Word: susanna
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There are about ten of these women. Most have come to school after several years of attempting to make a go of being a traditional housewife and mother. At times during the afternoon the discussion became heated, as Katiti, Susanna, Gail S. Macdougal '78-4 and Marguerite B. Walker '79 talked about an experience far different from that of the average Harvard student. The talk ranged from how they decided to return to school, to the nuts and bolts of combining children and college...
That central fact is the child. "You are always conscious of the child," Susanna said. "I brought her to one class when I just had no other option. And even though she was made to feel very welcome, the entire time I had to worry abut whether she was going to fall down the stairs or bite somebody. And it's like I can't function. Even if people are optimally nice, there is still nothing...
...They all asked me, 'How can you do that to your child,'" Susanna said. Susanna, 30, is a small, quick woman. Married and divorced, she was living in Australia when she made the decision to apply to Harvard. "I was tired of living on the bottom end. And it frightened me to know I was so dependent on the man I was with to keep me from starving or working as a waitress for 40 years. I became a bitch, feeling like a passive participant...
...some husbands began retaliating. Marguerite's husband accused her of not being a good wife, and she remembers he "couldn't understand why I didn't want to do housework." As the rate of personal growth accelerated for all of these women, old relationships became more and more untenable. Susanna told of being informed by one Radcliffe official of a "Harvard syndrome"--a condition that hits couples with one member at Harvard and one member outside, eventually destroying the link between them. These four women illustrate the syndrome: three either had been or were getting divorced, two of them--Gail...
...Susanna said there are times when the different life experiences set up a wall between her and younger undergraduates. When at lunch with other older friends, she talks about supermarkets and other day-to-day subjects. But "I would feel so dumb if an undergraduate heard me. I would feel inferior in some way, like I sounded like a housewife...