How are you doing out there? Are you dying? [audience cheering] I'm sorry! I'm trying to talk fast. We're coming to something- to a wonderful part, though. Hang in there. It's now my distinct honor to introduce another distinguished alumna: our commencement speaker, Nora Ephron. [audience cheering] A graduate of the class of 1962. I had a long introduction that I had prepared for her, but I think you should just hear from her. She's fabulous. She's Wellesley. And here she is... [Applause] [Nora Ephron] - accused Diana of having asked Martha Stewart first. And I meant to call her to see what she might
have said to you. She would probably be up here telling you
how to turn your lovely black robes into tents. [audience laughter] I will try to be at least as helpful, if not
quite as specific as that. I'm very conscious of how easy it is to let
people down on a day like this, because I remember my own graduation from Wellesley
very, very well, I am sorry to say. The speaker was Santha Rama Rau who was a
woman writer, and I was going to be a woman writer. At least I hoped I was. And I had spent four years at Wellesley
going to lectures by women writers hoping that I would be the beneficiary of some terrific inside
secret—which I never was. And now here I was at graduation, under, not these
very trees, but some not too far from here, absolutely terrified. Something was over. Something safe and protected. And something else was about to begin. I was heading off to New York and I was afraid
that I would live there forever and never meet anyone and end up dying one of those
New York deaths you read about where no one even notices you're missing until the smell drifts out into
the hallway weeks later. And I sat here thinking, "OK, Santha, this is it. This
is my last chance for a really terrific secret, lay it on me," and she spoke about the need
to put friendship over love of country, which I must tell you had never crossed my
mind one way or another. 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, I told this to the Wellesley College News, There was an article in the Harvard Crimson about the women's colleges: the seven sisters. It was one of those stupid
mean little articles full of stereotypes, like girls at Bryn Mawr wear black. We were girls then, by the way. How long ago was it? It was so long ago that while I was here,
Wellesley actually threw six young women out for being lesbians. It was so long ago that we had curfews. It was so long ago that if you had a boy in
your room, you had to leave the door open six inches exactly, and if you closed the door you
had to put a sock on the doorknob. In my class of, I don't know, 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. How long ago was it? If you needed an abortion, you drove to a
gas station in Union, New Jersey, with $500 in cash in an envelope and you were taken,
blindfolded, to a motel room and operated on without any anesthetic. On the lighter side, and as you no doubt read
in the New York Times magazine, and may have been flabbergasted to learn, there were the posture pictures. We not only took off most of our clothes to
have our posture pictures taken, we took them off without ever even thinking, this is really weird,
why are we doing this?—not only that, we had speech therapy—I was told I
had a New Jersey accent I really ought to do something about, which was a shock to me
since I was from Beverly Hills, California, and had never set foot in the state of New
Jersey... Not only that, we were required to take a course called Fundamentals. Remember Fundamentals? It was called 'Fundies',
and we were taught - I'm not kidding - how to get in and out of the back seat of cars. Some of us were named things like Winkie. We all parted our hair in the middle. How long ago was it? It was so long ago that among the things that
I honestly cannot conceive of life without, that had not yet been invented: we didn't have panty hose, lattes, Advil, pasta (there was no pasta then, there was only spaghetti and macaroni and lasagna)—I
sit here writing this speech on a computer next to a touch tone phone with an answering
machine and a Rolodex. There's a bottle of Snapple on my desk I couldn't live without. Well, you get the point, it was a long time
ago. Anyway, as I was saying, the Crimson had this
snippy article And it said that Wellesley was a school for tunicata— tunicata apparently
were 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 was mean... but it had the horrible
ring of truth, it was one of those do-not-ask-for-whom-the-bell-tolls things, and it burned itself into our brains. Years later, at my 25th reunion, one of my
classmates mentioned it, and everyone remembered what tunacata were, word for word. My class went to college in the era when you
got a masters degrees in teaching because it was "something to fall back on" in the
worst case scenario, the worst case scenario being that no one married you and you actually
had to go to work. As this same classmate said at our reunion,
"Our education was a dress rehearsal for a life we never led." Isn't that the saddest line? We weren't meant to have futures, we were
meant to marry them. We weren't' meant to have politics, or careers
that mattered, or opinions, or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married
an architect. Non Ministrare sed Ministrari—you know the joke, not to be ministers but to be ministers' wives. I've written about my years at Wellesley,
and I don't want to repeat myself any more than is necessary, But I do want to retell one anecdote. I'll tell it a little differently in case you read it. During my junior year,
I was engaged for a very short period of time. And I thought I might transfer to Barnard my senior
year. I went to see my class dean for advice and she said to
me, "Let me suggest something You've worked so hard at Wellesley, when you
marry, take a year off. Devote yourself to your husband and your marriage." Well, it was stunning piece of advice
to give me because I had always intended to work after college. My mother was a career woman, and all of us,
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. Take a year off being a wife. I always wondered what I was supposed to do
in that year. Iron? I repeated the story for years, as proof that
Wellesley wanted its graduates to be merely housewives. But I turned out to be wrong, because 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 take the fabulous education we
had received here and use it to preside at a committee meeting or at a dinner table, and
when two people disagreed we would be intelligent enough to step in and point out the remarkable
similarities between their two opposing positions. 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, by the way, lived
happily ever after. But many of them didn't. All sorts of things happened that no one expected. They needed money so they had to work. They got divorced so they had to work. They were bored witless so they had to work. The women's movement came along and made harsh
value judgments about their lives—judgments that caught them by surprise, because they
were doing what they were supposed to be doing, weren't they? The rules had changed, they were caught in
some kind of strange time warp. They had never intended to be the heroines
of their own lives, they'd intended to be—I don't know? First Ladies, I guess, first ladies in the lives
of big men. And they ended up feeling like victims. They ended up, and this is the really sad part, thinking
that their years in college were the best years of their lives. Why am I telling you this? It was a long time ago, right? Things have changed, haven't they? Yes, they have. But I mention it because I want to remind
you of the specific gravity. American society has a remarkable ability
to resist change, or to take whatever change has taken place and attempt to make it go
away. Things are different for you than they were
for us. Just the fact that you chose to come to a
single-sex college makes you so much smarter than we were- I cannot tell you. We came because it's what you did. That was the choice then. If you were bright, and a woman. That was where you went, to one of the Seven Sisters schools. The college you are graduating from is a very different place from the place I went to. Many things caused Wellesley to change,
but it did change, and today it's a place that understands its obligation to women
in today's world. The women's movement has made a huge difference, and you are the lucky, lucky beneficiaries of it. There are women doctors and women lawyers. There are anchorwomen, although most of them
are blonde. But at the same time, the pay differential
between men and women has barely changed. Don't forget this. In my own business, the movie business, there
are many more of us who are directors, but it's just as hard to get a movie made about women as it
was 30 years ago, and it's much much harder than it was 60 years ago. Look at the parts the Oscar-nominated actresses played this year: hooker, hooker,
hooker, hooker, and nun. It's 1996, and you are graduating from Wellesley
in the Year of the Wonderbra. The Wonderbra is not a step forward for women. Nothing that hurts that much is a step forward
for women. [laughter] What I'm saying is, don't delude yourself
that the powerful cultural values that wrecked the lives of so many of my classmates have
vanished from the earth. Don't let the New York Times article about
the brilliant success of Wellesley graduates in the business world fool you—there's still
a glass ceiling. Don't let the number of women in the work
force trick you—there are still lots of magazines devoted almost exclusively to turning black robes into tents. Don't underestimate how much antagonism there
is toward women 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 in the world and, I beg you to take it personally. Understand this: every attack on Hillary Clinton
for not knowing her place is an attack on you. [applause] When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn't really serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The acquittal of O.J. Simpson is an attack
on you. Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack
on you—whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on
the Supreme Court today is an attack on you. Above all, whatever you do, be the heroine of your life, not the victim. Because you don't have the alibi my class
had—this is one of the great achievements and mixed blessings you inherit: Unlike us,
you can't say nobody told you there were other options. Your education is a dress rehearsal for a
life that is yours to lead. Twenty-five years from now, you won't have
as easy a time making excuses as my class did. You won't be able to blame the deans, or the
culture, or anyone else: you will have no one to blame but yourselves. Whoa. So what are you going to do? This is the season when a clutch of successful
women—who have it all —get up and give speeches to women like you and say, to be perfectly honest,
you can't have it all. Maybe young women don't wonder whether they
can have it all any longer, but in case any of you are wondering, of course you can have
it all. What are you - [cheering] What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the
mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the
complications. It will not be anything like what you think
it is going to be like, but surprises are good for you. And don't be frightened: you can always change
your mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands. [cheering and laughter] And this is something else I want to tell
you, one of the hundreds of things I didn't know when I was sitting here so many years
ago: you are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever. We have a game we play when we're waiting
for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe you
on a piece of paper. When I was your age, I would have put: ambitious,
Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things
turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced,
funny. [laughter] Today not one of those five things turns up
in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy. Whatever those five things are for you today,
they won't make the list in ten years—not 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, and more particularly to women than to men. I think. It's slightly easier for us to shift, to change
our minds, to take another path. Yogi Berra, the former New York Yankee who
made a specialty of saying things that were famously maladroit, quoted himself at a recent
commencement speech he gave. "When you see a fork in the road," he said,
"take it." [laughter] Yes, it's supposed to be a joke, but as somebody
said in a movie I made... don't laugh this is my life. This is the life many women get to lead:
Two paths diverge in a wood, and we get to take them both. It's another of the nicest things about being
women; we can do that. Did I say it was hard? Yes, but let me say it again so that none
of you can ever say the words, nobody said it was going to be hard. But it's also incredibly interesting. And you are very lucky to have an interesting life as a real option. 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. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your lives. [Applause]
