Rebels in white gloves

When these women entered Wellesley's ivory tower, they were initiated into a rarefied world where the infamous "marriage lecture" and white gloves at afternoon tea were musts. Many were daughters of privilege; many were going for their "MRS." Four years later, by the time they graduated, they found a world turned upside down by the Pill, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Roe v.

Wade, the Vietnam War, student protests, the National Organization for Women, and the battle for the Equal Rights Amendment.

For the thirtieth anniversary of the Class of '69 - "Hillary's class" - Horn has created trenchant, remarkably nuanced portraits of these women, chronicling their experiments with sex, work, family, politics, and spirituality. Horn follows them as they joined SDS, tumbled into free-love communities, prosecuted pot growers, ministered to Micronesian natives, fled trust-fund security, forged and surrendered marriages, plumbed the challenges of motherhood, and coped with the uncertainties of growing older.

Their tumultuous life paths - wild, funny, heartbreaking, unforgettable - are a primer in women's history of the past fifty years and a timely attempt to make sense of the increasingly blurred line between the personal and the political.