professional achievement, worldly adventure—were no clearer. Again, Wellesley offered muddled guidance. The only one of the Seven Sisters to have always had a woman president and a charter mandating female faculty, Wellesley offered in its deans and scholars the first model that many of these girls had encountered of women committed to an intellectual and public life. For all its lingering scent of a finishing school, the college maintained rigorous academic standards and afforded an opportunity for its students to exert leadership without competition from men. Wellesley also had a remarkable history of educating “useful” women. In 1892, the college had graduated twelve doctors and twenty missionaries; by the turn of the century, it was sending substantial numbers of women into social work. Many became heads of settlement houses and trade unions or suffragists. Carolyn Wilson, ’10, covered the First World War for the
Chicago Tribune
. Marguerite Stitt Church, ’14, went to Congress from Illinois. Madame Chiang Kai-shek, ’17, served as liaison between Nationalist China and the U.S.: In 1943, she went before Congress to plead for help in her nation’s war against Japan, and, ever the Wellesley girl, described the lawmakers as “clodhopping, boorish and uncivilized.” Patricia Lockridge Bull, ’37, landed with the marines at Iwo Jima and was the first woman correspondent to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp. Jocelyn Gill, ’38, was chief of in-flight science at NASA; Selma Gottlieb, ’41, designed helicopters. Madeleine Albright, ’59, would become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the first woman secretary of state. Cokie Roberts, ’64, and Diane Sawyer, ’67, would have spectacular journalistic careers. A 1962 survey of all alumnae found that more than four fifths had been employed, the vast majority in teaching. Though 62 percent had stopped work at marriage, 18 percent had worked for twenty years or more.
Still, “old maid” professors offered a warning as much as a model to the class of ’69. And in a cultural climate so inhospitable to the education of young women for anything but future domestic roles, Wellesley joined other women’s colleges in actively discouraging professional ambition in its charges. Though the deans consistently assured the girls thatthey were the cream of the cream, America’s smartest young ladies, in the marriage lecture during their freshman year, the dean of the college advocated that the girls pursue work only as volunteers, to avoid competition—professional or financial—between husband and wife. During a debate over going coed, the director of admissions, Miss Clough, defended their single-sex education on the grounds that it prepared them for a “post-college life in community affairs with mostly women.” An editorial in the college newspaper found “it probable that most Wellesley girls see professional careers, not marriage responsibilities, as the diversion” from their true and ultimate path in life. Jacqueline Kennedy was held out as the ideal: A “certifiable egghead,” multilingual, a painter and art lover, educated at Vassar and the Sorbonne, she had been above all else exquisitely gracious and ornamental at her husband’s side. “Those of us who graduated from Wellesley in the sixties weren’t ever meant to have futures … or opinions,” recalled writer and director Nora Ephron, ’62, “we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect.” Even the campus architecture underscored the message, as classics professor Mary Lefkowitz has noted. The Wellesley library doors are ornamented with two figures: Wisdom is a man; his female companion is Charity, comforting a child.
In the late sixties, the college newspaper was full of advertisements for engagement rings, padded bras, and pantie girdles, for a new computer dating service at MIT and Princeton tryouts for go-go girls for the Yale game.
Chicago Tribune
. Marguerite Stitt Church, ’14, went to Congress from Illinois. Madame Chiang Kai-shek, ’17, served as liaison between Nationalist China and the U.S.: In 1943, she went before Congress to plead for help in her nation’s war against Japan, and, ever the Wellesley girl, described the lawmakers as “clodhopping, boorish and uncivilized.” Patricia Lockridge Bull, ’37, landed with the marines at Iwo Jima and was the first woman correspondent to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp. Jocelyn Gill, ’38, was chief of in-flight science at NASA; Selma Gottlieb, ’41, designed helicopters. Madeleine Albright, ’59, would become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the first woman secretary of state. Cokie Roberts, ’64, and Diane Sawyer, ’67, would have spectacular journalistic careers. A 1962 survey of all alumnae found that more than four fifths had been employed, the vast majority in teaching. Though 62 percent had stopped work at marriage, 18 percent had worked for twenty years or more.
Still, “old maid” professors offered a warning as much as a model to the class of ’69. And in a cultural climate so inhospitable to the education of young women for anything but future domestic roles, Wellesley joined other women’s colleges in actively discouraging professional ambition in its charges. Though the deans consistently assured the girls thatthey were the cream of the cream, America’s smartest young ladies, in the marriage lecture during their freshman year, the dean of the college advocated that the girls pursue work only as volunteers, to avoid competition—professional or financial—between husband and wife. During a debate over going coed, the director of admissions, Miss Clough, defended their single-sex education on the grounds that it prepared them for a “post-college life in community affairs with mostly women.” An editorial in the college newspaper found “it probable that most Wellesley girls see professional careers, not marriage responsibilities, as the diversion” from their true and ultimate path in life. Jacqueline Kennedy was held out as the ideal: A “certifiable egghead,” multilingual, a painter and art lover, educated at Vassar and the Sorbonne, she had been above all else exquisitely gracious and ornamental at her husband’s side. “Those of us who graduated from Wellesley in the sixties weren’t ever meant to have futures … or opinions,” recalled writer and director Nora Ephron, ’62, “we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect.” Even the campus architecture underscored the message, as classics professor Mary Lefkowitz has noted. The Wellesley library doors are ornamented with two figures: Wisdom is a man; his female companion is Charity, comforting a child.
In the late sixties, the college newspaper was full of advertisements for engagement rings, padded bras, and pantie girdles, for a new computer dating service at MIT and Princeton tryouts for go-go girls for the Yale game.
Similar Books
