Free Rebels in White Gloves by Miriam Horn Page B

valedictorian, he told her she was “mouthy.” Asked to contribute a paragraph to her college application, he wrote one sentence: “Nancy is impatient, impulsive, and inconsiderate.” “It stayed with me forever,” says Nancy, “that he would say such a damning thing.” At Sophomore Father’s Day, Nancy got a glimpse of the reasons for her father’s scorn. Mr. Young turned to Nancy and said, “You know, these [other] men all went to college.” It was clear, says Nancy, “that he was terribly embarrassed, mortified.” Still, when Nancy grew desperate to leave Wellesley, her father would not let her go. “He said, ‘I will never see you again. I will give you no support.’ He had no expectations of me, but wanted to make sure I would not be a financial burden. I think he thought that at Wellesley Ihad the best chance of marrying someone successful and being well fixed. He finally told me he’d give me a thousand dollars if I’d stay and finish senior year. I took the deal.”
    Eager to get away from Wellesley, Nancy “split” from campus as often as she could. She began acting in Boston with professional theater groups, rehearsing every night—a kind of revenge on her father, who had hated his actress mother for her neglect of him and what he imagined to be her “promiscuity.” Nancy was also the first unmarried girl permitted to live off campus on her own, though she had to produce a psychiatrist’s report to win that freedom. “I wanted to be in the city, not in this stupid suburb with all these stiffs in the Villager look, these Johnny Appleseed prim, flowered blouses. Everywhere else everyone was getting groovy. At Wellesley, they were playing bridge all afternoon. Except for the fact that they had more money, these women were like my mother, without curiosity about the world. What am I saying? Hillary was in that class. But even then I thought she was way too mainstream, talking the language of the administration, co-opted, all about politics and visibility. I thought, Why are you talking to these people? We should do everyone a favor, burn this college down.
    “I tried to find other women who I could be friends with, but the only thing I ever had in common with any of them was that we were on the fringes. I was a working-class Catholic; they were overweight or unattractive or Jewish. That set us outside the in crowd. The tone of my life was set by that time. I felt alienated, and that feeling has stayed with me ever since.”
    As archaic on matters of religion as it was on class, in the late sixties Wellesley housed Jews in dorm rooms with Jews and Catholics with Catholics, offering the rationale that such an arrangement would make it easier for the girls to go together to synagogue or mass. In 1967, the
Amherst Guide
reported that Wellesley maintained a Jewish quota of 12 percent. Such a policy was by then sufficiently unacceptable that Hillary’s mentor, Professor Alan Schechter, was called upon to make a public denial. Yet the following year Wellesley was still struggling with its “Jewish problem.” Worried about persistent public perceptions that Wellesley was a “Jewish school,” chairman of the board John Quarles publicly affirmed that “Wellesley was founded for the glory of God and service of the Lord Jesus Christ” and that “with a view to maintainingthe Christian purpose of this college … the faculty, administration and trustees should be predominantly Christian.” The statement outraged students and alumnae; under pressure from both, the college finally altered its stance. By Nancy Young’s senior year, Bible class was eliminated as a requirement. Religion professors no longer had to be Protestant. Quarles announced that a Catholic was joining the faculty, and promised to add a Hindu and a Jew.
    The question of race proved less susceptible to appeasement. During the four years these women were at Wellesley, the civil rights movement radicalized: Roxbury erupted in