July 2010: Commencement (Sullivan) & The Group (McCarthy)

Post date: Jul 21, 2010 2:22:49 PM

Unfortunately, we did not have any very recent graduates among the group that gathered at Sherrill's house on July 20 to discuss J. Courtney Sullivan's tale of the 1990's Smith experience, Commencement, and Mary McCarthy's look at 1930's Vassar graduates, The Group. With the class of '95 as the most recently represented, we were not able to determine when clothes started coming off for convocation. However we did determine that bridge playing, a staple at Smith for generations, went out between 1976 and 1979.

A couple of looks at the topic of nudity at convocation can be found in this article from the Sophian covering a panel discussion of the topic (moderated by Tom Riddell, our recent faculty speaker), and this article from Inside Higher Educuation, which among other things posits that the start of the change from formal academic ceremony to a more student-oriented and overtly celebratory event came with Jill Ker Conway in 1975.

While none of us hated Commencement as much as Kate reportedly did (too bad she could not attend to tell us why), we were not in love with it either. Most of us enjoyed tidbits--references to Smith or other familiar locations--we were not taken by the writing, and everybody agreed that the entire kidnapping storyline was implausible. Several also felt that one of the most fundamental parts of the Smith experience, the broadening and blossoming of the intellect, was completely missing. Kathy, who joined us late, summed up the book as "fluffy".

None of us were old enough to relate directly to the period of The Group, although Jane's mother did graduate in that era, and she confirmed that echoes of the values and ideas represented were present in her childhood. Mary, on the other hand, felt she could not relate at all to The Group at all, as it was too young for her grandmother's generation, too old for her mother's. Most were interested by the eloquent picture of the experience of women in that class and era, and most enjoyed McCarthy's detailed writing style. I personally was annoyed by her misuse of "like" (as opposed to "as") which I found jarring in a book about highly-educated women. Catherine read us Polly's musings on Psyche and Cupid as an example of one of the detailed passages scattered through the book that she enjoyed. Jane, in contrast, was impatient with these detailed vignettes. Several expressed difficulty keeping track of the various members of the group. All of us cringed at the childcare regimen. Jane said her mother did follow this general model, and later apologized to her for doing so. Though it seems to me that each new model on childcaring is pushed as "best for the baby", so it is hard to fault her, or any parent, who follows the theory of the day, however weird it seems to a future generation with a different set of "best for the baby" ideas.

A point of departure into other topics was the apparent lack of self-confidence in the Commencement Smithies. The women's movement has broken down many barriers, but has not solved the confidence problem for girls. We posited that girls & young women now may not feel constrained by their gender, but just struggle with feeling inadequate or incapable on a personal level.