SPEECH: Nora Ephron addressing Wellesley graduates- 1996.

I was going to be a woman writer. And in fact, I had spent four years at Wellesley going to lectures
by women writers hoping that I would be the beneficiary of some terrific secret—which I never was.
And now here I was at graduation, under these very trees, absolutely terrified.  And I sat here thinking,
"OK, this is my last chance for a really terrific secret, lay it on me,"

I want to tell you a little bit about my class, the class of 1962. When we came to Wellesley in the fall of 1958,
How long ago was it? While I was here, Wellesley threw six young women out for being lesbians.
It was so long ago that we had curfews. In my class of maybe 375 young women, there were six Asians and 5 Blacks.
There was a strict quota on the number of Jews. Tuition was $2,000 a year and in my junior year
it was raised to $2,250 and my parents practically had a heart attack.

The Harvard Crimson had this snippy article which said that Wellesley was a school for tunicata.
Tunicata apparently being small fish who spend the first part of their lives
frantically swimming around the ocean floor exploring their environment, and
the second part of their lives just lying there breeding. It had the horrible ring of truth.

My class went to college in the era when you got a masters degree in teaching because it was
"something to fall back on" the scenario being that no one married you and you actually had to go to work.
As was said at our reunion, "Our education was a dress rehearsal for a life we never led."
We weren't meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them.
During my junior year, I went to see my class dean and she said to me,
"You've worked so hard at Wellesley, when you marry, take a year off. Devote yourself to your husband and your marriage.".
I'd always intended to work after college. My mother was a career woman, and all of her four daughters,
grew up understanding that the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was as valid for girls as for boys.
Years later I met another Wellesley graduate who had been as hell-bent on domesticity as I had been on a career
and she had gone to the same dean with the same problem, and the dean had said to her, "Don't have children right away.
Take a year to work." And so I saw that what Wellesley wanted was for us to avoid the extremes.
To be instead, that thing in the middle. A lady. We were to spend our lives making nice.

Many of my classmates did exactly what they were supposed to when they graduated from Wellesley,
and some of them lived happily ever after. But many of them didn't.
All sorts of things happened that no one expected. They needed money, got divorced, were bored witless so they had to work.
The women's movement came along and made judgments that caught them by surprise,
because they were doing what they were supposed to be doing, weren't they?
They had never intended to be the heroines of their own lives they ended up feeling like victims.
They ended up thinking that their years in college were the best years of their lives.

Things have changed, haven't they? Yes, they have. American society has a remarkable ability to resist change,
or to take whatever change has taken place and attempt to make it go away.
Don't underestimate how much antagonism there is and how many people wish we could turn the clock back.
One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don't take it personally,
but listen hard to what's going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally.

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
You are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever.
We have a game where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper.
Whatever those five things are for you today, they won't make the list in ten years.
Not that you still won't be some of those things, but they won't be the five most important things about you.
Which is one of the most delicious things available to women.
Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady.

I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there.
And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.
Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your lives.