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thing in the middle: a trustee. “Life is not all dirty diapers and runny noses,” writes Susan Connard Chenoweth in the class record. “I do make it into the real world every week to present a puppet show on ecology called
Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute
.” The deans would be proud of Susan. She is on her way. A doer of good works. An example to the community. Above all, a Samaritan.
    I never went near the Wellesley College chapel in my four years there, but I am still amazed at the amount of Christian charity that school stuck us all with, a kind of glazed politeness in the face of boredom and stupidity. Tolerance, in the worst sense of the word. Wellesley was not alone in encouraging this for its students, but it always seemed so sad that a school that could have done so muchfor women put so much energy into the one area women should be educated out of. How marvelous it would have been to go to a women’s college that encouraged impoliteness, that rewarded aggression, that encouraged argument. Women by the time they are eighteen are so damaged, so beaten down, so tyrannized out of behaving in all the wonderful outspoken ways unfortunately characterized as masculine; a college committed to them has to take on the burden of repair—of remedial education, really. I’m not just talking about vocational guidance and placement bureaus (which are far more important than anyone at these schools believes) but also about the need to force young women to define themselves before they abdicate the task and become defined by their husbands.
What do you think? What is your opinion?
No one ever asked. We all graduated from Wellesley able to describe everything we had studied—Baroque painting, Hindemith, Jacksonian democracy, Yeats—yet we were never asked what we thought of any of it.
Do you like it? Do you think it is good? Do you know that even if it is good you do not have to like it?
During reunion weekend, at the Saturday-night class supper, we were subjected to an hour of dance by a fourth-rate Boston theatre ensemble which specializes in eighth-rate Grotowski crossed with the worst of
Marat/Sade
. Grunts. Moans. Jumping about imitating lambs. It was absolutely awful. The next day, a classmate with the improbable name of Muffy Kleinfeld asked me what I thought of it. “What did
you
think of it?” I replied. “Well,” she said, “I thought their movements were quite expressive and forceful, but I’m not exactly sure what they were trying to do dramatically.”
But what did you think of it?
    I am probably babbling a bit here, but I feel a real anger toward Wellesley for blowing it, for being so damned irrelevant. Like many women involved with the movement, I have come full circle in recent years: I used to think that anything exclusively for women(women’s pages, women’s colleges, women’s novels) was a bad idea. Now I am all in favor of it. But when Wellesley decided to remain a women’s college, it seemed so pointless to me. Why remain a school for women unless you are prepared to deal with the problems women have in today’s society? Why bother? If you are simply going to run a classy liberal-arts college in New England, an ivory tower for $3,900 a year, why not let the men in?
    Wellesley
has
changed. Some of the changes are superficial: sex in the dorms, juicy as it is, probably has more to do with the fact that it is 1972 than with real change. On the other hand, there are changes that are almost fundamental. The spinster deans are mostly gone. There is a new president, and she has actually been married. Twice. Many of the hangovers from an earlier era—when Wellesley was totally a school for the rich as opposed to now, when it is only partially so—have been eliminated: sit-down dinners with maids and students waiting on tables; Tree Day, a spring rite complete with tree maidens and tree plantings; the freshman-class banner hunt. Hoop rolling goes on, but this year a feminist senior won and promptly