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L A D I E S
F I R S T
STAFF…
Julia Roberts, Dominic West and Marcia Gay Harden as members of the Wellesley faculty…
mona lisa smile
For writers Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, it all started when one of them read an article about former First Lady and New York Congresswoman Hillary Rodham Clinton. The article referred to her years at Wellesley College - one of the top women-only colleges in the US, known as the ‘Seven Sisters’ - in the sixties. By then Wellesley had been transformed by the social and political changes of the day. “But we wondered what it would be like if we went back a generation, before the vocabulary of feminism was handed to women on a silver platter,” says Rosenthal. “They were doing French literature and physics in the morning, and how to serve tea to your husband’s boss in the afternoon,” adds Konner with a chuckle.
Although Wellesley supposedly shared the same total commitment to academic standards as male Ivy League colleges such as Harvard and Yale, the assumption was that a young woman’s goal was primarily to find a good husband, build a home and raise a family. This was, after all, the fifties, the Eisenhower years, when the country was culturally as well as politically conservative.
In their research, Rosenthal and Konner came across a 1956 issue of The Wellesley News which showed the ideal student: smartly dressed, with the hour-glass waist of the era, wearing pearls, and carrying in one hand a book, in the other a frying pan. The photo spoke volumes.
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JULIA ROBERTS STARS IN MONA LISA SMILE -
THE STORY OF A
PROGRESSIVE TEACHER WHO ARRIVES TO TEACH ART AT AN ALL-GIRL’S
COLLEGE IN THE FIFTIES.
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