Glimmering Girls: A Novel of the Fifties

Hadassah Magazine August/Sept 2005 Glimmering Girls: A Novel of the Fifties by Merrill Joan Gerber, The University of Wisconsin Press, 249 pp., $26.95. Merrill Joan Gerber's Glimmering Girls recreates with cool humor and aching passion what it was like for college-educated young women to grow up at a time when the spirit of the age remained the `50s, even when the decade changed. The story is set in conservative 1959 and ends with Francie's college graduation. Although the feminist, free-wheeling `60s don't explode until the new decade is half over, Francie's not waiting. A good Jewish girl, whose letters home to her parents in Brooklyn are filled with appreciation and updates on her life--from studying hard on a pro forma education major to observing the rules of the heavily chaperoned dorm. Restless to experience life, and unlike her more typical roommate Mary Ella Root, who looks to get a Mrs. degree, Francie falls in with Liz and Amanda. The two propose that they move in together off campus - with three guys. one of whom, though of Francie's "tribe," is in love with Liz. The other two are amiable identical twins in love with cars. As Francie discovers, however, experiencing life involves secrecy and taking half-understood risks, some of which propel her into anxiety. Having run off for a couple of days with Liz and Amanda and the twins to a lakeside cabin, will she ever get back to finish her term paper? Could she become pregnant if semen leaks through her skirt? Will she ever get back to civilization and her term paper, having run off for a couple of days with Liz and Amanda and the twins to a lakeside cabin? Will she and Joshua, a Jewish boy and fine pianist whom she beds and loves, get together again? Meanwhile, Francie, a Phi Beta determined to be a writer, is turned down for a graduate school fellowship by a dean who says women are unreliable. Though she is poised on the edge, uncertain, Francie senses that "something is definitely going on here, something shattering and monumental enough to bring tears to her eyes." One thing's for sure, Francie and Liz have escaped from "the innocence of the Garden of Eden, no longer glimmering girls, more like illuminated women. Gerber movingly captures the ambivalence of the coming of age of bright young women, and of the brave new world in which they will make their way. That Francie is Jewish and far from home gives the tale special resonance. Her path may be rougher than Liz's or Amanda's, but then again, she's burning bright. --Joan Baum

Although I "went away to school" to what I would have thought was college vastly differernt from the Florida university that is the scene of Gerber's most recent triumph, the similarities among the experiences of her young woman protagonist and mine and those of my friends startled me. I guess that for almost everyone who was a teen in the 1950s in the USA the intense repressiveness made secret-keepers and rule-breakers of us all. Glimmering Girls is both a wonderful novel, beautifully written and absorbing, and an important social document that I hope will be read by many. Gerber successfully recreates a time when women's bodies didn't belong to us, when female sexuality was supposed to be an oxymoron, when the MRS. was a degree more devoutly to be wished for than a PhD, and "true love" and its "inevitable" consequence -- a happy marriage -- was the only legitimate transition to adulthood for a girl. And yet, for all the astute revelations of the repressiveness of life for women in the decade before the Women's Liberation Movement began to stir, there is no hint in this book of the polemic; it's just a wonderful story about a time that is thankfully past (although the current administration seems to be doing its best to revive it) -- or is it?