<p>I just watched “Uncommon Women & Others” on DVD. One of the major elements of the play is the role “Gracious Living” had in the informal curriculum at Mt. Holyoke in the early 1970s.</p>
<p>“Gracious Living” was a also a part of the plot in “Mona Lisa Smile,” which was set at Wellesley in the mid-1950s.</p>
<p>My qiuestion for Seven Sisters alumnae of a certain age is this: was “Gracious Living” really a part of campus life when you went to college? Did you find it demeaning or helpful?</p>
<p>Gracious living was part of Radcliffe life for my first semester. I remember things like having tea with the head of the dorm. </p>
<p>Afterward, co-education arrived, and all of the attempts at gracious living went down the drain.</p>
<p>Come to think of it, I think that they already had gone down the drain when my class entered (fall, '69). The Radcliffe catalogue that I had gotten when I applied said, “Radcliffe students don’t wear shorts or slacks in the street.” From what I saw even when applying, that rule had been long out of date.</p>
<p>Some of my relatives went to Scripps in the 40s and late 60s/early 70s and have both mentioned gracious living as an aspect of their experience there.</p>
<p>Gracious living was not confined to Seven Sisters. One of my friends attended a Catholic college which forbade the wearing of trousers even in the most severe weather. This was true, too, of a friend who attended the University of Colorado. A native of a tropical country, she said she resorted to wearing 12 pairs of tights!</p>
<p>Gracious living was very much a part of life at Mount Holyoke in the late 1960s, though I believe that’s when it eventually disappeared. (Well, we considered ourselves quite gracious in our own inimitable way!) Each dorm had its own dining room with “napkin boxes” outside the door where we kept our white cloth napkins (napkin rings were quite the thing). “Gracious,” as we called it for short, was Wednesday and Sunday dinners. I don’t look back on the tradition with great fondness. I had to study my behind off at Holyoke, and I didn’t appreciate having to pause and change into dress-up clothes. Many people just skipped Sundays. Until I think my sophomore year, we had to wear skirts to dinner every night, and so I discovered the denim miniskirt. I loved the other social traditions–Friday afternoon tea and late-night “milk and crackers” (now called M&C). </p>
<p>Wendy Wasserstein, who wrote “Uncommon Women” and went on to win a Pulitzer, was one class behind me and was in my dorm one year. I haven’t seen “Uncommon Women” in years, but I remember thinking how well she had portrayed the details. Her early death was a terrible loss. Writing this makes me feel really, really old!</p>
<p>Khipper-
Dumb question- can you clarify what you mean by “gracious living”? I was at a 7 sister school in the 70’s and am not familiar with the term.</p>
<p>Gracious living was alive but on life support at Wellesley in the late 60’s.</p>
<p>It co-existed happily, believe it or not, with the free love/Ms. Magazine/anti-Vietnam war era that was being ushered in at the time.</p>
<p>Gracious living artifacts from my time at Wellesley in the late 1960’s:
Sit down dinner daily. No pants or boots allowed.
Tea in the dorm common room weekly (I almost never attended personally, but it was very popular).
No smoking in “the Vil” (ie, if you walked into town for any purpose).
We had parietal hours (no men in the dorm room except Sunday afternoon; door must be open etc. etc.) But then so did Harvard although a bit more liberal.</p>
<p>Gracious living antidotes co-existing with the above:
We students were our own waitresses for said sit-down dinner. Everyone in the dorm rotated unpaid jobs throughout the term (eg, wait-on; “bells”- ie sitting at the dorm front desk to announce visitors/callers…)
Tea was served in whatever you were wearing - typical would have been jeans/Dr. Scholl’s sandals.
Teach-ins were an everyday occurrence, more or less, in my last year or so.
Parietal hours disappeared during my last year.</p>
<p>The gracious living era was really probably alive and well and not on life support in the 50’s, I’d say.</p>
<p>But then, I’m not <em>that</em> old and I’ll bet geezermom isn’t either ;). It appears we are the two best representatives of the “of a certain age” category here present :D.</p>
<p>“Gracious Living” is what they called it at Mount Holyoke–it may have been called something else in other places. It was a twice-weekly event–Wednesday dinner and Sunday lunch–that involved dressing up (dresses! stockings! heels! clean hair!). I seem to remember candles, maybe tablecloths–someone help me here. It was an event rather than a concept, though it was the concept they were trying to “teach” us. By the late '60s we lost interest. One of the things Wendy Wasserstein’s play does well is show how we were starting to bristle at the assumption that our future would be filled with “gracious” dinners.</p>
<p>This could really get me going. But I’ve got to get back to work–you know, my career. The concept that wasn’t really front and center at women’s colleges in the 1960s. The thing that we expected to do for a few years until we started having children and became intelligent wives who gave “gracious” dinners!</p>
<p>It was fun, wasn’t it? And we were the best! Everyone who came after us should be eternally grateful that we were feisty and contrary. They could still have curfews. :)</p>
<p>Ah yes, geezermom. And the point/counterpoints go on and on. Marches and sit-ins? Check. “Raise right, lower left” (my first training in proper waitressing)? Check. Scruffy jeans found in the laundromat paired with combat boots to coordinate with BF’s sideburns, shoulder-length hair and matching combat boots - for everday wear? Check. Peck and Peck suit with little heels and nylons to coordinate with BF’s navy suit and tie to wear to the Harvard football game? Check.</p>
<p>jmmom-
Too young?? HAHAHA. I haven’t heard that in a long time! Actually, now that you describe it, we had something similar at Vassar. We had tea served in the parlours at 4pm. and demitasse after dinner. When the all college dining center (affectionately known as the ACDC) opened in 1973 or so, 4:00 tea was served only in the Main Parlours, rather than in all of the dorms (lucky me, I lived in Main at that time). The only time I recall a meal with white tablecloths and formal attire is when the Main dining room was going to close. We had a “last dinner in Main” event. Lots of fun. Everyone dressed in formal gowns and tuxes (or suits) for dinner. It was the last time the silverware embossed with the VC logo was going to be used. All I recall is people taking “souvenirs”. I think at one time I had a knife, fork and spoon, as well as a demitasse spoon, but I dont know what became of them. Before you send the CC police after me, please know that the silverware that predated the VC logo’ed silverware (it had “Vassar College” written out in small embossed letters in the handles) ended up in the sandbox at the campus nursery school (for faculty kids)!</p>
<p>By the late 70s at jmmom’s and my alma mater, the only vestige that remained of this was the weekly tea and cookies in the dorm. Everyone came dressed casually, but it was a nice opportunity to see everyone and certainly helped to promote a sense of community within the dorms. They generally had a large turnout, since most people were heading back from classes around then, anyway. As jmmom says, each of us was responsible for taking turns hosting said tea as well as staffing the front desk and fielding the visitors and phone calls. Secret code was : phone call = female, call = male, visitor = female, caller = male!!</p>
<p>Seriously, my freshman year we still had the job assignments you describe above. They included manning (and helping to set up/clear) tea or demitasse. The other jobs included the always disgusting “scrape”, which involved scraping off the leftover food from the plates in the dining room before putting them on the conveyer belt to the dishwasher, and covering the phones for the dorm front desk receptionists (they were called the “white angels” and the cleaning people were the “green ladies” for their uniform colors). These jobs were assigned alphabetically, and lasted a week. My maiden name was at the end of the alphabet, so I never had to do it! That was fortunate, as I would have had a lot of payback due to me. Whenever a friend had “scrape” duty in the dining room, we would usually mush the leftover food into some totally disgusting format (though one time I used noodles, a 1/2 canned pear and a few other things to design a lady on the plate). Oh, by the way, one friend had front desk detail one week (to cover for the white angel). She looked in the drawer of the front desk to discover that the 'white angel" ahd a side job-- she sold undergarments including crotchless underwear!! :eek:</p>
Mercy me. Roshke’s and my school was entirely too gracious for that. I’m sure the delicate morsels of food remaining on any of our plates magically pouffed away, perhaps via a sprinkling of fairy dust. Much in the way that we gracious ladies “glowed” rather than perspire or, heaven forfend, sweat. :D</p>
<p>Yup. Between “scrape” and crotchless underwear, and Jane Fonda riding her motorcycle down the hall (never was sure if that was fact of fiction), Vassar ladies were far from “dainty”.</p>
<p>I should clarify- While "scrape’ was a totally disgusting job and nobody wanted it, at least the school had the decency, at the time, to have individual diningrooms in each of the dorms. So, you were not having to clear plates for more than perhaps 200 or so students (depending on the dorm and the size of the dining room). Still gross, though. Yuk ptooey.</p>
<p>Mount Holyoke continued to have “Gracious Dining” into the late 1970’s. At that time it was only once or twice a month. Most students dressed a little nicer, the meal was a little better, and it was usually served by candlelight. Faculty were frequently invited by students to this meal (although they were invited to, and attended, other meals throughout the month.)</p>
<p>Most dorms still had the cubbies at the entry to the dining hall that had held the cloth napkins…but they were no longer used for napkins!</p>
<p>Friday “tea” still took place, but it wasn’t formal most of the time…more like a “snack”. “Milk and cookies” were put out every night (all dorms had their own dining halls)…again, not formal but a unique part of attending MHC.</p>
<p>When I was at Williams ('67-'71), in my first year, there was still sit-down, jacket and tie dinner four nights a week. (I had to wait on my roommate in a little white coat - that lasted a total of three weeks.) It went to once a week in my upper class years - I wore a turtleneck, with a a 45 of “The Eve of Destruction” attached to a thong hung around my neck in lieu of a tie.</p>
<p>My first love at Smith had a Harley. After her first term, the school told her that either the Harley went or she did. So she did.</p>
