A Girly Girl Who Gets Things Done

I did my nails to match the spring flowers.

Reading Mark Judge has gotten me thinking again about gender roles, conforming and not conforming, and how I managed to go to college in an era so PC that men did not pay for dates.

I went to Yale from 1992 - 1996. I had a wonderful time there. It was much easier than my high school, Interlochen Arts Academy, whose motto was “Do more in less time.”

The first thing I did was to join the Yale Political Union. The YPU was a debating society of sorts, with (back then) five parties, in left to right order: Liberal, Independent, Progressive, Tory, and the Party of the Right. I joined the Libs my first day at Yale, and gave my first speech (or as the Tories or POR folks would say, “maiden speech”) the first week of school, and by the end of the week was dating the President. I don’t waste time.

The Yale Political Union taught me more about organizing than any activism ever did. There’s a good reason for that. All of the politicking in the YPU is actually about nothing. There are no real issues, just silly ones that come up every year in set piece battles that are fought with all the ceremony of a jousting competition. For example, every spring there is a vote on whether or not there will be a moment of silence for Charles I of England, to whom the Party of the Right refers as “Charles the Martyr.” It is the duty of the Liberal Party leadership to make sure this motion does not pass. Why? Cause the YPU. It’s like asking why cats take breaks in fights to groom themselves. Because cat.

Elections are dead serious in the YPU, and I was ambitious. I was the most successful Chief Whip in memory, qualifying 100 people to vote in YPU elections. I led a very successful “drag,” the YPU term for Get Out the Vote. I ran for Chair (we no longer used the word Chairman) at the end of my freshman year (I am just now remembering that at Yale in the nineties we called freshmen “frosh.”), which was unusual though not unheard of. A first semester sophomore was not the norm as Chair, usually it was a first semester junior. But I liked climbing ladders and I liked climbing them fast.

A man who had not been particularly involved in the Libs ran against me. No one saw that coming - it had been almost a foregone conclusion that I would run unopposed. But quite a few people, as it turned out, had some problems with my style. No one argued with my record of successful work or with anything whatsoever about the views I expressed in weekly Lib debates. I had a perfect attendance record at everything and ran the most efficient ship anyone had ever seen as Chief Whip. But you know, style is everything when people don’t have anything else to complain about.

During the campaign, a rumor began to spread that I was cheating on my Liberal Party former chair, former President of the Political Union boyfriend with a young man from the Party of the Right. Oh, the scandal. We were seen by well-informed spies who must have been lurking outside my window drinking Diet Dr. Pepper together in my dorm room. Diet Dr. Pepper! My then-boyfriend (who is one of the most honorable men I’ve ever met) stood by me, but a lot of people, including my boyfriend’s vice-president at the PU, jumped on the anti-April bandwagon.

“April is too open about her sexuality,” they claimed.

What the hell does that mean? I dressed conservatively, but definitely in a feminine way. I never attended a YPU meeting in anything other than a dress and heels. I had not yet learned to get my nails done then, but I wore my hair long. In the nineties at Yale, these things were not necessarily a sign of depravity, but they were enough to qualify me as a slut in some people’s books.

It was my first real experience of slut-shaming, and I had a microscopic list of ex-lovers at the time: one boyfriend from high school. My sin wasn’t sleeping around, or dressing sexy (I could wear any of those dresses to a business meeting and no one would bat an eye), it was being ambitious and feminine.

I won the Chair’s race, which took six hours as the Libs used to decide things by consensus, so they had to argue until everyone agreed or died. In the middle of that long night (elections went on all night), I got to be good friends with the man who was running against me. He had been recruited to do it, and as it turns out he had no grudge against me at all. By the time we were brought back into the room to find out the results, the person who came to get us asked if either of us had decided we didn’t want it anymore. One of my good friends was crying. The insults and character attacks had been bad.

I had a weird kind of PTSD after that, but I had a great semester as Chair. I dated that guy from the Party of the Right, gave my maiden speech on the floor of the POR, where there was an open bar at every meeting. “Get the lady a drink!” someone barked as soon as I walked in. I loved the formality, the graciousness, and the fact that people could quote philosophers. My boyfriend was a huge fan of Wittgenstein.

We didn’t last all that long, as no one does in college, and I moved on to date a former Chair of the Tory Party who was up at Harvard Law by that time. Some weekends I would ride up with the woman who is now his wife to visit him and his roommate, whom she was dating. I learned to eat Ethiopian food in Boston and hung out with rich people. All of them have turned out well, have fabulous careers and beautiful children.

The reason I am now remembering it all is that it was the Left, not the Right, that piled on to slut-shame me. The right was made up of way more men than women, but had quite a few female Chairmen, who were all treated with the extreme respect and deference that the men got.

The folks on the Right tried to get me to run for Yale Political Union President the semester after I was Chair. I was hell bent on retiring, but they were desperate to stop the Independent party hack who was running. They even wrote a song about it, to the tune of “Who’ll Stop the Rain?”

“Then we went to April Smith, the Liberal Party Chair.

She qualled a hundred people, and Joe thought she was fair.

But she said, ‘No way man, this job you can’t sell’

So I wonder, still I wonder, who’ll stop (insert last name of the guy running, which rhymes with sell)”

I retired from the YPU and got into computers, a strange and odd quest that even at the time I recognized as an attempt to get away from personal judgments about me. The computer doesn’t care if you’re a man or a woman, your program either runs or it doesn’t.

It would be another seven years before I got caught up in that kind of attack again, a story for another day, but my feminine style continued to rub the Lefties of Yale the wrong way. When I got involved with the Student Labor Action Coalition, defending Yale’s unionized workers, I was the only girl who wore skirts sometimes. My lefty boyfriend told me I should stop shaving my legs because it wasn’t feminist. I stopped for about two days and then gave up on pleasing him at the expense of feeling scratchy all the time. Years later, my trust-fund anarchist boyfriend, who I met during the aftermath of the 2000 protests at the Republican National Convention, told me that I should try to make myself less attractive because it made the other women feel bad. He proceeded to cheat on me with one of the other women, which was meant to cheer her up I suppose.

These things get easier with age. I am no longer accused of sleeping my way to the top, perhaps because I work in a company that is almost all female and the founders are already married to each other. I still get things done, a record number of them I’m told. I’m in a research and education role now, not a leadership one, so metaphorical loaded guns aren’t pointed at me much anymore.

When I was in an executive job for many years, I wore suits and heels and got my nails done. I was fortunate enough to be the Director of Organizing for a nurses’ union, and nurses, at least in Pennsylvania, are not a particularly hippie-dressing bunch. I got to be what they wanted me to be: a strong, well-put together woman who could take on the rich bosses in style. Young organizers often balked at our strict professional dress code, but I would explain that we had to look and act more professional than the boss if we were to gain any credibility. I had always wanted to change the world in high heels, and for a long time I could.

I am missing things these days… being up on stage to give speeches and presentations, wearing heels and Ann Taylor dresses, being around smart men who do what they do well. I’ve always been a girly girl with a lot of male seeming energy. I get to the point, get things done, and get on with it. I’m not much for talking about feelings or sharing the little confidences that tend to be the currency in female environments. Life is comfortable, but I sometimes feel like Baby in the last scene of Dirty Dancing, sitting off in the corner table.

Waiting for someone to say, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”