It's Good to be a Woman (review)

Alison Baker, a writer and oral historian living in New York City, is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, class of 1962. Her second book, It's Good To Be a Woman, is a thoughtful and insightful oral history of her fellow classmates from Bryn Mawr. Baker sensitively captures both the naiveté of the intelligent young women as they recount their journeys from the cloistered Bryn Mawr in the 1960s to how they found their place in the outside world. In poignant stories, her classmates relate their individual narratives of historic transformation. Baker calls them "A little-known generation, neither hippie, nor housewives, difficult to define, more reticent than the boomers that followed, less angry, more confused, perhaps more thoughtful of living through exciting times, but the gains for women happened with considerable heartache and compromises that occur in one's life" (xvi). In her introduction, Baker writes about the impact of her 25th Class Reunion (held in 1987), and the lasting power of the stories she heard there. Baker's own life took a different turn, right after the reunion. She went to Morocco and wrote a book on the lives of Moroccan women (Voices of Resistance: Oral Histories of Moroccan Women, Albany: SUNY Press, 1993). However, the stories of her classmates kept haunting her, and ten years later she was able to come back to the subject. As a member of the class, Baker had amazing access; over fifty classmates (out of a class of 192) agreed to be tape-recorded; and over half of the class sent her information, answered a questionnaire, or sent papers, clippings, notes, and e-mails.

Baker divides the book into four parts, organized more or less chronologically. Starting with an introduction to the girls of Bryn Mawr's 1962 class and a chapter on their personalities, chapter 2, "From a Fetish for Decorum to Marching on the Picket Line," describes how some of the women discovered their activist roots in a desegregation incident at a local Woolworth's in the spring of 1960.

Part II, "Navigating the Sixties," highlights two women involved in the anti-war movement who then came out as lesbians. Baker brings these women to life on the page, as one reads lives through their discoveries about the Vietnam War and themselves. Baker excels in weaving the personal with the political here.

Part III, "Career Paths," discusses the women's career paths, from academe to public schools, from medicine to law, and the women who at 60, still have not found their niche yet. What is compelling about this chapter is how competent and smart these women were/are, yet how many of them more or less just fell into their positions. Noted anthropologist Sherry Ortner, for example, is from this class. Her entry into graduate school and subsequent academic career seem almost by chance. Her family had no expectations of her going to school beyond Bryn Mawr, and once she completed the Ph.D., her narrative of almost being denied a full three-year contract at Sarah Lawrence in the early 1970s is shocking, especially considering her subsequent stellar career. With Ortner's story and others, Baker beautifully shapes the personal narrative into a part of history. The final section of the book describes these same women, now in their sixties, looking for second or third careers. Lively and curious as ever about the world, they are still figuring out what else they want to do.

This book is an engaging oral history that reads more like a novel than a work of non-fiction. You need not be a graduate of Bryn Mawr to enjoy it, since the experience of searching for one's place in the world is universal. This book adds to the literary genre of both women's college alumnae and college class studies, perhaps the most famous one being The Group, a novelized semi-autobiographical work, by Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt Brace, & Company...