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apologized for my reckless behavior. My English professor confessed that she had thought of eloping herself but was saved when her boyfriend’s junk car broke down; she and I would become friends. I took a Greyhound back and walked up the long hill from the bus station and the half mile to the women’s campus, longing for the very confinement that I had sought to escape. My roommate and I squealed with delight to be back in our private girl-world together.
    McCarthy called my dorm night after night. My dorm mates knew to put him off. Over that Christmas vacation he drove by my house to tell me, no, threaten me, that if I didn’t come back to him, he was going to marry someone else. I feigned disappointment. I never saw him again.
    This is what is important: I vowed to revirginate myself. Not until I married would I ever allow myself to go “all the way” again. I kept that vow. In my junior year, however, my southern boyfriend in the Kappa Sig house next door to my sorority house made a grandstand play. We were in his car, enjoying a light makeout session, when music on the radio was interrupted for an emergency broadcast. The Soviet Union had sent something called Sputnik into orbit, the first artificial satellite in history. All the commentators sounded unnerved. This meant the evil rival could attack us from space. My boyfriend put his lips to my ear.
    â€œWe could be blown away tomorrow. This may be our last chance to know real love. Let’s do it.”
    â€œNice try,” I said.
    Countless Sputnik babies were conceived that night. I was proud not to be included in those statistics.
    THINGS BEGAN LOOKING UP ONCE I graduated from UVM in 1958. I had interviewed for a job at the Manhattan headquarters of J. C. Penney on West Thirty-Fourth Street. My friends snickered when I came back to school from spring vacation and told them how excited I was to have a job at J. C. Penney. “What, selling long johns to old ladies?” That’s what the stores in rural America were known for, of course, but I had done some research and found out that Penney’s had a consumer service department, forerunner of the public relations bonanza, and it published two consumer magazines.
    â€œNo, actually,” I told my friends. “I was interviewed by Mr. James Cash Penney himself.”
    The legendary entrepreneur from Missouri was then in his eighties and had a bushy white mustache that wagged when he smiled. He had Golden Rule written all over his face (indeed, his first stores were called Golden Rule stores). I had learned from reading about him that he always called his employees “associates.” Men became manager-partners in new stores and shared in the profits. Penney’s goal was not to build a chain of stores but to assemble a chain of “good men.”
    â€œWhat do you want to be in five years?” Mr. Penney inquired. A writer, I said, or maybe a buyer. He asked if I’d like to start in their management training program. “Do you train girls as managers, too?” I asked. He said they were just starting. “Do you pay girls the same as boys?” I dared to ask. He looked surprised. He smiled, puffed up a little, and pulled on his suspenders. “We certainly should.” And so he did.
    That was 1958. Unbeknownst to me, I had struck a faint blow for equal opportunity employment, which would not become a national issue for another decade. That job allowed me to travel America in a hat and gloves to put on educational fashion shows at college home economics departments, displaying Penney’s fabrics. Oshkosh, Appleton, Kansas City—it was an education in small-town American values that never left me. I was also able to write for the company’s magazines and work with Madison Avenue ad agencies to make informational filmstrips. This was so much more exciting than the lives of my girlfriends who had graduated with engagement rings or fraternity