Feminist writer, author, editor
(1941– )
I loved nature and being outside, so when we moved to Fieldston from Washington Heights, the idea of living in a place with a lot of trees and private houses was very appealing. Fieldston, which is a section of Riverdale, looks a lot like Larchmont or Scarsdale, but unlike Larchmont or Scarsdale it has hills and rocks so the houses aren’t in straight rows. Some are up on big outcroppings of rocks, and others, like ours, are below on the street level. I don’t think I knew that Riverdale was part of the Bronx. I don’t think I was aware of the boroughs at all.
I was a tomboy. My favorite outfit was my flannel-lined jeans with matching flannel shirt. You got dressed up in a skirt or dress when you went “into the city,” and I didn’t want to get dressed up, so I avoided going into the city. The Fieldston School, which was a few blocks from my house, was my home base.
I loved being on the basketball team. I loved the practices. I loved getting on the bus to go to away games. I loved having a number. Seventeen. Years later, Title IX (legislation that banned sex discrimination at government-funded educational institutions) changed the nature of sports for girls.
In my day, teams like the one I was on were second-class citizens. We played in an old gym, while boys monopolized the new one. No one came to watch us. Even our parents didn’t come. I guess it didn’t seem as important a school event as, say, a class play. When I got to college there was no girls’ basketball team at all. It’s hard to imagine today; my daughter played volleyball all through high school and college and now plays on a coed city team. She loves volleyball the way I loved basketball and she’s been able to make it part of her life. Title IX was too late for me, but it has affected me in watching my daughter. I think it was one of the major achievements of the women’s movement.
Being popular was as important at Fieldston as anywhere else in the fifties, even though the Ethical Culture philosophy that guided the school made a big point of community building and respect for each other. Socially, the goal was to be “a fabulous kid.” It meant you were a team player. That you were well rounded. But most of all, it meant that people liked you.
There were a hundred and three kids in my class. One day, one of them, who was a friend of mine, said, “You’re so great and you’re so popular and you’re head of the student council—and I only know one person who doesn’t like you.” I went bananas and I got out all the yearbooks and I made lists of who it could possibly be. It obsessed me for weeks. And later—years later—it dawned on me. I know who that one person was. It was the person who told it to me.
Like most women of my generation, I expended a lot of energy trying to be liked. I never asked, Do I like this person? Do I want to be with this person? Why am I working so hard to make somebody like me who I have no interest in? Now I do.
Also like most women of my generation, I was ambivalent about being smart. This came out most clearly in our advanced math class. The three or four of us girls in the class all suffered from what came to be called “math anxiety.” Because everyone “knew” that girls weren’t good in math, we always felt that if we got the answer to a hard problem it was a fluke. No matter how many flukes we achieved, we were sure that we would get the next one wrong. Our teacher, Hans Holstein, loved giving the class challenging problems, and he never understood why we were so stressed while the boys were so exuberant. “Math anxiety” was something else the women’s movement helped us understand—and overcome.
Something I never really outgrew was my lack of interest in clothes. My mother would take me to Loehmann’s, the big department store near Fordham Road. They had this big open women’s changing room, and everybody tried on clothes in front of everybody else. That was my first experience seeing older women’s bodies. And girdles. Those orangey skin-colored girdles. It was fascinating and a bit shocking. The women there were not only big, they were loud and demanding. They would yell at salespeople. They fought over garments. It was a real Bronx experience. I don’t think anybody who used that changing room would ever forget it.