The women who graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 were among the best and brightest of their generation. The most famed class member, Hillary Rodham Clinton, went on to become first lady, her career fueled in part by a message drilled into every Wellesley student: You have the talent and drive to be anything you choose to be.
It's a message that every child ought to hear. When delivered by an elite institution such as Wellesley, it's a message that can be both blessing and burden.
It's a blessing because Wellesley grads did learn to aim high. It's a burden because life inevitably brings setbacks and compromises, which can be hard to accept after you've been told you're the "cream of the cream."
When the message is delivered to Wellesley women -- who are expected to raise children and arrange carpools and manage their homes, all while pursuing a brilliant career -- confusion and self-doubt can result.
Those themes are explored, with drama and poignancy, in tonight's edition of PBS' "Frontline," called "Hillary's Class," which looks at Wellesley's 1969 graduates. It's a wonderful documentary, thought-provoking, emotional and never dull. The show will air on Maryland Public Television (channels 22 and 67) at 9 p.m.
Many of Wellesley's 1969 graduates were pioneers, whose lives were profoundly affected by feminism. They were the first female partners at law firms, or the highest-ranking woman at the bank.
"We had all sorts of opportunities opening up to us because of the times," says Betsy Griffith, who became headmistress of the prestigious Madeira School for Girls in Virginia.
She added: "We had been taught to excel, to expect that we could do well, that there should be no inhibitions on what a woman could do. That's the Wellesley message."
To the degree that they set out to fulfill themselves at work, they ran up against the expectations of their mothers and husbands and even their children.
Ann Sherwood Sentilles had a promising career as a TV reporter curtailed when her husband's work forced a move to Dallas, and she had three children.
"I had an identity that I was comfortable with, and that was taken away from me when I moved to Dallas," Ms. Sentilles says. "I did a lot of crying and raging and screaming, and I'm not proud of that time in my life."
By contrast, Martha Teichner, a much-traveled and well-regarded foreign correspondent for CBS News, had to confront the reality that her work had left her little time to pursue romance or have a family.
Ms. Teichner, by her account, loves reporting. "I'm never bored. I never get tired of the adventuring," she says.
But, she goes on: "If someone had told me, when I was 24, that the price tag at the end of the road, when I'm 46, is that I would have moved 10 times. . . . Being uprooted again and again, just when some root in a personal life begins to grow, I don't know what I would have done."
The Wellesley women have struggled with such choices for the past 25 years. To their credit, they talk about their lives with almost brutal honesty.
Their stories are filled with unexpected twists and turns, and they are woven together skillfully by the "Frontline" producers, Rachel Dretzin, Jane West and Ofra Bikel. In the end, Ms. Dretzin says, this is a story about limits, about how a group of women had to come to terms with the limits of what they can do and be.
To some of the women, Hillary Clinton also represents an impossible standard against which they measure themselves. One woman says: "You know, you spend a day running carpool and thinking, Hillary doesn't do this. And what's my life . . ."
Hillary, by the way, was interviewed for the show, but her observations were left on the cutting room floor. They weren't as revealing as those made by other women, according to the producers.