Book 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 behindclosed 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.