Radcliffe estimated that in the fifteen years after 1950, the proportion of girls having intercourse in college had risen from 25 to 40 percent. Where a generation earlier college boys had of necessity strayed off campus, “today they’re looked down on if they can’t succeed with a coed.”
Though the sexual revolution is now remembered as a legacy of the sixties, it was not the younger generation that had launched this “orgy of open-mindedness,” in
Time
’s view, but their elders, “who embrace the Freudian belief that repression, not license, is the great evil … and Ernest Hemingway’s manifesto that ‘what is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.’ ” Cynthia Gilbert, ’69, recalls an unsettling trip to the psychiatrist to deal with crippling bouts of depression during her sophomore year at Wellesley. “I’d just gotten engaged; our family had never been quite the
Father Knows Best
scenario, and I wanted the ‘real family’ that I hadn’t had. The psychiatrist felt my childhood had been totally repressed and that I should be sleeping with my fiancé. I told her that in my family you simply didn’t have sex, and she said, ‘Why not?’ I told her a story my mother had toldme of going to a back alley with her best friends for an abortion in the thirties. She told me I could always go to Mexico if I had to. That psychiatrist’s ‘Why not?’ scenario turned my already upside-down world totally inside out. Maybe a more gradual change would have been more helpful. My father was authoritarian; when I took that psychiatrist’s advice and threw it all over, it was like adding fat to the fire.”
Even at home, youngsters were pushed toward adult behavior too soon,
Time
warned in that same 1964 story, “by ambitious mothers who want them to be popular; with padded brassieres for twelve-year-olds and pressure to go steady at an ever younger age.” Nancy Wanderer had balked in junior high at her mother’s insistence that she wear heels and a girdle and makeup; she fought in vain against her mother’s demand that she perm her hair. “She thought I should be more interested in dating, and though I didn’t want to date, I did want to please her. So in eighth grade I had a torrid romance with a guy at my brother’s school, who was three years older than me. He initiated me sexually, though I was so inexperienced, I didn’t even realize it. My mother had never told me what not to do.”
With her parents’ blessing, Nancy and her beau talked about marriage and opened a joint bank account, a serious form of playing house in a decade when one out of every two girls was a teenage bride. But the sex had unnerved Nancy. “I quickly wised up that getting pregnant at thirteen was not the way to a great life. I broke it off, and after that I stayed in control. I just wouldn’t have intercourse. At Wellesley I went out with this guy from MIT, a jazz pianist who was completely full of himself and was always telling me I should trade in my skirts and turtlenecks for something slinkier. Another guy, from Harvard, broke up with me ’cause I wouldn’t have sex with him, then called me later to boast that he was sleeping with a girl at a local trade school. I lost so much valuable time at Wellesley with all my involvement with men. On weekends, the men’s schools would send scouts to campus to pick up as many girls as they could fit in their cars to bring us to parties. It was like going for provisions. I was sick of all the smoothness, sick of the pressure not to be myself, worn-out by the struggle of: Will I have sex? Will I get birth control? I decided the important thing was to settle who would be the best husband. I wanted to get marriage over with, and put to rest all those questions about sex.”
Useful Women
If the culture of the late sixties sent these women contradictory messages about marriage and sex, their alternatives—for financial self-sufficiency,
Though the sexual revolution is now remembered as a legacy of the sixties, it was not the younger generation that had launched this “orgy of open-mindedness,” in
Time
’s view, but their elders, “who embrace the Freudian belief that repression, not license, is the great evil … and Ernest Hemingway’s manifesto that ‘what is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.’ ” Cynthia Gilbert, ’69, recalls an unsettling trip to the psychiatrist to deal with crippling bouts of depression during her sophomore year at Wellesley. “I’d just gotten engaged; our family had never been quite the
Father Knows Best
scenario, and I wanted the ‘real family’ that I hadn’t had. The psychiatrist felt my childhood had been totally repressed and that I should be sleeping with my fiancé. I told her that in my family you simply didn’t have sex, and she said, ‘Why not?’ I told her a story my mother had toldme of going to a back alley with her best friends for an abortion in the thirties. She told me I could always go to Mexico if I had to. That psychiatrist’s ‘Why not?’ scenario turned my already upside-down world totally inside out. Maybe a more gradual change would have been more helpful. My father was authoritarian; when I took that psychiatrist’s advice and threw it all over, it was like adding fat to the fire.”
Even at home, youngsters were pushed toward adult behavior too soon,
Time
warned in that same 1964 story, “by ambitious mothers who want them to be popular; with padded brassieres for twelve-year-olds and pressure to go steady at an ever younger age.” Nancy Wanderer had balked in junior high at her mother’s insistence that she wear heels and a girdle and makeup; she fought in vain against her mother’s demand that she perm her hair. “She thought I should be more interested in dating, and though I didn’t want to date, I did want to please her. So in eighth grade I had a torrid romance with a guy at my brother’s school, who was three years older than me. He initiated me sexually, though I was so inexperienced, I didn’t even realize it. My mother had never told me what not to do.”
With her parents’ blessing, Nancy and her beau talked about marriage and opened a joint bank account, a serious form of playing house in a decade when one out of every two girls was a teenage bride. But the sex had unnerved Nancy. “I quickly wised up that getting pregnant at thirteen was not the way to a great life. I broke it off, and after that I stayed in control. I just wouldn’t have intercourse. At Wellesley I went out with this guy from MIT, a jazz pianist who was completely full of himself and was always telling me I should trade in my skirts and turtlenecks for something slinkier. Another guy, from Harvard, broke up with me ’cause I wouldn’t have sex with him, then called me later to boast that he was sleeping with a girl at a local trade school. I lost so much valuable time at Wellesley with all my involvement with men. On weekends, the men’s schools would send scouts to campus to pick up as many girls as they could fit in their cars to bring us to parties. It was like going for provisions. I was sick of all the smoothness, sick of the pressure not to be myself, worn-out by the struggle of: Will I have sex? Will I get birth control? I decided the important thing was to settle who would be the best husband. I wanted to get marriage over with, and put to rest all those questions about sex.”
Useful Women
If the culture of the late sixties sent these women contradictory messages about marriage and sex, their alternatives—for financial self-sufficiency,
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