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Nora Ephron
Remarks to Wellesley College Class of 1996
President Walsh, trustees, faculty, friends, noble
parents...and dear class of 1996, I am so proud of you.
Thank you for asking me to speak to you today. I had a
wonderful time trying to imagine who had been ahead of me on
the list and had said no; I was positive you'd have to have
gone to Martha Stewart first. And I meant to call her to see
what she would have said, but I forgot. She would probably
be up here telling you how to turn your lovely black robes
into tents. I will try to be at least as helpful, if not
quite as specific as that.
I'm very conscious of how easy it is to let people down
on a day like this, because I remember my own graduation
from Wellesley very, very well, I am sorry to say. The
speaker was Santha Rama Rau who was a woman writer, and I
was going to be a woman writer. And in fact, I had spent
four years at Wellesley going to lectures by women writers
hoping that I would be the beneficiary of some terrific
secret -- which I never was. And now here I was at
graduation, under these very trees, absolutely terrified.
Something was over. Something safe and protected. And
something else was about to begin. I was heading off to New
York and I was sure that I would live there forever and
never meet anyone and end up dying one of those New York
deaths where no one even notices you're missing until the
smell drifts into the hallway weeks later. And I sat here
thinking, "O.K., Santha, this is my last chance for a really
terrific secret, lay it on me," and she spoke about the need
to place friendship over love of country, which I must tell
you had never crossed my mind one way or the other.
I want to tell you a little bit about my class, the class
of 1962. When we came to Wellesley in the fall of 1958,
there was an article in the Harvard Crimson about the
women's colleges, one of those stupid mean little articles
full of stereotypes, like girls at Bryn Mawr wear black. We
were girls then, by the way, Wellesley girls. How long ago
was it? It was so long ago that while I was here, Wellesley
actually threw six young women out for lesbianism. It was so
long ago that we had curfews. It was so long ago that if you
had a boy in your room, you had to leave the door open six
inches, and if you closed the door you had to put a sock on
the doorknob. In my class of, I don't know, maybe 375 young
women, there were six Asians and 5 Blacks. There was a
strict quota on the number of Jews. Tuition was $2,000 a
year and in my junior year it was raised to $2,250 and my
parents practically had a heart attack.
How long ago? If you needed an abortion, you drove to a
gas station in Union, New Jersey with $500 in cash in an
envelope and you were taken, blindfolded, to a motel room
and operated on without an anesthetic. On the lighter side,
and as you no doubt read in the New York Times magazine, and
were flabbergasted to learn, there were the posture
pictures. We not only took off most of our clothes to have
our posture pictures taken, we took them off without ever
even thinking, this is weird, why are we doing this? -- not
only that, we had also had speech therapy -- I was told I
had a New Jersey accent I really ought to do something
about, which was a shock to me since I was from Beverly
Hills, California and had never set foot in the state of New
Jersey... not only that, we were required to take a course
called Fundamentals, Fundies, where we actually were taught
how to get in and out of the back seat of the car. Some of
us were named things like Winkie. We all parted our hair in
the middle. How long ago was it? It was so long ago that
among the things that I honestly cannot conceive of life
without, that had not yet been invented: panty hose, lattes,
Advil, pasta (there was no pasta then, there was only
spaghetti and macaroni) -- I sit here writing this speech on
a computer next to a touch tone phone with an answering
machine and a Rolodex, there are several CD's on my desk, a
bottle of Snapple, there are felt-tip pens and an electric
pencil sharpener... well, you get the point, it was a long
time ago.
Anyway, as I was saying, the Crimson had this snippy
article which said that Wellesley was a school for tunicata
-- tunicata apparently being small fish who spend the first
part of their lives frantically swimming around the ocean
floor exploring their environment, and the second part of
their lives just lying there breeding. It was mean and
snippy, but it had the horrible ring of truth, it was one of
those do-not-ask-for-whom-the-bell-tolls things, and it
burned itself into our brains. Years later, at my 25th
reunion, one of my classmates mentioned it, and everyone
remembered what tunacata were, word for word.
My class went to college in the era when you got a
masters degrees in teaching because it was "something to
fall back on" in the worst case scenario, the worst case
scenario being that no one married you and you actually had
to go to work. As this same classmate said at our reunion,
"Our education was a dress rehearsal for a life we never
led." Isn't that the saddest line? We weren't meant to have
futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren't' meant to
have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions, or
lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an
architect, you married an architect. Non Ministrare sed
Ministrari -- you know the old joke, not to be ministers but
to be ministers' wives.
I've written about my years at Wellesley, and I don't
want to repeat myself any more than is necessary. But I do
want to retell one anecdote from the piece I did about my
10th Wellesley reunion. I'll tell it a little differently
for those of you who read it. Which was that, during my
junior year, when I was engaged for a very short period of
time, I thought I might transfer to Barnard my senior year.
I went to see my class dean and she said to me, "Let me give
you some advice. You've worked so hard at Wellesley, when
you marry, take a year off. Devote yourself to your husband
and your marriage." Of course it was stunning piece of
advice to give me because I'd always intended to work after
college. My mother was a career women, and all of us, her
four daughters, grew up understanding that the question,
"What do you want to be when you grow up?" was as valid for
girls as for boys. Take a year off being a wife. I always
wondered what I was supposed to do in that year. Iron? I
repeated the story for years, as proof that Wellesley wanted
its graduates to be merely housewives. But I turned out to
be wrong, because years later I met another Wellesley
graduate who had been as hell-bent on domesticity as I had
been on a career. And she had gone to the same dean with the
same problem, and the dean had said to her, "Don't have
children right away. Take a year to work." And so I saw that
what Wellesley wanted was for us to avoid the extremes. To
be instead, that thing in the middle. A lady. We were to
take the fabulous education we had received here and use it
to preside at dinner table or at a committee meeting, and
when two people disagreed we would be intelligent enough to
step in and point out the remarkable similarities between
their two opposing positions. We were to spend our lives
making nice.
Many of my classmates did exactly what they were supposed
to when they graduated from Wellesley, and some of them, by
the way, lived happily ever after. But many of them didn't.
All sorts of things happened that no one expected. They
needed money so they had to work. They got divorced so they
had to work. They were bored witless so they had to work.
The women's movement came along and made harsh value
judgments about their lives -- judgments that caught them by
surprise, because they were doing what they were supposed to
be doing, weren't they? The rules had changed, they were
caught in some kind of strange time warp. They had never
intended to be the heroines of their own lives, they'd
intended to be -- what? -- First Ladies, I guess, first
ladies in the lives of big men. They ended up feeling like
victims. They ended up, and this is really sad, thinking
that their years in college were the best years of their
lives.
Why am I telling you this? It was a long time ago, right?
Things have changed, haven't they? Yes, they have. But I
mention it because I want to remind you of the undertow, of
the specific gravity. American society has a remarkable
ability to resist change, or to take whatever change has
taken place and attempt to make it go away. Things are
different for you than they were for us. Just the fact that
you chose to come to a single-sex college makes you smarter
than we were -- we came because it's what you did in those
days -- and the college you are graduating from is a very
different place. All sorts of things caused Wellesley to
change, but it did change, and today it's a place that
understands its obligations to women in today's world. The
women's movement has made a huge difference, too,
particularly for young women like you. There are women
doctors and women lawyers. There are anchorwomen, although
most of them are blonde. But at the same time, the pay
differential between men and women has barely changed. In my
business, the movie business, there are many more women
directors, but it's just as hard to make a movie about women
as it ever was, and look at the parts the Oscar-nominated
actresses played this year: hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker,
and nun. It's 1996, and you are graduating from Wellesley in
the Year of the Wonderbra. The Wonderbra is not a step
forward for women. Nothing that hurts that much is a step
forward for women.
What I'm saying is, don't delude yourself that the
powerful cultural values that wrecked the lives of so many
of my classmates have vanished from the earth. Don't let the
New York Times article about the brilliant success of
Wellesley graduates in the business world fool you --
there's still a glass ceiling. Don't let the number of women
in the work force trick you -- there are still lots of
magazines devoted almost exclusively to making perfect
casseroles and turning various things into tents.
Don't underestimate how much antagonism there is toward
women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back.
One of the things people always say to you if you get upset
is, don't take it personally, but listen hard to what's
going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally.
Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing
her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those
attacks are the words: get back, get back to where you once
belonged. When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn't
serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The
acquittal of O.J. Simpson is an attack on you. Any move to
limit abortion rights is an attack on you -- whether or not
you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is
sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.
Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
Because you don't have the alibi my class had -- this is one
of the great achievements and mixed blessings you inherit:
unlike us, you can't say nobody told you there were other
options. Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that
is yours to lead. Twenty-five years from now, you won't have
as easy a time making excuses as my class did. You won't be
able to blame the deans, or the culture, or anyone else: you
will have no one to blame but yourselves. Whoa.
So what are you going to do? This is the season when a
clutch of successful women -- who have it all -- give
speeches to women like you and say, to be perfectly honest,
you can't have it all. Maybe young women don't wonder
whether they can have it all any longer, but in case of you
are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you
going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little
messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but
rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like
what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for
you. And don't be frightened: you can always change your
mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands. And
this is something else I want to tell you, one of the
hundreds of things I didn't know when I was sitting here so
many years ago: you are not going to be you, fixed and
immutable you, forever. We have a game we play when we're
waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write
the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper.
When I was your age, I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley
graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not
one of those five things turned up on my list. I was:
journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not
one of those five things turns up in my list: writer,
director, mother, sister, happy. Whatever those five things
are for you today, they won't make the list in ten years --
not that you still won't be some of those things, but they
won't be the five most important things about you. Which is
one of the most delicious things available to women, and
more particularly to women than to men. I think. It's
slightly easier for us to shift, to change our minds, to
take another path. Yogi Berra, the former New York Yankee
who made a specialty of saying things that were famously
maladroit, quoted himself at a recent commencement speech he
gave. "When you see a fork in the road," he said, "take it."
Yes, it's supposed to be a joke, but as someone said in a
movie I made, don't laugh this is my life, this is the life
many women lead: two paths diverge in a wood, and we get to
take them both. It's another of the nicest things about
being women; we can do that. Did I say it was hard? Yes, but
let me say it again so that none of you can ever say the
words, nobody said it was so hard. But it's also incredibly
interesting. You are so lucky to have that life as an
option.
Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I
hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find
some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out
there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of
that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The
first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of
your lives.
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