My High School Classmates at Louisville Collegiate School
For my girls’ high school, “coming out” in the summer after Freshman year in college was recognized as an important—even essential—rite of passage, ushering seventeen- and eighteen-year-old girls into the exciting and terrifying realm of adulthood. The long white dresses were often wedding dresses, symbolizing the British tradition of “coming out” as signaling that a girl was now open to receiving proposals of marriage, and indeed many of these young women married a few years later, often after graduating from college. But the rigorous conventionality of the British tradition, imported whole cloth into our new world, did not prevent all kinds of earlier, later and less expected unions; we were about to go into a period when all rituals would be questioned and many would be disposed of. But even today, this tradition, began in this country in 1813, continues, even more elaborately in New York’s International Debutante Ball but also in many cities, especially in the south.
I dreaded taking part in what seemed to me an elaborate popularity contest I was unlikely to win which demanded attendance at endless lunches, teas and dinners leading up to the ball itself. But I knew better than to try to win the battle with that feeble weapon, and so I explained my reluctance as being an unasked for and unrecognized bid to support the one Jewish girl in my class who would not be able to attend the ball at the Louisville Country Club, still years away from accepting Jews as members and even further away from accepting African Americans. I knew how important inclusion was to my parents, at least in theory, and so although my mother was horrified by my determination—”But what will you do all summer?” she asked—she had no way to combat me and so my decision was made. I would find out years later that two other of my classmates didn’t make their debuts and someday I would like to find out why.
So no lunches, teas, dinners or dances for me, to my relief but also my regret, for there was an undeniable glamor in all the dressing up, telephoning, conferring about dates, staying up way past midnight, going to swim somewhere and staying out till dawn—and so forth. My mother forced one concession: I would not be able to avoid dancing in the Richmond German, her hometown’s equivalent. This meant learning a kind of antique square dance, performed in a gilded Richmond ballroom; my date was a terrifying gentleman who seemed a thousand years old and was not pleased with my clumsy imitation of his steps.
The question, “What are you going to do all summer?” still had to be answered, and my father supplied the only one: I went to eastern Kentucky to serve as an unpaid aid to the Frontier Nursing Service (which I’ve written about previously, here and here). Since none of the five or six girl volunteers had any medical training, we were certainly not going to accompany the British midwives on their rounds—this was when the AMA banned training midwives in this country. And so I cleaned out stalls, scrubbed tact, fed the dozen or so horses, and wondered if making a debut might have been more fun.
It might have been, but working for the FNS showed me a world I had never even imagined of white poverty and resilience. Bootleggers thrived in those remote “hollers” and federal agents were suspected of nosing around. When we went riding, we were warned to sing so the bootleggers would know we were females and would not shoot us. Ball gowns and parties seemed trivial by comparison.
And my rebellion, uncomfortable as it was—for my classmates were my closest friends—also signaled my leaving the South, going to college, settling in the Northeast and marrying a man my mother’s friends identified, with horror, as a Yankee, publishing my first books and trying without success to abolish my accent.
But every now and then when I visit Kentucky in the late spring, the smell of lush, freshly cut grass on all those lawns reminds me of what I chose against, and of the price I paid.
One of my favorite of your posts.
I wonder about the young ladies such as you and me – Collegiate girls – who rejected the silly insulting patriarchal debut ritual? But I totally feel you when you grieve the lost fun. I was the only girl in the class of ’77 to decline the invite. The FNS internship was so much more interesting I suspect! Sorry you still had to dance in Richmond. I live in Boston and it’s impossible to describe the South’s white aristocracy and its pretensions sometimes. I’m guessing not much has changed, really.
I also attended Collegiate and was raised not far from your home. I, too, also chose not to participate in the debutante follies, as so many young women of my age and upbringing did in the 1960’s. Somehow I knew my life would be so different. I ended up marrying at 23 to a man from Leslie County, moving there and living many happy years (almost 30 yrs.) among the wonderful mountain people of southeastern Ky. At first I felt as if I were in a third world country with almost a different language and few of the amenities my comfortable life had previously afforded me and that I had taken for granted. But I was young with an adventuresome spirit and eagerly learned how to be self sufficient while living the simple life of the mountain folk, enjoying it. Having been inspired by the medical care and attention of the nurse midwives and family nurse practitioners of the Frontier Nursing Service, I also became a women’s healthcare nurse practitioner and worked at FNS for many years. Then later with a seven county district health department, those counties being among the poorest in the nation. Since my retirement, I now live in the bluegrass but my heart will always be among those mountains and wonderful people who taught me so much.