Betty Ann Phelps grew up in a traditional American home. Her father was a banker, working regular hours, came home for lunch, played golf on Saturdays, went to church regularly, and presided over a Sunday family dinner each week.
Her mother was Chairman of the Women's Auxiliary, a frequent volunteer at the public library, a good cook, seamstress, and homemaker.
In short, the Fifties were what they had always been touted to be - a time of peace, social harmony, prosperity, and good cheer. Women and men had their assigned places, and no one questioned the wisdom of the day. Minor bank executive and modest mother of three might not have been Wall Street or St. Tropez but they were indispensable bits of the way things were.
The Seventies changed all that, and Betty Ann was quick to pick up on the sedate, socially sedentary, and impossibly bourgeois life of her parents. There was no way that she would follow in their footsteps. The world was her oyster, women were finally seen and respected as the primary genus of the species, and would one day ride herd over the men who had for so long oppressed them.
She became a feminist firebrand, a woman who knew no solace, respite, or satisfaction. There was so much to do, so much disgrace to overcome, so much damned male obsolescence, so much still to fight for that the fight had to continue. La Lucha Continua!
Radcliffe was the right place at the right time - Jewish intellectual women come to Harvard to sharpen their teeth on the progressivism of Gompers and Brandeis, applying communitarian, socialist principles to the struggle for female equality. She was as happy as could be, a woman among woman, a young icon of equality, a woman who had found her place.
After Radcliffe it would have been Harvard Law but the doors were still closed to women, so she headed west to Berkeley where she thrived, law review, top of her class, honors, plaudits, and Woman Most Likely To Succeed.
Despite the blandishments of her colleagues who urged her to go into feminist law, she demurred and went where she knew she would have the greatest results - not necessarily in women's fight for equality, but in amassing the a personal fortune.
A senior partner at Bear Stearns, unheard of in those early times, would be both an acknowledgement of her talents and a path to wealth.
At her investiture - fifty men surrounding her, the first woman partner of the firm, responsible for nearly twenty-five percent of the last year's revenue, a woman worthy of the firm's formal embrace - she spoke kindly but impatiently. She had other fish to fry, and the Street was only the first stop.
But where to? The splinters of the broken glass ceiling were scattered on the boardroom floor, kudos and plaques were now run of the mill. Why was she so unhappy?
Men had always given her wide berth, leeway, and running room; but what she had missed was male attention. Had she turned herself into an Amazon, a Medusa, a woman so intimidating and demanding that no man wanted any part of her? Were there no real men here?!
'Oh, God', she thought. 'Am I becoming my mother?'; but of course she was, for despite all the ambition, the Sisyphean climb, the clawing, grasping, inhuman reach for the top, she had forgotten one thing. She was a woman who needed a man, who needed his solicitude, his interest, his vitality, his virility and his maleness.
There, she said it. It was now out in the open. The battlefield was littered with men whom she had eliminated with such success that none remained to court her, to love her, to make love to her.
She had been lied to all this time. The pursuit of independence, identity, purpose, and success had been a chimera, a febrile dream of queered feminists. Where was Mr. Right when she most needed him?
Of course she shuddered at the thought, images of daytime television, romance novels, and pop culture running wild through her brain - Archie, Veronica, and Betty in some fantastical universe of romantic love, comedy hour, the delights of courtship. Was she falling prey to American low-brow bourgeois romantic fantasy after all?
Hardly. A woman was created with vulva, cervix, and womb for a purpose, and it was not Senior Vice President of X, Y, & Z. Her womanhood, her femininity, her femaleness was at stake here, and she was dallying with spread sheets and creative credit swaps.
She thought of Cousin Rachel who had gone off the rails and married down to some bass boat, gunrack cracker from Arkansas who hunted squirrel, coon, and rabbit and made nothing else of his life, a limbo-man, sedentary, self-assured swamp rat. Rachel loved the guy, wouldn't trade him for the world, wanted more babies with him, and would stay by his side for eternity.
Fool, idiot, victim of misprision and social deceit; but Rachel was still happy, and here Betty Ann remained, a virgin in principle, an old maid in waiting, an unhappy young millionaire sleeping alone in a five bedroom Fifth Avenue apartment.
Yet where should she begin? The Oak Room of the Plaza? How predictable, prosaic, bourgeois and hopelessly tacky. Left Field, that bastard child of Max's Kansas City, watering hole of Warhol and The Factory on lower Broadway? Sixty-six, illegitimate offspring of Twenty-One, redoubt of Grace Kelly and Rainier?
Or barbecues in the park? Pork 'n' beans over the coals? Children, hausfraus, and clutter? Pools, donuts, and chaise lounges?
She was at a loss, betwixt and between. Desirous, passionate, virginally susceptible, but out of touch, clueless, and on the curb. Where was Mr. Right? And would he find her?
Her biological clock was ticking when all she had thought of was billable hours. What had she been thinking? How could she be so obtuse. Was it a simple matter of losing the Armani business suit and donning something frilly? Trading class for rutting? Betraying her upbringing to follow...what? a cock?
How crude and unladylike, she thought, shaking the idea from her head; but there it was in plain English. Any man would do at this point.
Freud wrote, 'A woman's desire cannot be measured, but it can be taken', an offhanded psychological meal ticket for all men; but there was truth in the old man's aphorism, and Betty Ann had not realized it until now. She was finally Lady Chatterley and Emma Bovary all rolled up into one - a sexually hungry woman who demanded nothing and was happy to take men's offerings.
Betty Ann left Wall Street to the surprise and consternation of her male colleagues who were convinced that they had a keeper not some bimbo who would run off and get pregnant at the drop of a hat; but those who knew her and followed her trajectory reported that she was married, a mother, and living in of all places, Arkansas doing not much of anything except keeping house and keeping her husband happy.
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