Carole Merritt
Transcript of Carole Merritt
Vassar QuarterlyFALL 1983
Geography: a hands-on
approach to a pressured world
Also inside: special section
on the Sixties
CHINA
Drawingby
JosephineSiew-PhaikFoo’B5
The Great Wall, Beijing
The art and archaeology of
the People’s Republic
1-21 October 1985
with an optional three-day extension to Taipei
Transportation (China/California): about $1,350Land expenses: $2,400-$2,600
Moving from North to South, the tour will travel from Beijing (fivedays) to Xian (three days) to Luoyang (two days) throughZhengzhou to Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Hong Kong.
Among the treasures we have asked to see are museums, institutes,
palaces, tombs, pagodas, caves, temples, and the terra-cottaarmy of
Qin Shi Huang-di. Guides on the trip will be Yin-Lien Chin, pro-
fessor of Chinese at Vassar, and Elinor Pearlstein ’73, assistant
curator of the Department of Oriental Art at the Cleveland Museum
ofArt. A detailed brochure will be mailed in January 1984, For more
information, write: AAVC in China, c/o AAVC, Alumnae House,Poughkeepsie, NY 12601.
Important notice to our readers
We are happy to announce that the AAVC
board has voted to return the Vassar
Quarterly to full circulation all four
issues mailed free to all alumnae/i. The new
policy will become effective next year in
fall 1984. We thank you for your good
nature during the period of limited circula-
tion, and look forward to serving everyone
regularly once again. The editor
Eleanor Roosevelt Conference
scheduled for fall 1984
October 11, 1984, will mark the 100th an-
niversary of the birth of Eleanor Roosevelt.
As a tribute to this remarkable woman,
Vassar College and the Eleanor Roosevelt
Institute are planning a national and inter-
national conference October 13-16, 1984, at
the college. Alumnae/i are invited to at-
tend.
The conference will emphasize five broad
issues which were of major concern to Mrs.
Roosevelt: economic and social policy,economic opportunity for special groups,
civil rights, the quest for peace in a nuclear
age, and human rights and international
organization. Conference organizers are in-
viting papers from scholars in a wide variety
of fields and also from persons with prac-
tical experience in government, public
policy, civil rights, labor, international rela-
tions, and the woman’s movement. In ad-
dition to the formal presentations and dis-
cussions, the conference will offer a major
commemorative convocation on Sunday
morning, October 14th, in honor of Mrs.
Roosevelt’s birth; also planned are a varietyof activities aimed at recapturing her life
and influences through photographs, film,
drama, and the reminiscences of those who
worked with her. Arrangements will be
made for participants to visit the Franklin
Delano Roosevelt Library and Museum,
and Eleanor Roosevelt’s home, Val-Kill.
The organizers would be interested in hear-
ing from alumnae/i who knew Mrs.
Roosevelt or have special insight into her
life and career. Please write; John F. Sears,
Director, Eleanor Roosevelt Centennial
Conference, Box 186, Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601.
Vassar QuarterlyFALL 1983
VOL. LXXX I NO. 1
Features
7 Around the world in 80 ways
Across the country, college geography departments are closing; but at Vassar, for
the first time in years, there’s a distinct geography major with courses that branchinto urban planning, computer science, and literary analysis. Judith Saunders tellswhat’s being taught, and what the field at large is up to.
12 Neutral states
Portraits of Vassar faculty by Mathieu Roberts ’83
16 Learning from the Sixties
Through movies, plays, and books, Americans are looking back to that turbulent
decade, but what significance do they draw from the view? Margaret Beyer ’70
discusses the changing social attitudes of 125 alumnae/i who entered Vassar in the
Sixties; Carole Merritt ’62 speaks of her journey toward her African-American
heritage; Michael S. Kimmel ’72, Leonard Steinhorn ’77, and Colleen Cohen (of
Vassar’s anthropology department) comment on the teaching of college courses
about the period; and Brian Rutter ’83 muses on its legacy.
30 Of sex, pearls, and the languages of time
The class is 1933. “The dean, in her opening address, told us that we were the
smallest class ever to be admitted . . . and hence the most highly selected. . . .I hardly listened, being so filled with the pride and glory of belonging to the
very best class in the very best college in America,” Mary McCarthy ’33 has written
of her first days as a Vassar freshman in 1929. In this issue, another ’33er,
playwright Lucille Fletcher Wallop, describes the quality of life at a Vassar of
legend.
Departments
2 Omnium Gatherum
33 Vassar People
34 Campus Notes
36 Get in touch — Vassar clubs around the world
38 Books
39 Person Place & Thing40 Class Notes
The last page
Blessings by Lisa Johnson Fleck ’66
Cover: Photo: Georgette Weir
1
Omnium GatherumExtra!
The Shakespeare Garden lives! The U.S.
Olympic Hockey Team plays Vassar! West
Point lusts — for Walker! These stories and
more can be found in our new “Campus
Notes” section, inaugurated with this issue.
Turn to page 34.
Vassar QuarterfyEditorial Staff
Editor
Mindy Aloff ’69
Assistant editor
Georgette Weir
Designer
Abigail Sturges ’66
Copy editor
Geraldine Herron
Books editor
Susan Osborn ’77
Quarterly Committee
Anne S. Alexander ’67, Ruth Brine ’4l
Fred R. Brooks, Jr., Elizabeth Davis ’6l
William W. GiffordFrances Aaron Hess ’53 (ex officio)Sally Kirkland ’34, Kathleen Holman Langan ’46
Dana Little ’62, Judith Woracek Mullen ’59
Nancy Newhouse ’5B, David L. Schalk
Liz Wexler Quinlan ’59 (AAVC board liaison)
Board of Directors of AAVC
President
Frances Aaron Hess ’53
First vice-presidentAnne Morris Macdonald ’42
Second vice-presidentAlix Gould Myerson ’7l
SecretaryMarilyn Palmer Helmholz ’6O
Treasurer
Fay Gambee ’62
Fund chr.
Laura Holt Douglass ’6B
House committee chr.
Beatrice Meyer Wilson ’36
Nominating committee chr.
Frances Thompson Clark ’53
Publicity director
Liz Wexler Quinlan ’59
Directors-at largeEmily Richardson Hewitt ’4B
Kim Landsman ’74
Mary-Dixon Sayre Miller ’44
James Mitchell ’75
Sally Lyman Rheinfrank ’63
Elizabeth Mills Schilling ’42
Nora Ann Wallace ’73
AA VC trustees
Mary Benjamin Arnstein ’47
Georgia Sims Carson ’52
Alice Frey Emerson ’53
Billie Davis Gaines ’5B
Eugenie Aiguier Havemeyer ’5l
Margot Bell Woodwell *57
AAVC Staff
Executive director (also AA VC board member)
Polly Messinger Kuhn ’47
Associate directors
Mary Meeker Gesek ’5BTerri O’Shea ’76
Assistant for recent classes
Deborah Macfarlan ’B2
The Vassar Quarterly, USPS 657-080, is published in thefall, winter, spring, and summer by the Alumnae andAlumni of Vassar College (AAVC). POSTMASTER:Send address changes to Record Room, Alumnae
House, Box 19, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601. Second class
postage paid at Poughkeepsie, NY. Yearly subscriptions$7. Single copies $2. Unsolicited manuscripts will not bereturned unless accompanied by a self-addressed,
stamped envelope, Copyright © 1983 by AAVC.
Typeset and printed in Poughkeepsie, NY, by Maar
Printing Service. ISSN: 0042-2851
August 27, 1983: for King
Getting out of the air-conditioned bus
which we boarded at 5 a.m. in Mt. Kisco,New York onto a large parking lot be-
hind Washington’s R.F.K. stadium, I’m hit
by intense, midmorning heat, and suddenly
feel that I’m stepping ashore onto foreignterrain. I set out to follow the directions to
the subway, which will take me and my
companions to the Smithsonian, where we
will join the march. But I soon find there’s
really no need for directions; our con-
tingent is immediately in the march, or,
anyway, the masses, as bus after bus dis-
gorges 50 more people at a time The
assembly so far is mostly White, just as the
group in our bus had been. The phrase
“bussed in” flashes through my mind, and
I smile. Have I been bussed in to a Blacks’
event, to give it a more balanced look?
Well, in away, that is the story, except that
Dr. King was my hero, too, and, as the
T-shirt parading in front of me proclaims,
“I still have a dream.”
This is called a march, but it’s actually a
gathering of the tribes, a celebration.
Washington was built for such events. It ab-
sorbs a crowd like a sponge: one park alone
connects directly to a mall which leads to
the area of the Washington Monument.
Once out of the subway, we join the amor-
phous pageant of balloons, posters, signs,
and banners. The messages proclaim
various identities, philosophies, and, some-
times, senses of humor. “Middlefield,
Conn, for Jobs, Peace and Freedom.”
“Vermont Still Has A Dream,” with a
green outline of mountains. An enormous
banner of purple silk, the size of a tennis
net, is held high “Presbyterians Want
Peace.” We’re part of the nuclear freeze
wing. “Dr. King Didn’t Dream About MX
Missiles” a sign reads. “Antarctica Wants
A Freeze” says a poster, with penguins
drawn around the edges.
By now we’re well under way. The blaring
music of the assembly area has faded into
the various noises of people walking along.It’s at last a mixed population, Black and
White. I almost decide that it’s a middle-
aged population as well, when a young
couple go by with their one-year-old in the
father’s backpack carrier, the mother
hovering with an umbrella to shield the
baby from the strong sun. With so many
bodies, the pace is unhurried. Then a chant
from a group behind us sweeps up and car-
ries along everyone’s voice. “One, two,
three, four. We don’t want a nuclear war.”
There are loud, rhythmic admonishments
to President Reagan. A snatch of “We Shall
Overcome” floats in from the distance, but
it’s pitched too high for general singing and
fades away. As it does I hear, close at hand,Dr. King’s legendary speech of 1963 being
delivered live. On the curb stands a middle-
aged Black man with a megaphone, recitingthe text. He has the Georgia accent, the tim-
ing, the cadence. He has memorized it with
all the pauses, the rushes, the inflections of
the original. He’s having a wonderful time,
speaking his piece, paying his homage, and
dreaming.
We aren’t yet anywhere near the Lincoln
Memorial, where the speakers planned for
the day are to stand, but one of the people
I’ve traveled with admits that she has em-
physema and must rest. We join other folks
under a tree and look out on the acres of
humanity. A Black woman beside me
strikes up a conversation. She lives in
Washington, and, yes, she was here 20 years
ago today. She asks why I’ve come such a
distance if I can’t even hear the speeches?
To swell the crowd, I explain. To show that
I share the dream. She seems pleased.
Polly Messinger Kuhn ’47
Polly Kuhn is executive director of AAVC.
Students, aid, and the draft
It was like being back in the days of the
Vietnam War. Banners with slogans were
hung. Petitions and pamphlets circulated
around the room. Strains of antiwar songs
filtered in from a distant guitar, and a stu-
dent sat at a table asking for donations. On
September 30, 1983, Vassar students,
faculty, and administrators rallied together
in the College Center to protest an amend-
ment that brings to light issues of draft and
registration.
Signed into law by President Reagan on
September 8, 1982, the Solomon Amend-
ment denies draft nonregistrants federal
loans, grants, and work study assistance, as
2 VQ Fall 1983
well as participation in federal job pro-
grams. Each Vassar student will have to
sign a Selective Service Compliance form
before being eligible for a guaranteed stu-
dent loan. Angry at such a stipulation for
students in need, men and women here have
mobilized under the leadership of Michael
Widman ’B6 and Maggie Jones ’B4 to pro-
test the law that threatened the course of
students’ education.
Speaking at the rally to an enthusiastic
crowd, President Smith acknowledged that
she’d already written letters of opposition,on the trustees’ recommendation, to the
U.S. Education Department. She protested
that the amendment is discriminatory, be-
cause it imposes a penalty on a selective
group of students, namely, needy, college-
age males, and that the amendment is un-
fair, because the penalties are imposed
without due process of law. Why, she
asked, should educational institutions be
required to act as enforcement officers for
the Selective Service? Neither the trustees
nor the president has taken a position on
the merit of draft registration per se.
Sidney Plotkin, assistant professor of
political science, accused the government of
asking for compliance to the nonexistent
draft out of a desire for coercion, rather
than loyalty to the United States. “The
Solomon Amendment is about war and pre-
paring for war,” he said at the rally. “I’d
call it legalized extortion.” Before receiving
a standing ovation, he struck a sentimental
chord. “Vietnam taught numerous lessons
about power,” he said, “and perhaps the
most important was never to keep quiet in
the face of power, never to suspend rea-
soned skepticism, never to permit patriot-
ism to be reduced to a war cry. Today’s
protest is part of that continuing lesson and
of a longer tradition of questioning power
when it seems to abandon reason.”
Mr. Plotkin’s oration seemed to shock
students into thinking about the moral and
social implications of war. “It was
Reagan’s way of quieting the conserv-
atives,” said Richard Koreto ’B4 of the
amendment. “The first priority is to stop
the war the registration’s for,” said Eric
Left: Bringing itall back home again. A
decal reading “Stop the Draft, ”
with peace
symbol, was affixed to a campus traffic signthisfall. The All College Dining Center is at
the right.
Bove ’B6, president of the Vassar Pro-
gressive Union.
Snatches of talk drifted through the
crowd.• “Nobody’s even going to care if we’re
all against it.”• “If Russia started rolling its tanks, I’d
go and hope many others would.”• “It’s a good way to get a free career.”
• “Maybe if the U.S. was involved in a
‘just, declared’ waragainst Nicaragua or El
Salvador, the draft might be important.”• “If we don’t have enough people to
fight a war, we should stop and ask why.”Some people here feel the imminence of
nuclear war. Explaining why students might
fear complying with draft registration laws,Diana J. Wynne ’B4 said, “If you sign up
for the draft, you’re signing up for some-
thing you don’t believe in or signing up
for your own death.” She compared
today’s anxieties and fears about war with
the ideals of the past. “We’re the shell-
shocked generation,” she said. “We’re all
afraid of it. Nobody likes to die.”
Although the rally excluded any conserv-
ative' arguments, Abram Feuerstein ’B4
editor of the recently founded conservative
magazine, the Vassar Spectator [see Sum-
mer 1983 Quarterly] reflected: “It’s the
concept of the draft, not pieces of paper
shuffling from Washington, which so many
of the students at Vassar object to.” Mr.
Feuerstein essentially argued that selective
obedience to the law isn’t practical, adding,
“It’s those righteous people who are pro-
testing the amendment who are supposed to
be educated.” He continued, “The govern-
ment always puts stipulations on the money
it gives out, and the only way to be free of
those restrictions is to be free of funding.”
He believes that it’s the duty of students to
comply with registration laws, if they do
receive federal assistance, just as “collegeshave to comply with affirmative action laws
though they might find them distasteful and
unconstitutional.”
The Solomon Amendment rally also
brought into focus the issue of women in
the military, for, according to the regula-
tions, all students, including females, are
required to sign the Compliance form to be
eligible for financial aid. It’s hard for many
women to imagine being in the armed
forces, although some believe it’s unfair for
GeorgetteWeir
Solomon says:
how Vassar is required to proceed
According to a rally address by Michael P.
Fraher, Vassar’s director of financial aid, at
that time about 120 male and female
students (a number much reduced since)had yet to return their Selective Service
Compliance forms to his office. “Given the
uncertainty of students having received the
forms due to summer vacations and the
amount of information sent to students
during the first weeks of school, we are of-
fering these students another opportunityto respond,” he said. “If they do not com-
plete the form and return it withinthe next
30 days then there are two steps that will be
taken. Disbursements for students scheduled
to receive Title IV funds will be held up un-
til the student complies by providing us
with the form. [Title IV funds include Pell
Grants, Supplemental Educational Oppor-tunity Grants, National Direct Student
Loans, and College Work-Study earnings.]
For students whose Guaranteed Student
Loan or Parent Loan for UndergraduateStudents has been certified, or disbursed,
failure to provide us with the Selective Ser-
vice Compliance Form means that the col-
lege will be required to notify the Secretaryof Education and the student’s lender that
the student has not complied. The lender is
then required to place the student into re-
payment status with respect to the disburse-
ment made for the 83/84 academic year.”He added that should Vassar find dis-
crepancies between the information
students provide on Compliance forms and
on other official records, the college is re-
quired to notify the Secretary about them as
well.
Mr. Fraher said that he did not know
whether Vassar would follow the lead of
some colleges in offering institutional
assistance to replace lost Title IV assistance
for students who do not return the Com-
pliance form. He did propose that such ac-
tion might weaken the argument “that the
regulation is discriminatory and adversely
affects the ability of all students to secure
funds for their education just to net a few
nonregistrants for Selective Service.” He
also noted that Title IV funds will soon be
under Congressional review. “What kind of
signal,” he asked, “do institutions send to
Congress regarding the need for continued,
if not increased, funding of Title IV, if we
are able to replace those funds for students
who fail to comply with the regulation?”M.A.
3
Omnium Gatherum
women to be excluded. Said Karen Gifford
’B4, member of the Peace Studies Group:“For everything we’ve worked for [in the
women’s movement] for so many years, we
can’t afford to be left out of the draft.”
Ms. Wynne agreed that “women have made
progress, but not in the military.” She con-
tinued: “Women who want to do combat
duty shouldn’t be denied the chance ... es-
pecially in a highly technical army as the
one today. More and more people aren’t in
the trenches.” Mr. Bove said that in today’s
military “it’s just a question of scientific
training, not of pure physical strength.”Mr. Feuerstein took a different view: “The
role of women in this society is to nurture
and protect it, not destroy it. The idea of
the draft being mandatory for men and
women is revolutionary.”
Revolutionary? In the short week follow-
ing the rally, the student body seemed to
change from an uncaring, uninformed,silent majority to a cohesive, emotional,
force of resistance. President Smith ap-
plauded those determined students who are
willing to unite and fight against what theyperceive as injustice. “Activism,” Ms.
Smith explained at the rally, “as it is en-
couraged at colleges like Vassar, begins with
education. Be willing to take action ap-
propriate to your beliefs, but remember
that we must also be willing to take the con-
sequences of the action.” It will be interest-
ing to see how many students continue to be
activists as the academic work of the term
increases. Valerie Silverman ’B4
Valerie Silverman, an English major, hopesto work in public relations.
Chemical high
Now rising in the science quad, Vassar’s new Seeley G. Mudd Chemistry Building is
seen from the ground floor of Olmsted biology hall. The $6.9 million Mudd building is
expected to be ready for use by fall 1984.
Letter from the Bermuda Triangle
As I watch the leftover chili slip off the
galley counter and splatter the starboard
settee berth, a sleeping crew member, the
cabin sole, the teak bulkhead, and half the
navigation station, I decide that cooking on
an offshore race is a hell of away to get to
Bermuda. On deck, the watch struggleswith a 25-knot gust that has crept up from
behind; down below, 1 try to keep the rest
of the galley from following the chili: dirty
lunch dishes, soup for the night watch, gar-
bage, forks, knives.
After cleaning up the mess, I go on deck
to sit on the stern pulpit and peel carrots
over the side. The peels are draped all over
the Jubilaeum’s transom and I ignore com-
ments from the owner about having his
yacht arrive in Bermuda looking like a side-
walk vegetable stand.
It’s about 600 miles and four-and-a-half
days from Marion, Massachusetts, to the
tiny British island stuck out in the middle of
nowhere, Atlantic Ocean. Despite the
skepticism of the more seasoned passage-
makers on board, we’re charging throughthe Gulf Stream with nary a hint of heavyweather. Most crossings during the Ber-
muda Race have been punctuated by big
seas, high winds, and cold bologna sand-
wiches. We’ve had relatively easy sailing on
this race, so meals are more extravagant.While the omelettes were burnt this morn-
ing, last night’s chicken breasts in white
wine received kudos from the deck apes. I
spent three days before the start of the race
stocking Jubilaeum with supplies from
Oreo cookies and fresh fruit to filet mignonand vitamin pills, only to discover that the
six strapping men and Queene Flooper (’73),the other woman aboard, ate like flyingfish. All they wanted was plenty of liquidsto offset the hot sun diet soda, lemon-
ade, fruit juice, beer.
Cooking offshore requires the organiza-tional skills of a field marshal and the dex-
terity of a tightrope walker. For the past
couple of days, I’ve fought a losing battle
against a mounting pile of dirty, styrofoam
dishes which clog up the small sink. I’ve
managed, however, without damage to my-
self, to dodge U.F.O.s (Unexpected Flying
Objects), and to pull a pan full of grease-
popping chicken out of the gimbaled 75-
pound stove while it swung like a pendulumto right itself against the yacht’s motion.
I’ve also learned to stagger around getting a
meal ready on less than four hours sleep.
This 47-foot yacht is by no means spar-
tan: it has every gadget known to the
Galloping Gourmet, including a trash com-
pactor, a Dust Buster, and a microwave,
currently housing a gooey chocolate cake.
The galley is almost like the kitchen in my
apartment, except everything’s heeled over
at a 15-degree angle.
Between cooking and cleaning sessions, I
sit on the cockpit coaming next to the
helmsman and look out over the ocean at
an empty horizon. I keep watch for any-
thing unusual: a school of whales,dolphins, flying saucers. (We’re in the Ber-
muda Triangle, after all.) After staring at
our wake for a while, I can understand whysomeone would become so mesmerized with
Shane Mitchell ’79, at the helm
4 VQ Fall 1983
the infinite motion that he’d simply decide
to jump overboard.
Several sonic booms bounce off the water
as the Concorde heads back to Kennedy.
It’s a terrible, tearing noise that rocks
across miles of open ocean, reminding me
that it’s nearly impossible, even out here, to
get away from the frantic human hive.
At 1700 hours I’ve got to head back
down below to get dinner ready. If we don’t
get captured by aliens or sucked into
another time zone, we should arrive in Ber-
muda by day after tomorrow. I can’t wait.
The crew gets to buy me dinner.
Shane Mitchell ’79
Shane Mitchell is an editor at Motor Boat-
ing & Sailing magazine, and spends a great
deal of time messing around on boats,
much to the surprise of everyone who
knows her. Jubilaeum reached Bermuda
22nd out of a fleet of 102 yachts, and each
crew member managed to gain five pounds
on the way.
Flight 7 as seen, barely,from Russia
Lisses, France
During the commotion over KAL Flight 7,1
happened to be traveling in the Soviet
Union. I would like to describe what I went
through in a struggle to obtain information.
On Sept. 1, the Russians shot down the
airliner, but I first learned of it Sept. 5.
During those four days I was in Yerevan,
capital of the Armenian Republic, just 40
miles from the Turkish border. True, I
speak neither Russian nor Armenian. But
no one in my Intourist hotel, which housed
English-speaking tourists and multilingual
guides, mentioned the incident in my
presence.
On the afternoon of Sept. 5, in Moscow,
I overheard Radio Moscow while shopping
in a hard-currency store. What drew my at-
tention was the announcer’s mention of a
U.S. spy plane that he said had entered
Soviet airspace. I knew that both super-
powers play this sort of game; on Cape
Cod, in Massachusetts, the public is well
aware of the surprise visits that Aeroflot
makes over Otis Air Force Base.
But the Russian announcer’s tone was
striking. He compared the Reagan adminis-
tration to Hitler’s regime. He said the
Reagan administration had committed a
crime comparable to the Nazis’ sacrifice of
women and children in biological experi-
ments.
I needed to know the meaning of those
slanderous remarks. I called United Press
International and was told that a South
Korean passenger plane had been shot
down, 269 persons were dead, Canada no
longer accepted Aeroflot on its runways,
and there would be sanctions against the
Soviet Union.
That was a lot to learn withoutwarning. I
called the press office at the U.S. Embassyand was invited over to see a tape of
Secretary of State George Shultz and read a
transcript of President Reagan’s speech. So
now I knew.
On Sept. 6, as far as I could tell, the
Soviet people still did not know that the
plane was Korean and that 269 persons were
dead. Not until Sept. 9 did some of these
details become public.
One night, I talked about it with a
woman from Moscow; we argued about
whether it was a spy plane or a passenger
plane. We argued until I showed her a
transcript of Mr. Reagan’s speech. It was
the first time in her life she had read a docu-
ment slandering her government.
Our debate then focused on the ethics
and morality of humanity. She agreed that,
although the aircraft probably did partici-
pate in some kind of military operation,
there were other solutions.
“I feel bad,” she said. “We made a
mistake.”
There were many mistakes made during
that week. The press had already discussed
the first one; the Russians could have
forced the Korean plane down. Another
mistake was not admitting the truth to the
Soviet people. During the week of Sept. 1 to
Sept. 8, there was no place in the world I’d
rather have been than Russia. I learned
firsthand how difficult it was to obtain in-
formation. And I realize how many of my
friends in the United States don’t under-
stand how lucky they are.
Scott K. Wilder ’B3
Mr. Wilder traveled to the U.S.S.R. with
Thomas Krasne Levine ’B2. This first ap-
peared as a letter to the International Her-
ald Tribune; it is reprinted by permission.
Organizers of “Project 1984,” the next
Dean’s All-CollegeSymposium, are pleasedto announce that the Reverend William
Sloan Coffin will deliver a symposium lec-
ture on Tuesday evening, next March 27th.
An outspoken clergyman and social com-
mentator, Mr. Coffin will address issues of
morals, ethics, and religion in the modern
age. All alumnae/i are invited to attend.
“Project 1984” will take place on the
Vassar campus, March 26-30, 1984/ For
more information, please write Minerva L.
Tantoco [’Bs], Vassar College, P. O. Box
1848, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601.
Logo: Claudia Mauner 'B3
Tower transmissions
When the Quarterly was the Vassar
Alumnae Magazine, appearing five times a
year instead of four, it carried a column
about campus life and ongoing debates
called “From the Ivory Tower.” In a
quarterly, which sometimes doesn’t reach
its readers until weeks after it’s mailed, any
topical column is imperiled with ir-
relevance. Still, in response to many
readers’ requests to be brought up to some
date on campus issues, we’regoing to take a
whack at the job. If this attempt seems
useful, we’ll make it a regular feature. We
welcome your response.
One of the leading topics this fall is af-
firmative action: Has Vassar done all it
could to recruit Black students, faculty, and
other workers? If not, how could it take
more aggressive steps to reach potential
Black applicants, and how could it speed up
the search process? The subject leaped into
the limelight in October with the release by
the Black Caucus to campus and area news-
papers of a report that charges the college
with negligence in the pursuit of equal op-
portunity policies it espoused in 1970. The
Black Caucus is an alliance made up of six
faculty members (one of whom is Oriental)
and an administrator. In the main, it ad-
dresses issues relating to the quality of the
Vassar experience for Black students,
although its members make the point that a
college population which is successfully
diverse in racial backgrounds provides a
broadened education for everyone.
The Black Caucus’s report is not new.
Prepared privately by the Caucus in 1980,
and then distributed to a few members of
5
OmniumGatherum
the administration, it assesses the previous
ten-year period, the decade immediately
following the publication of the “Report of
the Joint Ad Hoc Committee on the Educa-
tion of Minority Students,” commonly
known as “The Catlin Report.” That
report, adopted by faculty and college
trustees in the wake of perceptions aroused
by a Black students’ sit-in of Main in the
fall of 1969, states: “Vassar College sup-
ports the national goal of educational op-
portunity for all people and intends to do
all that it can within its abilities as a liberal
arts college and its resources to further that
goal.” It also says that “among the several
minorities in this country whose educa-
tional opportunities have been limited, the
Black minority at Vassar College shall have
priority over other minorities for the fore-
seeable future,” and that “Black member-
ship shall be increased in every part of the
Vassar College community students,faculty, staff, administration, and
trustees.”
By 1980, the Black Caucus concluded,there had been an “appalling lack of pro-
gress in the area of affirmative action over
the past decade.” It cited “approximately
six full-time and three part-time Black
faculty members out of a total. . . teaching
staff of approx. 292. ”In 1983, there are
six full- and two part-time Black* faculty in a
group of 300 or so, including 197 full-time.
Currently, there are two Blacks in admin-
istration, and the clerical/maintenance staff
is roughly five percent Black.
Caucus members have told the Quarterly
and various student journals that they de-
cided to release the 1980 report now be-
cause of their growing impatience at the
lack of improvement in the number of
Blacks on campus during the past three
years. The climate for their decision was
lively: the campus was already energized bythe news in September that of the 50 Vassar
faculty just hired not one was Black, and
that the number of Black students who ap-
plied to Vassar, and who enrolled, has been
decreasing over the past several years. (In a
report on the admission of racial minorities,
distributed to the Vassar community last
February by the admission office, the
figures were especially low for Black male
enrollment, a cause of universal concern
here: two Black males each in the classes of
’B6 and ’B7. Of Black women, 28 enrolled in
’B6 and 23 in ’87.) Too, people are still
talking about the assessment in the first
edition of The Black Student’s Guide to
Colleges, published in 1982, that Vassar is
“a difficult place for blacks to adjust to.”
“Vassar people are achievers and the transi-
tion to college academics for those who are
less well-prepared can be difficult,” it says.
“One respondent notes that there is a
‘significant attrition rate among blacks
males in particular’ and attributes this rate
to the tough academic situation.”
Public response to the Black Caucus has
come from Dean of the College H. Patrick
Sullivan. “The problem in our faculty and
student recruiting is not a lack of in-
stitutional affirmative action, nor is it the
presence of institutional racism,” said Mr.
Sullivan in a statement prepared for the stu-
dent paper Unscrewed. “It is in great
measure the failure of our society to realize
the goals of equal access for all to quality
education. It is also the general decline of
liberal learning in favor of vocational train-
ing. Our affirmative action policies and
procedures are strong.” Mr. Sullivan also
cited statistics. He noted that an article in
the New York Times Magazine last May
told of a 12 percent drop in 1983 freshmen
among the 42 member colleges of the
United Negro College Fund, “while among
Ivy League schools, Cornell fell from 198 to
178 Black freshmen and Harvard from 126
to 97.” He continued: “Of all the Ph.D.’s
awarded in the U.S.A. last year only 3.8
percent wereawarded to Blacks or about
1,200. Of that number about one-third, or
400, took their degrees in fields which
Vassar has in its curriculum, but probably
only 60 percent of that number sought
academic positions. That means that some
3,200 colleges and universities in this
country were, perhaps, in competition for
about 250 Black Ph.D. graduates.”
Even so, says the Black Caucus, Vassar
could be more effective through tighter
management of its recruiting tactics. And
Mary Janney ’42, chair of the board of
trustees (two of whom are Black), was
quoted by the Misc as saying that the
[decrease in the Black campus population]
“seems to be a nationwide trend among col-
leges our size,” yet “I’m not convinced
we’ve tried everything we can try.” Another
(White) board member was quoted as say-
ing that this problem “is the highest priority
the trustees have.” It is unclear at press
time what sort of action will be taken on six
recommendations the Black Caucus made to
the trustees in October regarding the
formulation of “a comprehensive Affirma-
tive Action Plan and Program.”
The reaction of the Black students seems
to be one of mixed feelings. “I would
recommend Vassar even with the unrealistic
social environment caused by having so
many black women and so few men,”
Toresa Tanks ’BS, president of the Students
Afro-American Society, told the Misc in
September. “I know I have grown here.”
M.A.
College trustees, 1983/4
In response to readers’ requests, once each
year the Quarterly publishes a list of Vassar
College trustees. The year in roman after
each class is the date of expiration for that
trustee’s term.
Mary Benjamin Arnstein ’47, 1987
Georgia Sims Carson ’52, 1985
Maura J. Abeln Casebeer ’77, 1985
George H. Chittenden, 1984
June Jackson Christmas, ’45-4, 1986
Judith Russell Driscoll ’4O, 1985
Alice Frey Emerson ’53, 1985
Billie Davis Gaines ’5B, 1984
Eugenie Aiguier Havemeyer ’5l, 1987
Harold H. Healy, Jr., 1985
JoanE. Morgenthau Hirschhorn ’45-4, 1985
Mary Draper Janney ’42, 1985
James C. Kautz, 1987
Peter Millones, 1984
Helen Maguire Muller ’45-4, 1987
George D. O’Neill, 1986
John R. Petty, 1984
Francis F. Randolph, Jr., 1984
Kathleen Tener Smith ’65, 1987
Virginia B. Smith, ex officioNorton Stevens, 1986
Frances Prindle Taft ’42, 1985
Richard E. VanDemark ’77, 1984
John Wilkie, emeritus
Margot Bell Wood well ’57, 1986
Observers:
Frances Aaron Hess ’53, 1986
President, AA VC
Maurice Edelson ’B5
President, Vassar Student Association
6 VQ Fall 1983
Around the worldin 80 ways
by Judith Saunders
From Landsat to the literature of landscape, geographers are looking at
space from a lot of surprising angles.
Left: “A Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish
Settlements adjacent thereto, ”published by Henry Popple, London, 1733. Part of the
Lasker Collection, donated to the Vassar College library by Loula Lasker ’O9, this map
has been described by experts as the finest and largest map of North America engraved
up to the time of itspublication. It was used to settle a dispute between President Franklin
Roosevelt and his neighbor on the west shore of the Hudson River, Howland Spencer,over the right to use the name Krum Elbow. Popple’s map clearly marks the east bank
of the river ”Crum Elbow, ” indicating that President Roosevelt might use that name to
describe his estate at Hyde Park.
Right: A remote sensing image of New York City and Long Island, taken from a
Landsat Satellite, August 22, 1978.
Courtesy,VassarSpecialCollections
"Geography is the study ofplace, or space, in
the sense that history is the study of time. . . .The first question a geographer asks is
‘WHERE are things located?’ but even more
important is his concern with ‘WHY are they
located where they are?’”
National Office of the Association
of American Geographers
The Vassar catalogue for 1983/84 an-
nounces a change in curriculum which rep-
resents the culmination of a ten-year strug-
gle: students may now elect a major in
geography. .For approximately the pastdecade there has been no major program in
this subject, and interested students gen-
erally worked with an interdepartmental
concentration in geology-anthropology. Be-
tween 1932 and 1973, however, Vassar did
offer a major in geography, and so this
“new” major represents a reinstatement
rather than an innovation.
For several reasons geography has be-
come “a beleaguered discipline,” not onlyat Vassar but at colleges and universities
across the nation. According to an article
published last spring in the Chronicle of
Higher Education, some observers of the
national scene argue that the relativelysmall size of most geography departmentshas left them prey to the economic pres-
sures facing educational institutions today.
Others have suggested that the interdisci-
plinary nature of the field may make it dif-
ficult for geographers to sustain strong in-
stitutional identity. Geography embraces
such a wide range of specialties some
oriented toward the physical and natural
sciences, others toward sociological and
even literary methodologies that to out-
siders it sometimes appears a poorly defined
field of study. But in the furor generated bynationwide cutbacks in geography depart-
ments, increasingly strong and persuasive
arguments are being heard on behalf of this
unique and underappreciated subject. The
study of geography, its supporters main-
tain, can save American students from the
provincial and insulated view of the world
which threatens now to weaken their politi-cal, ecological, and cultural judgment.
Judith Saunders, formerly of the Vassar
English department, is now assistant aca-
demic dean at Marymount College in Tarry-
town, New York.
Geography at Vassar has for many years
shared housing and administration of its
program with the geology department. The
college currently employs two geographers,
Associate Professor Harvey Flad (full-time)
and Instructor Jo Margaret Mano (part-time), who try between them to provide stu-
dents with a realistic sense of the field’s
range. Both are excellent at kindling en-
thusiasm for the kinds of knowledge geog-
raphy embraces. “The center of the field is
the way we look at the world, spatially,
synergistically,” Ms. Mano explains. “We
look at the way the world works together,
how it all interacts. We take bits and pieces
from other disciplines and fit them to-
gether. We have no walls to our discipline.It’s exciting because you can change your
focus without changing your profession.”Mr. Flad emphasizes that study of geog-
raphy clearly “has relevance outside the
walls of academe.” “Students see its useful-
ness in the community, as well as its useful-
ness in the job market.” They are eager to
learn about specialties such as urban and
rural planning, and quick to perceive geog-
raphy as “something that is a real-world
program.” Thus geography satisfies stu-
dents’ desire to have an impact upon their
world an impact such as Mr. Flad him-
self achieved three years ago when he
worked on a document used by a group
protesting the construction of a nuclear
power plant in the Hudson Valley. Mr. Flad
successfully argued that the aesthetic and
cultural center of the landscape would be
destroyed if the power plant were built on
the selected site and, partly as a result of his
efforts, the Nuclear Regulatory Commis-
sion declined to issue the building permit.
This kind of real-life application, Mr. Flad
explains, is enormously important to
today’s undergraduates. Field work con-
tributes significantly to the study of
geography; theory and practice are never
far apart.
Both Mr. Flad and Ms. Mano are con-
cerned that the striking omission of geog-
raphy from the curriculum of secondary
schools in the United States has created “a
woefully ignorant set of young people,when it comes to knowledge of a place or,
indeed, almost everything about the rest of
the world.” As a result, however, many
students today are hungry to gain more pre-
cise knowledge about “the world at large.”At Vassar, for example, geography ad-
dresses environmental issues on a national
and international scale, teaching students
“how harsh we have been on the earth.”
Not only the natural environment itself is
studied, but also the results of man’s ac-
tivities on it, going back to prehistoric
times. The thrust of such study is never
purely historical or descriptive; it is also
creative and problem-solving. Students who
ask, “Can we learn to do things differ-
ently?” can be steered to a specialty such as
bio-geography, where geographers strive
for “a global view of ecosystems.” Here a
question like, “How many forests are there
making oxygen?” is followed by, “What
Jo Margaret Mono of the geography department before geology’s rock collection in Ely Hall
Ellen
Frankenstein’B4
8 VQ Fall 1983
will happen if we keep cutting more
down?”
Geography as a discipline is also very
much a part of the computer revolution,making use of new kinds of technology to
analyze census data, or to make maps. “If
you have the personnel and the equipment,”
says Mr. Flad, “you can really move off in
that direction.” Ms. Mano’s course in Re-
mote Sensing teaches students to employsophisticated equipment and analyticaltechniques, to interpret air photographs,and to construct images from data providedby satellites. As might well be imagined,professional opportunities for students
trained in geography are varied. Says Ms.
Mano, “In geography you’re constantlybeing trained to look at lots of angles, and
this is a valuable tool for any kind of
career.”
During the twentieth century, geography
has been a field characterized by consider-
able inner debate, which may help to ac-
count for its multidimensionality. Until the
fifties, according to Mr. Flad, it was very
much a descriptive science. In the fifties,
however, geographers began to emphasizethe manipulation of quantitative data. Theymeasured how phenomena change quantita-tively: urban growth, population move-
ments, the diffusion of ideas or informa-
tion. In the late Sixties some geographers
became very interested in social factors that
affect geographical movement; they ana-
lyzed such things as the influence of politics
and economics on the flow of wealth and
power. As an offshoot of this kind of in-
terest, a strong minority of socialist and
Marxist geographers emerged.
Since the late Seventies, geographers have
turned to problems and approaches which
link geography with literature and the arts.
They ask questions about the relationshipbetween a landscape and human percep-
tions of it, as preserved in paintings or liter-
ature. For instance, they might compare In-
dians’ perceptions of the Great Plains with
ranchers’ perceptions of it. Mr. Flad con-
siders this interaction between geography
and the arts to be the newest, most fertile,most forward-moving area of the field rightnow. Just a few years ago, he offered an in-
terdisciplinary course in the American
Culture Program at Vassar called “Ameri-
can Landscape,” which he conceived and
The study of geography, its supporters maintain, can save American
students from the provincial and insulated view of the world which
threatens now to weaken their political, ecological, and cultural
Judgment.
Classroom and field work courses in geography for 1983/84as described in the Vassar College Catalogue
101a. Environment and Culture: A Geographical Analysis of World Problems
An investigation of selected aspects of the interrelationships between man andhis habitat, with a focus on the landscape as modified by man. Particular em-
phasis will be paid to environmental issues such as population growth and
migration, hunger and food supply, and the distribution and misuse of resources
such as water, air, soil, vegetation, mineral and energy supplies, and wildlife.
The course will distinguish world regional differences by investigating politicalunits, cultural institutions such as religion, spatial organization such as settle-
ment patterns, and the varying cultural, historical, and economic factors whichhave shaped contemporary land use patterns, with comments about the future.
111b. Cultural Landscapes of the Hudson ValleyField trips to selected localities in the Hudson Valley and vicinity to study the
landscape and the role of the Hudson River, the historical settlement of the
region, the contemporary urban, residential, and agriculture land use in the
region, and some of the environmental issues affecting the river and the land.
220a. Cartography
Study of the graphic presentation of ideas through the application of the basic
principles of map making and design.
245a. Anglo America
Study of the patterns of human organization in the United States and Canada.
250a. Urban Geography
Study of the formal structure and the functional organization of cities.
290. Field Work (a or b term)
300a. Senior Thesis
301b. Senior Seminar
374b. Rural Planning and Development
An inquiry into the changing rural American landscape. From contrasting pat-terns of rural decline and emergency, associated with shifts in ecologic values,occupational structure, and transportation and housing patterns, emerge poten-
tially conflicting plans for local and regional development. Land use analysis
through literary and historical approaches will combine with local field research.
Problems of Third World agricultural development will also be investigated.
385b. Seminar in Urban Planning Issues
Investigates current major urban and environmental issues such as land use,
transportation, housing, urban renewal, new towns, and environmental quality,analyzing causes and attempted solutions.
399. Senior Independent Work (a or b term)
Reading Courses in Geography 1983/84 (a or b term)
297.01 Geography in the Secondary School Curriculum
297.02 Geography, Ecology, Culture
297.03 African Regional Geography: West Africa
297.04 Geographical Factors of Poverty
298. Independent Study
9
Below: A detail from one of the many richly il-
lustrated maps in Vassar’s Lasker Collection ofEarly Atlases and Maps. Included there are ex-
amples of cartography from the 16th, 17th,and 18th centuries.
taught together with John Sears in the
English department. A quick glance at a re-
cent issue of Annals of the Association
of American Geographers indicates the
enormous spread of contemporary geog-
raphers’ concerns. Articles analyzing the
“Nile River Low Flows” or “glacial out-
wash” one might expect, but the same issue
also includes articles on “Structural Marx-
ism and Human Geography” and “Un-
documented Migration from Mexico.”
Vassar has played a role in the develop-
ment of the field of geography. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Ellen Churchill Semple, V.C. 1882, achieved
a worldwide reputation for her field in-
vestigations, for her bold theories, and her
colorful writing. Known as “the dean of
American geographers,” Semple studied
with the German anthropo-geographer,Fredrich Ratzel, bringing back Europeanmethods and enthusiasm to the United
States. She invented a new approach
now known as environmental determinism
to the relationship between the landscape
and its human inhabitants, arguing that
human cultures are to a great extent molded
by the physical environment in which they
are located. Semple’s theories gained wide-
spread acceptance and predominated in the
Community design from study to street
Last spring, Vassar’s geography department
offered a new course, Community Design,
which introduced students to geographicconcepts both in and out of the academic
world. Taught by Associate Professor
Harvey Flad, the course was developed to
examine “the spatial arrangement of the
natural and the built environments as theyrelate to the .social function” of com-
munities. Throughreading and discussions,
students were asked to study many different
aspects of community design from traf-
fic patterns to architectural styles then
take to the streets of the business district
adjacent to campus to see and apply what
they learned in a practical exercise in com-
munity planning.The core of classroom work consisted of
reading assignments from such books as
Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, Jane
Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, and lan McHarg’s Design
with Nature. The semester began by in-
terpreting these and other authors’ percep-
tions of communities, and ended by ex-
amining the ways one can effect change in a
community through such means as land-
scaping, preservation, and traffic controls.
Next door to Vassar, the Arlingtonbusiness council was looking for solutions
to their concerns regarding parking
shortages, a number of abandoned build-
ings, and the protection of their shoppingdistrict’s prosperity and identity in its
competition with nearby malls. Communityleaders, knowing of Mr. Flad’s course, saw
the perfect opportunity to help students
with their field study while providing
Arlington with inexpensive and enthusiastic
researchers.
To initiate the field work portion of the
class, we took a weekend trip to Cornell
University, where we werebriefed on issues
of business district revitalization by
Lisa Byers is an American Culture major.For her senior thesis she is investigating the
attitudes that residents and merchants ofCanaan, Connecticut, hold toward their
community.
members of the Landscape Architecture
Program. That workshop introduced us to
projects by graduate students and profes-
sionals that were similar to the one we were
about to undertake in Arlington. After the
trip, we launched our field study.
Documentation of Arlington’s business
district was one of our first tasks. We com-
piled information on dates of building con-
struction, land ownership, space classifica-
tion (open, commercial, single or multipleresidence), and we took surveys of mer-
chants, shoppers, and residents. Later, we
sifted through our data, discussing, for ex-
ample, suggestions for adding and expand-
ing parking areas (including the idea ofcon-
structing a parking lot on the lawn of
Alumnae House). In the end, our recom-
mendations included the development of
more open green spaces with benches and
places to sit, the upgrading of sidewalks,and the addition of crosswalks to slow
down vehicular traffic. We also proposedthat facades and signs be changed to bringmore unity and appeal to the area.
The next task became a presentation to
interested members of the Arlington com-
munity. Approximately 30 area residents
and merchants attended a meeting in
Vassar’s Chicago Hall. There we displayedmaps we had drafted that documented
present-day Arlington and others that il-
lustrated our proposals for improvements.We had drawn pictures of facades, parks,
and sidewalks to show how simple and
sometimes not-so-simple improvements
could make a large impact on the area’s
visual appeal; slides of these drawings, of
old photographs, and of existing spaces ac-
companied our oral presentation.
Over the past summer, while still in
Poughkeepsie assisting with the Vassar
Summer Institute on Historic Preservation,
I was able to see our effort carried one step
further. In July, Mr. Flad presented a con-
densed version of our proposals to the
Poughkeepsie Town Council. The response
was very positive and the suggestion was
made to incorporate our findings into the
masterplan for Arlington. Lisa Byers ’B4
10 VQ Fall 1983
field for many years. “It’s taken half a cen-
tury,” says Mr. Flad, “to overturn her
notions. Geographers today believe that en-
vironment is one contributing factor in
shaping human cultures, but not the only
factor.” Ms. Mano speaks admiringly of
Semple’s professional achievements and
also of her courage in battling prejudice
against women scientists. “When deter-
minism went out of favor, Semple’s reputa-
tion suffered. I always defend her. She
wasn’t even allowed in the lecture halls with
Ratzel, her teacher; she had to sit outside
and listen through the doorway.”Despite Semple’s prominence, however,
geography has traditionally remained quite
inhospitable to women scholars. “Women
have been denied opportunities. It’s been a
white, male discipline,” says Mr. Flad. He
attributes this state of affairs in part to af-
filiations between geography and militar-
ism. The waging of war has always de-
pended upon maps and spatial kinds of
analysis, which perhaps explains the ex-
clusion of women from the field. Ms.
Mano, like many women active in the pro-
fession today, belongs to the new Commit-
tee on the Status of Women in Geography,which, for the past several years, has
published a quarterly newsletter describing
employment opportunities and feminist
research. Only about 4 percent of geog-
raphers in higher education are women,
Ms. Mano says, and the number of those
holding tenured positions “can be counted
on your fingers.” “It’s a very stodgy pro-
fession,” she admits. “There are a lot of
crusty, boring, old male geographers out
there.” Ms. Mano is one of a new genera-
tion of ambitious women who are strivingto make changes by introducing debate in
scholarly journals about sexist biases in
field work, and by publishing research on
feminist questions. A recent issue of The
Professional Geographer featured articles
on subjects such as the male-female ratio in
an urban labor force and the geography of
prostitution.
Resources for Vassar students of geog-
raphy include access to many historically
significant maps housed in the Special Col-
lections area of the library. Particularly
notable is the Lasker Collection of Early
Atlases and Maps, assembled by Edward
Lasker of New York City and donated to
Vassar by his sister, Loula Lasker, V.C.
1909. This collection consists of 12 rare
atlases, dating from 1572 to 1778, and three
portfolios of maps. The collection includes
the work of several of the most famous
cartographers of the sixteenth, seventeenth,
and eighteenth centuries: the Hondius-
Mercator Atlas Minor, published in Am-
sterdam in 1634; Theatrum oder Schaw-
platz des Erdbodems, published by Abra-
ham Ortelius of Antwerp in 1572; and
Theatrum orbis terrarum, published by
Willem and Jan Blaeu in Amsterdam, 1645.
In its October 13, 1937 issue, the Miscellany
News reported on the Lasker Collection,
noting; “The whole represents the stage
Michael Rapp ’75, market manager and former geography major: ‘Tell
Harvey Flad I am still hiking those electric right-of-ways.’
when geographical knowledge was becom-
ing precise, without wholly severing its re-
lations with beauty, adventure, and
romance.” Many of the maps contain tiny
representations of ships, sea monsters, mer-
maids, Indian teepees, elephants, or deer,
scattered over the land masses and the
waters to indicate what sorts of real or
mythological creatures a traveler might ex-
pect to encounter. Such figures do, in truth,
lend the documents an air of adventure and
romance. Gazing at the exquisite coloring
and finely drawn outlines, one gains new in-
sight into the quiet pronouncement of
Elizabeth Bishop ’34: “More delicate than
the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.”
m
Geography majors in the real world
In the past several years, prior to the recent
reinstatement of geography as a formal
major at Vassar, approximately three stu-
dents per year “majored” in the subject,
either through the independent program or
as part of an interdepartmental concentra-
tion. Only a few recent graduates continue
to make geography an academic pursuit.One is Julie A. Stephens ’B2. Ms. Stephens,
currently in the graduate geography pro-
gram at the University ofMinnesota (rankedthe top graduate geography program in the
nation, according to the Chronicle of
Higher Education), plans to earn a master’s
by the end of 1983/84. “I’m pursuing an
applied geography career in public and
private planning,” she told the Quarterly,“and am considering a Ph.D. program.”
Her senior thesis at Vassar, “Socio-
Economic Impacts of the MX Missile Pro-
ject, A Case Study of Callente, Nevada,”
was awarded a grade of distinction, and has
been used as a resource by geography and
anthropology students since her gradua-tion.
Russell Cohen ’7B, now the executive
director of Hillside Trust in Cincinnati,
Ohio, went from geography to a career
focused on environmental policy. After
earning a master’s degree in natural re-
sources and a law degree from Ohio State
University, he worked for the Mas-
sachusetts Audubon Society, the Lincoln In-
stitute of Land Policy, and the Ohio
Chapter of the Nature Conservancy before
coming to the Hillside Trust, a private non-
profit land conservation organization. He
has published articles on land conservation
in journals, most recently one on the
National Natural Landmark Program
{UCLA Journal ofEnvironmental Law and
Policy, June 1983).
Most geography students take up careers
far removed from the subject, but those
contacted by the Quarterly look back with
fondness on their Vassar classes. “I’m now
working on improving the mental landscape
rather than the physical,” says Michael
Rapp ’75, market manager for Software
Outlets in Nashville, Tennessee. “Tell
Harvey Flad I am still hiking those electric
right-of-ways. And we make a great
isopleth map maker.” Then there’s Rob Fry
’7B, assistant investment analyst with
Metropolitan Insurance Company in New
York City, who notes that his geography
background “makes living in the city more
satisfying.” “It also served well for my get-
ting into the Tulane School of Business and
this job. I’m no longer a geographer, but
I’m happy I once was. ” J.S.
11
NEUTRAL STATES
James Day, Classics
12VQ Fall 1983
Portraits of Vassar faculty by Mathieu Roberts ’83
Brett Singer, English
13
For this series, the only direction
was where to stand.
1 began to appreciate photographic portraits after seeing AugustSander’s work at the Boston Museum of Fine Art in 1981. The
following summer, I worked as an intern at Richard Avedon’s
studio in New York. Upon returning to Vassar in the fall, I thoughtthat a portrait series of college professors might prove interesting.
Dixie Massad Sheridan ’65, assistant to the president, liked the idea
and provided encouragement and funding. The portraits published
here belong to that project, undertaken independently of my
senior-year academic program. The complete set of photographswas exhibited in the College Center Gallery last spring.
To establish a relationship between the subject in the photographand the viewer, the portraits were enlarged to 16” by 20”, propor-
tions that approach life size. In the gallery, the prints weremounted
so that the subject’s eyes were level with the viewer’s own. To make
the relationship between portrait and viewer more immediate, the
faculty members were photographed with the appearance of look-
ing directly into the camera. In addition, each subject’s posture is
of a static quality. By this I mean that the person assumed a posi-
tion that implies he or she could maintain it over a period of time.
Such a quality can be stark, particularly if one is familiar with the
subject as an animate being. Although the faces in these photo-
graphs are at the point of neutrality, this neutrality has echoes of
previous emotions.
In creating the portraits, the use of a studio was essential. It al-
lowed me to use a white backdrop to isolate or suspend the subject
in a neutral space. This background intensifies attention on the
subject. I dislike using props because they may prove distracting
and bias the viewer. Had these professors been photographed in
their offices it would have been difficult to consider them as in-
dividuals apart from their profession.To light the subjects, I used a single strobe with an umbrella and
positioned it close to the camera lens, thereby eliminating shadows.
This, in combination with the use of large negatives (2 1/4” by2 1/4”), fine-grain film, and careful darkroom work, can produceportraits of excruciating and perhaps unforgiving detail. I showed
the images to a friend, who became furious at me because she felt
that they were cruel in their specificity. She would have preferredthem to be soft and dreamy to fit her own image of the people. I
like this kind of detail, however, for it can cause a viewer to forgetthat the portraits are only photographs, and to react as if real per-
sons were present. Excruciating detail also forces one to ponderhow mental images of an individual may depend on our feelings
toward that person, or toward what he or she represents.
The studio also helps to foster a relationship between subject and
photographer, which can greatly influence the portrait. When first
shooting portraits, I was inclined to give directions, but I became
uncomfortable doing so. I have come to think that subjects who are
manipulated make for dishonest portraits. For this series, the only
direction given was where to stand. When the initial focusing and
framing of the subject was complete, I stood three feet to the side
of the camera for the rest of the session. Keeping oneself in the
open instead of hidden behind a camera better encourages sincere
conversation. Twenty-six photographs were taken during each half-
hour session. Most of the frames you see here were achieved in si-
lent moments or while I was speaking.
Mathieu Roberts, a biology major while at Vassar, is working
as a free-lance photographer in New York and Connecticut.
Christine Havelock, Art
Curt Beck, Chemistry
14 VQ Fall 1983
Walter Fairservis, Anthropology
Jean Pin, Sociology
Elbert Tokay, Biology
Gwen Broude, Psychology
15
Learningfrom
The Sixties
Will the post-World War II baby boom generation
ever take the full measure of the period during which
it came of age the era offlagrant oppositions
known as “The Sixties?” Will there ever be
agreement, even, on what span the term “Sixties”
really entails? The calendar years from 1960 to 1969,
or the years bridging watershed events? From the
election ofPresident Kennedy to the resignation of
President Nixon. From Castro’s overthrow ofBatista
to the U.S. pullout from Saigon. From the birth of the
Twist to the deaths at Altamont. Passing time makes
one hungry to understand. In 1983 alone we’ve
witnessed the telecast of a multiprogram history of
the Vietnam War, widely publicized stage and film
works about erstwhile student radicals looking back
from middle age, and many analyses of the civil rights
effort, occasioned by the 20th anniversary of Martin
Luther King’s address known as “I Have A Dream.”
In the section that follows, Vassar alumnae/i and a
faculty member contribute raw material toward the
large and no doubt dramatically ambivalent portrait
that history will construct of the Sixties. The
individual articles are hardly definitivefor the Sixties
Vassar as a whole; the 125 reunion responses that
Margaret Beyer discusses cannot fairly be said to
bespeak the attitudes of their classes at large. Still, as
someone who attended the collegefrom 1965 to
1969, I am sure that the opinions expressed in these
pages will touch a chord in many of my
contemporaries, in the faculty who oversaw our
struggles on the road to reason, and in the families
who argued politics with us long distance, then paid
the phone bills. The emphasis here on the
transformation of action into reflection and of
activism into the subject of scholarly study
seemed appropriate to a college magazine. And our
Sixties logo the vision in an astronaut’s visor of a
mailed fist punched up from the Earth seemed
appropriate to a period when extremes of hope and
anger were often, and inextricably, linked. M.A.
The wages of
Aquarius
Trying to keep the activist alive
inside the professional earning
over $35,000/year
by Margaret Beyer ’70
What has happened to the Vassar students
who marched on Washington and were ac-
tive in campus protests? How have the peo-
ple whose supposed drug use and sexual
behavior were the hallmark of a “new
morality” weathered the years from Kent
State to Reaganomics? Have the political
and social values which made them famous
in the Sixties continued to dominate their
lives? Or have they “sold out” and become
as establishment as those who preceded and
followed them at college?
The media would have us believe that all
that remains of the Sixties generation is a
penchant for jeans and chemical highs, but
it’s not that simple. The evolution of my
values since I entered Vassar in 1966 has in-
trigued and sometimes tormented me. What
do I really believe in and how do I put those
beliefs into action? Part of what I valued
about Vassar was its encouragement of acti-
vism, its “enduring commitment to prepare
each new generation of leaders for the un-
charted future.” Involved in college
government and now a youth advocate in
the juvenile justice and mental health
systems, I have always been troubled by the
question, How much activism is enough? Is
it acceptable to make my contribution to
improving the world during the week and
enjoy suburban living on the weekends? Is
it possible to be liberated and still have a
husband and children? How much income
is it all right for a person committed to
social change to earn? Is it acceptable to
own any stocks, or are they all tainted by
the military-industrial complex? Is all
elitism wrong, even a parent-run private
Margaret Beyer, a psychology major at
Vassar who was graduated with honors,
holds a Ph.D. in clinical/community
psychology from Yale University. Once
directorof the D.C. Coalition for Youth in
Washington, D.C., she works as an advo-
cate to improve youth services (including
institutionaland group home conditionsfor
delinquents), to find alternatives to in-
carceration, and to develop youth employ-
ment programs and special education. In
preparing this article, she wishes to
acknowledge with gratitude the suggestions
of Louise Gorenflo ’7O, Dennis Gregg ’7O,
Alix Gould Myerson ’7l, Joyce Rubin
Schwartz ’7l, and Lenny Steinhorn ’77.
18
When statistics below don’t add up to 100
percent, it’s because some of the figureswere taken to tenths of a percent, and the
fractions have been omittedfor readability.
school? Must I have separate garbage pails
for glass, tin cans, and paper to deliver to
the recycling center, or is it sufficient to
restrict my use of disposable paper and
plastics?
Issues like these were plaguing me, as
usual, when the twelfth reunion of my class
approached. I wondered how troubling the
transition from Sixties values had been to
my classmates. I developed a questionnaire
which was completed by 125 reuning Vassar
alumnae/i, representing 22 percent of the
registrants among four classes 1969,
1970, 1971, 1972 reuning in 1982. (The125 responses represent 6.8 percent of the
entire populations of the four classes at the
time of the 1982 reunion.) A third of the
respondents were from the class of ’72;
about a fifth each were from the other
classes. Ninety-three percent of those an-
swering the questionnaire were female.
(The first seven men to graduate from
Vassar in recent times were in the class of
1970.) Ninety-three percent of the
respondents were White. (In 1970, approxi-
mately four percent of the student body
were Black.) Although the sample included
graduates from across the country, it
tended to be composed of Northeasterners
interested in, and able to return to, reunion.
We can’t be certain how reflective the views
of these respondents are of their graduating
classes in general, although we suspect that
they do represent more than their own im-
mediate group.
Values in collegeIn the main, these Vassar graduates re-
ported that they held liberal values during
their undergraduate years: they favored
social and political change, although most
were not activists or radicals. About a third
traveled to Washington, D.C., to march as
part of the Vietnam Moratorium in the fall
of 1969 or during the Cambodia Strike in
May of 1970. After four Kent State Uni-
versity students were killed by members of
the National Guard during a widely pub-
licized demonstration on that Ohio campus
over the bombing of Cambodia, many U.S.
colleges struggled with the question of how
to respond both to the student deaths and
to America’s role in the Cambodian in-
vasion. Classes at Vassar were suspended in
response to the Kent State affair, and
special arrangements were made for com-
pleting coursework. In place of the formal
curriculum, seminars were set up by Vassar
faculty and students, and a college delega-
tion was sent to Capitol Hill. Most of the
alumnae/i respondents favored these re-
actions.
In October 1969, 35 Black Vassar
students took over part of Main Building.Most of the respondents to the question-
naire reported that they had favored the
Black students’ demands at the time to
make the college’s Black Studies program
capable of granting degrees, to provide
funds for the Urban Center in downtown
Poughkeepsie, and to plan for an all-Black
Vassar dormitory.
In March 1969, shortly after Vassar de-
cided to admit men for undergraduate de-
grees, students voted to curtail parietalhours in the houses. An overwhelming
majority of the reuning respondents re-
ported that they had favored unlimited
parietals.
Beginning in the fall of 1968, student rep-
resentatives met with faculty, administra-
tors, and trustees at the Minnewaska con-
ferences, an attempt, on a large scale, to
sharpen the sense of community and par-
ticipatory democracy at Vassar. The high-
light of the first conference was the ex-
pansion of the decision-making roles that
students enjoyed on college committees.
With Minnewaska in mind, I asked the re-
uning respondents whether they had
favored a stronger student role in college
governance while they were in school. The
vast majority reported that they had.
Values in collegeDidn’t
Favored care Opposed
Cambodia strike
at Vassar 68% 12% 20%
Black student
demands 64% 19% 16%
Unlimited parietals 87% 10% 3%
Student role
in governance 87% 12% 1%
Values now
The respondents continue to be liberals,
although their concern about issues gener-
ally does not make them active in social or
political causes. They are most active as
feminists, however. For many, the most im-
portant social or political issues are local
ones. A good number of respondents are
also involved in local or national efforts to
protect the environment. Some are activelyinvolved in local or national efforts sup-
porting nuclear disarmament.
Values now
Informed & Not
Active Inactive involved
Working for/con-
tributing funds
to women’s
rightsorganizations 34% 40% 27%
Fighting for equal
pay/promotionsfor women at
work 32% 40% 27%
Redefining familyroles 55% 31% 14%
Working on local
social/politicalissues 46% 44% 8%
Local/nat’l
environmental
protection 36% 63%
Local/nat’l
nuclear disarm. 24% 63% 14%
Volunteerism
About a third of the respondents are not
involved at all in volunteer activities. About
40 percent spend one to five hours weekly,20 percent spend five to ten hours weekly,
and 10 percent spend over ten hours weeklyon any single volunteer activity. Primary
volunteer activities were:
1-5 5-10
hrs./wk. hrs./wk.
Religious organizations 21% 1%
Alumnae/i activities 20% 3%
Boards of directors 18% 3%
Own child’s school 17% 3%
Service organizations 14% 5%
Fewer respondents are involved in neigh-
borhood organizations (13%), museum
work (7%), and electoral politics (6%).
This low rate of volunteerism is a major
finding from the questionnaire. Across the
country, the increase in women employed
outside the home has reduced their availa-
bility for volunteer efforts, and community
agencies have suffered. That such a large
number of graduates do not volunteer even
a few hours a week in addition to their jobs
may be a departure from the tradition of
Vassar alumnae. (If the group of re-
spondents about whom I speak were found
to be representative of their entire class
populations, the departure at least from the
19
classes of 1953, ’SB, and ’63 would be ex-
traordinary. According to a recent study
conducted by Eugenie Aiguier Havemeyer
’sl, over 65 percent of those earlier classes
were volunteers during their twenties, and
over 80 percent were volunteers during their
thirties and forties, with 70 percent servingon boards of volunteer organizations.)
Workaholism
Seventy-eight percent of the reuning
respondents are employed outside the
home. (One-fifth of the sample, included
above, are working parents.) They work an
average of 41 hours/week, ranging from 1
hour/week to 80. A staggering 47 percentwork more than 40 hours/week. The
respondents average $25,000 of annual per-
sonal income, ranging from SI,OOO to
$150,000. They report that their spouses
earn an average of $45,000 annually, rang-
ing from SIO,OOO to $250,000. Only half
reported donating any income to charitable
organizations last year.
The respondents are employed in a wide
range of occupations:
Teacher/professor/educator 18
Attorney 16
Manager (president, director, v-p) 16
Arts (producer, director, curator,
artist, architect) 8
Mental health (social worker,psychologist) 5
Physician 4
Writer 4
Systems analyst 3
Full-time student 3
Miscellaneous (consultant, planner,general contractor, researcher,veterinarian, geologist, librarian,bank cashier, etc.) 20
A third of the group work for profit-
making organizations (e.g. law firms, group
practices, business). A quarter work for
schools and universities, a fifth for non-
profit organizations, and 8 percent for
government agencies other than schools.
Thirteen percent are self-employed.It is a noteworthy finding that a group of
college graduates, a majority of whom are
women, are pursuing careers which are
• in such varied fields;• high-powered (presidents, vice-presidents,
directors, and partners);• well paid (18 women out of the 100 em-
ployed respondents are earning in excess
of $35,000 annually before age 35).
LifestyleAmong the most dramatic findings of the
questionnaire are that these graduates who
started college in the Sixties have neither
married nor had children at anywhere near
the rate of earlier generations. Fifty-nine
percent of the respondents are married, 30
percent are single, 10 percent are divorced.
Fifty-eight percent have no children. Nine-
teen percent have one child and 21 percent
have two children; one respondent has three
children and one has four. That nearly a
third of a primarily female group of gradu-
ates aged 30-35 are not married is a remark-
able departure from the engagement ring
craze of past senior years. That more than
half of these graduates have not had chil-
dren by the time they are nine to thirteen
years out of college is also worth pondering.
Career choices and the independence to
pursue them appear to be priorities for
these graduates to the exclusion of, or
before, having families. A larger popula-tion than in the past may elect never to have
children (even if they are married), and
others will delay childbearing until their late
thirties. Although the graduates in the
sample will continue to have children, the
42 percent who are now parents have nearly
achieved zero population growth a decade
out of college.
Sex and drugsIn general, the respondents are now more
sexually active, and monogamous, than
they were in their college years. Their use of
alcohol has increased, and their use of
drugs has decreased.
Senior year Last year
Had sex with no one 31% 8%
Had sex with one person 37% 78%
Had sex with 3-5 people 25% 15%
Had sex with over
5 people 7% 1%
Never used alcohol 14% 5%
Used alcohol once/mo. 25% 18%
Used alcohol once/wk. 54% 48%
Used alcohol daily 7% 29%
Never used drugs 60% 83%
Used drugs once/mo. 16% 10%
Used drugs once/wk. 17% 8%
Used drugs daily 7%
What to make of it
The majority of this group of my Vassar
contemporaries are not tormented by what
they have become in the process of trans-
ition from the Sixties to the Eighties. In
fact, they see the changes as predictable,and not inconsistent with who they were in
college. From the questionnaires:
“As an employer I pay enormous taxes and can
feel this ‘dying liberal’ fading to stage right.”
“Necessity of paying rent and being responsiblemakes coping with the system unavoidable.”
“In becoming more comfortable, the expressionof my values has been toned down.”
“I have changed because of earning money, hav-
ing a family, aging. Basically, now there’s more
to lose.”
They attribute their changes since the Six-
ties to family responsibilities and earning a
living. “Reality,” as many put it, seems to
have been sufficiently disillusioning to
make them change their youthful agenda:
“My values haven’t changed, but strategies have.
In college we were naive about the amount of
power we had to change the world, which provedamazingly resistant to change of a serious kind,despite the threat of nuclear destruction. Copingwith life is more difficult than we imagined in the
Sixties.”
“It’s harder to change the world than I thoughtintelligence and commitment aren’t enough.”
Jim Kunen, author of The StrawberryStatement and later a public defender at-
torney, in 1973 interviewed friends who had
previously chosen alternative lifestyles and
then enrolled in law school. “Our middle-
class instinct (subliminal, unshakable) to
‘make something of yourself,’ abetted by
our social commitment also rather hard
to shake drives us back toward the larger
arena,” one reads. “The pressure mounts
to make your deal, some sort ofcompromise
between the quest for authentic experience
and the need for identity, between adven-
ture and security.”
The Vassar respondents, too, seem to
have “made their deals.” Universally they
report that the Sixties greatly affected
them; most say that their values have not
changed since college. Nevertheless, they
acknowledge that their outward appear-
1970
VassarionLeft: Margaret Beyer ’7O, as a Vassar senior
Right: Ms. Beyer in 1983
20 VQ Fall 1983
‘Although superficially I probably appear very middle class, I am
nonetheless still a “radical” at heart.’
ances conform to the traditional symbols of
success. Having a family income three times
the national average does not make them
feel guilty or see a need to shed their Sixties
identity. Without regret they describe them-
selves as “suburbia with a conscience.” Or,
as a corporate assistant vice-president
wrote, “I am very conventional with liberal
opinions, still concerned about women’s
issues.” They seem to accept, without dis-
comfort, that family and/or working has
redirected their lives. Still, they don’t see
themselves ever becoming as conservative as
their parents:
“Although I’m a corporate lawyer, I’m still in-
volved in a considerable amount of pro bono
work which is not characteristic of those now
coming out of law school. Also, I’m a committed
feminist. My spouse and I have a wonderful rela-
tionship in which family and work responsi-
bilities are shared.”
“I don’t feel as ifmy values have changed much.
I have focused on incorporating them into my
personal life and speaking up in my workplacerather than actively working for more wide-
spread change.”
“Comfortable, yet aware of and somewhat in-
volved in politics. Have held jobs that are work-
ing for causes I believe in. Am conscious of
politics of food coops and sympathetic to friends
leading alternative lifestyles. Feel attitude toward
life strongly influenced by involvement in the
Sixties, but am more conservative/realisticnow,
more self-oriented, but still feel it’s important to
be involved in making things better.”
Most respondents had not chosen alterna-
tive lifestyles, but they report that the Six-
ties are reflected in their personal lives:
“Married, nuclear family. Try to stay politically
and socially aware; try to use my time effectively
in a variety of efforts; try to have honest and
meaningful relationships with friends. Very in-
fluenced by the Sixties.”
“Lifestyle very family-oriented now, but the Six-
ties still have an impact, making me especiallysensitive to environmental and consumer prob-lems, now on a personal rather than theoretical
level.”
“Much less obviously affluent than my parents;
public schools for kids, no servants, encompas-
sing, and not threatening to, people from many
walks of life. Also ecologically aware vegeta-ble garden, recycling, appropriate food usage.”
Others describe the influence of the Six-
ties in feminist terms:
“I am a professional, recently married. I married
later than most of my class because of my feel-
ings for independence and my desire to establish
a career. Women’s lib of the Sixties allowed me
that freedom (otherwise I’d be a suburban
divorcee with three kids).”
“Independent within a long-term, solid mar-
riage. More influenced by the women’s move-
ment than by political activism both then and
now. No kids yet, by choice. All this because of
what I lived through at college, although I
couldn’t exactly describe how or why.”
A physician working part-time:
“1 am a working mother, trying to be more
liberated than my mother was, trying to raise my
kids still more so.”
It appears that the struggle to combine
family and career has replaced a social or
political focus in the lives of most re-
spondents. Those without children face
decisions about whether to alter career
plans to accommodate a family. Two-thirds
of the parents are employed full time or
part time away from home. The thrust
toward career achievements is clear. So is
the pressure not to lose out anywhere:
“Vassar told us we could do anything. We think
we can have it all. We must have it all. Money
and other external things may not measure suc-
cess for all of us. But internally we are pushed to
be 140 percent. To be perfect at work and at
home.”
For some of the respondents, the Sixties
had a major influence on their work:
“Interest in the ‘conserver society.’ Preference
for working for the community, doing something
worthwhile for others (although not everyone
might appreciate that some people think I
work for the government for security).”
“I am strongly committed to social and political
change and 1 believe that this is because of what 1
lived through in the Sixties. Although super-
ficially I probably appear very middle class
(clothes, home, professional presence), 1 am
nonetheless still a ‘radical’ at heart. The fact that
I am involved in a social change profession is
critical to my well-being and sense of self.”
“I am actively engaged in a legal career. Cer-
tainly the politics of the Sixties helped me realize
that I could achieve more in the way of change
for society by having access to ‘the system.’ My
earlier conceptions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ have
also been tempered since the Sixties because of
the training I received in law school.”
As a comparison, the hundreds of people
surveyed in Woodstock Census were very
concerned with pollution, limitation of
nuclear weapons, marijuana decriminaliza-
tion, corporate power, and the E.R.A.
Nearly half of their sample saw themselves
as working to change the world. More than
80 percent saw themselves as not having
sold out. Nearly half in 1978 were making
less than $lO,OOO and 95 percent less than
$25,000. Half the sample said they felt
older, more self-centered, and a need to be
more practical. But the authors conclude
that the generation’s values had not really
changed. “The Seventies met the basic ex-
pectations that the majority of our re-
spondents had for themselves and for
society,” they wrote, “mainly because
those expectations were generally more
modest than most people realize.”
Students of the Sixties made their peace
with old values and new behaviors. Some of
the Vassar respondents with one foot in the
Sixties and one in the Eighties have mis-
givings about the incongruity between their
values and their lifestyles;
“I am anti-defense spending, suspicious of
patriotic flag wavers, love Joan Baez, but now
socialize with conservatives on the tennis court
and at JuniorWomen’s Club and raise kids in the
suburbs.”
“I live in a suburban house; my belief in collec-
tive living is down the drain. My work is a strong
expression of my political/social commitment to
change. But I feel guilty about spending so much
time away from my kids. Can’t be committed to
work and home both. Sixties made me feel re-
sponsible for changing the world, but living up to
that challenge has brought a lot of guilt. Is this
really me living in a ‘suburban paradise’ with two
kids, a dog and cat, and a station wagon?”
“I feel a responsibility to use my life to make
some small part of the world a little better. There
are many more causes that I feel 1 should (or
want) to support than I am willing to spend the
energy or money on. The moral/social value of
the way I spend my time is an issue I think about
often.”
They have found that there are no rules
for activism, in the Sixties or the Eighties.
They have had to discover for themselves
what they really value, whether or not they
are comfortable with the discovery. Grow-
ing up for me and my contemporaries has
been a process of turning our youthful be-
liefs into personal and professional choices
we can live with as adults. |\Q
21
The status of a Black life
A Vassar classroom, a Mississippi jail, a workshop table, a will book’s
page: one woman’s stepping-stones to knowledge
by Carole Merritt ’62
A few months ago my mother wrote me in
some desperation. “Here I am at 12:30 a.m.
Easter Sunday trying to clear my over-
loaded desk. I decided to dispose of the
Vassar correspondence, and found these
three [letters] that I think might be of im-
portance to you. If not, then get rid of
them. The college has tried to catch up with
you for almost 20 years.” Since graduationin 1962,1 have, indeed, maintained distance
from Vassar. I have not been a supportive
alumna and have not kept abreast of the
college’s development. Perhaps the distance
is not only a measure of the alienation I had
felt as one of a handful of Black students
on a White campus, but also a reflection of
my ambivalence toward a privileged educa-
tion. The excellence of Vassar’s faculty and
administration did not fully compensate for
the relatively thin social fabric of an ad-
vantaged White female community. I have
been proud of the educational legacy, but
on occasion have felt apologetic to have
been one of the few Black beneficiaries.
The letters which my mother forwarded
to me in Atlanta presented both a challenge
and an opportunity to confront my contra-
dictory assessment of the Vassar experience.
The letter announcing the twenty-fifth class
reunion in 1987 reminded me that a genera-
tion has passed since I began my adult
journey. The prospect of accounting for my
travels is somewhat unsettling. The letter
from the Students Afro-American Society
informed me of curricular and social
changes which are being generated by a
Black student body 30 times our number in
the early 19605. Finally, the letter from the
Vassar Quarterly was inviting me to write
this personal statement describing my
passage from college to Mississippi and
home again. Vassar had at last caught up
with me, and was graciously asking an er-
Carole Merritt was born in Cincinnati,
Ohio. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where
she is the director of the Herndon Founda-
tion Museum and Archives. She has justcompleted an exhibit project on Black
family history in Georgia, which was
funded by the National Endowmentfor the
Humanities. (See sidebar.) As a doctoral
candidate in American Studies at EmoryUniversity, she is writing her dissertation on
slave family structure.
rant alumna to tell her story. The request
comes when I am trying to catch up with
myself. I need to trace the pattern I have cut
these past two decades, and, at the risk of
self-indulgence, I want to share my
thoughts.
I had not been a good student at Vassar.
Graduating cum laude attested more to per-
sistence than to scholarship. I used to envy
those classmates who went the extra
distance with their homework, and who not
only answered the professor’s more dif-
ficult questions, but also consistently posedtheir own. I had not yet experienced the
crises that would have focused my interests
and informed my studies. It would take
several years of struggle to learn who I was
before my education would take shape.I remember the anxiety of transferring
out of Carl Degler’s history course on the
American South at the last minute. I had
dreaded discussion of some of the issues
that area of study would have raised; the
impact of slavery, the status of Black life,the nature of American racism. In those
days, I felt obligated to be a knowledgeablespokesman on questions that turned on the
Black experience. It was an impossible
burden for a student, but since kinder-
garten, I knew the demands of being the
token Black, and wanted to ease my lot that
Carole Merritt ’62
22 VQ Fall 1983
semester. A political science major was as
much as I could handle then. Studying
politics allowed me to work out some of the
obligations I assumed on behalf of the race
without directly confronting those heavier
issues in our history.
Eventually, I would come to those issues,
but the route would be long, and was
usually directed by a very personal quest. It
was ironic that this journey should have
begun in such an unlikely place as Vassar
College, which seemed so far afield for a
Black woman who barely knew herself. I
suppose Vassar provided a particular set of
circumstances that made me realize some-
thing in my learning was amiss, and that
helped to set me on course.
In my second year at Vassar, two things
helped turn me around. One was a course
called African Heritage. The other was
the Southern student sit-ins. My studies
gave me a handle on my history for the first
time, and public events suggested a channel
for my commitment.
Africa has been the shameful past for
most African-Americans, but studying my
origins was easier than confronting the
slave legacy. Moreover, learning about dis-
tinctive American patterns that derived
from Africa offered a new and joyful per-
spective. The African Heritage course
taught by anthropologist John Murra, was
a provocative introduction to culture, rang-
ing from such subjects as West African
puberty and the Jamaican family to Black
American motor behavior.
Mr. Murra’s instructionon the culture of
political change was no less provocative.After Vassar students picketed Poughkeep-
sie’s Woolworth store in support of the
Southern sit-ins in early 1960, he chided us
for our failure to follow through. We had
felt rather self-satisfied with our sympathy
march, and had decided to send money to
the Southern students. Mr. Murra, how-
ever, had read the student protests as the
beginning of a significant movement. He
knew of a meeting scheduled in Raleigh,
North Carolina, and cornered me after class
one day to prod: “You don’t need to be col-
lecting money. You need to go down there! ”
A year after graduation, when the time
seemed right, I went to Mississippi to work
with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (S.N.C.C.), which had been
founded at that Raleigh meeting in early
1960. The move South with S.N.C.C. was
both the best and the worst thing I ever did.
In Mississippi our objective was direct ac-
tion, whether we were engaged in the major
program voter registration or in
economic boycotts and other protest
demonstrations. The substance of that ac-
tion was the organization of ordinary
people to speak and act in their own behalf.
S.N.C.C. field workers formed a kind of
uninstitutionalized leadership that gave im-
petus to local community effort. My
privilege was to bear witness to that pro-
cess. That I had skills for little else was a
nearly devastating realization.
There was a time when I could give an ac-
count of every detail of my arrest and im-
prisonment in Canton, Mississippi, early in
1964, for my work on a selective-buying
campaign. I told the story repeatedly to
raise money and recruit students for the
Mississippi Summer Project of 1964. In the
spring of that year, when I last visited
Vassar, I spoke on the same subject. The
students had petitioned the U.S. Depart-
ment of Justice when they heard of my ar-
rest, and had helped pay my bail. For that
triumphant return to campus, the speech I
delivered consisted of what had become a
litany on my imprisonment —a kind of
ritual to reaffirm my engagement in the civil
rights struggle. What I didn’t realize then
was how peripheral those early activities
were to the significance of the movement
and its impact on me.
After my release from jail, my new
S.N.C.C. assignment was to coordinate
educational programs for field staff and
community people who worked directly
with us programs that would provide in-
formation and training for more effective
work. It was a job, I suppose, that no one
wanted. What, in fact, did we need to
know? Political history and governmental
structure? Theories about social change?
Techniques in nonviolent protest? Or how
to read better? And how should these be
taught? It was Ironic that just two years out
of Vassar I was confronted, again, with the
need to be knowledgeable when I knew little
or nothing. I struggled to conduct a motley
group of workshops, some of which ended
in gross failure, while others were barely
passable. That struggle, however, helped to
change my perception of myself and my
people. I discovered that in critical areas of
knowledge, community people in the move-
ment knew more than I did. Their life ex-
periences in the South carried more infor-
mation on the American system than I
could have provided. Their trials with the
society’s injustices gave them some intricate
knowledge of its workings. From the bot-
tom of the ladder, the perspective is reveal-
ing.
In admitting what I didn’t know, I
discovered who the teachers are. I had to
change my posture for learning, deciding to
look to the unrecognized sources of infor-Catalogue for author’s 1982 exhibition
Drawing by Walter Hearn
Ms. Merritt at Vassar (’62 Vassarion)
23
mation. I remember a workshop led by a
woman from Itta Bena, Mississippi, who
encouraged the community participants to
talk about their civil rights work. The
discussion began as a collective narrative of
who we were and where we came from. It
developed into a concise statement of how
we had become a movement how in-
dividual acts of heroism had made the
ground fertile for change and for the
emergence of local leadership. That session
was more than a history lesson on the
movement; it was also my introduction to
our history as a people. The expressions of
the workshop participants, the clarity with
which they viewed their situation, and the
faith on which they acted belonged to an
old tradition. Moreover, that tradition
belonged to me, having come byway of my
parents and grandparents. I was a by-
stander in Mississippi, but hardly an out-
sider.
My family was rooted in the same soil
that nourished the movement. Coming to
the movement was the beginning of a long
journey home. I had not realized I was
going that way, but the road from Pough-
keepsie through Mississippi was certainly
headed there. For better and worse, my
venture turned me around and set me on
course to myself. Nearly two decades later,
on my second journey South, I finally
linked that very personal mission to a public
calling. That I would make a career out of
family history was perhaps predictable,
given the special turns in my route.
About ten years ago, I discovered my
slave ancestors in a will book in the county
courthouse in Athens, Georgia. Slavery was
no longer a heavy issue; it was my personalhistory. I was now able to approach that
heritage. Tracing my bloodline put me
directly in touch with that old tradition
that complex of experiences and values that
made us a distinctive people and sustained
us through hard times. Through family
history, I have gained access to some of the
richest sources of information. I have never
gotten tired of listening to the stories, of
reading for the details that tell who we are
and how we have come this way. The narra-
tive seems inexhaustible. It continues to re-
ward me with self-knowledge, and with un-
derstanding and respect for my people. *0!
Photospages24-25
from
Homecomingby
CaroleMerritt
Crawford B. Dowdell, Americas, 1919
John T. and Rosalind B. Gill, Sr., and son John, Jr., Atlanta, 1919
24 VQ Fall 1983
Bloodlines, mussels, a doll named Lou
“For African-Americans, home has had
many meanings,” writes Carole Merritt in
the catalogue for “Homecoming,” an ex-
hibition of historic photographs and folk
artifacts organized by Ms. Merritt last year
at the Atlanta Public Library. “As a place
of origin, it was Africa; as a place of birth
and residence, America. For many, home
has been Georgia. It is the family and all its
associations of kinship and affection. In the
sense of family, home has transcended
place and circumstance. Bloodlines ex-
tended from Africa to America, and kin-
ship survived slavery, oppression, war, and
migration.”
Subtitled “African-American Family
History in Georgia,” the catalogue gives
one a perspective on the everyday lives and
rituals of Black Georgians over the past 200
years. There are individuals and clans, in-
fants and elders, soldiers, ministers, beau-
ticians, and brides. Everywhere are the
images of children being birthed, nursed,
schooled, treasured. And toughened. Par-
ticularly direct are two undated photos by
Robert E. Williams of toddlers and an
adolescent, staring out from stooped labor
in a cotton field in the noonday sun. Ob-
jects depicted invoke children, too —a slat-
ted, small-scaled rocking chair and a pair of
1905 baby shoes, a delicately worked silk
christening dress from 1891 and a little
petrified stick some turn-of-the-century
imaginer wrapped in a rough piece of plaid
and christened “Lou.”
Ms. Merritt’s carefully documented
essay, woven through the volume, tells of a
complex and child-loving culture, both dur-
ing and after enslavement. It’s a cool,
knowledgeable, and sometimes discomfort-
ing piece of prose. “Slavery did not destroy
children’s imagination and sense of fun,
but the pain and indignities of slave status
were unavoidable,” says a chapter on
childhood. Then, quoting in part from an
oral history:
“in Willis Gofer’s childhood, which was
spent on a large plantation about five miles
from Washington in Wilkes County, all the
children were fed from a trough. ‘They just
poured the peas on the chunks of cornbread
what they had crumbled in the trough, and
us had to mussel them out. Yes’m, I said
mussel. The only spoons us had was mussel
shells what us got out of the branches.’ ”
Ms. Merritt concludes: “Emancipation
gave the family greater autonomy in the
care of its children. Economic deprivation
and racism, however, continued to make
African-American childhood a stern in-
troduction to the responsibilities of an
adulthood that would come all too soon.”
M.A.
Top: Emerging from the water after baptism,c. 1900
Above: Immersion during baptism, c. 1900
25
Teaching about the
Sixties in the EightiesIncorporating the lessons of the Seventies
by Michael S. Kimmel ’72
What am Inow that I was then
May memory restore again and againThe smallest color of the smallest dayTime is the school in which we learn
Time is the fire in which we burn.
Delmore Schwartz
I first realized that the Sixties wereover on
April 10, 1976. The night before, a friend
from New York had telephoned me in Cali-
fornia with the news that Phil Ochs, the
angry and troubled political folksinger, had
taken his own life. Ochs had been a key ac-
tor in the decade’s cast of characters; his
caustic satire and abiding optimism sus-
tained us on many protest marches and
picket lines. The next morning, I shared my
deep sadness with the introductory
sociology class I was teaching at U.C.
Berkeley. To my amazement, not one of the
30 or so students had even heard of Phil
Ochs. None could recognize a song title, or
a line from any of his songs. In that instant,
I experienced a profound separation from
my students that I had not felt before. They
and I had a drastically different set of
cultural experiences; we were not con-
temporaries. (And these were students at
Berkeley no less, where the student move-
ment began.)If my Vassar was quieter than the more
celebrated hotbeds of student activism, it
was not because Vassar students were any
less caught up in the issues. Vassar had
always encouraged a deep and abiding
moral concern; not particularly effusive, it
could easily be mistaken for complacency.
Everyone on campus was touched by the
events of the Sixties; many participated in
local and national demonstrations, and
nearly all participated in serious debates
about the costs and benefits of coeduca-
While studying sociology and philosophy as
an undergraduate, Michael Kimmel demon-
strated against the Vietnam War, went to
Woodstock, and resisted the draft. He re-
ceived a Ph.D. in sociology from the Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley in 1981,
and is now an assistant professor ofsociology at Rutgers University. His articles
and reviews have appeared or are forth-coming in Newsday, the Nation, the San
Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia In-
quirer, and various scholarly journals.
tion, feminism, drugs, Woodstock, com-
munes, and the proposed Vassar Institute
of Technology. When Black students oc-
cupied Main Building in the fall of 1969, the
thin veneer of this apparent complacency
was punctured. During the crisis, however,the protesters angry over what theyperceived as the lack of commitment on the
college’s part to active minority recruiting
and a well-funded, well-staffed Black
Studies curriculum were not confronted
as protesting students were elsewhere by an
intransigent administration, condescending
faculty, or apathetic White students.
Rather, the White students actively sup-
ported the Black students, the administra-
tion did some serious soul searching, and
the faculty promised to put their bodies be-
tween the demonstrators and the county
police, who were looking for a headline-
grabbing arrest after their embarrassment in
Millbrook with Timothy Leary’s followers.
Perhaps this explains Vassar’s placid at-
mosphere during the Sixties: a conviction
that faculty and students were engaged in a
common moral and intellectual enterprise,
and that our classroom experience bore
directly on our capacity to act as re-
sponsible citizens. This was rare in colleges
of the time; it is even rarer today.The shock of dissociation from my own
students first led me to consider the Sixties
as an historical moment, an era, circum-
scribed by specific pivotal events. Each of
us would probably refer to a different, very
personal moment when the Sixties ended
for him or her, or at least when we realized
they were over in spirit as well as in fact. It
might be that moment on May 4, 1970,when, watching student demonstrators be-
ing shot by National Guardsmen at Kent
State, we understood that our own govern-
ment was prepared to kill us for protesting
against the agonizing and ugly war in Indo-
china. (The silent scream of the kneeling
woman in the famous photograph of the
Kent State killings continues to haunt me.)
It might be the end of that tragic war, or the
resignation of Richard Nixon, the most
visible symbol of what we struggled against.
For some, the end of the Sixties might have
come with an event even more personal: the
dissolution of the commune, acceptance in-
to law school, marriage, or the tossing out
of those old torn jeans into the trash.
Most of us would probably agree that
whenever the Sixties ended for us, they be-
gan, as a distinct historical era, exactly 20
years ago, during academic year 1963/64.
Earlier, in ’62, John Glenn’s successful
orbit of the earth left us gaping at the seem-
ingly limitless possibilities promised by
technological advances. Martin Luther
King’s impassioned speech at the march on
Washington, D.C., August 1963 (the “I
Have a Dream” speech) remained inspir-
ingly optimistic despite the glaring inade-
quacy of political solutions to answer basic
human needs. Then the roof caved in, leav-
ing us groping for meaning through the
shards of a shaken culture. Lee Harvey
Oswald’s trigger finger irrevocably shat-
tered the pastoral of our contemporary
Camelot. Just as members of my parents’
generation can recall where they were when
they heard about Pearl Harbor, every
member of the Sixties generation can recall
exactly where he or she was on that chilly
day in late November when President John
Kennedy was assassinated.
Political and cultural events that demar-
cate the historical era followed quickly; the
Civil Rights Act, the Gulfof Tonkin resolu-
tion (which effectively began the official
war in Vietnam), the paperback publicationof The Feminine Mystique by BettyFriedan, the Free Speech Movement in
Berkeley, and the release of the first record
album by the Beatles. “Something is hap-
pening and you don’t know what it is,” Bob
Dylan sang the next spring. It sure was.
Today, as I prepare another lecture for
introductory sociology, I remember that
none of my freshmen students had been
born when President Kennedy was shot.
The Sixties are as distant to them as the
Second World War was for me the
pivotal era of an earlier generation. It is not
coincidental that today courses on the Six-
ties are springing up in colleges across the
country. Set safely into the realm of aca-
demic discourse, the Sixties appear further
removed as a vital force on the political
landscape.
We wanted to make history, not history
courses. But to see these Sixties courses as
the ultimate admission of a failed politics is
wrong. Even if the change was not as great
or as fast as we would have liked, we did
26 VQ Fall 1983
change the world. (Ironically, I have a
harder time convincing my contemporaries
about this than my 19-year-old students
who live in its wake.) I believe that the Viet-
nam War was ended sooner because of our
activism; today, it appears that despite
President Reagan’s efforts we are, as a
nation, less willing to commit ourselves to a
senseless war in Central America. The belief
in civil rights, the struggles against sexism,
racism, imperialism, environmental pollu-tion, and nuclear devastation in short,the political agenda of the 1970 s and ’Bos
were set by the Sixties.
Nor are the Sixties dead because they are
ensconced in the academy. As each of our
personal Sixties ended, many members of
the Sixties generation needed to sift through
those tumultuous years. As early as 1971,
Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman announced
that he was going to a Florida beach to “sit
with fat blue-haired ladies having nose jobs
and try to figure out what the hell happenedto all of us.’’ “The Sixties, like they came so
fast. Bang! Wham! Zowie! We don’t even
know what hit us. We’re still spinning!”
For many of us, one place to figure out
both the past and the future was graduate
school. If understanding requires both ac-
tion and reflection, it seemed to be time,
after a hiatus of from three to ten years, to
reflect on our activism. My graduate school
cohort at Berkeley included one past presi-
dent and three former national officers of
the Students for a Democratic Society
(S.D.S.); my local softball league team
featured three nationally known draft re-
sisters (center field, shortstop, and third
base) as well as one S.D.S. officer. No mat-
ter how long we delayed, many of us even-
tually completed dissertations and found
teaching jobs in colleges and universities
around the country. (If our elitist activism
drew us to the Northeast and Northern
California, the vagaries of the academic job
market have insured a more democratic dis-
persal of the Sixties generation with
Ph.D.’s.)
So we had done it and we had studied it.
Now we were teaching about it to a new
generation of college students, a generation
who, we imagine, are more like ourselves
than were the students in college during the
19705. In contrast to the pervasive despair
among Seventies students, college students
today often evidence an exuberant op-
timism about personal possibilities. If the
world remains intact, they feel, racism and
sexism will not be constraints on their per-
sonal lives. Instead, they have the sense
they can do anything they want. Their
world contains options, similar, they be-
lieve, to the choices the Sixties generation
had. (In contrast, the students of the Seven-
ties felt that neither personal nor social op-
tions were available to them in a shrinking
economy.) It is no surprise that students in
1983 do not yearn for a romanticized and
antiseptically clean version of the Fifties as
students did only eight years ago. The cur-
rent students don’t need to fantasize about
complacent enjoyment of life; they live it,
enthused about possibilities they see as re-
sults from our work in the Sixties toward a
more open society. (This applies mostly to
students in relatively privileged institutions.
At community and state colleges, the per-
vasive despair of the Seventies has been
translated into today’s exaggerated com-
petition for frequently dead-end jobs.)Finally, what we are teaching reflects
how we have changed as the decades have
passed. Gone are the wide-eyed propheciesof impending revolution and the rhapsodictestimonials to communal or religiousalternatives. Teaching about the Sixties im-
plies incorporating the lessons of the Seven-
ties. Specifically, it has meant integrating
the insights of several significant move-
ments: the environmental, new-populist,
antinuclear, and the women’s movement
all of which have significant overlaps in
both vision and strategy. Transforming the
world means more than stopping the war
machine in its tracks; it has come to imply,
in our classrooms, a serious confrontation
with personal and local issues. When the
political becomes personal, we begin to live
the alternatives that we are espousing. The
concerns of the Sixties have partially come
to rest in movements to clean up the en-
vironment, to democratize local politics, to
create neighborhoods safe for women, at
the same time as we resist global nuclear
holocaust. The children of the Sixties have
grown up, and they have brought their con-
cerns back home. IM3
1972
VassarionLeft: MichaelKimmel '72, as a Vassar senior.
Michael Kimmel '72, spring 'B3
DOONESBURY by Garry Trudeau
Copyright 1974, G.B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate. All rights reserved
27
Communes and outlaws
Few Sixties phenomena are more evocative
of their era than the commune, and few
have been more ridiculed. The idea of an
anthropologist studying a commune as one
might study an island community, for ex-
ample, startles at first, but when you hear
Colleen Cohen discuss the subject, your
consciousness will be permanently raised. A
visiting lecturer at Vassar in anthropology
and American culture, Ms. Cohen is also a
candidate for a Ph.D. in anthropology
from S.U.N.Y./Albany. Tier dissertation
“Fire over Water: economic and ideo-
logical change in a rural countercultural
community” is a detailed ethnography
of a commune in upstate New York be-
tween 1968 and 1980, a group in which she,
herself, was a fully participating member
for a number of years. “We never did refer
to ourselves as a commune,” she told the
Quarterly. “We were a family, and we
stressed sensitivity, caring, and politicalawareness. The members of that community
feel they have made a real effort to lead
complete lives.”
At Vassar, Ms. Cohen puts the com-
munes of the Sixties in the context of
American utopian communities in general
the first of which, the Labadie com-
munity, was founded in 1683. Nevertheless,
she believes the 1960 s were special. “We’re
not talking about an historical period as
much as a state of mind,” she said. “It still
has something to offer. Students today are
interested in careers. I emphasize to them
that they’re going to be members of at least
one community, a family, and that the
choices they make about their lifestyles are
important. Will they accept high-paying
jobs that keep them in the office until 10
p.m., or jobs that pay less but permit more
family time? I try to convey that what you
do does matter, and what you don’t do
matters even more.”
Leonard Steinhorn ’ll former winner
of Vassar’s Virginia Swinburne Prize in
History, A.B.D. in American history at
Johns Hopkins, and a political activist sincethe age of 12 visited the campus in
September to see his brother Charles (as-
sistant professor of mathematics) and to
deliver a lecture about the Sixties for the
history department. Called “Three Central
Themes in the Youth Culture of the 19605:
the White Negro, the Outlaw, and the
Apocalypse,” his work draws on his exten-
sive research for a course about the Sixties
which he taught at American University as
an instructor in the American studies de-
partment there. One special feature of the
classes was the regular appearance of guestlecturers: James Farmer, Abbie Hoffman,
James Kunen. “I found that students reallydidn’t know very much about the Sixties,”
said Mr. Steinhorn during a Quarterly inter-
view. “But when they read the original
documents, like Martin Luther King’s
book, and saw someone like James Farmer
actually reliving the Freedom Rides of ’6l
right in front of them, it was tremendously
inspiring. They began to reassess their am-
bitions, and became much more interested
in activism.”
Of the ’6os in spirit, Mr. Steinhorn’s own
activist history at Vassar was of both the
“outlaw” and the insider varieties. As a
junior, he organized a sit-in of the admis-
sion office “which was then trying to at-
tract a homogeneous population of stu-
dents”; then he was elected by his peers to
the Presidential Search Committee that
chose Virginia Smith. By nature, however,
he is a theorist; and so it was a major stepfor him when, recently, he left academe to
join a nonprofit public affairs office in
Washington, D.C. “I feel I can take the
best of the Sixties without it inhibiting me,”
he said. “It’s time to move on from the bat-
tles of yesteryear. Ideals are too important
to be stuck in a decade.” M.A.Colleen Ballerina Cohen: communes
Leonard Steinhorn ’77: the Youth Movement
Beginning with
Woodstock
What the Sixties mean to
the Eighties
by Brian Rutter ’83
This article was writtenfor the Quarterlyduring the author’s senior year.
Every summer from 1967 to 1971, my
family vacationed at our summer bungalow
in White Lake, New York, just north of the
Monticello Race Track. On Friday, my
father would drive up and spend the week-
end with us, leaving early Monday morning.
One weekend in 1969 he was unable to join
us. The road leading past White Lake was
jammed with cars, vans, buses, motor-
cycles, and thousands of people just walk-
ing. Occasionally a teenager or a group of
travelers would ask to use our bathroom or
have a drink of water. My mother, clad in
her usual Rosemarie Reid bathing suit,gladly said yes, slipping the kids some
money and food despite our neighbors’ ad-
vice to hide her purse and her jewelry. What
I didn’t know then was that these multi-
tudes were on their way to Woodstock, only
20 minutes away from our bungalow.
This memory of the 1960 s has stayed with
me most vividly. I can still see the multi-
colored shirts, the fringed leather jackets,the row after row of faded blue jeans, my-
self standing there in my Rob Roymix-’n-match, eyeing the denim’s delicate
patchwork. I can still recall the men with
dirty blond hair that reached down their
backs. The white bungalows, the old movie
theater, the still lake, seemed out of step
with these people.
What I didn’t recognize was the impor-
tance of the date. Woodstock has come to
represent a kind of symbol of the whole Six-
ties scene. The peaceful atmosphere, the in-
terlocking of emotion, and the jamming of
the great bands, all come down to us today
with incredible vitality. A single event like
Woodstock suspends as well as intensifies
one’s memory of the time.
Like most of my Vassar peers, I was born
early in the decade (1961). The period I
mean by “the Sixties,” then, really is the
late 19605/early 19705. For most of us, the
1960 s per se was a decade filled with
diapers, kindergarten, and endless games of
tag. I knew very little of civil rights protests,
drugs, or Vietnam. I was more concerned
with my Erector set and my spelling home-
work.
What information we have of the Sixties
usually is supported by our relatives who
are now in their thirties, and by the news
Brian Rutter was a history major at Vassar.
28 VQ Fall 1983
media. It seeps into our consciousness
through newsclip montages and books. (Ican still remember with great relish how I
read Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test with wonder and disbelief.) The period
is captured for us in old LPs, in 1970smovies like Coming Home and Hair, and
an occasional television show called “What
Happened in 1967?”
Most of the Vassar students I spoke to in
the course of writing this article seemed to
have adapted what they learned in the late
1970 s and early 1980 s to their Sixties’ recol-
lections. “The whole concept of the 1960 s issomewhat lost on me. I guess I am a pro-
duct of the 19705, the Me Generation,” said
Karen Bitar ’B3, of Brooklyn. Ms. Bitar
does not share that great leftist feeling
which arose from the Sixties. She does not
want to march against the government or
take a liberal approach to a hot topic,
although she applauds the Sixties genera-
tion for its movements in civil rights and its
attempt to address large issues.
Many students would agree with her.
Bradley Kule ’B3, of Long Island, acknow-
ledges the Sixties’ historical importance,but does not comprehend the great emo-
tional attachment to the decade still held by
young people. “It’s as if they want the
1960 s to return,” he said. “They tend to
glorify a period that was brimming with
social unrest and violence.” He points to
protests against Vassar’s investment in
South Africa during the late 1970 s and to
recent nuclear energy rallies as things that
seem 1960ish in their stance.
One could walk around the Vassar cam-
pus now and see remnants of Sixties’ con-
frontation. Students in old army fatigues
talk with students in designer jeans and
polo sweaters. In the Mug, students in
faded denim dance to disco music after din-
ner, while later in the evening students in
Brooks Brothers suits dance to Jimi Hen-
drix. Students argue over the government’srole in El Salvador. During the U.S. presi-
dential election of 1980, some students
vehemently objected to the conservative
edge that swept the country while others
gladly welcomed it.
Internal campus tensions also seem
touched with deja vue. During the late fall
of 1982, for example, the Students Afro-
American Society (S.A.S.) discussed an
amendment to limit membership of the
organization to Black students. According
to the S.A.S., this discussion was inter-
rupted by staff members of the MiscellanyNews, who broke into the room and in-
fringed on S.A.S.’s right to a closed meet-
ing. The resulting furor over this event
caused divisiveness withinthe student body.S.A.S. held a rally against irresponsiblejournalism, while the Misc staff countered
with charges that their presence at the meet-
ing of a group supported by Vassar Student
Association funds had been legitimate. The
S.A.S. rally was filled with posters,
speeches, and attacks on the Misc. Some
students supported S.A.S. and applauded
loudly whenever the Misc was condemned.
I heard one junior turn to his friend and say
something about the correlation between
this gathering and Sixties’ protests. He felt
that rallies were outdated and on the verge
of being revolutionary. What I think the
S.A.S. rally showed is that students now
can handle a charged situation in a peaceful
manner just like many students in the
19605.
Rob Dunton ’B3, of Pasadena, summed
up the Sixties in a reasonable way. “[lt] was
a test of humanity,” said Mr. Dunton, who
comes from a traditionally conservative
family. “It not only served to show us the
necessary restrictions that exist in our living
together, but also forced us to reevaluate
what had become a static lifestyle. The Six-
ties was a letting go in response to the
19505’ conformist attitude.” His point puts
the Sixties into a larger context. We
wouldn’t have the great liberating periods
of the 1970 s without the great social unrest
directly preceding. Student disagreementover the focus of the Sixties isn’t as impor-
tant as the fact of its legacy. Contemporary
Vassar undergraduates find that much from
the era has been incorporated into their col-
lege lives. If Vassar hadn’t gone coeduca-
tional in 1970, for instance, I wouldn’t be
writing this piece.
In late October of my senior year, Cush-
ing held a Sixties party. The music of
Woodstock rocked the wooden room.
Paper peace signs hung from the ceiling.
Students danced the Monkey, the Twist, or
just rocked to the music. The period head-
bands, the wildly decorated T-shirts wereall
there and so were the designer jeans of
today. It’s as if we had one foot in Wood-
stock, and one in the stock market. TO
Ellen
Frankenstein'B4
A message displayed from a Main dorm room during the symposium on “Issues of Nuclear War,”
held at Vassar in the fall of 1982
29
Of sex, pearls, and
the languages of time
Glimpsesof Vassar
1929-33
by Lucille Fletcher Wallop ’33 Drawing by Walter Hearn
Every Vassar class contains outstanding individuals, but some
classes are so strong they’re legends. Among them is 1933. One
of its members, Eunice Clark Jessup, has written of its term at
college, “Those were the years when the Bonus Marchers, an
army of 20,000 ragged people marched on Washington and
camped for three months demanding their World War I bonuses,
only to be dispersed by the U.S. Army with tear gas; when the
farmers of lowa were pouring tanks of milk over rural roads;
when stockbrokers were jumping out of windows; when there
were calls for martial law. ... So why was it bliss to be alive
It isn’t easy to attend a 50th reunion. It
takes courage to face what time has done to
us. I remember standing as a sophomore on
the steps of Strong and watching the class
of 1881 straggle into view. Perhaps ten or
12 white-haired ladies were all who had
managed to get back for their 50th, but
proudly they were holding their class ban-
ner aloft, although some of them could
hardly walk. I remember thinking that their
love for Vassar was sufficiently compellingto make them forget their age, their
Dresden-doll fragility, their infirmities.
That was my conception of a 50th reunion,
and I could not imagine myself ever attend-
ing one. But here we are, and I’m happy to
see that we’ve turned out in such numbers,
so hale and hearty. And we’ve brought our
husbands. What a wonderful thing to have
so many young husbands. And we are all
instantly recognizable aren’t we? as
the young girls we used to be.
Can it be more than five decades since we
arrived on campus in the fall of 1929, in our
rolled stockings and cloche hats, with our
steamer trunks and laundry cases? Herbert
Hoover was President of the United States.
Henry Noble MacCracken was Vassar’s
president. Portly and affable, he was a
Chaucerian scholar who was capable of
levity. Once he did an imitation of Rudy
Vallee with a phonograph strapped to his
chest and Rudy crooning “I’m Just a Vaga-bond Lover.” With a megaphone in his
hand and a wavy red wig on his head, he
pantomimed Rudy’s pained expressions
and stilted gestures to such good effect that
it brought down the house. He had to do a
couple of encores.
Our class was a special one. It had been
hand-picked, they said, and was the
smallest ever admitted. In the entire student
body there were fewer than a thousand
girls. Vassar was expensive. It cost a thou-
sand dollars a year, later raised to twelve
hundred a year and if that doesn’t give
you a sense of time, then nothing will. Dur-
ing the four years we spent here the world
would change drastically. Almost im-
Lucille Wallop, writer of many suspense
novels and plays, is also the author of the
radio play Sorry, Wrong Number and the
Broadway play Night Watch. She lives in
Oxford, Maryland, with her author-hus-
band, Douglass Wallop.
mediately after our arrival the stock market
crashed. We saw the end of the jazz age, the
age of good times and Babbitt optimism.Soon our lives would be shadowed by the
Depression, and toward the end ofour stay
we would hear the rasping voice of Fascism,
the distant muttering of war.
But in September 1929 we didn’t know
this. We were thrilled. We were excited. All
our hard work in high school had paid off,and here we were. AT VASSAR! The best
school in the country. With a chance to
meet Yale men and carry the Daisy Chain.
Right away, before we knew it, we were
shuffled into the Group System, pre-
packaged families of 12 in which we had to
live, like it or not, for the next four years.
My group lived in Main, where I roomed
with Janet McLeod and Ozzy Osborne in a
large drafty suite consisting of a living room
and two small bedrooms. The living room
had a fireplace and two enormous win-
dows,. and the bedrooms had windows
fronting on a corridor. These accommoda-
tions were typical of Main at that time,
relics of Matthew Vassar’s day, when he
had built his female college in the style of
the Tuileries. As at the Tuileries, there were
no closets, only huge black armoires fas-
tened to the wall. Matthew Vassar didn’t
believe in closets. He felt that all a female
needed for her garments were two hooks,
one for her nightgown and one for her Sun-
day dress. She would be wearing her week-
day dress most of the time, and when she
took it off at night or on Sunday, she could
hang it on the hook which had just been
vacated.
In this room we got acquainted very
quickly indeed. Janet and Ozzy were from
private schools and knew the ropes, but I
was homesick and I drooped. To cheer me
up they taught me how to ferment cider
from the Cider Mill into an evil-smelling
brandy. They taught me how to ride a bi-
cycle and stay up late and smoke a corn-cob
pipe. I’ve never stayed up later than I did
those freshman nights. We did everything
but study: played Pounce, knitted sweaters,
painted furniture we’d bought for 50 cents
or a dollar at the Vassar Furniture Ex-
change. And talked, talked, talked about
everything under the sun sex mostly, of
course, but a lot about religion, a lot about
politics. I learned about lesbianism from
the current shocker, The Well of Loneli-
during the most ghastly years of the 20th century in America? It
was bliss, however temporary we knew it to be, because,provided we could get up the tuition, we were in a serene bubble
of a literary renaissance and a simultaneous explosion of social
protest, protected briefly by the ivied walls, and the empathy ofa great faculty.
”
(“Memoirs of literatae and socialists 1929-33, ”
Vassar Quarterly, Winter 1979). Mrs. Wallop’s essay below givesan account, tender and amused, of life at Vassar during that
extraordinary time. In a longer version, her piece was delivered
as a speech to 1933 at itsfiftieth reunion thispast June. M.A.
ness, which everyone passed around. And
sometimes a poor little girl preacher, one of
our classmates, would drop over to talk to
us. She was trying to convert all the fast and
loose Vassar girls to pure, saintly lives. She
played hymns for us, unaccompanied, on
her violin. She touched our hearts, but she
didn’t last longer than one term.
By sophomore year some of our roughedges were gone. We no longer ran into the
senior dining room at Main to grab up the
bricks of ice cream the seniors hadn’t eaten.
We learned that the only sweater was a
Brooks Brothers sweater and the only pro-
per skirt was made of Harris tweed. One
wore a real pearl necklace, nothing less,
with one’s sweater, and one’s hair in a
chignon. Over my family’s dead body I
grew in my windblown bob and bought a
lot of hairpins. I was beginning to look like
a Vassar girl, but unfortunately I had to
take swimming every morning at eighto’clock for the next two years, and no mat-
ter how many bathing caps I wore, no mat-
ter how many yards of canvas bandages I
wrapped my hair in, it stayed wet till supper
—a Vassar chignon smelling of chlorine.
Hairdos and pearl necklaces aside, we did
study at Vassar. Our teachers were wonder-
ful; I wish 1 could name them all. The in-
tellectual life was intense, and uninter-
rupted by the opposite sex. Long before
Woman’s Lib we were trained to think of
ourselves not as women, but as human be-
ings with brains it was our duty to develop.
At Vassar, equality with men was taken for
granted. It wasn’t shouted from the house-
tops, but was simply a fact of life. We could
marry and raise children, have careers, live
any way we pleased, but all our lives we
would retain that special core, that bedrock
of serene assurance and feminine dignity.
I remember some of the famous people
who visited us. Stephen Vincent Benet read-
ing from his “John Brown’s Body,” a shy,
diffident man with a reedy voice, peering at
us over horn-rimmed spectacles. Gabriela
Mistral, the Chilean poet, who taught here
long before she won the Nobel Prize. (She
had the face of a Mayan carving with her
massive head and broad Indian features, yet
her eyes were sky blue.) Mary Wigman,
who danced for us in pink bare legs and
silver tunic. And world-famous guitarists,
pianists, singers, and string quartets who
performed at Students almost every night in
30
Time was contained in the chiming of the library clock...a gentle
voice that never stopped telling us we must work hard, persevere, keep
faith with the scholarly life.
the week, except of course on Saturdays,when there was “J.”
“J” supposedly took care of our love
life, but it didn’t. It was just a place to take
boys you were bored with. And the girls on
the stag line were at heart not enthusiastic.
In the first place, they couldn’t cut in unless
introduced, and moreover they knew that
all the boys there were probably duds. If
they’d been at all attractive, they would
have been whisked away to the Outdoor
Cabin, where you could spend the weekend
(if you signed up early enough) in the
depths of the forest with your current be-
loved, with no chaperone, nothing but
the birds and the bees for company.
Vassar in general had a relaxed attitude
about sex. It put you on your honor as a
lady to behave properly. After freshman
year it took for granted that you knew a
thing or two. The student population for
the most part was also pretty sophisticated.
It included girls who spent their summers
on the Riviera, girls who’d gone to school
with duchesses in Switzerland, girls with
fathers in high places in Washington. I saw
my first Fortuny dress at Vassar. It was
worn to one of the proms by some slender,
exquisite upperclassman, a white, shimmer-
ing, knife-pleated silk gown that fitted her
hourglass figure like the skin of a snake.
With it she wore a Cleopatra-style wig
white strands of silk cut in bangs. She was a
vision out of ancient Egypt.
One of the most sophisticated places at
Vassar was the Experimental Theater,
where Hallie Flanagan reigned. Can it be 50
years since I sat spellbound before the play
she co-wrote with Margaret Ellen Clifford
(’29) about Okies, Can You Hear Their
Voices?, in which she used a newsreel in the
opening scene? In the years since, I’ve been
watching the theater catch up with Hallie
Flanagan. From the W.P.A. Theater on
through Orson Welles and Harold Prince,
on through a host of Off-Broadway pro-
ducers, she influenced generations with her
original ideas and innovative techniques. I
remember a play she did entirely in colors
red triangles and blue spheres lumbering
around the stage'and squeaking. And a play
done only with feet. A play done only with
pairs of hands. She even did a play that
took place inside a man’s head, with gray
configurations for scenery and two win-
dows for the eyes.
She attracted some truly avant-garde
people. I remember a set of Italian futurists
who came in full dress to one of her open-
ing nights, with their faces painted chalk
white like clowns and corsages of beets,
onions, and carrots pinned to their lapels.
And she had such a handsome husband. I
remember one enchanted evening, a spring
evening in the Outdoor Theater, when I
walked down the aisle on the arm of Phil
Davis, Hallie’s husband, the campus
Adonis who taught Latin and Greek. In my
yellow satin robe and cardboard circlet of
gold I was playing Anne of Bohemia to his
King Richard the First in a performance of
The Canterbury Tales. We sat in the front
row. A flute began playing an antique
melody. And out of the dusk, the darkening
semicircle of forest, came a lone figure, a
horseman in medieval doublet and gray
hood. He was followed by another and then
a whole processional of fairytale figures
melting out of the night as though from a
poet’s brain.
We talked a lot about Time in those days.
It was one of the preoccupations of Virginia
Woolf, whose novels were new then, and
very much in vogue. She wrote that time
could be contained in a flower, the fall of a
leaf. For us time was contained in the chim-
ing of the library clock which was with us
all through the long afternoons of study,
like a gentle voice that never stopped telling
us we must work hard, persevere, keep faith
with the scholarly life. For time was moving
on.
Can it be 51 years since the Prom? That
quintessence of formality, that night of ele-
gance? The young men wore white ties and
tails, and kid gloves, and dancing pumps
with little grosgrain bows. Some came in
top hats. Some brought bootlegged gin in
silver flasks, sipped in rumble seats or the
cavernous interiors of Pierce-Arrow
limousines. Every one ofus had a corsage
mostly gardenias, a few orchids. The band
cost a thousand dollars Glen Gray’s Casa
Loma Orchestra, the best of its time and
we had engraved prom programs, and
dance cards hung from our wrists by little
silken cords with tassels. The waltzes,
tangos, and fox trots were danced cheek to
cheek with many a gliding dip. Between sets
we sat in prom boxes we had fixed up our-
selves in the corridors of Students cozy
corners with divans and Indian prints and
leather hassocks sipping fruit punch and
eating cookies, smoking cigarettes from
monogrammed gold cases. . . .How far away it is.
How old it makes us feel.
That June day the following year when
we marched up the aisle to receive our
diplomas and tell Vassar College goodbye
now seems a world apart.
Yet here we are.
We have made it to the half-century
mark, a great achievement. Three wars have
taken place since our graduation day,
millions of people have been slaughtered,
and gorgeous cities bombed and rebuilt.
Many of us were born the year the Titanic
went down, and have lived to see man walk
on the moon. Now the silicon-chip age is
upon us, the robotic age, the genetic age,
the age of computers.
We are the survivors. We are the lucky
ones and tonight we think of those who
are unable to be with us. We don’t see their
faces, but in our memories they are eternal-
ly young. Our lives have been full-lengthnovels since graduation, containing love
and tragedy, death and parting, terrible suf-
fering, occasional triumphs. Our class has
lived up to its label “hand-picked” in
literature, sociology, science, medicine,
music. We have turned out novelists,
teachers, distinguished scholars, and dedi-
cated public servants. We have also given
the world our share of wonderful wives and
mothers, women who have been a joy to
their husbands, children, and grandchil-
dren. And as selfless volunteers in com-
munities all over America, many of us have
served the poor and furthered good causes,
giving time and money and ourselves.
We have kept faith with the principles we
were taught. To paraphrase Emily Bronte,Vassar went through and through us like
wine through water and altered the color of
our minds. And we are different persons
for it, women forever united in a bond of
the spirit which linked us during those years
with all the good things of life scholar-
ship and beauty and love for one’s fellow
man so that we are always seeking,
always hoping that some day, somehow,
this will be a better world.
And this unity of feeling is what makes
reunion a joy, a touching and a sharing of
all that was golden in 1933. [9Q
31 VQ Fall 1983
VassarPeopleFreshmen in focus
Nicole Blue ’87, of Atlanta,
Georgia, came to Vassar because
she wanted a good liberal arts
education and, at the same time,to be close enough to, but not in,
New York City. Nicole, who takes
ballet, jazz, and modern dance
classes at Vassar six days a week,
recognizes New York City as the
capital for dance and expects to
travel there sometimes to take
special dance classes. She attended
Northside High School for the Performing Arts in her home town,where she was elected to the National Honor Society and won the
Harvard Book Award, given to the high school junior who proves,
through academic excellence and extracurricular activities, to be
the most “well rounded” student. She also wrote for her school’s
literary magazine, and was named a Governor’s Honor Participant.
As such, she attended a six-week college communications seminar
during the summer of her senior year at Valdosta State College in
Valdosta, Georgia, where she helped write, produce, and anchor a
local television news program. At Vassar, she thinks that English
will be her major, and she hopes to pursue a career in the com-
munications field or in dance, “not necessarily in that order.”
“Vassar was my first choice,” says
Steven Goodman ’B7, of San
Diego, California. Wanting a
change from the “sun and surf” of
California to the “faster pace and
intellect” of the East, Mr. Good-
man is very happy with his selec-
tion. “I like the atmosphere of a
small school and also the special
attention one receives.” He at-
tended LaJolla High School in La-
Jolla, California, from which he
graduated with honors. After touring Israel for six weeks during
the summer of his high school junior year, he returned to that
country last summer to work in a marine biology center in Elat as
an intern. His interests include playing the drums (for 11 years),
tennis, and baseball. Mr. Goodman is thinking of majoring in
economics, with the goal of attending Harvard Business School
after graduating from Vassar. He said he chose a liberal arts
undergraduate school instead of a business school because he feels
that corporations today want as employees people who have liberal
arts backgrounds rather than those who may be “too specialized”
in business. Any complaints about the East? “I did not know it
would get so cold so quickly,” he answered.
Newell Young ’B7 attended
Oberlin High School in Oberlin,Ohio, where he took part in a
“little bit of everything.” He
played soccer, wrote for his school
newspaper, was a member of the
chess club, and participated in the
drama club. His many parts in-
cluded Happy in Death of a Sales-
man and George in Our Town. He
repeated his performance of
George in the Oberlin Collegeproduction of Our Town for the college’s sesquicentennial celebra-
tion. “It was a great experience because I got to work with collegestudents and faculty members and get away from the high school
scene a bit.” Mr. Young, whose father is on the Oberlin College
faculty, attended Laguna Beach High School in California during
his junior year when his father went to that area on a year-long sab-
batical. While there, Mr. Young was a member of the Artists
Repertoire Theater and performed in their production of Noel
Coward’s Hay Fever. He was in the National Honor Society and
was a National Merit Quarter Finalist, graduating sixth in his class.
He came to Vassar because “the drama department seemed pretty
good, and I like the compactness of the campus.”
“Between classes, studying, and
soccer practice, I am kept quite
busy,” said Marisa Premus ’87,
with a smile. She came to Vassar
from Rockland County, New
York, where she was also kept
busy. At Tappan Zee High
School, she was on the yearbook
committee, was a member of the
National Honor Society, and was
a varsity soccer player for four
years. Ms. Premus, who has been
dubbed the “freshman sensation” on the Vassar women’s soccer
team, played for three years in the Empire State Games — an an-
nual Olympics-style event for New York State residents — this past
summer as team captain. “We won the bronze medal last year,” she
said modestly. Ms. Premus belonged to the Rotary Interact Com-
munity Organization and was very active in community services.
Even though soccer is a great love of hers, her academic work has a
higher priority. “I chose to come to Vassar because I wanted to go
to a good school that had a soccer team. I did not let soccer choose
the school for me.” Ms. Premus is still undecided on a career,
though she knows that she wants to major in math-related sciences,
perhaps with a second major in sociology or psychology.— Denise Taylor ’85
Photos:DeniseTaylor’85
32
CampusNotes
Hockey harmony
A visit by the United States Women’s
Olympic Field Flockey team to the Vassar
campus in mid-October was one of the
highlights of the season’s athletic
schedule. The exhibition match, played
against the Vassar team and, in alternating
quarters, a team of players drawn from
several schools including Vassar, was one
of eight on the Olympic squad’s autumn
tour of New England colleges. Other stops
included Dartmouth, Wheaton, Smith,
Williams, and the universities of Vermont,Connecticut, and Southern Maine.
For Patricia Fabozzi, coach for both
Vassar and the U.S.A. Olympic Develop-
ment Program, the match was an oppor-
tunity to give her players “an experience
they will never forget.”
“It’s like listening to a concert pianist,”
she said two weeks prior to the game.
“The playing is executed with such
fluidity that you’re just inspired. Most of
the time it’s next to flawless.”
Ms. Fabozzi is an instructor of physicaleducation at Vassar as well as coach to
the field hockey and women’s basketball
teams, and the coed indoor field hockeyclub. During the past two summers, she
has offered a field hockey camp at Vassar,
for the past three years has run a similar
summer camp at S.U.N.Y./Cortland, and,since 1979, has coached at the grass-rootslevel in the U.S.A. Olympic Development
Program, training beginners and inter-
mediate-level players. “Their [Olympic
Development] standards are very
stringent,” she commented. “In the group
with which 1 was trained, only two out of
20 passed.”
Ms. Fabozzi came to Vassar after serving
as a full-time field hockey coach at
Indiana University. “When I was a
student, my dream was to be a full-time
field hockey coach. But then, after doing
that for four years, I felt that I wanted a
new challenge. I had taught in high
school, and I didn’t want to go back to
that. And 1 had taught in a communitycollege.” Arriving at Vassar two years
ago, she now says that her time at the
college has been the best of her pro-
fessional life. “The type of student athlete
we get here is just tremendous. They are
really willing and able to learn, and they
obviously are people who expect the best
of themselves. As a coach, that’s all I
have ever asked of anyone.”
As for working at a college that is best
known for the quality of its academic
program rather than its sports, Ms.
Fabozzi sees the two as complementing,
not competing with one another. “The
philosophy of Vassar College is liberal arts
diversity. Athletics fits into that
philosophy. It’s something different.”
Asked how she thought her team, which
includes eight freshmen, seven
sophomores, and five seniors, would fare
against the Olympians, she answered,
“When you play people who are as good
as they are, you don’t expect to win.
You’ll be one-on-one with someone, and
think that you’re really with them, and
then they go past you so fast that you
almost don’t believe it. They’re so good.
The score won’t be important. The en-
counters on the field will be. The players
on my team will never talk about the
score. They’ll talk about their individual
encounters.”
We won’t talk about the score either.
The Shakespeare Garden
as you like it
Long a point of aesthetic and sentimental
value to many, Vassar’s ShakespeareGarden has been a tough row to hoe in
recent years. During the mid-19705, a
financial squeeze resulted in the neglect of
the garden and its rapid evolution to a
state of natural disarray. It was partiallyrevitalized in the fall of ’77 and the springof ’7B through the joint efforts of a group
of students, faculty, and members of the
Poughkeepsie Vassar Club. At the time,plans were in the works for the completerefurbishing of the garden. In 1979/80,college horticulturist David Stoller reports,
there was further replanting. “We weren’t
doing anything major. But it was
beginning to look decent,” he commented
recently. In 1981, a brown brick wall was
constructed at the foot of the slopinggarden, parallel to the Fonteyn Kill. “A
Shakespeare Garden is a formal garden,”
Mr. Stoller explained, “and I think that it
should be completely enclosed. I put the
wall in to separate it from the natural area
beyond.”
Shortly after the wall was installed, a
new obstacle to the garden’s improvementcropped up. Plans were being drawn for a
new chemistry building, and its site was
still to be selected. One of the favored
locations encompassed the northeast slopeof the garden. Work on the garden was
halted pending a decision on the location
of the chemistry building.
Finally, in the summer of 1983, the
chemistry building having been firmly
planted on the north side of the science
quad, work was resumed on the
Shakespeare Garden. Steps and walks
leading into and through the garden were
rebuilt, and a brick circle the focal
point of the garden was installed. The
terraces were leveled, and drainage in the
lower region of the garden was improvedto make that area accessible even in the
wet springtime. “The basic outline and
construction are completed,” Mr. Stoller
said. “The soil needs to settle, and we
need to do some fine-tuning on the beds.
This fall, we will do some planting of
daffodil and crocus bulbs. And maybesome yews on the terraces along the walk,and some boxwood to edge the circle. But
much of the planting we hope to completein 1984.”
Sentiment aside, Vassar’s Shakespeare
Garden has also served educational
purposes. It has often supplemented
courses in the curriculum, starting with its
germination in 1916 as a project for
botany and Shakespeare students. This
has been true even through the garden’s
recent period of changing fortunes, when
it proved its relevance to the computer
age. In the spring 1983 semester, Leila
deCampo, lecturer in computer science,
took advantage of the concern on campus
regarding the garden’s disarray and
developed a special computer project
related to the garden for students in her
course, Computers in the Nonnumerical
World. “I try to gear at least one project
in the course to something that is current
at Vassar. I find that there is much more
student involvement and enthusiasm for
the work.” Ms. deCampo said she chose
the Shakespeare project because it was
multidisciplinary involving computer
science, botany, and English. “What each
student had to do was to write a computer
Fedora’s chorus
hreshman songsters at Noyes, including the
gent in the hat, listen up as the seniors
vocalize during Serenading ’B3.
Photos:
GeorgetteWeir
33 VQ Fall 1983
program that would store, in an easily
retrievable manner, all the information
about the plant that he or she was to
research.” This information included the
folklore and use of the plant; a full
botanical description, including its
appearance, hardiness, shade tolerance,
soil preference; and information regardingShakespeare’s mentions of the plant. “It
was a very successful project in terms of
generating enthusiasm,” Ms. deCampo
said. “Because the garden was in such
disarray, we felt a kind of missionary
purpose.” The enthusiasm for the garden
that Ms. deCampo said she found among
her students was further demonstrated bythe class of 1983, which directed that its
senior gift be used to help support the
garden’s renovation.
Renovation is proceeding, but Mr.
Stoller cautions that it will be some time
before visitors to campus can fully enjoy
the colors and fragrances of a flourishing
Shakespeare garden. Beds are still being
planned; plants are being researched,
ordered, and grown; and a sundial or
some similar object is being sought for
the circle. “Everybody wants to get
married there,” Mr. Stoller said with a
sigh of amusement, adding modestly, “I
hope it will be attractive enough.”
Good sports
On an early fall weekend in 1982, a
ribbon was cut and the Walker Field
House was unwrapped for the public. The
occasion included a quiet, decorous group
of about 100 students and alumnae/i who
stood together, with signs and banners, to
protest the denial of tenure to assistant
professor of physical education Roman
Czula. One year later, the business of
athletics has become more routine for the
field house and, as it turns out, for Mr.
Czula. After an appeal, he both won
tenure and was selected by his colleagues
to be chair of the Department of PhysicalEducation and Dance. Recently, he sat in
his Kenyon office and helped a reporter
decipher coaches’ summaries of their
teams’ weekend contests. “I think,” Mr.
Czula commented, “that any alumna or
alumnus coming back and walking
through this campus on any weekend
would be stunned by the amount of
activity going on. There is a pulse here.
It’s not a sleepy campus. There is more
activity now than I can remember at any
time since 1975, when I first came to
Vassar.”
The first weekend of October had been
especially busy. On Friday, the women’s
soccer team had hosted Smith (playing to
a 2-2 tie), while the field hockey squad
also competed against Smith (losing 9-1).
The golf team traveled to a tournament at
Skidmore (standings unavailable by press
time). On Saturday, Vassar hosted both
the Seven Sisters Volleyball Tournament
in Walker (the college placed sixth out of
eight teams) and the Seven Sisters
Invitational Cross-Country track meet,
which started and ended on the Ballintine
playing field. (Vassar ran fourth among
five competitors.) In tennis, the men’s
team traveled to S.U.N.Y./Albany to
participate in the Eastern Collegiate
Athletic Association Tournament (final
standings were not compiled before press
time), while the women went to West
Point to compete in the Eastern Collegiate
Tennis Tournament (ranking 14th out of
26 schools). Back at Vassar, on Prentiss
Field, the men’s soccer team was busy
beating Upsala, 6-0. On Sunday, the
fourth in a series of annual competitions
between alumnae/i and varsity teams was
staged: in rugby, the alumni beat the
students, 26-14; in men’s soccer, the result
was a 2-2 tie; and in women’s field
hockey, the varsity beat the alumnae, 6-2.
On the intramural schedule, 12 football
games (all men) were played, five softball
games (coed), six volleyball matches
(coed), eight three-on-three basketball
contests (all men), as well as several
matches in a semester-long racquetball
tournament (coed). An open rehearsal of
the Vassar Repertory Dance Theater
(coed) was scheduled to entertain
freshman parents, who happened to be
visiting campus that weekend. “We were
pretty well booked up,” Mr. Czula said
with a smile.
As the weekend demonstrated, one
reason that athletic activity has increased
on campus is that there is more space to
accommodate it. “Our indoor facility can
compare with that of any other
institution,” Mr. Czula said firmly.
“We’re able to host more tournaments
now because Walker provides us with
greater flexibility. And at the same time,we don’t have to shut the Vassar
community out of the facilities, because
there are alternatives.”
An additional benefit, Mr. Czula notes,
is the exposure Vassar gets when it hosts
an athletic event. “The very first
intercollegiate contest held in Walker was
in the fall of 1982,” he says, warming up
to what is obviously a favorite story.
“The women’s tennis team played the
women from West Point. That was
significant in itself, because it was raining
and normally the match would have been
cancelled.
“Anyway, an officer the West Point
teams all travel with an officer was
standing near me on the balcony, looking
over the five matches that were going on.
And he was muttering, ‘I wish we had
something like this at the Point.’ He was
stunned. He couldn’t believe that he was
at Vassar. The idea that Vassar has an
athletic facility that a West Point officer
would lust after is mind-boggling.”
Georgette Weir
Vassar student (left) and an alumnus during games on Alumnae// Day this fall
34
Get in touch
Vassar clubs around the world
United States
Alabama
Admission Chr.
Adeline Feidelson Kahn ’5O
3597 Springhill Rd.
Birmingham 35223
Alaska
Admission Chr.
Bettyrae Fedje Flanner ’7B
S.R.A. Box 133 V
Anchorage 99502
Arizona
Phoenix
Admission Chr.
Mary Cone O’Riley ’56
88 North Country Club Dr.
Phoenix 85014
Tucson
Sharon Kahn Weizenbaum
’56
920 Corinth
Tucson 85710
Arkansas
G. Lorene Lloyd Patterson
’54
27 Wingate Dr.
Little Rock 72205
CaliforniaEast BayLinda L. Tedeschi ’6B
517 The Alameda
Berkeley 94707
Fresno
Admission Chr.
Jonel Maoris Mueller ’69
933 East Pico
Fresno 93704
Co-Chr.
Barbara Blum Dahl ’69
2875 W. Athens
Fresno 93711
Monterey BayShirley Mills Sargent ’46
7068 Valley Greens Circle
Carmel 93923
Peninsula
Suzanne Mcllroy Gregg ’64
2041 West Hedding St.
San Jose 95128
San DiegoAda Slack Hunt ’5B
6226 Waverly Ave.
LaJolla 92037
San Francisco
Johanna Kelly ’Bl
3029 Buchanan St.
.San Francisco 94123
Santa Barbara/
Tri Counties
Nancy Dunlop Lohrke ’46
601 Por La Mar Circle,Apt. 312
Santa Barbara 93103
Southern California
Marcia Horr Grace ’67
124 Club Rd.
Pasadena 91105
Colorado
Ellie-Reed Lewis Koppe ’64
1310 Meadow Ave.
Boulder 80302
Connecticut
Greenwich
Barbara Vesey Reed ’5O
377 Cognewaugh Rd.
Cos Cob 06807
Mid-Fairfield
Adele Pleasance Edgerton’43
Wallack Point
Stamford 06902
Upper Fairfield
Barbara Currier Bell ’63
160 Harbor Rd.
Southport 06490
Hartford
Letitia Ewing Landry ’55
52 Norwood Rd.
West Hartford 06117
New Haven
Judith Greenspun
Bernstein ’624 Ranch Rd.
Woodbridge 06525
New London
Admission Chr.
Lee Wilcox Kneerim ’47
3 Gold St.
Stonington 06378
Northwestern Connecticut
Janet Mayer ’52
White Hollow Rd.
Lime Rock 06039
Delaware
Emily George ’77
2112 The Highway, Arden
Wilmington 19810
District of Columbia
Leslie Carter Silver ’7l
7822 Moorland La.
Bethesda 20814
Florida
Central Florida
Elizabeth Cornwall Tilley’35
360 Sylvan Blvd.
Winter Park 32789
Clearwater/Tampa/St. PetersburgAdmission Chr.
Mary Repole Andriola ’62
1320 Indian Rocks Rd.
Clearwater 33516
Fort MyersAdmission Chr.
Sylvia Chase Gerson ’66
812 Cape View Dr.
Ft. Myers 33907
North Florida
Elizabeth Howe Pettet ’25
7976 Woodpecker Trail
Jacksonville 32216
Pensacola
Admission Chr.
Viktoria Coleman-Davis
Schaub ’73
Rt. 1, Box 973
Innerarity Point Rd.
Pensacola 32507
Sarasota
Admission Chr.
Constance Buttenheim
Swain ’4l
4662 Gleason Ave.
Sarasota 33581
South Florida
Admission Chr.
Mira Tager Lehr ’56
5215 Pine Tree Dr.
Miami Beach 33140
GeorgiaCatherine Ann Binns ’72
1165 Zimmer Dr., NE
Atlanta 30306
Hawaii
Deane Waters Wentworth
’63
46-139 Heeia St.
Kaneohe 96744
Illinois
ChicagoEleanor Mack Raths ’56
455 E. Woodside Ave.
Hinsdale 60521
Indiana
Mary Albright Bradley ’44
1310 So. State Rd., 421
Zionsville 46077
lowa
Area Rep.Kathryn LaMair Peverill ’53
4225 Greenwood Dr.
Des Moines 50312
KentuckyAllis Eaton Bennett ’55
5519 Apache Rd.
Louisville 40207
Central KentuckyKatherine BreckinridgePrewitt ’5l
316 North Maysville St.
Mt. Sterling 40353
Louisiana
Lorraine Woods Thomas ’75
7843 So. Coronet Court
New Orleans 70126
Maine
Admission Chr.
Charlotte Rice Wilbur ’45-4
112 Mabel St.
Portland 04103
MarylandNell Gilmore Stanley ’65
1110 Bellemore Rd.
Baltimore 21210
MassachusettsBerkshire CountySandra Umanzio Stowe ’65
26 Brunswick St.
Pittsfield 01201
Boston
George F. Litterst ’75
28 Daniel St.
Newton Centre 02159
Fall River
Ruth Albro Holmes ’37
P.O. Box 30
Fall River 02722
Pioneer ValleyMary Jane Howe McDonald
’46
Box 265
Deerfield 01342
Worcester
Barbara Clark Bernardin ’56
78 Newton St.
West Boylston 01583
MichiganGrand RapidsCarolyn Pett Grin ’66
2840 Bonnell, SE
Grand Rapids 49506
Southeastern
Marlynn Weinsheimer
Barnes ’56
5567 Westwood La.
Birmingham 48010
Minnesota/Dakotas
Gertrude Smith Juncker ’63
16 E. Minnehaha Pkwy.Minneapolis 55419
MississippiAdmission Chr.
Darnell L. Nicovich ’7B
505 Lameuse St.
Biloxi 39530
Missouri
Kansas CityJean A. D. Hullsick ’54
6115 Howe Dr.
Shawnee Mission 66205
St. Louis
Suzanne Chapman Jones ’6l
110 Aberdeen PI.
Clayton 63105
Montana
Admission Chr.
Irene Piekarski Dorr ’64
411 Highland Park Dr.
Billings 59102
Nebraska
Emily Goodwin Kemp ’5l
740 North Happy Hollow Blvd.
Omaha 68132
New JerseyCentral New JerseyMary Clyde Marsh Seivard ’44
360-c Northfield La.
Rossmoor-Jamesburg 08831
Essex
Lillian E. Jasko ’55
10 Evergreen Court
Glen Ridge 07028
Jersey Hills
Lois Lieber Leventhal ’59
24 Hilltop Circle
Whippany 07981
New Jersey Shore
Marilyn McManus Largay’ss24 Buttonwood Dr.
Fair Haven 07701
35 VQ Fall 1983
To assist those alumnae and
alumni who want to
maintain their Vassar
connections, the Quarterlypublishes the names and
addresses of Vassar club
contacts each fall. Exceptwhere otherwise noted, the
individuals listed are club
presidents.
Northern New Jersey
John Wolf ’74
535 Grenville Ave.
Teaneck 07666
New Mexico
Admission Chr.
Emily Hoda Garber ’76
Dept, of AnthropologyUniv. of N.M.
Albuquerque 87131
Co-Chr.
Sudye Neff Kirkpatrick ’63
Box 1417
Santa Fe 87501
New York
Long Island
Nancy Mae Burns Hurley ’63
392 West Neck Rd.
Lloyd Harbor 11743
New York CityClaire Mather Sheahan ’64
401 East 65th St., Apt. 11-G
New York 10021
Northern New York
Admission Chr.
Judith Levine Lempert ’59
19 Pheasant La.
Delmar 12054
PlattsburghAdmission Chr.
Eleanor Garrell Berger ’64
6 Lakeview Dr.
Mounted Route 8
Plattsburgh 12901
PoughkeepsiePhebe Townsend Banta ’6l
1 Hornbeck RidgePoughkeepsie 12603
Rochester
Ellen Hahn Croog ’65
40 Boniface Dr.
Rochester 14618
SyracuseBetsy Nelson Stone ’55
5221 Longridge Rd.
Jamesville 13078
Westchester
Jane Bertuleit Hoelscher
’7l-’72
Rte. 9
Garrison 10524
Western New York
Jo Kaplan Nasoff-Finton ’67
760 Robin Rd.
West Amherst 14228
North Carolina
Caroline Dern Johnston
’6B-’7O
4005 Bristol Rd.
Durham 27707
OhioCincinnati
Betty Ann Glas Wolf ’4B
1102 Sunnyslope Dr.
Cincinnati 45229
Cleveland
Clare Weed Obermeyer ’56
3454 Rolling Hills Dr.
Cleveland 44124
Toledo
Area Rep.Marion Bridgewater Kapp’4O
3602 Edgevale Rd.
Toledo 43606
Oklahoma
East
Admission Chr.
Josephine Grasselli Winter
’53
1819 East 27th St.
Tulsa 74114
West
Sherry Sullivan ’72
1817 Westminster
Oklahoma City 73120
Co-Chr.
Elizabeth Mygatt Nitschke
’63
6701 North Rhode Island
Oklahoma City 73111
OregonCaroline Rockwell Lobitz
’35
2211 S.W. First Ave., #1603
Portland 97201
PennsylvaniaGreater Wilkes-Barre
Mary Hooper Kiley ’35
R.D. 5, Sutton Rd.
Shavertown 18708
PhiladelphiaShirley Cruze Baird ’42
613 New Gulph Rd.
Bryn Mawr 19010
PittsburghLucy Thiessen Rawson ’6l
6401 Darlington Rd.
Pittsburgh 15217
State CollegeAdmission Chr.
Diane Steinman Greenfield
’62
600 N. McKee St.
State College 16801
Rhode Island
Emily Stone Cocroft ’39
7 Barnes St.
Providence 02906
South Carolina
Admission Chr.
Elizabeth Hardy Spence ’65
2057 Shady La.
Columbia 29206
Tennessee
Knoxville
Area Rep.Judith Haas Sumner ’72
5325 Shady Dell Trail
Knoxville 37914
Memphis
Area Rep.Elizabeth Nelson Smith ’52
6562 Bramble Cove
Memphis 38119
Texas
Dallas/Ft. Worth
Kathleen P. Schaffer ’69
3747 McMillan, Apt. #2OIA
Dallas 75206
Houston
Sandra Granville Sheehy ’67
P.O. Box 13447
Houston 77219
San Antonio
Frances Kallison Ravicz ’6O
c/o Yarn Barnes
4803 Broadway
San Antonio 78209
Vermont/New HampshireJean Pierce Stetson ’4O
R.D. #1
Box 438
Concord, NH 03301
VirginiaCentral VirginiaCarol Sutherland Keenan ’6O
102 Penshurst Rd.
Richmond 23221
Virginia Beach
Area Rep.
Margaret Ten Hagen Green-
wood ’45-4
4500 Yarmouth Court
Virginia Beach 23455
WilliamsburgAdmission Chr.
Jean Wyer ’7O
140 Pasbehegh Dr.
Williamsburg 23185
Washington State
Carolyn Shafer Bledsoe ’63
14020 Northwood PL, NW
Seattle 98177
Co-Pres.
Lucy Burch Steers ’65
2817 Cascadia St.
Seattle 98144
West VirginiaAdmission Chr.
Audrey Schwartz Horne ’55
Patricia Dr.
Wheeling 26003
Wisconsin
Kristin Kemper Kronenberg’67
8305 N. Regent Rd.
Milwaukee 53217
ForeignBelgiumArea Rep.Barbara Callihan Eloy ’79
AV Frangois Folie 30 (BTE27)1180 Brussels
Canada
QuebecAdmission Chr.
Carol Buettner Marley ’64
1 St. George’s PI.
Montreal H3Y 2L2
Ontario
Mary Balfour Anastassiadis
’6B
46 Gormley Ave.
Toronto M4V IZI
China
Admission Chr.
Thomas N. Canellakis ’Bl
USA Student
Shao Yuan 2-516
Beijing Univ.
BeijingPeople’s Rep. of China
EnglandSally Pearce McNulty ’62
50 Springfield Rd.
London NWS
Vassar link-ups on terra firma or otherwise
It’s a world on the move. But whether you’re circling the
globe or the universe, you’ll inevitably find a Vassar
alumna/us. When you do, you’ll also find a chance to
meet the natives, make a friend or few, reminisce about
Vassar then and now, and do something important for
higher education by participating in Vassar admission and
fundraising work. The need and the opportunity to get
involved have never been greater.
Today there are 71 Vassar clubs dotting the maps of
the United States and Europe. (The count for outer space
is as yet uncertain.) Why not make a connection?
Liz Wexler Quinlan ’59, AAVC Publicity Director
France
Joan Zimmerman
Shore ’56
24 rue des Grands
Augustins
Paris 75006
Greece
Admission Chr.
Nancy Settle Miles ’53
20, M. Botsari, Filothei
Athens
Guatemala
Admission Chr.
Dorcas Billings Taylor ’6l
American EmbassyGuatemala
APO Miami 34024
ItalyAdmission Chr.
Mary Flaupt Grayson ’74
Milano Viale
Abruzzi 23
SpainAdmission Chr.
Marilyn Galusha Ferreras
’6l
Los Alamos de Bularas 27
Pozuelo de Alarcon
Apdo. 36154
Madrid 23
Thailand
Admission Chr.
Elaine Toy Assarat ’62
16/4 Sukhumvit Rd.
18, Bangkok
United Arab
EmiratesArea Rep.Peter M. Weiss ’BO
c/o ABN Bank
P.O. Box 2567
Deira-Dubai
West Africa
Admission Chr.
Nancy Wills Keteku ’72
Catholic Relief Services
1011 First Ave.
New York 10022
36
Books
Something for Nothingby Kathryn Kilgore ’67
Seaview Books, 1981
261 pages, $13.50, hardcover
Something for Nothing chronicles the
adventures ofa young woman who is an in-
veterate and accomplished thief. She has
the professional know-how to steal almost
anything with ease: an emerald ring from a
jeweler’s, a wallet from a moviegoer’s
pocketbook, a can of crabmeat off a super-
market shelf. Her creator names her Molly,
a coincidence which seems to invite com-
parison with Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Like
her predecessor, Ms. Kilgore’s Molly carries
out her larcenous projects with poise and
aplomb, often working in borrowed finery.
She shares the eighteenth-century Moll’s
cynical contempt for the people she so suc-
cessfully dupes and robs, as well as the first
Moll’s tendency to translate all human
needs into monetary terms. And just as
Defoe’s Moll uses poverty and circum-
stances to justify her career as a thief, so the
contemporary Molly comforts herself with
a pseudo-Marxist “class analysis” of her
world: other people are con artists and rob-
bers who happen to operate on the right
side of the law. “You rob from the rich
what they’ve robbed already.” Moll and
Molly both believe that self-interest is the
guiding principle of every living being, a
philosophy which causes them to live
curiously isolated and friendless lives. Even
people whom they claim they love, they see
primarily as tools to be used in some
scheme.
Ms. Kilgore moves her heroine into the
twentieth century by providing complex
motives for her behavior, motives which are
not solely economic. Behind most of
Molly’s large-scale attempts at theft there
lies a romantic, regressive fantasy of re-
claiming the farm which was her childhood
home. She equates recovery of the place
with recovery of all the things she has lost,most importantly with the father, mother,and brother who died during her growing-
up years. She translates her feeling of hav-
ing been cheated by life into an urge to
cheat others, to get back some of her own.
Her inner emptiness also expresses itself in a
perpetual leanness and a frantic appetite for
Books for Quarterly notice should be sent
to: Susan Osborn (book editor), 424 W.
57th St., #4-D, New York, NY 10019.
Books for the Alumnae// collection in the
library should be sent to: Vassar Quarterly,
Alumnae House, Poughkeepsie, NY
12601, attn.: Alumnae/i Collection.
Alumnae/i interested in reviewing poetry,
food. She is always hungry, either eating or
else wishing she were. She is especially
prone to attacks of hunger when she is ply-
ing her trade, driven by a “devouring pas-
sion” which cannot be satisfied by the
money and goods which she steals.
When I think about why I do these things I getno answers. ... I just know when it starts. It
starts always with a feeling. A feeling like
hunger; but it’s not hunger because it can’t be
filled, not with all the lilacs in the world, all the
dusky nights, all the beautiful strangers. I justknow my share of normal life, security, idealism,childhood whatever crap you want to call it,whatever other people got was put in God’s
Cuisinart and shredded.
Molly is shaken out of her compulsive need
to remake the past when she tangles with
the Mafia and is defeated by a group of
people who play rougher than she does. Her
stepbrother sells the farm to a developer
and the place, as she knew it, is irrevocably
destroyed. Once the farm is gone, there is
nothing left in the world worth the taking,
no reason to steal. Unlike Moll Flanders,
who reforms because she finally gets
enough (“grew Rich, liv’d Honest, and died
a Penitent”), Molly changes because she
finally loses everything.
Ms. Kilgore’s attempt to make her
heroine more psychologically credible than
Defoe’s is not entirely successful. Molly is
far from a likeable character, and we are
not convinced that we want to sympathize
with her just because she gets beaten at her
own game in the end. It’s hard to believe
that her traumatic failure to recover her old
home can transform her from a manipula-
tive loner into a person who appreciates the
value of human attachments. At the end of
the book, she suddenly decides that it is
people who matter: her old friend Georgia
(sometimes an unwitting accomplice in
Molly’s adventures) and her lover Jim (not
so unwitting an accomplice). But since Jim
is a drug pusher who speaks “weasel
words,” he scarcely seems worthy of the
trust and affection Molly now says she feels
for him. And we have small reason to place
confidence in Molly’s feelings: throughout
most of the book she indulges in an am-
bivalent and quasi-incestuous passion for
her alcoholic stepbrother, who turns out to
be a murderer and betrayer. We naturally
question whether her new protestation of
affection for a whining drug dealer is liable
to prove any more admirable. She is pre-
fiction, nonfiction for a general audience,or scholarly work are asked to send a
letter and tearsheets to Ms. Osborn at the
above address. Unfortunately, owing to
the number of volumes received, individual
acknowledgements of books cannot be
sent out.
sented so clearly as a psychopathic person-
ality that her supposed transition to warmth
and normalcy seems as improbable and
morally meaningless as Moll Flanders’s
“penitence” in prosperity.
It is the details of Molly’s criminal career
which engross us, not her psychological
development and this is the final point of
congruence between Ms. Kilgore’s book
and Defoe’s. We are fascinated by Molly’s
ingenuity as a thief, absorbed in learning
about her style and technique. The true
heart of her story is the complicated plotshe devises for stealing stolen paintings
from the Mafia. Her one-woman operation
is full of puzzles and suspense, a detective
story told from the inside out. In construct-
ing this intricate and surprise-packed
mystery, Ms. Kilgore shows real talent. If
her book shares some of the weaknesses of
its eighteenth-century model, it also shares
its strengths, and even improves upon
them. Judith Saunders
For more about Judith Saunders, see her
feature on geography in this issue.
The Making of the Pre
hv Francis Poneeuj i lautn jl uugc
translated by Lee Fahnestock ’50
University of Missouri Press, 1979
238 pages, $14.95, paper
Francis Ponge’s La Fabrique du Pre as of-
fered in Lee Fahnestock’s translation com-
bines artistic and poetic elements which in-
vite our instant delectation. The 1971 pub-lication by Editions Skira of a facsimile
edition of the journal that Ponge kept while
working toward the final version ofa seven-
page poem inspired the present volume.
Here, the English text appears opposite its
French handwritten original, and is inter-
spersed with 14 full-color illustrations rang-
ing from a Pol Limbourg miniature to
Chagall’s “The Poet Reclining” and
Picasso’s “Spring.”
If Francis Ponge stands today as a
singular and most rewarding poet, it is, as
Ms. Fahnestock makes clear in her elegantand lucid preface, for his relentless explora-tion of the infinite connections between
nature and language as well as for the
authentic spirit of jubilation from which his
37 VQ Fall 1983
writing springs. His texts are intended to
function as mediators between the human
world and the world of things, while his
craft consists of seeking the closest possiblecorrespondence between the thing and the
word so that their perfect fusion might fill
both poet and reader with exultation.
Moved by a Promethean conviction that
everything remains to be said about the
nature ofthings, he works at the crossroads
of the materialistic and ontological interro-
gations to which nature and language lend
themselves.
Given the particular poetics governing it,
La Fabrique du Pre may well have provedto be a translator’s paradise. As an ex-
emplary unveiling of the process of crea-
tion, it reflects the tendency of much
French art to combine simplicity of form
with complexity of thought. Ms. Fahne-
stock’s elucidation of the many levels of
poetic expression at work within what M.
Ponge prefers to call an “essay” aptly
reveals their rich interplay. Three comple-
mentary modes of apprehension enable the
poet to draw conjointly on sensorial reality,
replete with metaphoric associations, on
linguistic reality with its wealth of etymo-
logical ramifications illuminating the poly-
semic nature of words, and finally on
philosophic reality, viewed in Nietzschean
fashion, as an unending cycle of birth,
death, and resurrection.
Through such cultivation of the expand-
ing reverberations of sound and sense, M.
Ponge aims to achieve the utmost solidarity
with the object of his contemplation. His
fascination for the pre (meadow) grew from
an initial aesthetic emotion to the gradual
elaboration of a veritable cluster of
linguistic, cultural, and philosophic associa-
tions. Thanks to its versatility, the pre
becomes in his eyes the most perfect
linguistic symbol; it is a phoneme which
serves as syntaxic prefix (as in prepare and
presence)-, and its homonyms, pres (near)
and pret (ready) provide a fertile ground for
the poet’s keen linguistic instincts and
semantic intuitions. On the auditory level,
the syllable pre is compared to the plucking
of a string, the brief note of a harpsichord.
Object and word thus gradually assume a
multidimensional reality, attaining what we
might call full existential status.
Continued on page 64
PersonPlace&Thing
Thinking about a new career? The shortage
of qualified math and science teachers is
critical. To address this crisis in our
schools, the Harvard Graduate School of
Education offers a one-year specialized
master’s degree program to train those at
midcareer to become teachers. For further
information, write; Dr. Katherine Merseth,
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
106 Longfellow Hall, Cambridge, MA
02138.
Did you know that there’s more than one
newspaper at Vassar? Investigate the college
with UNSCREWED. We give you more
than miscellaneous information. Issues af-
fecting the whole community, including the
opinions of students, faculty, and ad-
ministrators, are explored in depth. The
public interest is our concern and Vassar is
our public. Join us and support a necessary
element of the Vassar community of ideas.
Subscribe now! Six issues for $lO. Send
check to: UNSCREWED, P.O. Box 178,
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601.
For sale: three cottages on three secluded
acres. Lots of pine trees; ten minutes to
Woodstock, New York; one-half hour to
Hunter Mountain ski area. Well on proper-
ty, electric and telephone lines installed.
Needs work, low taxes. Graduate of 1981
asking $24,500. Call 914/357-4972 evenings
or weekends.
For rent, Scottsdale, Arizona. Beautiful,
new, fully furnished, two-bedroom, two-
bath townhouse in recently restored historic
Casa Blanca Camelback Mountain area.
Private patio. Tennis, pool, golf, Scottsdale
shopping within walking distance. One
month minimum. No pets. Contact: Nancy
B. Riegel (’57), 14 Surplus St., Duxbury,
MA 02332, 617/934-5161.
Sublet available for February. Looking for
a pied-a-terre on the East Side? Comfort-
able one-bedroom apartment will be unoc-
cupied for a month to six weeks, and I’m
looking for someone to baby-sit my plants.
Walking distance from Midtown, round the
corner from shopping district and
restaurants. Please contact: Shane Mitchell
(’79), 1229 First Ave., New York, NY
10021.
Hudson River debut. Announcing a new
album of original compositions by
guitarist/composer Stephen Funk Pearson
’ll. In April of this year, the Times of
London called Mr. Pearson a performer
“with an impressive command” and “a
composer of rare sympathy.” The music on
this album represents a unique blend of
popular and classical styles with broad ap-
peal. Copies are available on the Vassar
campus at Cardinal Puff in the College
Center, or direct from Kyra Records, 5
Willow Dock Rd., Highland, NY 12528.
Cost is $B/album (U.S.A. and Canada), $9
(overseas, allow four weeks for delivery).
Prices include postage.
Theater theater theater is what I’ll be study-
ing in London from early January through
June ’B4. Although enthralled, I do realize
that I need a place to sleep, so I’m looking
for a small, inexpensive flat to rent in the
Hampstead area. I am amenable to house-,
plant-, and cat-sitting, and to roommates.
Please send hot tips to: Brilane Bowman
[’Bs], P. O. Box 1285, Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601.
Wanted: to rent. Permanent retirement
home, small (two bedrooms), within an
hour or so of Boston (in Massachusetts or
any of the bordering states), in walking
distance of a grocery and pharmacy, with
the privilege to garden, and with country
roads for walking. C. Gordon Post [pro-
fessor emeritus of political science at Vassar
and Wells], P.O. Box 81, Aurora, NY 13026.
Experienced house-sitters available. Young
couple (’B5 and ’B3) seek a house/
apartment-sitting position in any locale. We
have had experience with houseplants, yard
maintenance, and pets. References avail-
able upon request. Contact: Victor Block,
5415 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Apt. #823,
Washington, DC 20015, 202/364-0705.
Professional couple (attorney, M.D.
V.C. ’74, ’ll) would like to house-sit or
rent a house or an apartment in the greater
Boston area from December 1983 to June
1984, or any part thereof. References
available. Please write: P. Costa, Box 573,
Brookline, MA 02146.
Stephen Funk Pearson ’77
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All the resources of language have been
called upon to arrive at the essential equa-
tion between the soil and the page, between
the traces appearing on the ground and
those inscribed on paper, between the
movement of a bird’s flight over the pre
and the reverse movement of the acute ac-
cent over the letter e on the page. The word
pre, entering, as it does, in a series ofnames
(e.g. Josquin des Pres) or locutions is also
reminiscent of the Pre aux clercs, the
historic dueling ground where
Of the two equals that arrive upright, one at
least
After a crossed assault of oblique blades
Will remain couched,First above and then below.
The dialectic structure at work here
permeates the elaboration of meaning
throughout the poem, as the vertical vegeta-
tion, antithetically related to the horizontal
ground, becomes charged with inevitable
connotations of life and death. The evoca-
tion of the poet’s own death follows, sig-
naling the end of the poem, as he requests
the typographers to couch his name below
the last line.
In lowercase, quite naturally,Save for the initials, of course,
Since they are also those
Of Fennel and of Purslane
That tomorrow will grow above.
Francis Ponge
Through temporal, spatial, visual, and
musical metaphors, through philosophic
and linguistic exploration, M. Ponge comes
as close as his alchemist’s powers will per-
mit to the transmutation of the very texture
of reality into words. His reverence for
language and nature has sometimes led him
to call them “divine.” And we, in turn,
coming upon his poetry, may experience a
sense of wholeness restored.
Lee Fahnestock’s sympathy with M.
Ponge’s aesthetic premises is evident: she
has captured the soul of the text with true
finesse. My only reservation concerns her
conscious decision to give variable formula-
tion to a number of lines which recur iden-
tically in the original. This multiplicity of
renditions seems to detract from the simple
precision which is one of M. Ponge’s trade-
marks. But no translation is an exact copy
of the original, and the final impression one
has is of utmost delight upon acceding to
the intimate record of a poem in the mak-
ing. A very gratifying gift.
Marguerite Le Clezio ’62
Marguerite Le Clezio is an assistant pro-
fessor of French at Vassar.
An Experience of Women:
Pattern and Changein Nineteenth-Century Europeby Priscilla Robertson ’3O
Temple University Press, 1982
673 pages, $35 hardcover
In the chapter “If Ignorance Is Bliss. . . ”
of An Experience of Women, Priscilla
Robertson relates a tale about an old
Virginia lady whom she regards as a
“perfect exemplar” of Victorian woman-
hood.
When she became engaged, in the mid-nineties,her married sister, Alice, came to her and said,“Now, Ella, there is one thing you ought to
know before you get married. It is that men, nice
men, have certain desires repeatedly, perhaps as
often as once or twice a week!” Alice had
become mixed up from reading about bees be-
fore she was married, and had gotten the notion
that sex involved a single consummation which
lasted for life. Ella was not in the least fazed at
her sister’s words. “Oh, I know all about that,”was her cheerful response. “I’ve read my Bible!”
To my natural inquiry whether Alice had not had
just as much chance to read the Bible, Ella
answered that she supposed so, but somehow“that part” had gone over her head.
An Experience of Women is filled with
such anecdotes which help Ms. Robertson
weave a complex tapestry of women’s lives
in nineteenth-century Europe. Roughly the
first half of this large book is devoted to de-
picting the sexual, familial, educational,
occupational, and social mores of upper-
and middle-class women in England,
France, Germany, and Italy. The latter part
deals with the lives of those women who
broke from these patterns and turned to
public and political life rather than to the
domestic world for fulfillment.
The vignettes are drawn from a wide
variety of sources: contemporary novels,memoirs, travel books, advice manuals for
the young, journals, and literary reviews, as
well as secondary sources. Ms. Robertson’s
sources are staggeringly voluminous and
eclectic: her bibliography is 46 pages longand will be a gold mine for those wishing to
follow up their reading with other works by
or about nineteenth-century women. Be-
cause the book contains materials from
four countries, it allows one to compare at-
titudes and practices ofdifferent cultures; it
is, for example, amusing and instructive to
compare British disdain for the French
practice of arranged marriage with French
contempt for love matches, the correspond-ing British practice. Without falling into
cultural stereotypes, Ms. Robertson suc-
cessfully highlights national differences in
attitudes toward women, marriage, and
family.
Although the book is concerned with
women’s emancipation during the course of
the nineteenth century, Ms. Robertson does
not impose a single thesis on her material,
nor does she make these wide-ranging data
fit into any pattern. Partly as a result of this
tendency to let the sources speak for them-
selves, the book can be “dipped into” at
will rather than requiring a straight-
through, beginning-to-end perusal. How-
ever it’s read, it will enlighten and reward
those eager to know something of the lives
of upper- and middle-class Europeanwomen of the nineteenth century.
Mary Lyndon Shanley
Mary Shanley is an associate professor of
political science at Vassar. In 1983/84, she
will be at work on a book aboutfeminism in
Victorian England under a grantfrom the
National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Foods and Wine of Spainby Penelope Casas ’65
Alfred A. Knopf, 1982
457 pages, $17.95 hardcover
Spanish cuisine remains relatively unknown
in America. All that will change though, if
Penelope Casas has her way. Ms. Casas has
criss-crossed the Spanish countryside, and
written a welcome and comprehensive guide
to traditional Spanish fare. Her book con-
tains over 400 recipes, most of which are
easy to follow and demand only an adven-
turous spirit and a willingness to spice gen-
erously. Ms. Casas covers every part of the
meal, introducing each section with a short,
lively historical or regional narrative. The
last chapter provides a systematic guide to
Spanish wines. If you always thought that
Spanish cooking was only gazpacho and
paella, you have a real treat in store.
Michael S. Kimmel ’72
For more about Michael Kimmel, see his
feature on the Sixties in this issue.
Books
Continued from page 39
63 VQ Fall 1983
theLastPage
Blessingsby Lisa Johnson Fleck ’66
On April 18, 1980, I lay in New York Hospital recuperating from
surgery on my Fallopian tubes. My neatly structured world was
falling apart. My husband and 1 had decided that the climate was
finally right, emotionally and financially, to have children. In 1974,I had undergone an ectopic pregnancy which irreparably damaged
my left tube. Now, at the age of 34, I had just been told that
surgery on my congenitally defective right tube had failed. I was in-
fertile. For someone who had wanted children since picking up her
first doll, it was a terrible blow. I felt I had lost control over a most
important aspect of my life. That night, 1 cried unabashedly behind
closed curtains. A nurse tried to comfort me, the beginning of a
long succession of sympathetic words from family, friends,
strangers, and not least, my husband, Vinny, whose support
throughout the ordeal was crucial.
Then, two important yet separate events which would radically
change our lives took place. My obstetrician-gynecologist urged me
to see a couple he knew who had recently adopted. And in the
course of my work as a librarian with the Reader’s Digest editorial
department, I began to see articles on Howard and Georgeanna
Jones’s experimental in vitro fertilization clinic in Norfolk,
Virginia.
The first of these events was to bring us our daughter, Jocelyn.The couple we met counseled us to adopt privately, as they had
happily done. It was relatively inexpensive, it was legal, and it cut
through the five-to-seven year wait regularly faced through adop-
tion agencies.
By December, through a chance conversation with a mutual
friend, a colleague of mine from Columbia graduate school had
heard of a baby. Jocelyn was only a month from being born, and
her out-of-state mother was anxious to find her a good home. We
flew to meet the young mother and agreed among us that adoption
was feasible. Two weeks later, she came to New York at our ex-
pense to give birth. I ran from the delivery room to the waiting
room to tell Vinny. In tears, we hugged one another. Fifteen
minutes later we were clasping Jocelyn’s tiny hand. She was
perfect; she was lovely. After some tense months, and scores of
financial, medical, and legal documents in our support, the court
declared us to be Jocelyn’s legal parents.
If all prospective couples had to show similar fitness for parent-
hood, there would be far fewer children in the world and many
more responsible adults.
The same year, 1980, we simultaneously pursued another course
of action in vitro fertilization. It was a slim hope. Although
several births had been achieved inEngland, the American clinic in
Norfolk after facing great resistance from the right-to-lifers,
“After rewarding stints in publishing, and then dead-end jobs,”
Lisa Fleck received her master’s in Library Service from Columbia
University in 1978. She hopes to return to a librarian’s career
“someday, when the children are in school.”
Fame, fortunately,
she says, has been brief, and the Fleck family lives quietly in
Woodhaven, Queens. The children “continue to be healthy, active,
and demanding that is, normal in every way.” The Flecks like in-
formally to help couples considering adoption and in vitro pro-
grams “any way we can.”
who accused it of destroying embryos had just opened its doors.
On the basis of an examination, including, for me, a laparoscopy,
the Drs. Jones accepted Vinny and me into their program in
September. Since we then had no inkling of Jocelyn’s existence, we
made a psychological commitment to the in vitro process, even
though no American pregnancies by that method were yet in the
offing. We maintained that commitment after Jocelyn’s birth.
This resulted in our son, Daniel the ninth in vitro baby to be
born in the United States.
Circumstances dictated that a full year go by from the time of
our acceptance by the clinic to our first try. I went first, alone. The
regimen there, though not particularly painful, was uncomfortable
and boring: weeks of daily injections, blood analysis, sonograms,
and still another laparoscopy to harvest the multiple eggs the
method by which the Joneses had finally achieved their first
pregnancy. Other women going through the program traded stories
of operations and of adoptions which had fallen through. This
proved to be useful group therapy. We all hoped against hope. Vin-
ny joined me at the clinic mid-cycle, to make his essential contribu-
tion and to bolster me psychologically. We flew home, dreaming of
good results. But nothing happened.Three months later we returned to try again. Miraculous news. It
had worked!
Daniel was born October 31, 1982, in the same hospital where
Jocelyn had been delivered. His was a normal delivery, not
Caesarean section as most of the in vitro babies had been. Vinny
was able to watch the birth. The same nurse who previously
counseled me in baby care now lent her advice on breastfeeding.
Daniel looked beautiful to us, and we didn’t have any worries
about a mother somewhere changing her mind.
We were surrounded by the press. But I got the biggest kick
when, in front of the nursery window, a woman who had heard the
news turned to me and said, “There’s the Fleck baby.’’ “I know,” I
said proudly, “I’m his mother.” Jocelyn viewed her new brother on
TV. “Mommy, Daddy, Baby,” she exclaimed. She had said a
mouthful.
The Flecks: Lisa with Daniel, Vinny with Jocelyn
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earthly thingsmore splendid than
a university"JohnMasefield
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The presence of talented students, an excellent
faculty and a rich learning environment requires
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