Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [31]
There was a time in the late 1960s when a world that had existed for decades ended. The world of men’s colleges, muscular and intense, and women’s colleges, serene and pastoral, and the weekend trips from one to the other. A time of hard-sided suitcases carried by well-dressed young women onto local trains, and then by sport-coated young men to the grand old houses of widows where bedrooms had been transformed into bunk rooms for visiting girls. I wasn’t Franny Glass, but like Franny, I took the train to the men’s college, in my case, the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, for weekends. Like Franny, my date met me at the station and we walked to whatever approved guesthouse he had found for me for the weekend, where I would room with girls from Hollins and Sweet Briar and Randolph-Macon, and I would admire their elegant clothes and their shiny blonde hair and gold jewelry, and then later, like Franny, I would make fun of all that I had envied, drawing amusing caricatures of the other colleges to a date more intent on getting me drunk than being amused by me. It was the very last minutes of this era, and I was glad to be there, glad to have slipped in before the door shut forever.
The point of a women’s college, or so I had always thought, is that young women, uninhibited and unintimidated by young men, would blossom and find their rightful place in communities, and they would take that sense of confidence and sometimes entitlement with them into the world. You would have to ask someone who was inhibited or intimidated whether it worked. I was neither. I had been president of my class; I had been brash enough to get kicked off the cheerleading squad for talking back to a teacher. I am pretty certain I didn’t need to feel less inhibited, less intimidated. In the first weeks, still wearing my freshman beanie (yes, we really had to wear them), I was already flexing a robust independence. Asked in freshman English to write an essay that started “I began to become an individual when…,” I did not write the recipe-style essay (add a pinch of fun, bake for eighteen years) that won the best grade. Instead I wrote an essay about the abortion conflict and got one of the worst grades. And it was fine with me.
There is a camaraderie at a women’s college that is intellectual and social and political. This is not to suggest we were made out of one cloth. The student referendum on whether to allow us to wear pants to class, rather than dresses, failed, for Pete’s sake…in 1968. A fellow student turned me in one time when, after getting out of physical education late, I wore my shorts—under my buttoned raincoat—to class in violation of that dress rule. (She should know, if she reads this, that I could name her but choose not to.) We dated fraternity men who wore sports coats and Marines from Quantico who wore uniforms. We acted or danced or—in my case—wrote, or we did none of these. We were not all friends, but within that larger body, we worked out communities, often more than one, which met our needs and allowed us to find essential parts of the adults we would become.
As a freshman at Mary Washington, I had a junior roommate. While my parents tried to figure out how to pay for college, the freshman dorms filled up, and I found myself in a grand old dormitory rooming with Christine Cole from Warren, Ohio—her blonde hair shaved like a boy’s, her paintings of nudes propped