. . . March 1993

Vassar's Groups

By Diane Swanbrow

Not long ago, the phrase 'educated American women' was looked on as an anomaly, if not an oxymoron

Mary McCarthy's The Group is about bright, emoii6nally brittle Vassar women. She got the idea for her novel from a real-life study of Vassar grads in the summer of 1954. To find out what happened to McCarthy's prototypes, long after McCarthy's story ended, ask psychologist Donald Brown.

Brown and his colleagues are the source of both the fictional and factual accounts of this group of Vassar grads ever since they asked the women to return in groups of ten throughout the summer of '54. Their goal was to gather data for a pioneering study of a subject that was then considered almost seditious: the higher education of women. But this is where fact and fiction begin to diverge because among the findings of Brown's team was that their subjects fit into five groups, none of which precisely parallels the fictional group created by McCarthy.

Brown, who directs the U-M Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, details the findings from the study in two chapters of Women's Lives Through Time: Educated American Women of the Twentieth Century (Jossey-Bass, Inc., 1993). For nearly 40 years, through 1991, Brown's team repeatedly tested and probed the psyches of approximately 850 Vassar women from the classes of 1929,1935,1957 and 1958. For the women, at least those in "the group" attending that first gathering, the experience was memorable:

"For three vertiginous days we reeled and spun on Leap-the-Dips of breathless questioning," one member of the group recalled. Some of those questions were:

"Do you like men who look as if they can be brutal?

"True or False: Is Yucatan in Costa Rica? Mexico? Brazil?"

"Here's a simple problem in arithmetic . . ."

"Remember nine numbers, while lights flash on and off."

"Which of the group would you pick for manager of Peck and Peck?"

"Who do you think you are?"

After following the women from young adulthood through their 80s, Brown and co-author Rosemary Pacini, a doctoral candidate in psychology, identified five predictable life patterns, five "groups" instead of the one crafted by McCarthy. According to Brown and Pacini, the five groups are these:

SOCIALIZERS - About 60 percent of the college women studied fit this pattern, a percentage that's probably higher than would be found in many colleges today. Instead of focusing on their academic performance, they preferred spending time with peers. Having fun in a socially acceptable wav was their main preoccupation. They tended io marry within their social class and enter into comfortable, traditional, upper-middle class suburban lives.

"This group tends to show very little personal or intellectual growth during the college years," Brown says. "They keep the same values, beliefs and ideas they had when they began their college years. They are capable of personal growth later in life, but it generally takes a serious problem, like divorce or the illness or death of a child, to shake them up and trigger change."

OVER-ACHIEVERS - About 15 percent of the college women studied fit into this group, performing better academically than their college entrance scores would suggest. Usually they came from affluent, well-educated families. Getting high grades was extremely important to them, and they didn't hesitate to use manipulation or flattery to reach their objective. "They tend to be quite insecure and unsure of themselves," Brown says. After graduation, their lives were cautious and conservative. These "good girls" seemed to have the hardest time of any group navigating through the identity changes accompanying menopause and aging.

UNDER-ACHIEVERS - The college grades of about 12 percent of the women did not reflect their abilities. Nevertheless, these were the women most likely to be judged "ideal" students by college faculty for being open, curious and valuing the life of the mind. During college they showed more signs of intellectual and emotional growth than any other group. After college they showed great flexibility. Their lives were somewhat chaotic but highly functional. They became active professionally in the early years of marriage in addition to keeping their family and community commitments.

"They tend to come from families who were open and somewhat confrontational," Brown says. "They had parents who tolerated disputes and disagreements. As a result, they feel secure making their own choices in life. These under-achievers are also the least likely to get divorced."

HIGH ACHIEVERS - These women, about 12 percent of the sample, tested and performed well in college, then went on to intense and high-powered professional careers. The older generation of women in this group rarely married, while the younger ones tended to delay marriage and were most likely to remain childless. On the whole, this group seemed to have internalized the comment of one Vassar administrator, who sniffed, "Only our failures marry."

In childhood and adolescence, high achievers were likely to have experienced intense conflicts with domineering but uneducated mothers, toward whom they continued to feel considerable repressed hostility and guilt.

IDENTITY-SEEKERS - A scant 1 percent of the women studied were unhappy, confused and unable to achieve stability in their lives without prolonged therapy, drastic changes in their environment or both. In youth and middle age, their intellectual interests and personal growth were largely abandoned in the maelstrom of their personal struggles. The most likely to divorce, they seldom had mates. Later in life, however, some of these troubled souls bloomed, having discovered their personal and professional strengths.

"In the novel, McCarthy's emphasis was on the emotional and social development of her characters rather than their intellectual and academic sides," says Pacini. "So it's difficult to categorize any of her characters into one of the five study groups. Lakey is probably the easiest to identify. With her intellectual spark and passion to see the world, she's pretty clearly a high-achiever."

"The most encouraging finding from this study," Brown concludes, "is that change is always possible. Some of these women found personal and intellectual growth more difficult than others, largely as a result of their early family backgrounds and experiences. But women in all five groups demonstrated the capacity to learn and change throughout their lives-some of them well into their 80s."

Pacini also sees reason for optimism in the lifecourses of these women. "Their lives show that you can have a lot of problems and make a lot of mistakes and still wind up okay," she says. "You don't have to pick your life's course at the age of 22 and rigidly adhere to it. You can change paths midway through, go back to school, resume a career or start a family. The one lesson of their lives for today's college women is that life is fairly flexible ff you have the motivation to make the changes that are necessary."

Mary McCarthy probably wouldn't have argued much with that.