A Righteous Woman's Pause For Plaudits - No Point Hiding Doing Good Under A Bushel

Vassar isn't what it once was, the women's college equivalent of the Ivy League before it went coed. While the other Seven Sisters held the line, deciding that there was still a place for a single-sex education, Vassar went coed and immediately dropped a tier.  Why would a woman qualified to go to Harvard or Yale waste her money on what was now a second rate school in an out-of-the-way corner of New York state?

 

Nevertheless, it was Vicki's alma mater to which she owed allegiance.  The school in her day attracted the best and the brightest women, and she was still friends with many of her classmates.  They had gone in different directions - some, having taken advantage of the Ivy League connection married well and were either still married or widowed; others, pioneers in a pre-feminist generation, went to Wall Street; and still others took an academic track. 

Vicki floundered a bit after graduation.  A stint at a New York publishing house, a shared apartment in girl ghetto on the Upper East Side, singles bars, the Hamptons, but nothing 'pertinent' as she put it, nothing that grabbed her attention or felt right until she met Herman Gottlieb of the New York garment Gottliebs, associates of Samuel Gompers and his supporters in the early labor union movement.  Herman had been dyed in the wool of socialism thanks to his parents who had never lost their Jewish advocacy for the little man.

 

It often takes a man to throw a switch in a woman who has been hesitant to throw it herself - the incomparable mix of political reform and sex always does the trick. Vicki conflated the two - sexual throes fueled her passion for the garment worker and her time on the shop floor amidst the spindles, spools, and sewing machines made her anxious to be rudely sexually taken, a kind of penance for the oppressed. 

The affair ended - Herman had had enough socialism, labor rights, and the plight of the downtrodden worker and headed to where he belonged - Harvard Law School where he would focus on corporate law and leave public service in the rear view mirror.  

So Vicki was again at sixes and sevens. Her stint as a volunteer at The Daily Worker and night cashier at Shraft's were both dead ends.  Her apartment on Avenue C which she had shared with Herman was now a crash pad for late-model hippies, dopers, and radical wannabees - untidy, gross in spots, and a reminder that a good Vassar education was going sorrowfully to waste. 

Epiphany Part II.  It was an easy elision from labor organizer to civil rights activist.  She had not lost her commitment to progressive causes, and Washington would be the place to mature her as yet unformed political ambitions and to make a difference.  The Americans For Progressive Reform, a well-known non-profit was exactly the right place.  The employees, all women were all enthusiastic, bonded in feminist and progressive solidarity, and serious.  

The ensuing years were all spent in the interest of social justice, and each year and each decade she became even more convinced of the rightness of the causes for which she was fighting and her anointed place within the struggle. 

After much debate she decided to go to her tenth reunion, a chance to meet old classmates and more importantly to share with them what she had accomplished.  It would be high-level show and tell and her classmates would be impressed.  After all she was making a difference. 

Much to her surprise no one seemed interested.  'What was that like?' asked Piers Cabot about the East Village, not so much of a question as it was a statement. She didn't wait for an answer as the canape tray with delicious foie gras truffles came around. 

It was like that, all husbands and children, the Women's Auxiliary and summers on Nantucket, plans for Porto in the Spring and Gstaad in the winter, nothing vaguely resembling outrage or oppression. Had she taken a wrong turn, Vicki wondered?  Who was it who said that class was destiny?

She returned to Washington disheartened and disappointed, but such counterpoise gave her the fuel she needed to refire the furnace.  The agenda was long - black men were still victims of police brutality, transgenders were increasingly put upon and bedeviled by the homophobic Right, the climate had not ceased its warming, and capitalism kept stealing the hearts and souls of working Americans.  

By the time the next reunion rolled around, she was still a cog in a perpetually turning wheel. Despite her selflessness, her diligence, and her unflagging belief in a better world, nothing much had changed in ten years.  She was still looking out a grimy window of a two-room office on Florida Avenue way east of 14th Street and bumping up against the ghetto.  

There were minor successes - a municipal order in Grand Forks to shift resources from police patrols to community service; a court order from Indiana's fourth circuit to allow gender education in K-12; but all in all, she and her colleagues were a shabby lot still eating warmups and leftovers, wearing old denim, and darning socks. 

Nevertheless, she went to her reunion.  What had been an incipient display of wealth and good fortune at 32 was in full, magnificent flower at 42.  Piers Cabot was a young grandmother, Abigail Newton had just financed the renovation of the American Wing at the Fogg and was now a trustee, and Delilah Mason had discovered a new neural pathway to the cerebral reticulum and as Associate Professor of Neurology at Hopkins was a recognized pioneer in her field. 

'Are you still...where was it again...Avenue B or something like that  in New York?', asked Piers Cabot but no more interested than when she first asked the question ten years ago. 

Four years of college out of a long life is nothing, and yet it has a disproportionate influence on one's life, and so it was that Vicki couldn't shake the ingrained, inbred, historic, renowned Vassar tradition and the aristocratic society from which its students had come.  She was of that milieu but had spent the greater part of her life denying it.  When she should be summering on the Vineyard and skiing the slopes of Vail, she was still in her wretched studio apartment in Shaw and taking the Metro to work. 

Epiphany Part III. There was still time.  Nothing is ever set in stone, nothing beyond alteration or change.  Did she really care about black people? and wasn't almost seventy years of civil rights enough for the black man to pull himself out of poverty and social dysfunction?  Why was she spending her life trying to improve conditions in the ghetto when it remained the shithole it was when she started?

Her inheritance was still banked and intact, earning interest and substantial enough to buy houses in Palm Beach and St. Bart's.  Why not?

 

Yet the old pull, now a niggling guilty plea for consideration was still tugging, and she continued on her progressive course for another ten years.  Sunken costs she remembered from Econ 101 were an economic and social anchor.  She simply was not ready to pull up stakes. 

By time of the next reunion when she was fifty-two, she arrived in style - cultured pearls, Givenchy, a diamond as big as the Ritz, and the silk and organza richness of a Boston Brahmin grande dame. Free at last!  she sighed as she took her place on the dais.  She had been asked to give the welcoming address to the event and did so with 'Heritage, Tradition, and Grace - The Triad of Privilege', a speech she had specially prepared for the occasion but to be published in the DAR Journal of the American Revolution. 

The speech was elegiac of the great academic and social tradition of Vassar and the women who had made it the premier women's college of the nation - 'a tradition which once embraced, is forever, a permanent ethos of success'.  She went on to indirectly dismiss all the cant, tired rubric, and faded assumptions which she had endorsed for so many years.  'I am here to claim my birthright', she said. 

She was home again and never looked back.  Roots have their way of staying firmly in place, she said, and when the time is right, they produce limbs, branches, and flowers. 

'What was it like?', now asked a very interested classmate, and Vicki was able to answer, a new woman.