Recently the husband of a member of the class of 1990 at Mount Holyoke wrote about attending her 25th reunion. I think it says a lot about what it is like to attend a women’s college and how much it matters in life after graduation. He attended Williams College. The following consists of excerpts from his commentary:
Uncommon Women
By hook and by crook, and with the help of some great friends, we made our way Friday to Mount Holyoke College (MHC, the oldest women’s college in the Americas and the first of the Seven Sisters, founded in 1837, the same year as Tiffany & Co., for whatever that is worth) for _’s 25th reunion. It was a gift beyond measure for to spend the weekend with some of her oldest and closest friends in the world at a place that means a great deal to her. _____'s “moving group” or suite, as many might call it, all came. All four of them, thick as thieves for almost 30 years. And when they saw each other, they cried. And then, only seconds later, yours truly became utterly irrelevant, as it should have been. They see each other in person not often, but they fell into place like no time had passed. It was a remarkable testament to the power of true friendship, to spending formative years together. They talked about their lives, their choices, the accidental paths their routes had taken them. But no matter their journeys, they had each other. And in fact, they still have each other. It is unabashedly glorious.
_______ attended the dinner Friday and the graduation parade Saturday. She rallied for the post-dinner festivities, the highlight of which was a VHS (dating ourselves) recording of their commencement speech given by Wendy Wasserstein '71. It was not only the finest graduation speech on record but among the finest speeches given in the English language. Wendy was earnest and funny and poignant and impassioned and humble and spirited. She urged the women of MHC not to live down to expectations, to trust in their decisions, to do the right thing. Now, none of that is novel for a commencement speech, but she delivered it with passion and devastating zingers: as a woman of direction, I applied to both business and drama schools; one’s worst nightmare is have a term paper due at one’s college 19 years after graduation; given I am a “W” I spent the first hour of graduation marveling at the parade of women who had done so much more with their college years than had I; ten minutes into the Yale School of Drama I knew what it needed was an all women’s curtain call, and I set about to write that play. Twenty-five years on, her speech brought the room to whooping and bouts of thunderous applause. I had the privilege of seeing it all live 25 years ago, and it was better than I remembered.
We went to reunion because it was important to ______, because friendship outlasts everything, because winning is a matter of how you define what winning is. And winning is celebrating what matters most in the world: love.
In 1977, Wendy Wasserstein wrote her first play, which received critical acclaim, entitled “Uncommon Women and Others” about her friends at MHC. More than forty-four years on, MHC is bastion of uncommon women, and I was privileged to spend not only the weekend with them but the last 29 years to boot.
