In Conclusion

By Jane O’Reilly
Copyright Jane O’Reilly

One morning last December I was walking my dog in the wintry park. My neighbor, a genial fiftyish man, came along with his two beagles.  At the time, we, the humans, were both searching for the cheapest flights to Europe to be with our families for Christmas.

“The best airline prices I have found are Portuguese, Irish, and Turkish”, he reported.  “I like Turkish.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“Why not?” he demanded.

“People from the United States can’t get visas,” I explained,  “journalists are being jailed, democracy is being crushed.  And, there are bombs exploding.”

He looked surprised, and disappointed.  Then he beamed. “Well, there is an upside to a bomb,” he chuckled, “at your age, what difference does it make?”

At My Age?

I am only 82.  I can still pass for seventy-five, thanks to my steel knees, plastic cataracts and dental implants.  My father lived to 94.  I plan to achieve at least 90. The oblivious neighbor made the words “sixtieth reunion” sound less like “celebration” and more like “redundant to need: please prepare to board the ice floe.”  I am not ready.  My life still makes a difference, to me.  The question that troubles me is: what difference have I made? 

I have contributed splendid children and grandchildren to the world. But they get the credit, not me. I give myself credit for things like having written the cover story for the first issue of Ms. Magazine in December 1971.  The story’s title was  “Click!  The Housewife’s Moment of Truth”.    Click! efficiently described the moments of recognition that prompted the feminist revolution.  

Click! covered all revelations, ranging from “Yes, feminism does means you have to wash the dishes” to, “Why are there so few female tenured professors at Harvard?” (There was one in l958. Today, the percentage is beginning to approach 27%) to,  “Why have 99.9% of unspeakable crimes against humanity in all of history been carried out by men?”

Click! passed into the language, and then quite recently evolved into the broader “Woke” and then, post Trump, into “#MeToo”. As of this writing, women in the United States are very angry. I myself am very angry, but I try to be angry about only one thing at a time, just to save my energy.  This morning I am angry because the United States has the highest infant mortality rate and the highest maternal mortality rate of all developed countries, and our record is getting worse despite the fact that we are the richest country in the world. As usual, it is impossible to focus on one thing. Anger immediately expands to rage about causes: racial discrimination, inadequate national health care, grossly underfunded schools, non-existent child care, economic inequities, systemic political contempt for children and the women who bear them. What is the point if we don’t care about children’s lives? The result is a pointless, aimless, doomed society pursuing nothing but The More, The More, More, More…. I hope the next Click! will be the one first suggested in 411 B.C.: “The Lysistrata Tactic.”

History, like life, is just one damn problem after another. For too long I clung naively to the illusion that it was always creeping forward, toward an ideal. I didn’t understand that people forget, or find going backwards profitable, or are just plain stupid.  Our job, as the elders of today, is to try to avert repeats repeating history by passing on our experience to benefit the future, even if the future seems to have deaf ears. I know I am a product of the limitations of white privilege. But I, like all of the class of 1958, am also a product of growing up during a World War that killed, they estimate roughly, fifty to eighty five MILLION people. We know a nuclear bomb is not something to threaten idly. We had our problems, and so did our parents, who were still trying to recover from World War I and from the Depression. Their parents were still recovering from the Civil War. Every generation is raised to take its places in a society that is already passing.  I myself struggle to remember that it is more important for my grandchildren to know the Holocaust was real and the Sermon on the Mount makes a handy guide to being happy than it is to send handwritten thank you notes and perhaps wear a little less eye shadow.

Sixty years ago, in l958, we were still smoking, for goodness sake. Change is possible. Change, turning away from stupid, was an idea that prompted The Civil Rights movement, the Anti-War Movement, the Anti-Poverty Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, the Environmental Movement, and the Women’s Movement.  Those movements freed us. We were just making progress, adjusting to the new possibilities, when the backlash took hold.  Reagan, Kochs, Falwel, Citizens United, Hate Radio.

Sixty years is a long time. In l958 we were still afraid of Communists.  Panty Hose hadn’t been invented, much less the birth control pill. So long ago, and yet, I remember as if it were yesterday, the fine September day in l954 when my mother saw me off to Radcliffe from Union Station in St. Louis.  My trunk had gone ahead via Railway Express.  Even to remember that trunk I feel as though I am evoking an antique time, as distant as Edith Wharton. I had just put one foot on the step up to the sleeping car when my mother offered a bit of advice to my departing back.  “By the way,” she said, “you may find that there is prejudice against Irish Catholics in Boston.”  My mother’s advice was usually somewhat Delphic, constricted as she was by the family rule that we never discussed politics or religion.  On that particular occasion she was torn between being proud to see me go to Radcliffe (In my family Harvard and Radcliffe ran thicker than blood. I was the tenth generation to attend.  The first was John Russell, Class of 1645.  He was not an Irish Catholic).  She was glad to see me go away (I was not a pleasant eldest child).  And she was justifiably envious. (Her dream of college was destroyed when her own Harvard trained father, an Irish Catholic Veterinarian, died young and she had to support her family)

I think she had a sudden last minute prick of maternal concern and realized she had never really explained the different attitudes of the Northeast.  The South, yes, indeed.  She often told the story about being nine years old and her family moving from New Haven, Connecticut to a small town in Tennessee. The other school children repeatedly asked her to take off her shoes and socks so they could see her cloven hooves, widely accepted and anticipated as signs of the devil’s spawn…a.k.a.Roman Catholics.   The religious situation in my own family was delicate. I was once sharply shushed after I had come home from my parochial school one afternoon and told my paternal, Cantabridgean grandmother Jane Elliott Sever O’Reilly (Radcliffe 1899) that I was sorry she could not go to heaven because she went to some church called Unitarian.   Now, some 70 years later, I would definitely go to a Unitarian church if I were to go to a church at all.  But in 1954, at the moment of boarding that train, I truly had no idea at all that Irish Catholics could be objects of obloquy.  (Nor did I know what obloquy meant). 

         My mother was correct. But Irish Catholics were in good company, included with all the other groups scorned by Boston‘s elite: Italians, Jews, Blacks, Browns, Asians, Communists, miscellaneous groups of foreigners, and Yalies.  I really felt left out only when some cousins from the upper tiers of the North Shore society told me, rather gloatingly, about festivities I would never be invited to, about waltz evenings and debutante parties. 

          Well, autre temps, autre mores.  These days the old Boston elite has chosen obscurity. “Illegals” is now the code word for newly designated undesirables.  Half the population of the United States scorns the other half, and too many of our overstock of Public Intellectuals pass their time arguing on Facebook about how many neo-liberals can, or should, stand on or be stuck on the head of a pin.   And, just to emphasize the end of civil discourse, we have Trump.  In l954, we had Eisenhower.  I wish I could apologize to him for my Senior Year opinion.  Thank you, sir, for the warning about the military-industrial complex.  

In l954, the train to Radcliffe deposited me at Back Bay Station. My Radcliffe ’99 grandmother picked me up. We went to buy a Coop box (I still have mine, will sell cheap to first offer) and Meissen Onion Pattern cloth to make curtains for my room in Barnard Hall. She also presented me with two precious antiques: her fudge pans from her own college days. Apparently fudge was a delightful novelty in that era, having been invented at Vassar about 1892 and spread quickly throughout the Seven Sisters.  After lunch at the Commander Hotel, my Grandmother climbed into her blue Chevy Coupe, leaned out the window to kiss me goodbye, and said: “Remember, you will now make the friends you will have for the rest of your life.”

She was right.  

What sustained me, inspired me, added joy to my life, comforted me and challenged me were, and are, the friends I began to meet my first afternoon in the small parlor of Barnard Hall.  I don’t feel a catch in my throat when I hear “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard”. It is no longer accurate, for one thing. I feel no urge to buy plates printed with Memorial Hall, or even plead with my great nieces to attend if they are accepted.  I am still surprised that I graduated, and very grateful.  Just the mention of having been at Radcliffe was, for a long time, maybe even now, impressive enough to win me a moment or two of being taken seriously, which was not, unfortunately, a moment I was often granted while at Radcliffe.  We were one in ten, girls to boys, and not much was expected of us except to be vaguely remarkable and definitely married.  Radcliffe was one of the Seven Sisters, six of them exclusively women’s colleges with, like us, a particularly privileged entrée to the world of ideas.  But we Radcliffe women had one unique hurdle to face every single day, in every single class. Men. To the men, we were, as far as being taken seriously went, the dismissible minority.  It took its toll.  I think we turned out pretty tough.  Tough is good, in my book. It was also very hard to achieve, but nowhere nearly as hard as it might have been, because we had our friends.

For sixty-four years, those Radcliffe friends have sent money when I needed it; put me up with tea and sympathy and wisdom when I was exhausted or heartbroken. In my senior year they kept my secret pregnancy a secret and rejoiced when my daughter found me thirty-two years later. Our conversations today are as they always were: bad news, good news, comfort and plain advice, public policy to support or defeat, raucous laughter, wrongs to right, books to read.  In 1996 one of the girls I had met that first afternoon in Barnard Hall pulled me into The Committee For the Equality of Women at Harvard, formed originally by members of the Radcliffe Class of l953, and joined by many women from the Class of l958.  They were the most impressive, and the most effective, group of people I have ever had the profound privilege of knowing.

I include as one of those long time friends my first ex-husband. But I am disappointed and surprised that so few other men in the Harvard class of l958 became true friends. Perhaps they did not really share my commitment to demolishing the patriarchy.  

I am writing as though we are all still here, available for the phone calls and lunches and trips and affirmations and squabbles that have sustained me the last sixty years.  But we are not all here, and, not to be too abrupt about it, soon we will be dropping like leaves in October.  Living to 90 is no longer so appealing. When I was younger, about 70, I was fascinated watching how it all turned out.  I don’t like the way it is turning out now.  I keep my spirits up by muttering: “Parkland School kids are the hope of the future.” “Hundreds and hundred of women are running for elected office.” “The whole entire world knows the Emperor has no clothes.”

And, every once in a while, something makes me laugh.   Phyllis Schlafly, R.I.P., is no longer a household word. She was an Opus Dei Catholic, a right-wing termagant and militarist who chose as her route to fame and glory opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. (It failed to pass in l982, in case you don’t even remember).  She was to the Women’s movement what Savonarola was to the Renaissance.  As it happens, she, like me, grew up in St. Louis, went to the same Convent schools, and did some graduate work at Radcliffe (Harvard certainly has turned out more than its share of right-wing doozies).  She was particularly alarming while warning that equal rights for women would require that everyone must use the same bathroom.  Last summer my family flew from Portland to San Francisco.  We landed and everyone raced for the nearest rest room.   Eventually I emerged from a cubicle to see my own son washing his hands at the nearest sink. “Don’t panic, Mom,” he said, “This is San Francisco.  Gender free bathrooms.”   Oh my, how I wish Phyllis had lived to see it.  But wait! I have just remembered another example of the ways women’s method of peeing has been considered almost as much of a handicap as our ability to reproduce. In the late l960s I attended a meeting at the Harvard Club of New York, where a great murmuring crowd of Radcliffe graduates had gathered to demand equal admission to Harvard for women. From the stage, a distinguished woman Radcliffe Dean very anxiously replied that greater admission would be impossible because:..... “We don’t have enough bathrooms”.   

Cheers me every time I remember. And now, in this best of all possible worlds, I am going to go and walk my dog in the garden.