Making It Up: A Vassar Alum’s take on Feminism’s Revival in the ‘60s

Making It Up: A Vassar Alum’s take on Feminism’s Revival in the ‘60s

When I was a little girl, a war baby growing up in the retrogressive decade of the 1950s, my ambition was to be a wife and mother, settled and secure, my life defined in traditional terms, as were the lives of most of the women I knew, or saw in magazine ads or on TV. I also wanted to go to Vassar, a brainy women’s college then, where I would indulge my intellectual interests with the result that I would be a smart, sophisticated, well-informed wife and mother. 

What I didn’t expect was that I would have work of my own, a professional life that would come to define me as much as the domestic life that I had anticipated. As I approach my eighties and look back at both the turbulent era—the 1960s—in which my Vassar classmates and I came of age, and the unlikely unfolding of our lives (and work!), I see us as a unique cohort of women, unprepared for the way American culture was turning upside down all around us as we walked out of Taylor Gate in the spring of 1965. In my book Making It Up: The Vassar Class of ’65 on the Cusp of Change, I wanted to explore how we fifties girls, raised for a domestic life, reinvented ourselves, making our lives up as we went along, without role models and without the social structures we needed to manage our new expectations of ourselves.

What got me started? In the winter of 1987, reunion planners gathered groups of women from the class of ‘65 to identify themes for discussion at our upcoming 25th reunion. I attended one of those gatherings and discovered there that I was not alone with my feelings of vulnerability. What we heard was that each of us was surprised, even a bit shellshocked, by the unexpected course of our unfolding lives. No matter whether we led domestic lives or built careers or something in between, each of us found ourselves inventing a life with new rules for living, new expectations, and no guideposts for the decisions we had been confronting for the last 20 years.

If we had the domestic lives we anticipated, we were judged as old fashioned by our more ambitious age mates. If working, we were judged as inadequate mothers. How did we manage working and raising children? Were we giving our children enough attention? Were we focused enough on our work? Since that gathering, I have been thinking that the class of ’65 has a unique story to tell, a story that had already changed for Vassar classes at the end of the decade.

Interviews with classmates confirmed that many ‘65ers just waking up to resurgent feminism were taken by surprise by their lives. Dede Thompson Bartlett, arguably our classmate most spectacularly successful in a man’s world—she rose to be the senior woman executive in two Fortune 25 companies—told me that after working for a couple of years following graduation, she planned to “marry a guy who went to one of the Ivies and promised to be a good provider.” 

Debbie Michaelson Kolb, who would write a book—in fact, several—helping young women negotiate a less-than-welcoming workplace, in her capacity as professor at Simmons College School of Management, had planned to “go to Vassar, graduate, get married and have children.” Elizabeth Ratigan, who would thrive in the brand new field of computer technology, assumed she would, like her mother, get a Vassar education and “just see what happens.”

What made the story especially interesting was a 10-year study of Vassar students undertaken during the decade of the 1950s by the Mellon Foundation, whose final report was published just a couple of weeks before we entered Vassar as freshmen. Launched in 1949, the study’s purpose was to measure and evaluate change in college women over a decade.  Its conclusions unearthed an unhappy profile of Vassar girls in the 1950s. Most of the young women interviewed over the decade had as their single ambition to find a husband. College was a means to an end, an intellectual diversion.

Though these girls were talented, they were sufficiently uninterested in their academic pursuits that disillusioned faculty told researchers of their frustration in even trying to teach them. These findings were remarkably similar to those of Betty Friedan, whose research at Smith led her to write The Feminine Mystique, the book, published in 1963, our junior year, that helped reignite the women’s movement just as we were coming out of Vassar.

Feminism was alive and well in the two decades after women earned the right to vote in 1920. The women on Vassar’s faculty and administrative staff were products of that era. Imagine what a relief it must have been to them when their students woke up, after the general anesthetic administered to girls in the 1950s.  In Making It Up I begin to explore that story.

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MAKING IT UP: THE VASSAR CLASS OF ’65 ON  THE CUSP OF CHANGE

Making It Up: The Vassar Class of ’65 on the Cusp of Change examines the lives of a collection of girls born in wartime, raised in the 1950s to be good wives and mothers, who graduated from Vassar College in 1965 to find a world turning upside down with social revolution. How did those young women on the cusp of social change redefine themselves, without role models, to meet a new age of opportunity for women?

In Making It Up, Selby McPhee tells the stories of classmates who followed their own curiosity and nascent ambitions through doors suddenly cracking open to them, while figuring out how to manage domestic responsibilities without any of the social support that exists now. She tells, for example, of Debbie, who in a stellar academic career gave women tools to negotiate workplaces slow to adapt to their presence; Elizabeth, who fell in love with computers and helped define a brand new field; Sylvia, who used a law degree to fight for health equity.  All of them were midwives to change.

The revolutions of the 1960s are now a part of contemporary history.  But change keeps happening, and the work to adapt to it is never done.  New generations will find inspirational models of ingenuity, flexibility and just plain guts in these women who figured out how to thrive when the very definition of what it was to be a woman was tossed into the air.

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About the Author: Selby McPhee was a staff writer and editor at schools, universities, and other educational institutions including Tufts University and the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), where she was marketing vice president. A freelance writer, McPhee has published articles in a variety of print and online publications. McPhee’s first book, Love Crazy, (Martin Sisters Publishing, 2013) was inspired by a box of letters marked “Personal letters of Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Fleming,” with the admonition “to be destroyed unopened,” in her parents’ house. McPhee lives with her husband in Potomac, Maryland. Learn more at www.SelbyMcPhee.com.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing