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We'd shipped out to college expecting exactly what our mothers before us had expected – to get whatever degree we could manage with as little inconvenience as possible, and, more important, to meet the boy of our dreams, marry him no later than the summer after graduation, and subsequently live a life of bliss. That we chose Millsaps as our arena did not seem inconsistent to us. We had educated parents, and we wanted a good education too – and intelligent husbands. What better place? |
Back then, girls’ reputations
mattered. For a girl to smoke while standing was
considered unseemly. Worse than tacky, it spoke to her
character. Eyebrows raised at the sight; good names were
endangered. Sororities had active Standards Committees,
whose duty it was to make certain that members’
reputations remained immaculate. Boys, of course, had no
dress code, no curfew, no sign-out requirement. They
could roam campus all night long if they cared to. They
could live in apartments. And there was no limit to what
they could do inside them. It strikes me now that the early model bonnet hair dryer was the perfect symbol for our lives. In ’66, the blow dryer didn’t exist, nor did carefree hairstyles, so all of us had to roll our hair before every date and before going to bed every night. Some nights at 3:00 A.M. after big parties, we’d be propped up in bed rolling just-washed hair. We adapted to the constraints of the ubiquitous prehistoric dryer and rollers, wearing the industrial-strength plastic bonnet and carrying the motor and cord – our “leash” – wherever we went in the dorm, chatting or playing bridge near an electrical plug, often sleeping all night with the hot, whirring hair dryer in bed with us. Every morning we arose from bed with elastic marks punched deep into our foreheads. We never imagined there might be another way. Similarly, we never thought to try to change inequities in the rules. We had so much more freedom than we’d ever had at home. And all of America – not just the “backward” South – accepted without question a double standard for men and women. Hadn’t it been that way since Adam and Eve? Or at least Ozzie and Harriet? Conditioned to marry and marry soon, we celebrated each bit of progress along the way. Standing in a circle at “candlelight ceremonies,” we, with our other friends, passed around a lighted candle – once for dropped, twice for pinned, three times for engaged, and four for married – until the lucky girl revealed her secret by blowing out the flame. Eleven of us met or exceeded society’s target date for our weddings; seven of the unwed, alarmed over the untoward delay, married by age 25. But the era of the late 60s was to earlier generations
as the Renaissance was to the Dark Ages. After years of
somnolent sameness, the country erupted, never to return
to its previous innocence. We in The Group don’t
usually examine how remarkable our years at Millsaps were
and how blessed we were, as the fortune cookie says, to
have lived in such interesting times. But those years
– unprecedented in American culture – shaped us
and our friendship as surely as the South had molded our
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