Free The Good Girls Revolt by Lynn Povich Page A

Howard.
    Margaret and Lucy were close friends and later shared a weekend house in the Hamptons, but they were from different worlds. Margaret had grown up in Columbus, Ohio, the daughter of an engineer and a housewife—“standard issue 1950s Republican conservatives,” as she described them. More liberal than her parents, she had always been interested in history and avidly read the newspapers. After public school, Margaret went to St. Mary’s College, the sister school of Notre Dame, and earned a master’s in medieval history from Fordham University. She was working on her PhD in Russian history at New York University when she landed a job at Newsweek, which she found far more interesting than a previous teaching job.
    A petite brunette with a sardonic sense of humor, Margaret became a Nation researcher just as the 1968 campaign season was heating up. “I loved being plugged into the political scene,” she said. She was sent out on the Eugene McCarthy campaign and covered the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Margaret quickly gave up the idea of teaching and became a political junkie, keeping meticulous track of the ever-changing convention delegate counts on a giant chart in Nation. “We were all obsessed with politics,” she recalled. “That’s all we talked about, especially in the early part of the week before the files came in. I think that’s what brought us all together.”
    Lucy Anne Calhoun Howard was descended from John Eager Howard, a member of the Continental Congress, a senator from Maryland and former governor for whom Howard County, Maryland, is named. On her mother’s side, she was related to the famous American painter Charles Willson Peale. Her father’s family had lost everything in the Civil War and, at the age of fourteen, her grandfather went into the investment banking/brokerage business and bought a seat on the stock exchange. After he lost money in the Depression, he wanted his son to become a minister. Instead, Lucy’s father became a doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
    Lucy’s mother, also named Lucy, didn’t work outside the home but she was very competitive. She excelled in fox hunting, and after she had children, continued to play tennis—“club tennis,” her husband disparagingly called it. She hated to lose and she also hated to give up her maiden name. “Everyone knew her as Lucy Iglehart,” said Lucy. “Late in life she said things like, ‘If I had been a young woman in the 1980s and 1990s, I would have been a jockey and ridden in the Hunt Cup.’ She was a very good rider but women weren’t allowed to do that.”
    Lucy grew up on a small farm outside Baltimore, Maryland. She had a horse, which she showed in competitions and rode to hounds. She was far more competitive in school and sports than her two older brothers. At Garrison Forest, a boarding school, Lucy played field hockey and was a member of the riding team. “I was conditioned to want to do well in school—and I did,” she said. “But I didn’t do it to get into college. I did it to get more points for my [intramural] team. I was a very competitive person, that’s why I wanted to be at the top of the class—you got more points for that. Part of me didn’t want to lose that status. But part of me hated it and wanted to disappear from it because it put so much pressure on me and I was always anxious.”
    A pretty girl who hid her strong opinions beneath a pleasing demeanor, Lucy was also a debutante like her mother. “All my friends were debutantes,” she explained. “That’s what we were thinking about—parties, dancing, boys, and martinis.” Although her parents didn’t care whether she went to college, Lucy chose to go to Radcliffe because a cousin went there. “Something was driving me to get out of how I grew up,” she said, and indeed, she found life on campus liberating. “I had a good time at Radcliffe. You could goof off. I got contact lenses—I wasn’t