| Kent Brain Rogers
From the Twentieth Century into the Twenty-First
When I graduated from Smith in 1955, Adlai Stevenson gave our commencement address. Since a classmate was about to marry his son Adlai, he had a special reason to be with us for the big event. I was too excited that day to remember exactly what he said, but I thought his words were great at the time. Twenty-five years later, our world had changed, and when I read a copy of his talk which was sent out in preparation for our twenty-fifth reunion I was shocked by what he had said. He could never have made such a speech in 1980; even less so now. As I remember, his general message was that we young ladies could do great things for our country and the world by supporting our husbands so they could do great things and raising sons who would go on to do great things, too. That message wouldn't sell now.
And yet, that is in large part what I have done with my life. Only I hope I have raised daughters who will do great things, too. They have grown up in a different world.
I was the second child in a family of three children, which meant that my parents, following the custom of the time, moved after my birth from an apartment in New York to a house in the country. But, while my parents did the trendy thing by moving to the country with the second child, they did not follow their friends in other ways. My father looked for more land and a more rural setting than was generally available for young families in Westchester County or northern New Jersey. They found a lovely, if somewhat impractical, house in northern Rockland County, a house with pre-Revolutionary origins that had been almost totally rebuilt and greatly expanded in 1929, a home with enough land for privacy and wonderful views over the Hudson.
But while trying to be so different from other young couples and escaping the usual suburban experience, my parents fell into yet another category, later well chronicled by Spectorsky in his book, The Exurbanites. They weren't as different as they thought they were. The place was perfect for my father, however, as he could get home from his stressful job as a corporation lawyer in New York and sit on his terrace with his martini and his family and friends and look out over the river and not see or hear a single neighbor. That was his idea of a perfect home.
My mother adapted well to the total change of environment. Born and raised in Alabama, she had already made one big transition when she married my father and moved to New York. (The story of how the young lawyer from the mid-west, straight out of Yale Law school, met and married a girl in Alabama is still another tale.) With her Alabama accent, my mother was totally foreign to our rural neighbors, so foreign, in fact, that when war broke out in Albania in the late thirties, a neighbor said to her one day, "I was so sorry to hear about the terrible fighting in your country." But she was friendly and outgoing and willing to volunteer in all directions, so she was soon accepted and appreciated by everyone in our end of the county.
Of course she didn't work. None of the women in my family ever did except for my paternal grandmother, who taught school for a few years before she was married. My mother was raised in the southern tradition of those days to wait upon her men-folk and relieve them of all duties and cares at home. We had a live-in maid, as many did then. With no washer of dryer or vacuum cleaner or electric mixer or any of the other machines we have grown so accustomed to, and with a big, impractical house, three children, frequent guests, and many pets, full-time help was a necessity. Because of her southern upbringing, my mother was used to help and was reluctant to add machines that she thought she didn't need. So we had a maid and someone to take care of the yard and serve as a general handyman, and we even had a neighbor boy come in to add coal to the furnace before and after school so my mother wouldn't have to do that.
When my parents moved to the country with a toddler and a new baby, they probably didn't give much thought to schooling, but it was not long before the question of our education became relevant. The little school in our village had been built in 1874 and was staffed by four teachers and a principal who also taught a few subjects to the older children. There were eight grades, two to a classroom, with no kindergarten. I had five children in my class most of the way through school, with only one other girl most of the time. Luckily, she was a good friend and a good student and we challenged each other. There was no bus, so we had either a half-mile walk down the mountain through the woods or a mile drive in the car.
My brothers and I were different from most of the children in the school. Only two other families had fathers who commuted to New York. I'm not sure that any other children in the school had parents who were both college graduates, let alone a father with a law degree; it was rare enough that both parents had finished high school. Most of the children came from large families, up to ten children in the case of the family of one of the boys in my class, so there were not a lot of different families in the school, and most of those families were related to each other in one way or another. One of my fellow first graders had a nephew in the eighth grade! It was a poor school district, and our books were not at all new. Each year, when books were handed out, students looked on the labels in the front to see who had had them in previous years - older siblings, cousins, and even, believe it or not, parents in some cases.
This was the down side of the school. The up side was that we got a lot of individual attention and that the town library was in the school. Again, the books weren't the newest, but there was a lot of reading material easily available. Another advantage was that the school was very flexible. My older brother started school in first grade at six, as was normal for first grade, and was not challenged. He was eventually moved up a grade, but spent most of his school years reading since he knew much of the work before the class came to it. My younger brother and I started first grade a year early, and that gave us a more interesting scholastic experience. I don't regret the eight years I spent in that little school, and I loved living surrounded by woods with the endless opportunities for exploring them. In the early grades, before I had a girl in my class to be a best friend, I spent many hours roaming the woods with my older brother and the two other boys in the neighborhood or playing baseball and other games with them.
But the real problem came when we reached high school. Students from our village were bussed two towns away to a school that didn't have a very good reputation, so it was clear that we had to go away to continue our education. My brothers went off in eighth grade, to Kent and Groton, respectively. My father had heard that Chatham Hall was the best girls' school in the country for academics, so that is where I went, all the way to southern Virginia, at the age of thirteen. Academically, it was a great school. It took me much of the first year to catch up after my rural education, but from then on I did fine and learned a tremendous amount. Socially, however, it was very isolated and a long way from home - or anything else.
So when it came time for selecting a college, I wanted one that was good academically, but where I could also enjoy myself some. That is why I turned down both Radcliffe and Bryn Mawr and went to Smith; I had had four years of intense academics and wanted a bit more of a life. Smith then had the reputation of being more "well-rounded." I also liked the type of girl who had gone from Chatham to Smith, people who seemed to have more of a variety of interests. It turned out to be a good choice for me, and I loved my time there. The classes were good, though not so difficult for me as most at Chatham, and I loved all the social activities, dates at close-by Amherst and weekends elsewhere. I even went to Princeton for a couple of football weekends in 1951, my freshman year, and was in Campus Club the night of the fire. Had I met Steve that year, my life would have been much simpler!
While my years at Smith were great, I was not really prepared to earn my own living. I suppose I had thought I'd probably marry right out of college like so many of my friends, but as graduation approached and there was no one I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, I decided to delay the real world by continuing my education. I had spent my junior year in Paris and majored in French and loved languages, so applied to Radcliffe to study linguistics. I also applied for a scholarship for a program at Columbia Teachers' College in the teaching of core courses.
Of the three professions traditionally open to women in those days, teaching had always appealed to me, and I had enjoyed tutoring while I was in school and college. I did not major in education because that was not a strong department at Smith but chose French because the French department was considered to be very good. I did not want to teach French, however, since I did not feel my accent was adequate, though I have taught it several times over the years. The concept of uniting English and social studies into a core subject interested me, and I had enjoyed working with the junior high age where core was most often taught, so I accepted the sizable inducement Columbia offered, assuming I could postpone Radcliffe to the following year if I still wanted to pursue my interest in linguistics.
But fate decreed otherwise. I loved Columbia. After Chatham and Smith, the classes were not terribly challenging, but quite interesting and very different from anything I'd had before. With practice teaching every day and classes in the late afternoon and evening, I kept busy but still had time to enjoy the big city and meet interesting people. One was Steve, who was at Columbia working on a masters' in economics after his three years in the navy following Princeton. We met at the French House, where we'd both gone to work on our French. He was soon to take the exams for the Foreign Service, including one in French, and I wanted to keep up with the language even if I didn't want to teach it. The rest, as they say, was history. We both received our MAs in June and I received my Mrs.
Steve entered the Foreign Service in July, right after our honeymoon. I was very excited about being part of the Foreign Service, having seriously considered a career in the Foreign Service myself after the experience of spending my junior year studying and traveling in Europe. When a "recruiter" came to Smith my senior year, I attended her session. I put the "recruiter" in quotes because I thought at the time, and still do, that she was sent out to discourage all of us from applying. She said we'd more or less have to promise not to get married for at least three years after joining the Foreign Service and that we'd have to quit if we did get married. She was dull and very negative. Her bottom line was, "Frankly, young ladies, the Foreign Service is no place for women." I don't know of anyone who applied after her talk. I really believe that that is what she had come to accomplish.
So I had the best of both worlds. I was in the Foreign Service - "You are a team!" - but could be a wife and mother, too. We asked for a Washington assignment to begin with so I could get some experience teaching and we could save up a little money. I taught eighth grade core for two years, then retired to have our first child, Kryston (P '79). Shortly after that, we took off for New Delhi, about as interesting and exciting a first post as can be imagined. There, I was quickly recruited to teach at the American International School, which I did for our two years in India, teaching American history, Latin, and French. Then Steve was sent to Harvard for a year, where he earned an MPA at what is now the Kennedy School. After that, we had two years in Paris before returning to the States again for a Washington assignment. Our second child, Halsey (P '86), was born not long after our return, and, having always wanted three children, we decided to have the third before we left the country again. Two years later, we had the third kid, Julie (Amherst '88), and, three minutes later, a bonus fourth, John (P '88).
For obvious reasons, we delayed leaving Washington until the twins were almost three and we could leave all the baby stuff behind. Then followed two years in London, three years in Paris, three in Washington, four in Mexico City (without Krys, a senior at Princeton when we left), four in Washington (while Halsey was at Princeton), four in Pretoria (having left all the kids behind), and three in Mbabane, Swaziland, where Steve was the Ambassador.
In all, we moved fourteen times. I spent much of my life creating homes for the family, finding schools for the children and volunteering in them and churches and other organizations, entertaining, getting to know the countries we were in, studying the language wherever we were - Hindustani, French, Spanish, Afrikaans, siSwati - and generally enjoying our peripatetic life. We all learned a great deal about people and cultures from our traveling around, especially that a person is a person no matter what that person looks like or what language he or she speaks. This was the exciting part of our moving around. However, the moving meant that I never had much of a profession, though I did substitute teaching when we were home in the 70s and taught (French again) in the 80s when we were again home and had three kids in college.
My experience in teaching was perhaps most valuable with our own children, who stayed with us until college in spite of attending a variety of schools of differing qualifications. I was always able to supplement what they were getting from their schools wherever we were. Also, there was so much for them to learn outside of school in each country. We felt that the experience of learning languages and geography and history and cultures first hand far outweighed what might be lacking in the schools, so never even considered sending them home for an education. Perhaps this decision was also influenced by my experience of leaving home at thirteen.
The children have all done well. In spite of attending ten different schools through high school, which she graduated from in Paris at fifteen, Kryston was accepted by all the colleges she applied to. She obviously made the right choice, accepting Princeton over Harvard and the others! Halsey chose Princeton over Yale. Julie was our one rebel, opting for a smaller school than Princeton, applying only to Amherst. John really considered only Princeton, wanting to follow his big brother. All the kids have masters' degrees; Halsey and Julie have doctorates. We have a businesswoman (now a stay-at-home mom), an economist, a clinical psychologist, and a solar engineer in the crowd. Three are married and we have five [now six - ed.] grandchildren. We are proud of what they have accomplished, but, above all, we are proud that they are interesting and caring people whom we enjoy being with.
But what about my life? I feel I've come very far from my country childhood through international experiences and now into a none-too-quiet retirement. I don't think my parents ever considered that I would have a career and I was never strongly encouraged to have one. My brothers were definitely urged to continue into higher academics with one earning a law degree and the other a Ph.D.; I was lucky in also being supported in going into further education, though I'm not sure my parents felt it was at all necessary for a daughter. My father was very intellectual; my mother was very bright, but quite people-oriented and not at all academic. I suppose my parents assumed I, too, would spend my life raising children and volunteering and entertaining like my mother, and that, in spite of my other aspirations, is what I did do for much of it. Having household help while overseas enabled me do more of what my mother did than most of our generation has done, but while in the States, I have lived the typical life of a suburban housewife, not unlike, I suspect, that of many of the wives of '52.
I look at our daughters and daughters-in-law and their busy working lives and wonder if I would have wanted it that way. Krys juggled a demanding job with day care and sick kids and PTA meetings and Saturday sports and scout meetings and household chores for many years before deciding to stay home for a while. Now I see our daughters-in-law getting into that period in their lives. Do I envy them their careers? I do when I see what good things they are accomplishing, but I very much enjoyed staying home with our children most of the time. And yet I haven't done all I had planned to do. Even in retirement, I don't paint or write as much as I would like, and even my long-time hobby of genealogy doesn't get much attention in the middle of our many volunteer activities and our travels.
Still, I can't be unhappy with the way my life has gone. Our children are doing well and I have many, many interesting experiences to look back on. We have a lot of good friends and are healthy. What more could I want? |
