Wonder Women
By Victoria Lyall

I am a woman in my final year at Yale. Today is Friday and by Monday everything will be different. Not different in a little way, but rest-of-your-life different. Suddenly, living a life in Manhattan on $10,000 is a possible concern, and then comes the next six months … the demands of graduate school, jobs, careers, life. This is my future, and it’s standing outside, if I’ll only let it in. I keep hoping that maybe along with my diploma, Dick will hand me an instruction booklet:
Dear Graduate, Welcome to your life post-Yale! Your first step is to contact all those successful Yale alumni, who will instruct you further on how to attain ultimate happiness and fulfillment both professionally AND emotionally … Worry not: Those $120,000 were well-invested.
But life is more complicated than that. And I am perplexed. In a small English-language bookstore in Paris last spring, I found a beat-up copy of The Feminine Mystique. Living in Paris, reading Friedan, I wondered where I would be in a year, five years. Where would we all be in five years? I became so interested in these questions that, like any good Yale student, I decided to write my senior essay about them. But my essay does not address issues of the future for every Yale graduate. I am not Everyman; I am one woman. Therefore I chose to look at one specific group: Yale women.
Thirty years after the explosion of feminism, millions of women struggle to balance a professional career and a stable family. The question is no longer whether to do one or the other, but how to do both. Women of my generation have found that it is now their turn to ask themselves this question. A Yale woman’s identity is in flux, its nature discussed daily in dorm rooms, apartments, bars, dining halls, and classrooms. We think both long and short-term and wonder where to anchor our identities. I and every other woman I know stand at this edge, asking ourselves, “How do I come to decide what makes life worthwhile?”
The history of women at Yale has been one of stops and starts. Back in 1783, Ezra Stiles wrote up a sheepskin parchment for one of his private female students, noting that were it not for her sex she would surely have been a member of the Yale freshman class. In 1886, another ambitious woman applied to Yale Law School. She was admitted and managed to graduate, narrowly escaping the wrath of the Yale Corporation, which quickly instituted a rule that no woman could belong to any class save the ones already enrolled in the School of Arts and Sciences. So, for 268 years of Yale College’s illustrious history no woman roamed its hallowed halls until the “experiment” of 1969. 580 women were selected from an applicant pool of 5,000 to be the first female Yalies. La crème de la crème, ma cherie. Lauded as “superwomen”, they were photographed endlessly by The New York Times, Newsweek, Look, and Life, not to mention all the women’s magazines that speculated about their dating lives in full-page spreads. That spring, as Kingman Brewster uttered the traditional Yale promise to graduate the next “1000 male leaders of the future”, for the first time dissension was heard among the ranks.
For the class of 2004, 6549 women and 6338 men applied, yet there was a 16.6 percent admission rate for men, versus only 15 percent for women. The final class standing is 674 men and 678 women. The unequal rate of admission is done to compensate for the higher matriculation rate among women. Old Blue wants to keep things balanced—and rightfully so. However, my point is, it’s damn hard to get into Yale and it’s even harder if you’re a girl.
In a 1987 article entitled “The Next Steps for the Superwomen,” the Yale Alumni Magazine explored the fate of female Yalies after graduation: “The possibility that these extraordinary young women might become leaders—the conventional destiny of their male classmates for centuries—[then] seemed more remote. It is now taken for granted.” We are all, men and women, trained to be “super.” We look at the admission rates and our jaws drop—how did I make it here? To be a Yale graduate is something momentous. But my question is, how is it different for a woman?
Every senior woman I know struggles with the idea of being a leader. We reach out to each other and talk, as if by talking we can sort through the messiness of all that awaits us in the real world. Some of us construct elaborate life plans: “Live in New York two years, grad school, marry around 28 (don’t want to be tied down too early), kid by 32, three years off, and back to work.” Others live more in the moment: “I don’t think in long term, only short term. I go from today to tomorrow and maybe to the next six months but can’t really think beyond that, you know?” Some grapple with social conventions: “Yeah, I wanna get married. Marriage may be a societal construction but it’s one that I have bought completely.” Or: “You know, the more I think about it, all I am doing is biding time till I can actually have a family. I know I am completely shitting on the feminist doctrine; we are taught to go out and take on the world, but what if I just want to have kids?”
Most of the women I interviewed wanted it all. They don’t want to enter the work force; they want to lead the work force. They want to find loving partners and have happy, fulfilling lives. As we make decisions about next year, the year after, the next five to ten years, we wonder how all the pieces of this puzzle will come together. Or if they will come together. I worry about how to balance ambition and life’s realities. I worry about loving someone in L.A. from my apartment in Manhattan. I leave you with the voices of four Yale women who are facing the same difficulties. In their voices anxiety and optimism, ambition and practicality, coexist as equal partners of a Yale woman’s identity. Their openness and honesty have helped me define my own dilemma.

I want great kids, I want to have a fabulous relationship with my husband, and I want to be the best in my field. Maybe I could accept being topped by the Brits, no, wait, I want to be the best in my field. It may not happen because it may entail more sacrifice than I am willing to make, but in an ideal world that’s what I want.

I guess for me, success entails not only being happy and having a great family but also achieving a certain level in my career. If I were a world-renowned doctor but had sacrificed marriage and family, and were miserable, I wouldn’t consider that success. But neither would I consider it success if I were simply a happy housewife.

I thought I just wanted to be a high school science teacher but that is not something you do when you go to Yale. Unless you do Teach for America for a couple years and then you go to law school. Definitely people have this view that if you go to Yale you have to make something of it—you can’t just be a housewife or something. You have to do something with that degree … I have very conflicting feelings about it … I don’t need to have some big powerful career and I just want to do something that makes me happy. But then the other side of me is like but you went to Yale and you should use that ….

I think that’s why I’ve struggled for the past year, year-and-a-half … everyone is asking you, “So what are you going to be doing next?” And I’m expected to have an answer; I expect an answer from myself ... And especially coming out of Yale they expect that you’re going to do something incredible. A lot of people don’t know what they are going to do and they are just trying to find themselves and maybe there is nothing wrong with that.

Victoria Lyall, a senior in Pierson College, is on the staff of TNJ.