Rebels in White Gloves by Miriam Horn

the rules,” wrote Marilyn Hagstrum. “The good deedism of the motto is condescending and inadequate,” added Jan Krigbaum. Students wrote to the newspaper with scorn for “housewives putting in time, superficial and risk averse” or suffering from a “rich girl complex, at this prissy finishing school.… To assuage the guilt there are threats of hunger strikes. Is Wellesley an intellectual community or an extension of Junior League?” When a student strike to protest the war in April 1968 was only feebly honored, Hillary Rodham lamented the “large gray mass” of the uninvolved. To Professor Marshall Goldman’s belittling suggestion that the girls make a real sacrifice and give up a weekend mixer instead, she responded: “I’ll give up my date Saturday night, Mr. Goldman, but I don’t think that’s the point. Why do these attitudes have to be limited to two days?” In fact, many of her classmates lay at Hillary Rodham’s feet credit, or perhaps blame, for the genteelnature of their protests. Typical was her response as college government president to California governor Ronald Reagan’s March 1969 demand for a federal investigation of student protesters and order for the arrest of nearly two hundred San Francisco State demonstrators. Hillary stayed up all night to talk students out of staging a protest “that would embarrass our college.” She would “co-opt the real protest,” in one classmate’s words, “by creating an academic one.”
    Returning from her tenth reunion in 1972, Nora Ephron wrote a derisive account in
Esquire
of her alma mater. What Wellesley wants for its graduates, Ephron wrote, is “for us to avoid the extremes, to be instead that thing in the middle: an example to the community, a Samaritan.… How marvelous it would have been to go to a women’s college that encouraged impoliteness, rewarded aggression, encouraged argument. Women by the time they are eighteen are so … tyrannized out of behaving in all the wonderful outspoken ways unfortunately characterized as masculine.… A college must do remediation, force young women to define themselves before they abdicate the task and become defined by their husbands.… We all tend toward tiny little rebellions, harmless nips at the system. We will never make any real trouble. Wellesley helped see to that.”
    In “Silences,” Tillie Olsen had lamented the near impossibility for a woman, trained always to please, to believe in the right to speak her mind or the importance of what she might have to say. Mary Day Kent recalls a lecture attended by five hundred Wellesley women and five male guests: Three of the visiting men asked questions; not one of the young women said a word.
Hillary Rodham Versus the Washington Establishment
    For girls so deeply ingrained with the feminine habits of silence and docility, the audacity of Hillary Rodham’s speech on graduation day was unimaginably liberating.
    Few anticipated her bold performance. Hillary had always been a great practitioner of procedures and rules, undaunted by long meetings and complex policy wrangling; she had won the admiration of faculty and administrators, even more than students, for her skills at conciliation, damping unruly passions by finding common ground among dividedcampus factions. But if Hillary had already proven her political skill, on that sunny spring afternoon she revealed a capacity more electrifying to the gathered young ladies. Massachusetts Republican senator Edward Brooke had spent his long-winded speech praising Richard Nixon and America’s “strength abroad,” and scolding the assembled girls for their generation’s resort to “coercive protest,” calling it a perversion of democratic privilege. It would be tragic, he said, if they adopted dissatisfaction as a way of life.
    The gathered parents were still nodding their assent when Hillary Rodham, the first student speaker in the history of Wellesley graduation ceremonies, stepped to the podium.