The Imperatives of Class

HARVARD SEEMS TO HOLD an odd fascination for Harper's. This month, the magazine has followed last year's much-vaunted "Harvard on the Way Down?" by Nelson Aldrich with an article on Radcliffe by Diana Trilling, called "Daughters of the Middle Class." Although the coincidence is probably accidental, Trilling's title underlines Harper's probable reasons for giving so much space to an institution whose internal evolution cannot concern a particularly large audience: Harper's is geared to the educated middle class of the Northeast, and its readers include enough alumni to make such articles profitable.

Excerpted from her forthcoming book--which received a fair amount of publicity last year when Little Brown refused to publish Trilling's charges against Lillian Hellman, forcing the author to seek another publisher--Trilling's essay is rather more thought-provoking than Aldrich's piece, which merely decried the decline of the Harvard tradition and the old-boy network. Trilling compares the Radcliffe undergraduates she met here in 1971, when she spent several months in Briggs Hall, to thz women she went to school with in the '20s, and concludes that, despite their obvious external differences, the two groups are relatively similar in their approach to their education. In both cases, she suggests, they accept their education not as preparation for a career, but as an enjoyable and interesting prelude to babysitting, a privilege accorded them by their middle class status.

The college's role in society has changed radically since the '20s, of course. Now, as Trilling points out, the educational system is perceived as a mechanism for "making restitution to the minorities for the deprivations and injustices they suffered in the evolution of the American middle class," rather than the stronghold of that upper class it served as in the '20s. As Aldrich pointed out in Harper's last Harvard overview, Harvard and Radcliffe now serve as steps to middle class status, rather than as the stomping grounds for those who already hold it. Nevertheless, Trilling argues convincingly that the dominant values at Harvard are those of the middle class, and if the admissions procedure has changed a great deal, the final product has not.

And one of the marks of the middle class has long been the relegation of the woman to the home, as a sign that her income is not needed for the family's welfare. So Trilling argues in her rather tortured prose,

For the majority of present-day middle-class students at Radcliffe, and at 'Harvard as well, their current concern for the black and the poor and their wish for a fundamental social renovation will all too soon yield to the sterner imperatives of class, their own class: such, in my view, is the inevitability of historical process. And this generally regressive impulse will include a return of young women to the sexual role determined in their middle-class origins, that of woman's emotional submission to men, a submission most readily made manifest in economic abdication.

Just as she and her classmates found themselves incapable of fighting their socialization, she argues, so will most modern Radcliffe undergraduates wind up without careers; and like the graduates of the '20s, the graduates of the '70s will leave college "to quote Shelley and Keats at the kitchen sink."

Certainly Trilling's prediction about the "fundamental social renovation" does not seem far off-base; in the five years since she wrote the article, the imperatives of class would seem already to have eliminated the anti-establishment activities that threatened the establishment at the time she wrote. What of her prediction for Radcliffe--or whatever one calls women at Harvard--undergraduates? One of her most telling criticisms of most women at Radcliffe is that they rarely put their education into an economic framework; that is, they choose courses and concentrations not by their subject's relevance to modern life, but by inherent interest; they see their education as a dabbling in the liberal arts, rather than as Preparation for a career. And when they leave, Trilling argues, Radcliffe's graduates are far less qualified to seek jobs than their male counterparts, who, impelled by their class imperatives, have chosen courses with an eye to the future.

Of course, when Trilling met her undergraduates of the '70s Harvard had not yet adopted equal access admissions, nor had Radcliffe changed the scholarship policies that for so long have kept the income brackets of Radcliffe students higher than those of Harvard's. Both those changes may have the effects Trilling seeks in her suggestion that only the Colleges admit students "solely on the strength of a students's intention to be a wage-earner." Trilling's suggestion seems somewhat ill-considered, as it would--and she admits this--inevitably reduce the number of women at Harvard, even though it would insure that those who did go here would make full use of their education. Equal access and a more generous scholarship program seem more likely to deal with the root of the problem Trilling has identified: the middle-class socialization that keeps coming back to haunt Radcliffe's alumnae, as they continue to treat their education as a privilege of the upper class rather than as vocational training.

And there is one more difference between the graduates of the '20s and those of the '70s that Trilling has forgotten to consider. While women could go on to careers in the '20s and '30s, that step meant they had little hope of having families at all. And many fields were closed to them entirely, so that even if they ventured beyond the home, they had little prospect of success.

But this situation is changing, slowly; and it would be only natural if it took some time before the socialization of little girls of the middle class changes in response. Trilling's final note of despair--"If one of our outstanding women's colleges can do not better than to encourage such flaccid sentimental idealism...What chance, I wonder, have we for a female social force equal to the stupendous task of claiming a full citizenship for the second sex?"--seems overly pessimistic. On its own, Radcliffe can do very little to determine the kind of education its students seek; it could force women into marketable areas, but that would not alter their post-graduate life. It is up to the women themselves to fight their socialization.

Which is why Harper's preoccupation with Harvard all seems a little silly. Harvard and Radcliffe are only symbols to most of middle class America, and if the Colleges change, it is only because their society changes first. For Trilling, the subject matter--Radcliffe undergraduates in 1971--was appropriate: it was her alma mater 50 years later. For Harper's, well, the choice of articles is rather more questionable.