224: political
opinions
Rhoda: times have changed, and it is not like during WW2 (when everyone
was on the same side), present political situation is more complicated. Personally,
she does fundraising for the League of Women Voters, but she is only now politically
active, she had no time as a student at MHC
Ellie: there was not a lot of student political involvement or activism
in 1955, and the Eisenhower era was pretty placid (not a very politically
active time in history?)
Gay: is not politically involved now nor was she in college.
- All 3 women come from traditional and conservative families
- Gay said she has become more liberal recently than she was when she was
younger (which she mentions seems unusual, and we usually think of people
getting more conservative with age). Ellie agrees: one of their mutual friends
said "Gay is getting so liberal!" recently.
224: change (in
political atmosphere of college)
Ellie: says college is very liberal, like many liberal arts colleges
in MA, and Republicans are in the minority on the trustee board also
224: Increasing
diversity of sexual orientation
Gay: campus is changing with the times
Ellie: campus is diverse because we go looking for diversity at MHC
these days
-Back in 1955 "no one talked about it" (Of course they knew which
professors were lesbians, and some students were in relationships with each
other, like one girl they knew walked into her room and found her roommate
with another girl, so she just took her things and went next door, but no
one really talked about it…)
- She and Gay's high school headmistress had been dismissed when they were
there for being a lesbian, Ellie recalls thinking that was not a good reason
224: What does
it mean to be a MHC woman?
Rhoda: she had 4 great years, proud to have been here, good friends,
etc
Ellie: Mom came to MHC and at her high school if you were going to
college (which all but one student did), women's colleges were the best. The
best part of MHC is the networking and the connectedness between alumnae
Gay: Once got a job at Aetna (first time in workforce, due to divorce)
because of her degree from MHC, and there's always an MHC alum club if you
move somewhere, to make friends.
Ellie: you can tell a Mount Holyoke or a Smith woman in a crowd, there
is a presence, and a power with it
224: Why did you
choose MHC and would you choose it again?
all 3: went to all-girls private high schools where attending college
was expected (Ellie and Gay went to high school together and of 22 in their
class, 4 came to MHC). Gay's mother went to Columbia, and her Grandmother
was a member of the first class at Stanford. And they'd all still choose MHC
for the same reasons (even though those reasons seemed to be partly lack of
options.)
224: Biggest difference
between MHC then and now?
All: diversity is the biggest difference. The responses thereafter
focused on academic diversity, the curriculum is not so rigid, there are more
double majors, self-designed majors, and students have access to 5-college
classes, etc.
224: On career
versus family
Gay: never considered a career, she was all about family (had to enter
the workforce much later in life after her divorce, like "re-entering"
for the first time.) In her family, motherhood was revered; her ivy league-educated
mother and grandmother saw their education as good preparation for raising
children.
Ellie: Did the nursing program and pushed marriage back to have a career-she
says a woman was criticized at that time for having a career, and also that
she didn't get engaged right away because she did not want to get pregnant
right out of college.
Rhoda: like Gay, had to "re-enter" the workforce for a first
time after her divorce, and is in awe of young mothers today who balance family
and career.
224: On increasing
racial diversity/changing attitudes
The sixties opened up society, their generation, children of the depression,
was more in synch with their parents' generation than their children were
after them. Rhoda came from a small town where everyone was white, Ellie made
some ambiguous references to growing up in industrial Patterson, NJ, but that
she wasn't really opened up until she worked at a hospital in Berkeley, CA
and it was very communist and anti-establishment (but this comment was going
beyond just race, I think.)
224: stigma attached
to financial aid?
All: this was another topic "no one talked about" or knew
about, apparently. They all worked the bell desks and washed dishes, Rhoda
waited tables for $200 off a semester, Gay showed art slides, they all agreed
the goal is always to have more money available to help students financially,
and Ellie said that MHC women do not come from such wealthy families as Wellesley
and Smith students.
Other fun facts:
Discussing social life, they all said they everyone smoked, Rhoda said she
had to smoke because she didn't drink and she had to do something. Ellie and
Gay told a story of how Ellie taught Gay to smoke in a canoe at one of their
parents' house when they were 15, and this led to the 3 saying that students
didn't drink much back then, but they would drink beer when they went on dates,
etc. They used to go to Holyoke for beer and pizza.
Gay also told us that boys from surrounding colleges (Amherst, Wesleyan, Trinity,
Dartmouth) used to get copies of the freshman facebook because they were sold
for $1 (they called it "The Bible) and sometimes call the girls for dates
after seeing their pictures. Blind dating was common, like getting set up
with friends' boyfriends' friends and visiting them for the weekend, etc.
Rhoda said that her grandmother's advice before she left for college was "Rhoda,
remember: your body is your own" and that the girls used to say "remember
what Rhoda's grandmother said!" before friends left on dates.
The last topic we didn't have room for above was gym requirements, you had
to be able to swim to graduate (they actually knew someone who did not graduate
for failure to swim) and by 1955 Body Mechanics was gone and students just
had to sign up for regular sports like tennis, skiing, golfing, etc. to fulfill
their requirements.