knew what happened if you got pregnant. You weredisappeared—sent away to a home for wayward girls to have the baby under cover of night and give it up for adoption. That sort of thing didn’t happen to a Wellesley girl. We were good girls. That’s how we got there in the first place.”
And yet. Something changed between freshman year, when Ann Landsberg, ’69, was “shocked” to find birth control pills in a senior’s room, and junior year, when she lamented that she was one of the last virgins on campus. The senior yearbook, designed by Alison “Snowy” Campbell, ’69, flaunted the girls’ new sexually knowing ways. Making a lewd pun on ’69 in what she looks back on as “the naughtiest thing I ever did in my life,” the angel-faced, willowy girl with soft brown eyes and white-blond hair put an acid-pink and green Mae West—in the psychedelic Art Nouveau style common to rock posters—right side up on the front cover, upside down on the back. (One of the many cheers for this class includes the line: “upside down, right side up, one-nine-six-nine Wellesley,” though that was before oral-sex jokes became a source of public torment for Hillary.) A picture meant for the yearbook frontispiece was pulled at the last moment by the college administration: It featured the bare-assed figures of Snowy and Eldie and two other girls standing atop their dorm roof surveying the lush landscape. With a self-importance typical of their generation, they left the frontispiece blank but for a small, somber note about censorship by official powers. Yet for all their bravado, an innocence lingered at the marriage lecture in their senior year, which, against the wishes of the dean, addressed the subject of sex both inside and outside of marriage. The invited speaker, Carola Eisenberg of MIT’s department of psychiatry, advised the girls that “if intercourse does occur, it is usually at first disappointing, often horrifying.” The many young women in the audience who wanted to know what an orgasm was were chastised. “This is a medical question and will not be answered here. Go to the infirmary.”
Like everything else, the sexual revolution reached Wellesley on a kind of time delay; elsewhere it had been gaining momentum since the end of World War II. A culture in the thrall of Freud anointed sexual fulfillment the best yardstick for measuring psychic well-being. Talking about sex became an acceptable, even necessary, proof of modern thinking: The Kinsey studies, first published in 1948, became runaway bestsellers with their accounts (however reliable) of rampant sexualexperimentation in mainstream America. In 1953, the year the new
Playboy
magazine offered advice to men on how to outsmart “Miss Gold Digger” and get sex without getting trapped, half of American women said they were having premarital sex; from 1940 to 1961, the number of illegitimate births to mothers under twenty-five increased by 300 percent. “It seems that all America is one big orgone box,” proclaimed a
Time
magazine cover story in January 1964, referring to the libido-enhancing machine conceived by Freud disciple Wilhelm Reich. “Day and night from screens and stages, advertising posters and newspaper pages it flashes larger-than-life-sized images of sex … with the message that sex will save you and libido make you free.” Everything from “incest to inversion” could be found in novels like
Tropic of Cancer, Peyton Place
, and
Valley of the Dolls
, complained
Newsweek
. In Hollywood, taboos were crumbling, which in 1967 the head of the film production code deemed “the most healthy thing.” Anaïs Nin offered her recipe for happiness: “Mix well the sperm of four men in one day.” Even the leader of the National Council of Churches joined in, urging couples to “conjure up various positions” for their mutual pleasure. And no longer was carnal knowledge the exclusive province of girls of the lower classes. A psychologist at
And yet. Something changed between freshman year, when Ann Landsberg, ’69, was “shocked” to find birth control pills in a senior’s room, and junior year, when she lamented that she was one of the last virgins on campus. The senior yearbook, designed by Alison “Snowy” Campbell, ’69, flaunted the girls’ new sexually knowing ways. Making a lewd pun on ’69 in what she looks back on as “the naughtiest thing I ever did in my life,” the angel-faced, willowy girl with soft brown eyes and white-blond hair put an acid-pink and green Mae West—in the psychedelic Art Nouveau style common to rock posters—right side up on the front cover, upside down on the back. (One of the many cheers for this class includes the line: “upside down, right side up, one-nine-six-nine Wellesley,” though that was before oral-sex jokes became a source of public torment for Hillary.) A picture meant for the yearbook frontispiece was pulled at the last moment by the college administration: It featured the bare-assed figures of Snowy and Eldie and two other girls standing atop their dorm roof surveying the lush landscape. With a self-importance typical of their generation, they left the frontispiece blank but for a small, somber note about censorship by official powers. Yet for all their bravado, an innocence lingered at the marriage lecture in their senior year, which, against the wishes of the dean, addressed the subject of sex both inside and outside of marriage. The invited speaker, Carola Eisenberg of MIT’s department of psychiatry, advised the girls that “if intercourse does occur, it is usually at first disappointing, often horrifying.” The many young women in the audience who wanted to know what an orgasm was were chastised. “This is a medical question and will not be answered here. Go to the infirmary.”
Like everything else, the sexual revolution reached Wellesley on a kind of time delay; elsewhere it had been gaining momentum since the end of World War II. A culture in the thrall of Freud anointed sexual fulfillment the best yardstick for measuring psychic well-being. Talking about sex became an acceptable, even necessary, proof of modern thinking: The Kinsey studies, first published in 1948, became runaway bestsellers with their accounts (however reliable) of rampant sexualexperimentation in mainstream America. In 1953, the year the new
Playboy
magazine offered advice to men on how to outsmart “Miss Gold Digger” and get sex without getting trapped, half of American women said they were having premarital sex; from 1940 to 1961, the number of illegitimate births to mothers under twenty-five increased by 300 percent. “It seems that all America is one big orgone box,” proclaimed a
Time
magazine cover story in January 1964, referring to the libido-enhancing machine conceived by Freud disciple Wilhelm Reich. “Day and night from screens and stages, advertising posters and newspaper pages it flashes larger-than-life-sized images of sex … with the message that sex will save you and libido make you free.” Everything from “incest to inversion” could be found in novels like
Tropic of Cancer, Peyton Place
, and
Valley of the Dolls
, complained
Newsweek
. In Hollywood, taboos were crumbling, which in 1967 the head of the film production code deemed “the most healthy thing.” Anaïs Nin offered her recipe for happiness: “Mix well the sperm of four men in one day.” Even the leader of the National Council of Churches joined in, urging couples to “conjure up various positions” for their mutual pleasure. And no longer was carnal knowledge the exclusive province of girls of the lower classes. A psychologist at
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