Word: schumer
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...like almost all college experiences, the angst had its redeeming qualities: "True we were jealous maniacs and looked at each other's accomplishments as part of a zero-sum game: You win, I lose," Schumer writes. "But it was because of the turmoil we were in that our friendships during that period were so rich and intense...
...some extent still typify the college experience--throwing off the values of one's parents and defining one's own, trying to outdo one another in radical political jargon, experimental binges of drugs, sex and sleep--assumed and added dimension for women in the early 1970s. "Five years earlier," Schumer writes, "men had been required to wear jackets and ties in the dining halls, and women weren't allowed in the undergraduate library in Harvard Yard. Now mattresses were pushed together on the floors and even the toilets were co-ed....What an anachronism the Radcliffe dorms now seemed, with...
...strength of the book, though, lies in the second section, in Schumer's chapters on each of six women, the "most likely to succeed" from her class. Most "succeeded" by Harvard's definition, yet all struggled with the conflicting expectations of marriage, career, family and personal fulfillment...
...QUESTION that Schumer leaves underdeveloped is how the women's college experiences influenced, for good or bad, their choices and priorities later in life. Each left college believing she could balance marriage, family and a high-powered career. But the shattering of the Supermom ideal hardly is a new or exclusively Radcliffe phenomenon...
...Schumer impressively chronicles the post-graduate live of her characters, and their psyches and adventures make the second half of the book a pageturner. But there is a disjunction between the book's first half--the crazy, angst-ridden college years--and the second half, in which the women seem to have come into their own. How did the first half of the book inform the second? Given Schumer's format, this should be a central question, yet the links are rarely more than implied...