Seven Books For Seven Sister Graduates

This past weekend, a couple of friends and I went back to South Hadley, Massachusetts to watch the 2017 graduation ceremony at Mount Holyoke College.

Needless to say, it was absolutely flawless and everyone looked awesome in their caps and gowns.

​It was a strange feeling being back on campus. One year ago, I too had graduated and walked away with my diploma, through the Mount Holyoke gates and into adulthood. My cap, spray painted with gold, spelled out one of the famous lines from the musical, Hamilton – “There’s a million things I haven’t done, but just you wait” – was currently back home on top of my desk in California. My gown, was stowed away at the bottom of one of my empty suitcases in my current apartment. And my hood . . . well, is somewhere. Most likely in my sock drawer. 

I remembered all of the excitement that brewed up the day before graduation. 

Marching in our white dresses in the Laurel Parade singing “Bread and Roses." 

Staying up past midnight watching Dirty Dancing in the amphitheater; the entire senior class erupting in cheers when Jake Houseman proudly announced that “Baby’s starting Mount Holyoke in the fall.” 

But the most important event that happened the night before graduation, was the baccalaureate ceremony in Abbey Church. There, the undergraduates attended, donning on their caps and gowns as the faculty made speeches, advising the to-be graduates to take a moment and feel proud of all of their accomplishments. 

It was the penultimate send-off ceremony, before the actual send-off ceremony.

My friend Lauren and I sat next to each other in Hooker Auditorium, where the entire Baccalaureate ceremony was being lived streamed. As we watched the class of 2017 file into Abbey Chapel, the faculty stood up and read aloud their speeches.

​But I couldn’t help but wonder if all of the other sister schools were doing what we were doing right now.

Granted, two out of the seven sister schools are different compared to the characteristics of the remaining five sister schools (Mount Holyoke, Smith, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr and Barnard). Vassar decided to go coed in 1969, and Radcliffe merged with Harvard and is now a research institute and no longer an undergraduate institution.  

Nevertheless, all seven of these schools produced some of the most intellectual and creative individuals in the country. Authors who’ve graduated from these schools looked back fondly on the memories of attending these women’s college and the bonds that were established. Mainly emphasizing how different the adult world is compared to the safe bubble that everyone lived in during their four years of college.  

So if you’re a former seven sister student looking for a book that brings the sentimental memories of your school on every page, I’ve got you covered.  

In addition, for those who’ve graduated from Vassar or who are finishing up degrees at the Radcliffe Institute, these books apply to you as well. 

​These stories are meant to help you ease into your life as full-fledged adults, while also providing you some advice on how to live a well-meaning life after college.  

For the Smith Graduates: Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan

For anyone looking for a good book that revisits the nostalgia of Smith College, J. Courtney Sullivan’s Commencement is a page-turner, showcasing four hall-mates who become a group of unlikely friends during and after graduating from college. Sally (whose mother just died), Bree (who is already engaged), April (a strong-willed feminist) and Celia (a young woman with dreams of becoming a writer). As they all together experience the ecstatic highs and painful lows of early adulthood, Celia grows to distrust men after a night gone terribly wrong, Bree falls in love with someone she knows she could never bring home to her traditional Southern family, Sally connects with her English professor and April realizes that she has a group of friends she can confide in. Sullivan produces a definitive range of topics about the implications of big dreams clashing against harsh reality as the readers follow each of the characters during their four years of and out of college. She touches upon single-sex policy on feminism, transgender issues, lesbian behavior, dating and the aspirations of graduates. Just like adulthood, these four woman have all of the opportunities in the world, but they have no clear idea about what to choose. 

For the Vassar Graduates: The Group by Mary McCarthy

First published in 1963, Mary McCarthy’s classic novel about nine female Vassar graduates in 1930s America, is a frank and honest description of life after college. Among the nine graduates, minor groupings exist. The original group consists of Lakey, Helena, Dottie, Pokey, Libby and Priss. Another classmate, but not a group mate, Norine provides a dissonant counterpart to the elitism of the others in the group. McCarthy refuses to shy away from the discomforting issues women of the 30’s were faced with: sex and contraceptions, career and marriage, love and lust, fidelity to one’s husband versus loyalty to one’s friends and an attempt to leave one’s mark on the world despite gender limitations. McCarthy’s writing is smart, tight, testy and unfaithful to the literary norms of classical balance. 50 years after it’s publication, the novel has become more of a sensation than ever. The uniqueness of The Group resides in the inherent irony of the very title of the novel. There is no single character or voice through whom the intellectually severe voice of the author is heard. The women in McCarthy’s novel have ideal images in their head as to how life after college will play out. Nevertheless, McCarthy focuses on the fact that all of her character’s plans fall short of success. 

For the Mount Holyoke Graduates: The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn

As Charyn assumes Dickinson’s own voice and surrounds her with invented as well as historical characters, he fills in the blanks of the inner imaginative world of America’s greatest poet. The story opens up in 1848 when Emily is still a student at Mount Holyoke and a struggling writer. Channeling the devilish rhythms and ghosts of a seemingly buried literary past, Charyn removes the mysterious veils that have cloaked Dickinson, revealing her inner turmoils and self-doubt when she finally enters the adult world. In a way, this literary tactic makes Dickinson more vulnerable as a character. Charyn reminds us that even the great Emily Dickinson herself was unsure about the future too, and endured the hardships of the real world like any other young adult. Through lyrical inflections and a dynamic breadth of Emily’s home life, Charyn pays homage to Dickinson’s past as she strifes to prove her indelible work of literature to the world.  

For the Bryn Mwar Graduates: The Year She Left Us by Kathryn Ma

Ma’s writing withholds and misdirects readers at nearly every turn, but she nevertheless successfully delivers a complicated but emotional novel that mirrors everyday life. When She Left Us centers around three generations of Chinese-Americans: Eighteen-year-old Ari (adopted when she was a baby from an orphanage in China), Charlie (Ari’s mother who lives in San Francisco) and Gran (who ended up moving to the U.S. after the Second Sino-Japanese War). These three women detail what it means to be Chinese-American, all while enduring the shifting of their own identities. Chapters told in the first person by Ari and Gran, alternate with third-person chapters describing Charlie’s life and her sister, Les. From Gran attending Bryn Mawr College and starting a brand new life for herself when she marries a Chinese man, to Charlie never marrying and entering the legal profession, and to finally Ari, whose attitude toward her upbringing is scathing. Ari is a “Whackadoodle,” a member of a group of adoptive Chinese girls. However, the first thing that Ari notices is that while her family is Chinese, most of the other girls in her group have been adopted by white families. After a disastrous trip to visit her “home” orphanage in China, Ari is unexpectedly plunged into a growing despair of searching for value in her life. Ma generates focus on the raw first-person ache of youth while calling attention to the reality that adulthood itself is both a cluttered and harrowing circumstance to endure.  

For the Barnard Graduates: Breathless – An American Girl in Paris by Nancy K. Miller

This memoir told through a series of short chapters, chronicles the moments of Miller’s misadventures. It’s 1962 which means that women had to prepare for three things: marriage, children and becoming a housewife. But then enters, Nancy Kepnis, a recent graduate from Barnard College who decides to rebel against the status quo of domesticity by setting out to live in Paris for a year. A big fan of Simone de Beauvoir and a frustrating product of her times, Nancy has it all planned out. Enamored by everything French, she decides to take classes at the Sorbonne while also striving to live out her life like a French romantic movie. Nancy is ready to become an entirely different person. What she finds along the way, isn’t what she hoped would be her perfect movie ending. She gives up her short-lived freedom in the iconic city of love to an American entrepreneur who promises her a lifetime of three-star meals and five-star hotels. Nevertheless, Nancy’s dreams are shattered when she discovers that her husband is actually a con man. What makes this memoir so fascinating is not Miller’s romantic mistakes that she is is able to recall so vividly, but her internal struggle to make her life fit at a certain ideal level. Miller’s younger self must deal with the dilemma of when your picture perfect life is broken apart piece by piece by the melancholy fingers of reality. Breathless is a unique window of youthful mistakes and surprisingly clarity upon jumping head first into the adult world. 

For the Wellesley Graduates: The List by Karin Tanabe

When twenty-eight-year-old Wellesley College graduate, Adrienne Brown leaves her glamorous job at Town & Country for a spot at the Capitalist (known simply as the List, the only media outlet in D.C. that’s on the rise) she believes that this is a life-changing career. However, staffing at the ​Capitalist means a low wage salary, moving back in to live with her parents and mainlining five-hour energy shots while subsisting on five hours of sleep. But Adrienne is determined to make the necessary sacrifices that she sees fit to carve out a name for herself. But then she stumbles upon a scoop, a story that might be a major career boost. Yet, the scandal involves an affair between a back-stabbing co-worker and a married senator. Tanabe herself was a Politico reporter back in her day, and zeros in on the skewering of digital journalism through tweets and blogs by an army of underpaid 20-something adults who just want to make an impression upon the world.   

For the Radcliffe Graduates: Class Reunion by Rona Jaffe

Radcliffe College: The all-women institute that functioned as a feeder for potential wives and partners for the men that attended Harvard College in the 1950’s. In Jaffe’s novel, Class Reunion follows four Radcliffe girls during their years in college and the years after they’ve graduate. If there’s one thing that these four girls have in common, it’s marriage. Upon entering college, Emily  is worried about fitting in among her indifferent wealthy classmates. Chris, a career girl, marries a man whom she later discovers is gay. Annabel, is a high-spirited and flirtatious Southern bell, until she ruins her reputation by sleeping around. And then there’s Daphne, who tries to hold on to her bohemian existence in the hopes that nobody will find out that she has epilepsy. The novel itself is a chilling reminder of the double bind in which women were expected to conform to their repressive gender roles. They owed it to their families to settle down with a man – especially a Harvard man – and produce children. More so, Jaffe’s message to her readers is crystal clear: Following a linear path will never be fulfilling. One must venture off and take risks if they are to lead a fruitful life. 

So gather your fellow sisters, and start recording as to what the adult world has in store for you!