Commencement

I got Commencement, by J. Courtney Sullivan, in a mystery book purchase. I was able to see a little description but no hint of the title or author. I thought it sounded like The New Girls, by Beth Gutcheon, which I’d read and loved. This turned out to be pretty accurate, with similar vibes and a wildly different plot.

The setting of Commencement immediately highlights the feminist themes of this novel. Much of the book is set at Smith College, where the four main characters are assigned first year rooms near each other, and become lifelong friends. Any college or university setting makes a good backdrop for coming-of-age experiences, doesn’t it? And here, we get to see the four friends insta-bonding as college hallmates, then going through college together, falling in love, grieving a parent, losing a relationship, discovering themselves, first jobs, and other life milestones.

A women’s college like Smith in the early 2000s, though, is a special setting for formative experiences. The blend of the older Smithie traditions and the new, queer campus activities offers many different paths for students. One of the girls is a legacy student, so there’s a fascinating look at the difference between the Smith College of Bree’s mother’s generation, and the Smith College that Bree and her friends experience.

Sally didn’t really go in for these professors who went by their first names. They were always men, intent on staying young forever, despite the fact that they had achieved a tremendously adult career goal.

There’s a feminist thread through this novel that manages to be realistic  without being too depressing or fake-uplifting. This isn’t the rah-rah girl-power feminism, instead we see how the girls are first told they can do anything and be anything, but actually… there are expectations about appearance, sex, money and career, and social penalties for breaking them. Commencement is set a couple decades before Didn’t See That Coming, in a different country, but there’s a similar feeling of coming of age and discovering that for all the lip-service gender equality, young women are actually held to a different set of rules.

Arriving at Smith, Bree is shocked by the lesbians on campus. Not because of their sexuality, but because Bree expects a certain kind of weight management and grooming and fashion, and she definitely reacts to overweight girls in ratty menswear. This is such a perfect example of the stated belief in equality crashing into the secondary list of expectations for women. There’s the stated belief that women should be free to dress however they like, that we own our bodies and can do what we like with them…. and the unspoken expectation that dieting and shaving are still mandatory for women.

Sally marries almost immediately after graduation. This is just what Smithies of Bree’s mother’s generation were expected to do — marrying a straight man, from a similar background, and buying a house together — almost what she’s assigned to do. But there’s annoyance from the others that she’s marrying too young. When she falls pregnant soon after, there’s a feeling that she’s chosen wrong, that her life is smaller than Celia’s in NYC or April’s documentary filmmaking. Again, there’s stated belief in equality, that women should be free to choose whatever path they want, meeting the unspoken expectations that actually, homemaker and young mother isn’t a very good path.

She had once said that she believed the women’s liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more. “I make as much money as your father, and I still do about ninety percent of the housework,” she said. “Which one of us has a higher quality of life because I work? I’ll give you a clue: It’s not me.”

Commencement takes Bree, Sally, April and Celia through college, and into their lives as young women.  In college, April is ready to join any club or protest connected with feminism, and as a new graduate, she works for an intense charismatic, feminist film-maker, Ronnie. Ronnie’s also a Smithie, and April is soon living in Ronnie’s apartment, working on a dramatic documentary around teen sex workers.

These girls’ lives are a dark counterpoint to the Smithie’s lives. This felt like the comment section of literally any argument where a woman wants equal pay or better maternity leave or something like that, and someone pops up to say those are first-world problems, and women in other places have it so much worse, and we first-world women should be grateful and stop complaining! The novel shows how Bree, Sally, April and Celia had challenges that were exacerbated by being women, and then connects the problems of college-educated women to larger dangers for women, without trivializing or sensationalizing. Commencement draws the connections between an Ivy League boy assuming his right to his date’s body, and a john assuming his rights to a woman’s body. Or between a sex worker who can’t escape and an intern pressured into unsafe work.

All over the planet women were being tormented, yet if you took sexism seriously, you were a bore, an idiot, or a pain in the ass.

Commencement is still a friendship story at its heart. This works well to develop the characters, and to keep readers invested. It also works because the four friends’ special bond keeps the negative events in the novel from becoming overwhelming, just like any good friendship should.