Making It Up: The Vassar Class of ’65 on the Cusp of Change examines the lives of a collection of girls born in wartime, raised in the 1950s to be good wives and mothers, who graduated from Vassar College in 1965 to find a world turning upside down with social revolution. How did those young women on the cusp of social change redefine themselves, without role models, to meet a new age of opportunity for women?
In Making It Up, Selby McPhee tells the stories of classmates who followed their own curiosity and nascent ambitions through doors suddenly cracking open to them, while figuring out how to manage domestic responsibilities without any of the social support that exists now. She tells, for example, of Debbie, who in a stellar academic career gave women tools to negotiate workplaces slow to adapt to their presence; Elizabeth, who fell in love with computers and helped define a brand new field; Sylvia, who used a law degree to fight for health equity. All of them were midwives to change.
The revolutions of the 1960s are now a part of contemporary history. But change keeps happening, and the work to adapt to it is never done. New generations will find inspirational models of ingenuity, flexibility and just plain guts in these women who figured out how to thrive when the very definition of what it was to be a woman was tossed into the air.
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Reviewed by K.C. Finn
Making It Up: The Vassar Class of ‘65 on the Cusp of Change is a work of non-fiction in the memoir and social issues subgenres. It is intended for the general reading audience and was penned by author Selby McPhee. As the title suggests, the writing follows a group of young women who graduate from Vassar in 1965 as the world around them is changing rapidly. After the housewife expectations of the 1950s and the post-war austerity around the globe, a whole new life of possibility and opportunity opens up for Selby and her friends. What results is a celebration of female empowerment and adaptation to a rapidly-shifting world.
Contemporary history is always a fascinating subject for those who recall it and those who want to better understand the generations before them and how they have shaped the world we currently have. Author Selby McPhee has crafted a superb work of resonant social history that reconciles the gap between the typical homemaker mentality of functionalism in the 1950s through to the birth of the modern woman as we know her today. She has a keen talent for embedding emotion and sentimentality into the friends she writes about without it ever becoming too saccharine, and I found the dialogue to be extremely well crafted and unique to each person featured. Selby also presents herself in an authentic way as a confident but never overpowering narrator and participant. Overall, Making It Up is a must-read for anyone interested in women’s history and for those who enjoy heartfelt memoirs that are also well-penned inspirational works.
Reviewed by Alexandra Barbush
An inspiring glance at feminist movements through a biographical lens
Selby McPhee presents the life and work of several of her Vassar College classmates from 1965 in Making It Up. This first-person narrative starts with a brief rundown of the first and second movements of feminism and then traverses through the womanhood and feminism at Vassar specifically, that which led the graduates to their subsequent lives.
McPhee touches on the Convention of Seneca Falls as a precursor to her time, which she considers to be the foreground for the second movement of feminism, roughly occurring in the fifties and sixties. She also briefly mentions what she thinks of as “third wave feminism,” constituting the #MeTooMovement and the Women’s March in 2017.
From there, she speaks on several imperative texts to the feminist movement, like Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and the ever-popular Ladies Home Journal. She uses several of her classmates as a kind of intimate case study of female life at the time, naming them explicitly and relaying interviews she had with them at a later time, seemingly circa 2017.
She speaks on their childhoods and their own mothers, an obvious starting point to how and why they ended up where they did—at a prestigious northern college of overwhelmingly white women.
Many of them did not know their fathers until toddler age, with them being born into the thick of World War II. McPhee speaks on their fathers’ return home from war and the subsequent cast-off of their mother’s brief careers, along with the catapult back into the home sphere.
Each of the women’s stories is chronicled over time, the most interesting being that of Sylvie Ivie, one of only two Black women accepted into Vassar their graduating year. Daughter of a homemaker and a doctor, Ivie goes on to be an NAACP lawyer, a civil rights advocate, and a published academic, all while marrying and having two children.
McPhee smoothly weaves the personal and political lives of her accomplished classmates with that of the norms and happenings at Vassar circa 1965. She presents them as individuals while hitting simultaneously on their commonalities.
At the time, women often felt unfulfilled and potentially unhappy. They may have used the idea of college less as the beginning of a career and more of a jumping off point to a life that included a husband and children. The women chronicled by McPhee inspiringly jumped the status quo, with their careers spanning breastfeeding advocacy, academia, and Fortune 500 company leadership. Making It Up is a smartly personal and political examination of micro-feminism in the modern era.
The feminism displayed here is that of a mostly white, middle-ish class woman who was afforded a chance at Vassar and made something of that chance. Fortunately, she isn’t naive about this fact. While she presents some historical facts and introductions, she is aware that she isn’t telling every woman’s story, just THESE women’s stories. These stories are that of accomplished women who, with privilege, made something of themselves and simultaneously struggled with their mothers’ stories in second wave feminism—housewives, discontent, stuck at home with the children.
Readers interested in feminist history and studies will get a quick and interesting read out of this one. To better understand ourselves, we must first understand those who have come before us. Making It Up makes that possible.
Making It Up: The Vassar Class of ’65 on the Cusp of Change is a memoir of coming of age in the 1950s and 60s that offers a different, socially intriguing perspective. It focuses on the lives of graduating women who were also on the cusp of seeing more opportunities than ever before. Accordingly, they were called upon to enter strange new waters with no role models or mentors for what they would become.
Selby McPhee’s story captures a generation of women caught up in the throes of social evolution in America. More than a singular memoir alone, it adds much commentary about the history and evolution of women’s rights and changing roles in society. Her powerful words are just one thing that elevates Making It Up from a singular experience to a social history of a generation of women that forged new roles and pathways.
She also documents the lives of other women who struggled with choices between career and family, often facing battles of wills against fathers, husbands, and other male figures who resisted these new opportunities for women. These additional biographical sketches of ordinary women called upon to achieve extraordinary things make for a collection of stories that is unified and strengthened by the experiences of a diverse population of women who forged careers and realized their talents and potentials.
Many of these unsung heroes deserve to be recognized for not just their achievements, but for the contrast between their lives and their mothers’. The result is a personal, political, and social history that charts the progress of a revolution in the hearts and minds of America’s women from the 1950s through the 1960s.
This memoir personalizes these experiences in such a way that future generations will readily relate to, and deserves top billing in any library strong in women’s issues, American women’s history, and memoirs.
Reviewed by Lynn Goodwin
Are we always on the cusp of change? Possibly, but do we realize it when it’s happening. Probably not. That’s why a look back can be valuable, especially for a group of women graduating from an elite school that has changed greatly since these women graduated and moved out into the world in 1965. I should know. In 1971 I graduated from the same school, Vassar College, and during my four years, world events propelled us forward. But how much did they change in the first half of the 60s? I couldn’t wait to find out.
McPhee writes about classmates who followed their own curiosity and ambitions through doors that had been closed to their mothers. In 1961, many of these women started college looking for a “ring by spring.” Watching early sit-ins and the assassination of President Kennedy, they began to take control of who they could be. By the time they reached their fiftieth reunion they had become wives, mothers, career women, volunteers, and successful multi-taskers who followed their passions and reinvented their lives whenever they needed to, proving that everyone’s life can and should be a work in progress.
“Debbie Michaelson Kolb, a college professor…thought she would ‘go to Vassar, graduate, get married, have children…. Over time [she] became a professor and founder of the Center for Gender in the Workplace at Simmons College School of Management among many other academic titles.”
“Elizabeth Ratigan, a computer analyst…assumed she would…get a Vassar education and ‘just see what happens.’ …Computers captured Elizabet’s imagination and launched her in a brand new career in the digital age.”
She also tells the stories of a civil rights lawyer and health advocate, a physical therapist and activist, a corporate wife, internationalist and volunteer, and others.
Instead of assuming the roles society normally imposed, each woman charted her own path, changing trajectories when appropriate, and reinventing her path when her balance went awry. Lacking role models or finding mentors in unexpected ways, each woman carved her own paths. As a fellow Vassar graduate from the class of ’71, I relished their stories, which renewed my belief that I’ve led a life that is uniquely my own.
Of course I enjoyed hearing the familiar names of faculty members and a website about the history, but I was much more powerfully struck by the ingenuity and flexibility of these women. Whether you were alive in the sixties or want to know more about the second wave of feminism in the United States, you should read this book. It will refresh your belief in your personal power. You, too, can carve your own path.
Interviews
Q: What inspired you to write Making It Up?
A: I have been thinking about this book since 1987, when reunion planners gathered groups of women from the Vassar Class of ‘65 to identify themes for our 25th reunion. I attended the Boston meeting and discovered there that all of us were surprised, even a bit shell-shocked, by the unexpected course our lives had taken.
We had arrived at Vassar as ‘50s girls, anticipating that after a good college education and maybe a few years of work, we would live domestic lives as good wives and mothers. It was the role our mothers had assumed and that we had been trained for.
But American culture was turning upside down, churning with revolution on behalf of civil rights, the war in Vietnam, the environment—and a revival of the women’s movement—just as we graduated. So each of us found ourselves inventing our lives—making it up—with new rules for living, new expectations, and no guideposts for the decisions we were making.
I began to understand that the 1950s, a sleepy, retrogressive decade of recovery from war and Depression, had shaped us for a world that no longer existed—that we were an age cohort with a unique challenge. I wanted to write about that.
Q: What impact did your years at Vassar have on your life in subsequent decades?
A: Though Vassar didn’t offer us support in building careers, there were plenty of examples on the faculty and in the administration of independent women: successful, strong, self-confident academics with agency and power.
Those women, and the male professors, expected a lot of us, assumed that we were destined to have an impact on the world, and gave us voice in our single-sex classes. It was a bit of a shock for us to have to work so hard to succeed academically at Vassar, and a shock to discover, in the workplace, that we, as women, were not taken very seriously.
Many of us think, though, that the Vassar name on our resumes helped us get jobs. It was just that after we got the jobs we realized no one really wanted our opinions…
Q: How do you think the expectations of the class of ‘65 upon graduating differed from the reality as your lives unfolded?
A: I think most of us still expected to marry and run a household after a few years of work. The opportunities that opened up to us and the surprising emergence of our own ambitions to succeed, to advance in the workplace, drove us on. As time went by, the satisfaction that we were being acknowledged for our work in the larger world outside the home was intoxicating.
For a while, it was hard for the women who chose traditional lives and those who had careers to understand each other’s choices. Full-time homemakers despaired for those children working women left in daycare, while working women wondered what those who had traditional lives did with their time all day.
Ultimately, what was important was that we HAD choices; that was what felt so good.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: My first thought was to just call it by its second title – The Vassar Class of ‘65 on the Cusp of Change. Then I thought about calling it Fifties Girls, which didn’t reflect where our lives went, then Midwives, which would have required me to prove how everyone I profiled was a “midwife to change.” That felt limiting.
Finally, I thought about how we all have been making up our lives, without role models, as we went along, and I settled on Making It Up.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Now I am writing memoir pieces that are generated by this stage of my life.
With help, I am taking care of my 97-year-old husband, who is in advanced stages of dementia. Anyone who has been a caregiver will tell you that this is a sad, difficult, taxing role to play, so I have been writing “caregiver chronicles” under an alias, to protect my husband’s privacy, so that I can share my experiences with others in the same circumstances.
Also, as I go through closets and boxes in an effort to unburden myself of “stuff” at this transitional stage, I have been writing memoir based on the things I find and the memories they stir up.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: There are so many stories I didn’t tell. I would like to figure out some way to continue a dialogue—perhaps a blog?—with other women from our age cohort and beyond. What have we learned that we can pass on to future generations of women?
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