CLASS OF ‘69
In 1994, Frontline, the PBS television series, produced a documentary about the Wellesley class of 1969, “Hillary’s Class.” It was mine, to be sure, but it was much more than that. The producer, Rachel Dretzin, explained why Frontline decided to scrutinize our class twentyfive years after we graduated: “They’ve made a journey unlike any other generation, through a time of profound change and upheaval for women.”
Classmates of mine have said that Wellesley was a girls’ school when we started and a women’s college when we left. That sentiment probably said as much about us as it did the college.
I arrived at Wellesley carrying my father’s political beliefs and my mother’s dreams and left with the beginnings of my own. But on that first day, as my parents drove away, I felt lonely, overwhelmed and out of place. I met girls who had gone to private boarding schools, lived abroad, spoke other languages fluently and placed out of freshman courses because of their Advanced Placement test scores. I had been out of the country only once―to see the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. My only exposure to foreign languages was high school Latin.
I didn’t hit my stride as a Wellesley student right away. I was enrolled in courses that proved very challenging. My struggles with math and geology convinced me once and for all to give up on any idea of be coming a doctor or a scientist. My French professor gently told me, “Mademoiselle, your talents lie elsewhere.” A month after school started I called home collect and told my parents I didn’t think I was smart enough to be there. My father told me to come on home and my mother told me she didn’t want me to be a quitter.
After a shaky start, the doubts faded, and I realized that I really couldn’t go home again, so I might as well make a go of it.
One snowy night during my freshman year, Margaret Clapp, then President of the college, arrived unexpectedly at my dorm, Stone-Davis, which perched on the shores above Lake Waban. She came into the dining room and asked for volunteers to help her gently shake the snow off the branches of the surrounding trees so that they wouldn’t break under the weight. We walked from tree to tree through knee-high snow under a clear sky filled with stars, led by a strong, intelligent woman alert to the surprises and vulnerabilities of nature. She guided and challenged both her students and her faculty with the same care. I decided that night that I had found the place where I belonged.
Madeleine Albright, who served as Ambassador to the United Nations and Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, started Wellesley ten years before me. I have talked with her often about the differences between her time and mine. She and her friends in the late fifties were more overtly committed to finding a husband and less buffeted by changes in the outside world. Yet they too benefited from Wellesley’s example and its high expectations of what women could accomplish if given the chance. In Madeleine’s day and in mine, Wellesley emphasized service. Its Latin motto is Non Ministrari sed Ministrare―“Not to be ministered unto, but to minister”―a phrase in line with my own Methodist upbringing. By the time I arrived, in the midst of an activist student era, many students viewed the motto as a call for women to become more engaged in shaping our lives and influencing the world around us.
What I valued most about Wellesley were the lifelong friends I made and the opportunity that a women’s college offered us to stretch our wings and minds in the ongoing journey toward self-definition and identity. We learned from the stories we told one another, sitting around in our dorm rooms or over long lunches in the all-glass dining room.
I stayed in the same dorm, Stone-Davis, all four years and ended up living on a corridor with five students who became lifelong friends. Johanna Branson, a tall dancer from Lawrence, Kansas, became an art history major and shared with me her love of paintings and film. Johanna explained on Frontline that from the first day at Wellesley, we were told we were “… the cream of the cream. That sounds really bratty and elitist now. But at the time, it was a wonderful thing to hear if you were a girl … you didn’t have to take second seat to anybody.”
Jinnet Fowles, from Connecticut and another art history student, posed hard-to-answer questions about what I thought could really be accomplished through student action. Jan Krigbaum, a free spirit from California, brought unflagging enthusiasm to every venture and helped establish a Latin American student exchange program. Connie Hoenk, a longhaired blonde from South Bend, Indiana, was a practical, down-to-earth girl whose opinions frequently reflected our common Midwestern roots. Suzy Salomon, a smart, hardworking girl from another Chicago suburb who laughed often and easily, was always ready to help anyone.
Two older students, Shelley Parry and Laura Grosch, became mentors. A junior in my dorm when I arrived as a freshman, Shelley had an unusual grace and bearing for a young person. She would look at me calmly with huge, intelligent eyes while I carried on about some real or perceived injustice in the world, and then she would gently probe for the source of my passion or the factual basis for my position. After graduation, she taught school in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa, where she met her Australian husband, and finally settled in
