Rebels in White Gloves (43 page)

“At bottom, I think that the equal relationship and the job sharing took a much greater psychological toll on Jeff. He had a harder time with his colleagues. He was viewed as wimpy or not properly ambitious or not fully committed to his career, traits which were expected of women, but not men, while I got positive strokes for being pioneering. Jeff worked hard not to become his father. He married a strong woman and always promoted women professionally,” and refused the U.S. attorney job in part, Kris believes, because he worried that his pursuit of it would be wrongly motivated, as a way to achieve success in his father’s eyes. “But the fact remained that he’d had a very traditional upbringing, and kept one foot in the fifties all along.”

Kris believes that Jeff resented, ultimately, his sense of being eclipsed by his wife and her power in the world. “There was this public persona of a liberated man, and then Jeff would need to control me at home. Anything I did that got public recognition would spark a flurry of behavior by him to undermine me.” After he recommended her for U.S. attorney, Kris wrote in her journal, “he grew distant, dour, snappish and mean.… He says I’m patronizing him when I don’t talk about it, but he doesn’t see his body language when I do.” When Janet Reno called and in passing mentioned being dumped out of her canoe into the Potomac, he seemed unhappy “that I didn’t take that opportunity to mention him and his love of canoeing.… The thing he said over and over was ‘I grew up in the shadow of my father and I’ll be goddamned if I’ll be in your shadow now.’ ”

In conversation and in her journals, Kris turns the story over and over, swinging from recrimination to self-recrimination and back again. In her journal, she wrote: “When he’s distant, I think I’m turning him off because I’m too fat … or wonder if I haven’t drawn him out because I’m self-absorbed.… Is Jeff right, am I icy?… I am about out of empathy. And if I keep trying to understand, do I set myself up as a punching
bag?” At times, she realized, she
had
neglected her family for her work. “I was full of guilt about my career taking me away from the kids, away from Jeff. I’ve examined every way I could have shored him up, given more emotional support.” Looking back, she says, “I was so confused, so emotionally at sea.

“Women like us think we’re above this drivel. I hate all the self-esteem crap, but that’s what it was—I had zero self-esteem. Even though I was a lawyer with two kids, I felt desperate and scared, felt I had to make it work.” An admirer of Eleanor Roosevelt, Kris mused in her journal over their common struggle. “Eleanor lost her sense of purpose for a decade, seeking to please her husband and his family.” She suffered from “the Griselda complex,” which counts forbearance a virtue, which means the more you put up with, the more noble you are. “That can lead you to accept too much. It can also lead you to overweight his injustices to enhance your own martyrdom.”

That a woman so fearless and outspoken in public would feel so vulnerable in her intimate relations; that a knight in the world becomes a damsel at home, helpless and panicked and determined to keep her protector whatever the cost: That paradox has plagued many women in Hillary’s class.

“The woman at home was the core of what I was taught to be,” Kris says. “It’s easier in the public realm to resist. Your life there is not tied up with vows and kids and the whole history and weight of the model of your parents, and, in my case, grandparents’ relationships. My grandparents lived with us. My grandfather was a philanderer and physically abusive, and my grandmother took it as her lot, hung in to the end. She believed that a woman should simply endure hardships, sacrifice herself, suffer quietly and nobly. I also grew up hearing my mother say that the woman gives seventy percent and that’s the way it is. By the time I got around to consciousness-raising, I’d already internalized those earlier messages, which are incredibly hard to shake. It took me a long time to realize that forbearance isn’t a virtue at all.”

Kris has continued, in public forums, to urge young women to resist their own habits of submission. In 1995, she and Susan Graber conducted a women’s forum on their “journey” since graduating from Wellesley. “I chided the young women there to get to know their life’s partner. There’s so much pressure for men to make supportive noises. A lot will know just how to sound, but dig deeper and it’s just not there. As
women, programmed to be the nurturers, we understand that we must accept the worst in our partner to achieve intimacy. But we confuse the acceptance of the person with the acceptance of mistreatment. We believe that we’re loving unconditionally; we try to accommodate his needs while feeling more and more inadequate. Women have got to stop turning this on themselves and feeling guilty. I told them to throw the bum out if he was demeaning them, making them feel shitty about themselves. They have to name it, do something about it, not model a stiff upper lip to their daughters.”

What to tell her own children has been for Kris somewhat more confused. She speaks of her shared effort with Jeff to shelter their kids from the worst, to not drag them through an ugly divorce; to that end, she says, she agreed to share custody. At the same time, she continues to use public forums (including this book) to recount the story, and has talked privately with her children. Her journals, she says, are written for her daughter, Karen. “I am convinced that recounting stories such as mine can make a difference in our children’s and their children’s lives. Though I loathe talk-show confessionals, somehow this seems more akin to warning others to avoid quicksand. Think how much we could have learned from Eleanor Roosevelt—had she been willing to talk more about her personal experience. I have learned so much from women risking openness, and feel so indebted to them, that it seems the only responsible thing for me to do—even if it means some embarrassment. And frankly, Jeff has waived his right to claim embarrassment, because he didn’t feel any compunction about exposing us all to it in the first place when his own pleasure was paramount.”

With her son, says Kris, she has spent a lot of time talking about how he treats girls. “Ty is tall and handsome and a basketball star. He has a great sense of entitlement. When he dumped a girlfriend in a way that seemed callous to me, I blew up at him, reminding him that he’d once professed to love her. He blasted back at me: ‘I’m not my father.’

“With Karen, I’ve spent time talking about what you don’t have to accept, conversations I never had with my mother. I think that if out of some instinct to protect her I’d closed myself, she would have been more distressed. She shut me down when she needed to, reminding me that she’ll always love her father. But she’s a sturdy soul; she doesn’t need to retreat into a shell and would have called me on it if I had.

“When I was going through my mother’s things after her death, I
found a letter she’d carried for fifty years, a letter sent to my grandmother by one of my grandfather’s mistresses, whom he’d bilked out of her life savings and then discarded. The woman had written trying to track him down. My mother carried that her entire life. I would never want Karen to carry my story through her whole life, not if my story carried so bitter a lesson. I hope with all my heart that she would make different decisions. I sometimes think I should have left the marriage much earlier for her sake. But I also worry that she will learn too much mistrust. I don’t accept the view of people like Catherine Mackinnon that all male-female relationships are inevitably about dominance and submission. I didn’t want Karen to think that I was unforgiving, that the first time he strayed, I threw him out. I wanted her to know you keep trying, and recover your hope.”

At Wellesley, Charlynn Maniatis was afraid to go to mixers. “I was a hermit, like my mother. I was scared and shy. I didn’t even get my driver’s license till I was twenty-nine.” She hid in work: Her accelerated push through college and law school and medical school consumed her time and walled her off from society as successfully as her father’s pressure to achieve and repressive rules had isolated her as a girl. Though work devoured her, it failed to make her happy. After a residency in diagnostic radiology, she discovered that she didn’t like medicine. But when she returned to trial law, the “sinking feeling” she had every day finally drove her back to medicine. She now has her own part-time practice in New York. “I get the worst headaches. I’m going bankrupt. I beg my creditors to take me to court and put a bullet through me. In school, you’re idealistic. You think when you get out, patients will come to you; you’ll be rich. I made the mistake of taking over the practice of a retiree. All his patients were dying; reimbursements were being cut. I have a few crazy old patients, who complain about the music, the furniture, my hair; they threaten us and steal pictures off my office walls. I guess my hermit tendencies are not well suited to New Yorkers.” She counts herself a failure professionally. “I am so paranoid about losing my job that I prefer to have several part-time jobs so that I will always have some income. But the money I make from those jobs is far less than other doctors make,
and I have no benefits and am extremely worried about my financial future.” The only place she ever felt safe and fully at home, says Charlynn, was in the Navy Reserves.

Charlynn always imagined she would get married, though for long periods she has had no men in her life. She dated an economics professor for ten years, but that relationship ended in 1993. From the outset he told her that he’d been burned once and would never marry again. He also always dated other people at the same time. “I thought it was better than nothing, and saw him every week. Then he decided I’d gotten too fat and too Navy, and that I had too little time for him. He left me and dated someone else for six months, then begged to come back, but by then I was dating an engineer from the Midwest, who was wholesome and religious but boring. I now have dinner once a week with the economics professor, which is an event that I look forward to every week. I also speak on the telephone almost every night to a man who lives on the other side of the country and whom I see very rarely. Most men I meet, after two nights it’s tedious. I’ve only known one or two interesting people in my life.”

Charlynn lives in suburban Cos Cob, Connecticut, and spends her free hours in mostly solitary pursuits—flying planes and doing needlepoint. Little inclined toward groups—“I’m in church only for weddings and funerals; I don’t even participate in my condo association”—she meets few people. “I’ve gone to singles’ groups, but the women outnumber the men, and the men talk only to each other. I did dating services, which are pretty good, but the men get so many women they can’t keep up with you. I met the engineer through a service, but they kept sending him names.” She also blames feminism, and especially harassment suits, for making men afraid of women and therefore still harder to meet.

Until her mid-forties, Charlynn held out hope that she might still marry and have a child. She thought of having her ova harvested and frozen, but was too shy to approach a colleague and ask. “Not having children is an incredible sadness. I mean, I have friends who have kids and they’re delightful for a few hours and then I stay for a weekend and I’m glad I don’t have the screaming and shouting. But my mother has no grandchildren and now it’s the option lost forever. When I was thirty I thought I might be artificially inseminated, but the technology was too new. Then I thought about adoption, but they would only give you a
child if you were married and I never really wanted to do it by myself anyway. At forty I was dating the economist. Then we broke up and it hit me: ‘Now what are you going to do?’ ”

Her “dearest friends,” nearly all of whom are men, have not been encouraging. They tell her that what men want is a woman “half his age plus seven,” which means those who would be interested in her are in their eighties. When a blind date waited in his car outside the restaurant where they were to meet and after checking Charlynn out took off without a word, her male friends told her they would have done the same thing: If they don’t like a woman’s looks, why waste their money and time? “I listen to what they say about other women and then I don’t feel as bad; I don’t take it all so personally. I realize the pathology is on their side, that they don’t really like women.”

Pat Sinclair, ’69, is also sorrowful at her childlessness. She didn’t mean not to have kids, though as a midwestern minister’s daughter, she’d been far less taken with the picture of her own mom—a Mennonite immigrant from Russia in an apron baking cookies—than she was with her friends’ moms, who did their nails and smoked and drank. After Wellesley, she launched into a vagabond life: waitressing to support her pottery making, selling paper dresses, doing cocaine and LSD, “smoking a lot of reefer and crashing at whatever freak’s” house she landed in for the night. A marriage of five years foundered on what she calls her husband’s possessiveness, and she has not lived with anyone since. In recent years, she has worked as a bank clerk and a bookkeeper at Kansas University, earning $13,000 a year. In her late forties, having lost many friends to AIDS, she began studying social work, “feeling my life needed more meaning.” She worries how she will take care of herself when she is old and at moments regrets not falling for Peter Parker (“as in pens”) or any of “those other rich boys” who roamed around Wellesley. “Sometimes I feel I’ve lived an aimless life: no life’s work; no kid. Maybe having a kid, being surrounded by people looking smaller than you all the time, makes you grow up. In the eyes of the world, I feel a freak.”

Twenty-three percent of the women in the class of ’69 have no children. That percentage is just slightly higher than among baby-boomer women overall but far higher than among the women who graduated ten years earlier (just 9 percent of the class of ’59 is childless) and much
lower than among women ten years younger: In 1994, when members of the class of ’79 were entering their late thirties, 42 percent had still not had children.

Some in the class have never had children because they never found a partner with whom they could make a family. One in five has struggled with infertility, some of it a consequence of waiting too long. “I think a lot of my classmates felt duped that no one clued us in that it was hard to have children in your late thirties,” says Jan Mercer, who lost three pregnancies between the births of her first and second children. A surprising number, however, trace their difficulties getting pregnant not to ill-advised delays at all but to the crude and hazardous methods of birth control common in their youth, a twist typically left out of the barren-career-woman story. Jan finally discovered that she had an infection, likely caused by the Copper 7 IUD she had once used. Federal prosecutor Rhea Kemble used birth control throughout her first marriage, concerned that a child would interfere with her career, and was then unable to get pregnant in her second marriage, despite four years of taking fertility drugs; in her case, too, it turned out that an IUD she’d had when young had caused a pelvic inflammatory disease that left her infertile. Cynthia Gilbert-Marlow, who could never conceive a second child, recalls a frightening midnight visit to a New York doctor followed by a horrible abscess: Her Dalkon Shield scarred her fallopian tubes and left one blocked entirely.