”
The surest escape for such a princess was into the rough arms of the wrong man. Most in the class fled from their safe, respectable destinies only in their fantasies—falling for Elvis or James Dean, dangerous boys from the wrong side of the tracks. Lorna arrived at Wellesley, “and thesecond I was sprung, I went wild. I hitchhiked to Rolling Stones and James Brown concerts. And I discovered that the sexual revolution was just my cup of tea. There were many overnights not recorded by Mrs. Jones of Cazenove Hall. I was into roulette, making up for my previous seventeen years of abstinence.”
After so sheltered an upbringing, however, Lorna was poorly equipped to handle such freedom. “I was not very wise about people, and about men in particular. Going to girls’ schools my whole life had left me somewhat naive. I ended up getting pregnant sophomore year. He was twenty-seven, in the middle of a divorce, and broke—his wife had split with their kid and all the furniture. He was at Wellesley working as the stableman.”
Six years before
Roe
v.
Wade
, Massachusetts state laws on sexual behavior, birth control, and abortion were the most conservative in the nation. An unmarried woman could not spend the night in a man’s room “even if he was her uncle.” Though the pill had come on the market in 1960 and 6 million American women
Less timid was Lorna Rinear, ’69, who, a decade after the publication of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, chose the surest means to escape the constraints of her class. Raised by a nurse and nanny on Manhattan’s exclusive Sutton Place, dressed at her mother’s insistence like a doll with long, golden Shirley Temple ringlets, Lorna was forbidden in high school to venture into the streets except with the family chauffeur, who took her each morning to the Spence School. “While my brother had complete freedom, I made exactly one decision in my life—and that was whether I was going to have braces. My parents knew where I was every minute of the day. It was a typical WASP family. No one talked about anything: I didn’t know that my mother was my father’s fourth wife until I got involved in genealogy at Wellesley and discovered half-sisters I’d never known existed. And no one ever touched. When my mother died years later, my uncle gave me a tap on the shoulder to express his sympathy.”
Though a few of her Spence classmates had working moms—modeling tycoon Eileen Ford, actress Kitty Hart—Lorna could not imagine a life “except the kind my mother had, supported by an incredibly rich man. Though it always struck me as bizarre that you would put that kind of money into private school for your daughter so she could be accomplished, but at nothing in particular. I was a reflection of them, part of the furniture. Here is my perfect house, my perfect wife, my perfect child.”
The surest escape for such a princess was into the rough arms of the wrong man. Most in the class fled from their safe, respectable destinies only in their fantasies—falling for Elvis or James Dean, dangerous boys from the wrong side of the tracks. Lorna arrived at Wellesley, “and thesecond I was sprung, I went wild. I hitchhiked to Rolling Stones and James Brown concerts. And I discovered that the sexual revolution was just my cup of tea. There were many overnights not recorded by Mrs. Jones of Cazenove Hall. I was into roulette, making up for my previous seventeen years of abstinence.”
After so sheltered an upbringing, however, Lorna was poorly equipped to handle such freedom. “I was not very wise about people, and about men in particular. Going to girls’ schools my whole life had left me somewhat naive. I ended up getting pregnant sophomore year. He was twenty-seven, in the middle of a divorce, and broke—his wife had split with their kid and all the furniture. He was at Wellesley working as the stableman.”
Six years before
Roe
v.
Wade
, Massachusetts state laws on sexual behavior, birth control, and abortion were the most conservative in the nation. An unmarried woman could not spend the night in a man’s room “even if he was her uncle.” Though the pill had come on the market in 1960 and 6 million American women
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