Generally Speaking Read Online Free Page A

and a sorority sister in Kappa Delta, Marilyn Gates.
    “What are you going to do this summer, Marilyn?”
    “I guess I'll work at TG&Y,” she said unenthusiastically, naming a local drugstore, “just like always.”
    I showed her the WAC College Junior Program brochure. “If you'll do it, I'll do it.”
    “I think that would be neat,” she said.
    Now I was committed.
    I had to obtain faculty references to complete my application. When I approached one of my science professors, he wasn't very receptive. “I don't approve of the military,” he honestly admitted. “But I do believe it's important for women to work. Have you read Betty Friedan's book
The Feminine Mystique?
”
    “I've never even heard of her.”
    “I think you ought to read the book.”
    I did, and found it very courageous for Betty Friedan to say out loud what many thought but were unable to put into words, that it simply was not enough for a woman to devote her life to being a wife and a mother. Every argument she made was not only rational, but captured the sense of what is the essential struggle in our lives, the two competing demands of family and work. I grasped her viewpoint instinctively—as did countless millions of other young American women over the coming decades. We were not inherently less capable or ambitious than the boys and young men we had grown up with. But until Betty Friedan spoke out, women as a group were simply expected to truncate their lives due to their gender, not fulfill their individual talents or aspirations.
    I did not join feminist demonstrations after reading
The Feminine Mystique,
but the book did open my eyes to much wider perspectives, and I was glad to discover a description for my political viewpoint.
    Before I left for the College Junior Program that summer, my father offered advice on what would be expected of me in Army training. He had recently returned from Vietnam, and I think he was both proud of and puzzled by my decision to explore the Army. “Work as a team. Organize your time. Memorize your serial number,” he said.
    Marilyn Gates and I arrived at Fort McClellan in my 1962 Ford Fairlane on a steamy July afternoon. Our milling formation of college juniors was greeted by a no-nonsense contingent of steely-eyed WAC sergeants in sharply pressed Army green cord uniforms, skirts exactly one inch below the middle of the knee, nylon stockings despite the wilting heat, and highly polished black, low-heel shoes.
    As the group was broken into platoon-size clumps, Marilyn and I were separated. “Don't say ‘ma'am’ to corporals or sergeants,” I advised her. “Don't say much at all.”
    But my advice proved unnecessary. She too was a soldier's daughter. Her father had fought in the Philippines early in World War II and had survived the Bataan Death March and almost four years of brutal Japanese captivity as a prisoner of war. Yet meeting Mr. Gates, who was a soft-spoken family man, you never would have guessed his courage. Marilyn had obviously absorbed some of his resilience. She did much better that summer than I did.
    I found some of the program, particularly the unbending discipline, to be rather tedious. We lived in cinder block enlisted barracks, three women to a partitioned space, each with her own dresser. Those dresser drawers had to be set up in
exact
order, with shorts and blouses folded a certain number of inches apart, toothbrush and toothpaste tube set in the identical positions as illustrated in the manual we were issued. And another requirement was the girdle display. Every woman had to have her girdle laid out in her drawer for daily inspection. At the time I weighed ninety-nine pounds, less than the skinny British model Twiggy, and I certainly did not wear a girdle. But my girdle was perfectly aligned in my drawer and that made my platoon leader happy.
    A few of the homesick young women were miserable and cried for days. They experienced the shouted corrections of the drill instructors as