![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Written a few years before Vassar started admitting male students in 1969, McCarthy delivers a nuanced satire of her classmates (she was Vassar ’33, just like her characters), while skewering a culture that expected them to educate themselves for society before returning to lives as docile wives and mothers. My copy is a battered Signet paperback that belonged to my mother, with eight daisies on the cover representing the eight Vassar College graduates characterized in its pages as they leave school and seek out husbands, careers, families, and lovers. Published in 1963, The Group by Mary McCarthy was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years, but scarcely anyone younger than sixty has heard of it now. I’d come out as bisexual while dating a boy my senior year, and it felt like if I didn’t get to a place full of women, I might never get farther than that. To me, someone who’d grown up a girl in rural upstate New York running track and feeling more than a little confused about sexuality and gender, the different agenda of a women’s college seemed radical. The first time I read The Group, I was a woman waiting to go to a women’s college. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |