… I had a traveling fellowship, and I sent my papers in to go to graduate school in philosophy, but I mailed them from Italy, so they were lost in a postal strike, and they didn’t get there until June. But I was mostly focused on going to graduate school in philosophy.
I went over to the law school and looked around and thought, maybe this is a possibility. That’s the best law school in the country.” I said, “OK.” So I did. And I said to Margie, “Where should I send them?” She said: “Send them to Yale. I remember looking around and thinking, this is really strange. Other than the proctors we were the only two women in a room of 200, 300 guys. One of my friends said: “Why don’t you take law boards? I don’t want to be the only woman taking them.” I said, “Oh sure.” So I went in, and we took them in Philadelphia. I came from Swarthmore, which is very academic, and mostly I had applied to graduate schools. The decision for women to attend law school, can you tell me a little bit about what this time was like? I might have read it, but I didn’t recall it, and Bob told me the whole story when we were at law school. I had a traveling fellowship, so I was pretty wrapped up - as most 21-year-olds, I was pretty wrapped up in myself. I didn’t remember that, but I was graduating at the same time. I didn’t know her very well that spring, although I think we were in the same constitutional law class.ĭo you remember whether you saw her in Life magazine or whether you had heard about the commencement address at Wellesley at this point? What is she like?” And he said, “Well, she is pretty good.” She came up with a bunch of Wellesley girls, and I’ve known her since then.” I said: “Oh. ” I said, “How do you know that?” And he said: “Hillary and I worked together on the McCarthy campaign up in New Hampshire. She gave the big speech at Wellesley when she took on Sen. I don’t specifically recall meeting her, but I remember asking Bob Reich if he knew this person, and he said: “Well, yeah, she is famous. You would have met Hillary about what time in this year?
That fall she was mostly there, because I don’t remember seeing her until spring semester. There was a specific institute that studies children.
When Hillary came to Yale, she decided she wanted to get a master’s degree in child development, and to do that you took a year of courses in the psychology department. I think partly that’s because that fall she was mostly taking courses at the Gesell Institute. This has got to be the only law student at Yale who knows everybody’s name. And I remember thinking, this is different. called them all by name, talked to them all. I knew the name of the lady at the end who took payment. We went through the lunch line, and the thing I realized was that he had been there not even a week and he knew the names of all the servers in the line. I was running Joe Duffy for the Senate and he just lost, so I need to borrow your notes.” And I said, “Well, I have to go through them first.” He said, “Why, do you have love letters in there?” I said, “No, I have really bad poetry, and I’m not going to let you see it.” He said, “Well, you could.” I said: “No. Bill showed up at school in November and came up to me in the hall and asked to borrow notes, and I said, “For what?” He said, “For all your classes.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, I’m in all your classes.” I said, “No you aren’t.” He said: “Well, I’ve been busy. You knew Bill before you knew Hillary?īill and I came in in the same class, and first years take all their classes together, so you tend to know the people in your class best. I want to talk first about your memories of that time period at Yale Law School. It has been edited for clarity and length. This is the transcript of a conversation with FRONTLINE’s Gabrielle Schonder held on June 17, 2016. In her interview, Bekavac discusses what it was like to be part of a trailblazing group of women at Yale Law School, her long friendship with Hillary, and the price she says Clinton has paid for being a pioneer.
I don’t think we had any idea of how complicated or costly that would be.” Bekavac, who went on to be the first woman president of Scripps College, recalls that the women in their class at Yale “thought we could do anything. Visiting Clinton in Arkansas in 1974, Bekavac was taken aback by the role women played in public life - while men talked politics, women stayed “at the table with the Jell-O,” she says. Hillary Clinton and Nancy Bekavac were in a small cadre of women attending Yale Law School in the early 1970s.
0 kommentar(er)
