Julia Child Rules by Karen Karbo Read Free Book Online

within walking distance of Hubbard House. She spent her time partying and continued to specialize in pranks large and small. Moment to moment, if there was an opportunity to do something unexpected, to change the course of the next five minutes, Julia did it. Her impulse to engage, to get involved, to mix things up, to see what happens when you do
x
instead of
y
was compulsive. If there was a chance to lock someone in or out of a room, she would do it. Anything that involved having to climb out a window was right up her alley. When her roommate, Mary, hung a rug between their beds so that she could study, Julia would toss jelly doughnuts over the makeshiftwall. I’m sure modern psychiatry has a name for this compulsive need to disrupt, distract, and get a laugh. It made Julie, as her classmates called her, popular. Her professors observed her sparkle and spunk; they appreciated her vivacity, but felt she lacked the ability to persevere. She was not serious.
    Caro had been a basketball star at Smith, but Julia lacked both the drive and the aptitude. * Although she did play tennis, hockey, and baseball and ride horses at some nearby stables. She was a solid C student her sophomore year and enjoyed a somewhat outlaw reputation among her friends for failing to care. They had no idea that for Julia’s father, good grades equaled being an intellectual equaled being a communist, and if there was one thing worse than a communist … well, in Pop’s world, there was nothing worse than a communist. A serial killer who voted Republican was better than a Democrat with the Nobel Peace Prize.
    None of this really mattered until junior year, when the young women were expected to declare a major, which mostly served notice to those who weren’t dating anyone steadily to buckle down and focus on their husband hunting. Despite the heady academic environment at Smith, most of the students were there to find a proper husband, culled from their male counterparts at Amherst, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia. Girls who landed a guy were rarely motivated to graduate.Getting engaged and dropping out within the same week wasn’t uncommon. And on the slim-to-nonexistent chance a newly minted Mrs.
did
want a job outside the home, the only real career that promised advancement, a decent salary, and prestige was teaching, which was subject to the so-called marriage ban, a federal law that prohibited the hiring of wives.
    Why women who were expected to spend their lives overseeing the help needed to be conversant in Homer and Descartes was never discussed. Even Sophia Smith, who founded the college in 1875 with money inherited from her father—“… with the design to furnish for my own sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our colleges to young men”—never quite addressed what the young women who would benefit from her largesse were actually supposed to
do
with the education they received there.
    First, Julia declared a history major, then decided that maybe she would be a “lady novelist” instead. She was in a more precarious position than most; as popular as she was with her classmates and even her professors who, if not impressed with her scholarship, still admired her “savoir faire,” the young men of the Ivy League just weren’t interested.
    One of Smith’s vocational counselors suggested that since marriage was obviously not in the cards for Julia, and since her family was well-off, she would not need to pursue a career, or even have a job, but could devote herself to charity work. Even the brain trust at Smith believed Julia’s sole option was to return home to Pasadena and join the tribe of Ladies Who Lunch.
A B RIEF R EFLECTION ON THE M ERITS OF C OLLEGE
    Before moving on to Julia’s inopportune early adulthood, let us pause to appreciate how her college education, an excellent one by all standards, did next to nothing to inform her future. Throughout her life Julia adored her