The Women We've Become

Eleven of my sorority sisters and I are back on campus at De Pauw University in Greencastle, Indiana for our forty-fifth reunion, staying in a dorm where we’re crammed two to a tiny room and the bathroom is a long walk down the hall. We’re wondering how we lived that way for four years. We’ve come from all over North America, and for some of us it’s been decades since we’ve seen each other. Still, the conversation is non-stop and the memories flood in. It’s as if we never left campus.

One of us tells of overhearing a woman from a class younger than ours say to her college girlfriends, “I really love the women we’ve become.” We all nod in agreement. We feel that way, too. And it makes me think about who we were, what was expected of us and the paths we ended up taking.

Our school was small and friendly and provided a sheltered environment in which we could first try our wings away from home. It was a place steeped in tradition and we were traditional girls from solid, mostly Midwestern families. When we entered college in the fall of 1962, we were girls on the verge of discovering who we were, who we were going to become.

We have been on the cusp pretty much all our lives. We were on the cusp of the baby boom, not technically a part of it, but the forerunners, the ones born just before the wave of post war births began. Ahead of the trend – that’s what our generation has been.

We were on the cusp of women’s lib, too. In our day girls went to college to find a husband. Failing that, they became teachers, nurses or secretaries. We became all those things and more, because even though the envelope of discrimination against women in the workplace was sealed pretty tight, we were starting to poke at it, looking for spots where the glue on the flap had worn thin so we could slip through to forbidden territory. We still became teachers and nurses and secretaries, but we also grew into administrators, artists, writers, and experts in special education, orchids, native flora and fauna. We became designers, business owners, college professors, bankers, fundraisers and tireless volunteers. We followed tradition and became wives, mothers and grandmothers, too. But we are also world travelers thirsty for knowledge of our planet and the people who inhabit it. We are involved, curious, always seeking to expand our horizons, learning something new and enjoying every minute.

We were on the cusp of the civil rights movement, too. And in our protected little corner of the world we innocently thought it would be a simple thing to invite a black college student from a Southern university to live in our sorority house for a semester or a year. What could be wrong with that? Plenty, according to the national sorority president, who came to scold us for our outrageous behavior, shaking her finger at us. That wasn’t what the sorority was about the president said. The black girl wasn’t one of us, couldn’t possibly live with us. There were rules, she said, and we must follow them. She put us on probation. But to us, the sorority was about the bond of friendship we had, not some exclusionary set of rules. We only wanted to share that friendship. Rather than breaking our spirit, the experience brought us closer together, made us value each other even more. We became more tolerant, more inclusive.

On the cusp. On the verge. Right before. Ahead of time. On the leading edge. That is where we’ve lived our lives as wave after wave of change has washed over our world. We’re there now, too, as we have passed 65 and head toward 70. We’re a new kind of sixty-something. We’re still exploring, still learning, still pushing the envelope instead of retiring to a front porch rocker.

At the reunion we talk about our lives now and how we were in college. We laugh over old times and cry over losses and illness. We have somber conversations about those in our graduating class who are gone and we’re thankful it’s none of us yet. So we celebrate each other and our friendship that has persisted through nearly fifty years and vast geographical separation. We hit the dance floor with the kids from the Class of 2006 who are forty years our junior, and we all rock out to “We are Family”.

A young man from the Class of 2006 taps me on the shoulder and asks what class we are.

“1966,” I say proudly.

“Wow,” he says with a big smile. “You guys are awesome!”

I look around at my sisters, smiling, vibrant, dancing with abandon.

“Yes we are,” I say.

Copyright 2011 by Liz Zuercher