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Reunion: The Girls We Used to Be, the Women We Became
by Elizabeth Fishel
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Random House (2000-03-07)
ISBN: 0679449833
EAN: 9780679449836
Dewey Decimal #: 373.7471
Hardcover: 304 pages
Release Date: 2000-03-07
SKU: 20266
Condition: Used: Very Good
Comments: Hardcover. Dust Jacket Condition: good. All pages clean and unmarked.
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Editorial Reviews
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Amazon.com
Journalist Elizabeth Fishel profiles 10 of her classmates from the class of 1968 at Manhattan's elite Brearley School, interweaving her own story with theirs to consider the choices they made in a period of wrenching social change. Raised in a privileged society where roles and rules for women were clear, these Brearley girls found after high school that none of the rules applied. Responses to this chaotic new world included dropping out of college, delaying marriage, bouncing from job to job, and having fewer children than their mothers (or none at all). Fishel finds her group more confused than her sister's generation, only five years younger, who could "assimilate the clash of cultures much more gradually" and who in her view managed the juggling act of career and motherhood with greater ease. Reunion also makes an interesting contrast with Miriam Horn's Rebels in White Gloves, a similar study of Wellesley College's 1969 graduates, who also seem more solidly grounded than Fishel's friends. Despite a tendency to overschematize (her categories of "untraditional traditionalist, unconventional career-tracker, seeker, and juggler" aren't especially illuminating), Fishel depicts with appealing sympathy a group of women whose winding paths toward maturity convince her "that being comfortable with change is the most important skill to develop early." --Wendy Smith
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Product Description
"It was from my curiosity about the gap between childhood dreams and midlife realities, between youthful promise and womanly fulfillment, that the idea for this book was conceived. Raised to believe they were among their generation's best and brightest, my class can be seen as a bellwether for a generation caught without a compass on the cutting edge of uncharted territory. After graduation they faced an explosion of choices unimaginable when they were schoolgirls. Each graduate, willing or no, prepared or not, would become a pioneer trying to discover her path on roads that were not yet on anybody's map. Their choices energized and empowered some, stymied or sidelined others. I began this book to find out why."
In Reunion, Elizabeth Fishel interweaves the story of the Brearley School class of 1968 with the history of a generation of American women born into tradition in the 1950s and engulfed by radical politics and social change in the 1960s and 1970s.
Beginning at the twenty-fifth reunion of her class, Fishel traces the lives of ten of her classmates at one of the nation's oldest and most renowned girls' schools. Nineteen sixty-eight was a watershed year--a year Time magazine said "shaped a generation"--and Reunion explores how each of that year's bright, privileged, famously situated, but often emotionally struggling graduates coped with the social upheavals of the sixties and the decades beyond.
Reunion looks at the contradictions in the lives of young women born into a traditional world of nonworking mothers and propelled into an environment of feminism, sexual liberation, and political radicalism. Fishel explores what happened to her classmates, particularly behind closed doors, to discover why so many women from her class didn't fare as well in life as women who graduated only five years later.
Filled with moving anecdotes, important life lessons, and revelations, Reunion is a powerful story of the women at one of America's top schools, as well as a history of an in-between generation.
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Customer Reviews
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Coming of age in the 70's
Rating  (3)
Date: 2000-12-30
8 out of 8 customers found this reveiw helpful
Reunion documents the lives of 10 members of the class of 1968 at the Brearley School in New York City. Each of the young women had the "advantage" of an elite education and the amenities of an upper class life. Each takes a decidedly different path...some encountering the sex and drugs so prevelent of the times. Marriages are entered into and ended. Some women have children, some choose careers, some wander from thing to thing. All seem to have to deal with families that are imperfect, from benignly so to worse. One member of the class commits suicide, all are touched in some way. Most are struggling with issues of self confidence and direction. This is the era when emotional issues are not talked about, and many turn to therapy. The stories are not really in depth and do not draw you in. I guess I measure every "what ever happened" type book to Goatbrothers, one of the best books of that type ever written. The stories are interesting but not compelling, which is in no way a comment on the women themselves.
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interesting
Rating (3)
Date: 2000-05-03
2 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
I had expected something a bit different with this book -- I thought it would focus on the Brearley experience and lifestyle. Instead, it really concentrated on the girls' lives after prep school. It was interesting to find that many of them faced problems like anyone else would. Although this book did describe the experience of attending Brearley, it did so in the beginning, and then followed how its traditional education left the women unprepared for the rapidly changing society of the 60s and 70s.
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Entertaining Book
Rating  (5)
Date: 2000-03-25
18 out of 19 customers found this reveiw helpful
Fortunately, I purchased "Reunion" prior to the posting of the above review! I found "Reunion" to be a fascinating story and free of the oppressive "insights", "dramas" and "accomplishments" that are force-fed to us by graduates of Wellesley, Radcliffe and Vassar. How delightful to see how much in common we "commoners" have with those who were priviledged enough to attend an elite school. I suspect that previous reviewers, possibly graduates of Wellesley, Radcliffe and Vasar, are loathe to find the myth of their superiority shattered by such a down-to-earth snapshot of a group of women who should have, in their (the previous reviewers') world-view, become bastions of Brahmin society. I was particularly struck by the character "Emma". Today's culture and society would benefit greatly by appreciating and nurturing the "Emma's" of our society. Peace-loving, generous and wise women of our world are too frequently overlooked, or their value dismissed, by vacuous and elitist Wellesley grads. Bravo to Elizabeth Fishel for her courage in sharing with us these true portraits!
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Overwrought and facile.
Rating  (1)
Date: 2000-03-17
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
The material here might have worked better as a novel, a la Mary McCarthy's The Group (1930s Vassar Grads) or Alice Adam's Superior Women (1950s Radcliffe Grads). Surely there is room for a coming of age story about bright, privileged women of the 1960s generation. The Brearley class of 1968 could have been the focus of such a work, and through narrative license the author could have provided more insight as to what motivated and in some cases tormented the individuals. Instead, this non-fictional work presents girls/women whose personal demons are described through veiled references and through class and historical cliches. The ellipsis may be necessary to protect the women's privacy, but in practice it leaves many of the individuals looking like ciphers on to whom the author projects her pocket psychological interpretations. This projection pattern is particularly disconcerting when the author discusses the girls in elementary and high school; she provides too many pithy insights that can only be derived from (possibly romanticized) memory and not from contemporaneous observation. Why not protect the women by writing fiction, and then using the psychobabble to enrich fictitious characters based on actual acquaintances? At present, some of the portraits lack credibility. Furthermore, the pat historical name and place dropping also hinder the work, as the women's personal struggles seem reduced to easy references to external political developments and pop culture. With overwrought prose the author states repeatedly that her classmates were caught between two Americas, the conformist old order and the tumultuous late 60s. More direct quotes from her classmates and less of the author's florid description of context would better illuminate this conflict. Instead readers are left with cardboard characters and jejune, melodramatic generational angst. The Brearley girls deserve better.
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