I never heard a word about sex from the nuns. I learned that clunker about patent-leather shoes reflecting up from a fat girl who had older sisters when both of us were in fifth grade. There were only two kinds of men I ever saw the sisters with: the priests, upon whom they danced attendance with an air both deferential and slightly flirtatious, and our fathers, who were either hangdog and very proper, or embarrassingly jovial and jokey. I know now that the sisters were in masculine thrall, both to Rome and to various philanthropists, relying on one for the rules by which they lived and the other for the money and the clothes and the house in which to do the living. But it seemed to me that they took good care of themselves.
I always thought the nuns were somehow sterner and less warm with the boys than with the girls, although my husband says he had a teacher who thought the girls were second-rate because they could never become priests. And there was always one—I remember mine as vividly as if she were glaring over the top of this page, hissing, “Miss Quindlen, is that you whispering in the back of my classroom?”—who was mean and angry and sadistic. But most of them were like Sister Mary Luke, tall, pale, her enfolding embrace exaggerated by her uniform capelet, who was wonderful with playground spills and played a mean game of volleyball; or Mother Mary Ephrem, who made me learn a new, arcane word from the dictionary every day of eighth grade so that someday I would be doing precisely what I am doing now.
I remember the sisters running down a hockey field or out on the polished wood of the basketball court, driving or dribbling, their voluminous skirts held up by huge safety pins that they always kept pinned to their bodices. I was amazed to hear from other girls that athletics were only for boys; a Catholic schoolgirl learns sports, led by a nun.
Above all it seemed to me that the nuns who taught us had their own lives—much more so than my mother, who was parceled out to many others, our family’s community property. I always pictured the sisters, each with a cool white bedroom in the top reaches of their stone house, no rug on the floor, a crucifix over the bed, books on the bureau. One of my most enduring memories is the last day of school each year, when we would fly down the street and they would stand on the steps and wave, waiting until the last child was gone before turning back and readying the classrooms for their long rest. I never saw the nuns during the summer months. I always wondered if they went swimming, and, if so, what they wore. I imagined this community of capable women gathered at a beach house somewhere, in white habits instead of their workaday black, playing volleyball, batting the ball back and forth over the net, their ankles flashing.
KEEPING THE FAITH
The first year I was in Catholic school there were, on the long wall of the convent parlor, portraits of two men in rococo gilt frames. One was an imagined rendering of Jesus Christ, wearing a gold robe. The other was a color photograph of a rather dour man in much more elaborate garments, wearing the sort of austere rimless glasses that would later be affected by rock-and-roll musicians and college students. This was Pope Pius XII, who from his likeness appeared to be stern and unapproachable. We knew that he was the closest thing we had to God on earth at the time.
John Paul II seems to me, in face and in fact, to be a man warmer and more human than that predecessor of his, four popes ago. But that is not why I think of him as a man rather than a near-deity. I have changed since the afternoons I spent in the convent parlor, and so has the faith in which I was raised. I find my religion within my heart, not within the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church.
When the Pope was here in 1979 and I covered the occasion, I found myself unaccountably moved by his visit despite the fact that I felt his influence in my life was negligible. It is the same way I felt the last time I saw the White House: deeply aware of a long and venerable history of which I am one tiny part, despite the fact that the person who leads the historical tradition at this moment is someone whose deepest beliefs are at odds with my own.
We have had an odd history, the people of my generation. When we were children, sexual mores were one way, and now they are another. National feeling was one way, and now it is another. Sexual politics were one way, and now they are another.
For those of us who grew up Catholic, the change has been similar. When we were young, the convents and seminaries were full. Now it is difficult to find young men and women with religious vocations. The Mass was said in Latin. Now, of course, in this country it is in English. Our lives were filled with a host of rules, regulations, and religious formulas. Most of them are gone. So are many of the parishioners. On Easter in our parish church the priest walked to the altar, looked out over the aisles crammed with people of all ages, and said wryly, “You know, we have this Mass every Sunday.” At Communion, the little children, those too young to receive the sacrament, were called up to the altar rail for the first time in their lives, to be given a cookie in the shape of the Paschal lamb. There was the tragedy: What if they finally had a church that knew how to care for its people, and nobody came?
Many of my friends have fled a Catholicism that, for some of us, no longer exists. It happens to be a Catholicism they see embodied in this Pope and his pronouncements on such matters as birth control, the ordination of women, and homosexuality. It is a Catholicism of “Thou shalt not.” I know it still exists much below the hierarchy. The last time I wrote a column about being a Catholic, I got lots of hard, mean, judgmental letters from people who said “Oh no, you’re not,” people anxious to exclude rather than include, people who seemed ignorant of the commandment I was taught was the greatest of all. Love one another.
For Catholics of my age, the central event of our maturation was the collection of changes and modifications now generally known as Vatican II. The central figure was John XXIII, who was to our religion what John Kennedy was to our government. That Pope changed our lives, and not just because the rites of the church were now in the language of the schoolyard. It was because what John XXIII seemed to be saying was that the spirit of the law was more important than the letter. That to be kind and considerate was more important than keeping your mantilla on. That to do good was as important as to do penance. It was the Catholicism of “Father, forgive them.” That is the faith in which I have remained. It is one in which the messages of your heart and your conscience take precedence over messages from Rome. Those who still shun the judgmental and authoritarian Catholicism that they are convinced triumphed over the changes of Vatican II are skeptical, particularly now, with a charismatic and deeply intellectual Pope who condemns in vitro fertilization and welcomes Kurt Wald-heim. But in a quiet, steady, almost sub rosa way others are following their hearts. Several recent polls show that the vast majority of Catholics believe they can be true to their faith while disagreeing with its earthly leader.
I have thought several times this week of an incident that took place ten years ago. My fiancé and I went to Cana conferences, the sessions that prepare young Catholics for marriage within the church. They were conducted by a priest we both knew well and loved. I was nervous, because we were living together, using birth control, but especially because I was not sure that I ever wanted to have children, and knew that he would be bound to ask about that. When he did, I could tell by his face that he had seen something click shut in mine. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Let me put it this way. Have you totally ruled out having children?” Both of us immediately leapt in: Oh, no, Father, no; absolutely not.
He knew my doubt about doing something which is absolutely essential to the spirit of Catholic matrimony. But he knew, too, a little something about the human spirit, and about trying to look beyond people’s words into their hearts. He would have been perfectly justified in asking that question exactly the way it was meant to be asked, and, given the equivocal answer I was likely to give, to refuse to marry us. He could have considered us unfit according to the letter of the law. But according to its spirit he knew we were good people, who would try to be good to others. He knew it, too, on the days he baptized our two chi
ldren.
TAKING
A
STAND
FEMINIST
I would like to say that I became a feminist to make the world better for women everywhere, but in truth it was to make the world better for me. This was almost twenty years ago, and altruism was not my strong suit; to paraphrase Rhett Butler, the only cause I believed in was me. Nor was I struck by the rank injustice of sex discrimination. It just seemed like men got all the good stuff.
I grew up in a city run by men, in a church run by men, in a household run by a man. Men had comfortable shoes, a life outside the home, and money in their wallets. Women had children, who are wonderful but not sufficient unto themselves, at least for me. The best job you could get as a woman then involved a lifetime vow of chastity, which was not my thing. I figured either life was going to be considerably different for me than it was for my mother, or I was going to be angry all the time. I jumped on the bandwagon. I’ve never gotten off.
As I watched the convention of the National Organization for Women on television the other night, I realized my only real political identification has been with womens’ rights. It is the only cause I have ever believed in that has improved the world. Life for many women is not the same as it was when I was young, and I do not believe it will ever be so again. I do not believe that ever again will there be a handful of token women in the graduating class at Harvard Law School. I do not believe that ever again will there be a handful of female New York City police officers.
Change is exceedingly slow, but somehow sure. My friend the female rabbi still meets up with the occasional father of the bride who will not pay for the wedding if she officiates. To write that sentence alone is a measure of the shock of the new, and the stubborn strength of the old. On the one hand, the father of the bride and his wallet. On the other, a rabbi who is a woman.
I went to a women’s college. Not long ago I was asked what it was like. At the time I was speaking at a college that until 1969 had been all-male and fiercely proud to be so. I said it was a little like learning to swim while holding on to the side of the pool; I didn’t learn the arm movements until after I graduated, but by that time I was one hell of a kicker.
When I began school there were still marks on the university buildings made by student demonstrators. Perhaps that was why some of us were happy to view our own feminism as a liberal and not a radical political movement. A liberal movement is precisely what we got. We were permitted limited access to the world of men provided that to some considerable extent we mimicked their behavior but did not totally alter our own.
I suppose we sometimes feel disappointed with our circumstances today because now that the liberal movement has taken place, now that women are performing cardiac surgery and becoming members of the welders’ unions, it has become clearer than ever that what we really needed was a radical movement. We have given the word an ominous connotation, but in fact it means only a root change. We needed a root change in the way things work: in the way everyone approached work, in the way everyone approached the care of children, in the way everyone, male and female, approached the balance of life and work and obligations and inclinations. I do not think this really came about.
Everyone now accepts that men, too, can cry, but women still often have more reason to. “We must fight for parental leaves for mothers and fathers,” one feminist told me, and I knew she was right, except that I didn’t know many men who were going to take paternity leaves if they were offered. I suppose we must fight to raise sons who will take them.
We still find ourselves dependent on the kindness of strangers, from Supreme Court justices to husbands and lovers. I do not believe that we are likely to go back to a time when patients refuse to be treated by female doctors, but I think we could go back to a time when doctors of both sexes are forbidden by law to perform abortions. I think that institutions run by men, with a sprinkling of women in high places, may begin to feel self-congratulatory and less enthusiastic about hiring and promotion efforts about which they have always been ambivalent.
It is difficult to communicate some of the terror of this to young women who have grown up with a sense of entitlement, who were born in the year in which a bin was filled with undergarments on the Atlantic City boardwalk in protest of the Miss America pageant, who grew up knowing that they could go to Princeton or rabbinical school or the moon if they worked at it hard enough, who have never been asked how fast they typed.
Some have told me that they do not think of themselves as feminists, that they are a generation of individualists who do not align themselves with a group cause, particularly one which represents battles they believe have been largely won.
Perhaps it was a particularly female thing about me, but I did not feel qualified, when I was young, to be an individualist. I felt that by birth I was part of a group, and that the signal hallmark of that group was that they were denied access to money and power by virtue of biology. That seemed overwhelming to me at seventeen, and it seemed to present me with two choices. One was to distinguish myself from other women. The other was to stand up for the rights of women as a group. I wasn’t capable of going it alone. Luckily, I didn’t have to. I had my sisters.
DIRTY BOOK
I remember with great clarity the afternoon my mother, an exceedingly gentle soul, hurled the current best seller across the living room with such force that it bounced off the wall opposite. “It’s a dirty book,” she said, nostrils flaring, as she saw my face, and she stomped off into the kitchen. It was some measure of how rattled she was that she left the book itself, its yellow jacket a bright blot on the carpet, in the same room with a teenager whose paperback copy of The Group fell open automatically to Dottie’s deflowering.
The book was Portnoy’s Complaint, and I thought it was wonderful. I understood what my mother meant—the breaks in the binding indicated that she had pitched the book just at the pivotal liver scene—but it seemed to me that the sex was so central to, so much a part of the extraordinary humor and tone that to be offended by it was beside the point. I tried to tell her this, but she could not be persuaded. And so I came to see vividly that reasonable people could disagree about whether something was obscene.
Naturally, this came to mind when the commission headed by Attorney General Edwin Meese III released its report on pornography. But I had thought of it many times before, because, of all the areas in which generations are divided from one another, the subject of sex is the one where they are least likely to meet. My grandmother once caused a great stir on the beach at Atlantic City because she and her best friend were among the first to venture forth on the sand wearing one-piece bathing suits instead of the bloomers and skirts and overblouses that were then the norm. I, on the other hand, had to decide on my honeymoon whether to be the only person on a Caribbean island wearing the top to my bikini. It is inevitable that we two would have disparate views about the propriety and obscenity of displaying the nude human body. This is not because my grandmother is old-fashioned and I am modern—I sometimes think my grandmother is about as old-fashioned as the Concorde—but simply because of the disparate climates in which we learned about, became accustomed to, and made our personal peace with sex.
And so I was in part distressed about the Meese commission because it did not seem very much like a jury of my peers. Mostly, of course, I didn’t like the idea of a jury of any sort. The commission seemed to spend a lot of time talking about sex with children, torture, and rape, which seem to me things that all reasonable people, regardless of their ages, agree are wrong. I’m under the impression that there are laws having nothing to do with pornography that make such acts illegal whenever they are performed. But reasonable people can surely disagree about some of the other material the commission examined: skin magazines, X-rated movies, the kind of material that most people my age have been exposed to over and over again.
The idea of outlawing pornography makes me remember the box spring and the mattress. I don’t know wh
en it was that parents decided that the space between the two was a good place to put their so-called dirty books—which in most cases were marriage manuals and the odd copy of Tropic of Cancer—but it was a good place for curious kids; we all knew just where to find them. In my home, the marriage manuals, or whatever you call The Joy of Sex, will stay on the shelf and off the box spring. After all, while my mother’s mother told her nothing about sex, and my mother told me the basics when I was ten (which I gather from my friends made her something of a pioneer), on some days it seems as if I will have to tell my almost-three-year-old the facts of life in the next fifteen minutes.
Will the illustrations in The Joy of Sex titillate my sons when they are in their early teens? Probably. (My recollection of teenage boys is that they can get worked up over women’s underwear flapping on a clothesline.) Is it pornography? Of course not. Would it have been so classified when my mother was a girl? Without a doubt.
Mores change. Fifteen years ago my father, like lots of others, said that if a daughter of his lived in sin before she was married, she’d be off his Thanksgiving dinner list. Today, he says he thinks cohabitation is sometimes a good preparation for a lifetime together. Fifteen years ago, I thought Playboy was pretty lewd. Now, I think the centerfolds are simply silly, and that all those women miming sexual ecstasy in bizarre undergarments succeed only in looking as if they have bad colds. And nearly fifteen years ago I saw my first pornographic movie. I was twenty-one, and a city editor with an odd sense of humor sent me to sit through Deep Throat with a judge who was ruling on some obscenity issue. I thought the judge was going to have a stroke when he saw, not Linda Lovelace, but me watching Linda Lovelace.