By Justin Pope,AP Education Writer

WELLESLEY, Mass. – A snapshot of two classes, 50 years apart.

The Wellesley College class of 2000 was celebrating its fifth reunion in 20-something style: Classmates ate Chinese takeout in a dining hall, drank pedestrian wine and danced late into the night to DJ-blasted tunes.

The 1950 alumnae also were back at the elite, New England women’s college. They marked their 55th reunion in a French manor house-turned-conference center – dining on steak and watching a slideshow lecture by an art historian. As the clock struck nine, the evening was winding down.

One generation grew up with the Internet and the other with radio. Their graduation years made bookends on a half-century that saw a dramatic transformation in the prospects of college-educated women.

Still, the shared experience of a women’s college gave them something to say to each other, and between reunion parties they sat together in a campus auditorium, a few husbands shyly in tow.

Using a survey the two classes had each completed as a conversation starter, they talked about their Wellesley experience and the worlds into which they had been sent – one reluctant to let them use their educations, the other offering so many ways to do so that simply picking a career was among the greatest anxieties.

In the auditorium, and in subsequent interviews, a few shared snippets of their lives, offering a sketch of their collective experiences.

Class of 1950 and 2000 joint survey, Question 5: Different racial and ethnic groups should change so that they blend into society. Class of 1950 agreeing: 52.8 percent. Class of 2000: 16.4 percent.

Marion Flynn recalls the thrill of arriving in the fall of 1946 to discover a place where it was OK for women to be intellectual, to love learning.

“When I got there I thought, At last I am with people I can feel comfortable with for the first time,”‘ she said.

She and her classmates came for an education on par with any elite private college, most of which locked women out. Wellesley was not just a finishing school for the wealthy: Flynn was among the 20 percent of the class of 1950 on financial aid. She sold cigarettes and typed papers for money, and remembers how she could tell the rich girls by their cashmere sweaters.

But while students understood discrimination against women, another barrier was still in place. Like most elite colleges back then, Wellesley was almost entirely white.

“The percentage of Negroes, as we were called in those days – you couldn’t take a percentage,” said Barbara Loomis Jackson, now a prominent education scholar at Fordham University. “Because I was the only one.”

College records don’t note the races of the incoming class, only their religious affiliations – 25 percent Episcopalian, under 10 percent each Catholic and Jewish, no Muslims – but, at most, there were a handful of other minorities.

In Wellesley’s class of 2000, by contrast, less than half the class identified itself as white; nearly half received financial assistance.

The younger alums say such diversity was a challenge but deepened their education. It produced much of the campus energy that Piya Nair, a recent business school graduate from an immigrant Indian family in Mississippi, felt on a visit to Wellesley – and which persuaded her to attend. For white students, too, it was valuable preparation for the world they would live in.

“It takes away a lot of that sense of otherness from cultures you aren’t familiar with,” said Erin Lunde, who went on to Harvard Medical School.

Many 1950 alumnae say they love what Wellesley has become. They helped make it possible. Wellesley’s endowment has increased more than 100-fold since they attended, to more than $1 billion. Last year, 1950’s 350 or so living members gave $450,000.

Question 34. A preschool child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works. Class of 1950 disagreeing: 65.9 percent. Class of 2000: 69.4 percent.

Many 1950 alumnae remember coming to Wellesley with modest ambitions. Raised in Depression and conflict, they looked forward to time and space to make friends and develop their minds before settling into new families.

There was “a safe feeling,” recalls Kitty Bassett, who worked various jobs for a few years after college before settling down with her husband in Maine. The pressing concern, Jackson recalls, was “how can we make a peaceful kind of a life?”

They worked hard. “We went to get an education equal to what men would get,” Flynn said. “And we did. We got it.” Classes were six days a week, the rules tight, though looser than elsewhere. Curfew was no later than 1 a.m.; shouts of “Man in corridor!” rose up if a gentleman was present in the dorms.

They resent the portrait of early-1950s Wellesley shown in the 2003 movie “Mona Lisa Smile,” where the students’ priorities were a “ring by spring” or a “BA and an Mrs.,” in the phrases of the day. Still, they acknowledge that for many in their class education was a treasure, not a career tool.

Meeting current Wellesley students at the reunion, Nancy Abuhaydar was struck by how they viewed Wellesley as one step on a journey.

“It seemed like almost every student we talked to felt this was just one phase along the way,” she said. “We thought it was the main phase.”

At its own fifth reunion, in 1955, the class of 1950 compiled a record book. Filed away in the Wellesley archives, it provides a picture of their class at the same point where 2000 is now.

Of the 312 class members who reported back in 1955, 261 were married, and they had a combined 274 children.

“You were an old maid in my generation at 24 or 25,” recalled 1950 alumna Phyllis Degen. Sitting on her back porch in Brunswick, Maine, she recalled her dream of becoming a doctor.

A physiology and zoology major, she had the grades for Harvard Medical School. But her interviewer told her: “You’re going to get married.”

“I said, I’m not going to get married,”‘ she remembered. “He said, Oh, you will and you’ll take the place of a fine doctor who didn’t get in.”‘ She was denied admission.

Many class members did, indeed, work after graduation – as teachers, secretaries, a handful in the foreign service, finance and journalism. But by their fifth-year reunion, many reported their own careers giving way to their husbands’.

“I am resigning from my present job (analyst in the Defense Department) in a month and by June my occupation will be housewife,” reads one record book entry. In another, from 1960, a class member married to an up-and-coming novelist reports: “My own writing has come to a virtual standstill, diapers replacing ink.”

The Harvard interview still angers Degen, though she won’t say she regrets the outcome. She received an education degree from Harvard instead, and worked developing science curricula and teaching.

“I absolutely adored watching children learn,” says Degen, who raised two of her own after marrying, at 27. “I did everything I wanted to do.”

Scattered among 1950’s reports are hints of frustration over opportunities denied, but many others report satisfaction, pride in their work as mothers and as vigorous volunteers.

And as their children grew up, many class members returned to work and school. One became a minister, another a Buddhist nun. Of the 25 class members who earned doctoral degrees, more were awarded in the 1980s than the 1950s. The feminist revolution did not entirely pass them by after all.

For 2000, the first five years have been utterly different. Of the 84 members who contributed to the record book, it appears only 18, or 21 percent, were married. Just one child attended their reunion.

There was virtually nothing the class of 2000 was told it could not do. They have become doctors, lawyers, teachers, an opera singer, a scientist who plays electric fiddle in an ambient rock band.

“I’ve started a lot of plans and dropped a lot of plans,” said 2000’s Deborah Fleur Milstein, a finance company temp trying to get an astrology and tarot reading business up and running in Brookline. She’s already considered or tried massage therapy, finance and graduate school.

“I’ve started things and been honest with myself it wasn’t what I expected it to be,” she said.

But the variety of options creates pressure to choose the right one. Then there is the expectation they will put their educations to good use. But for whom? Themselves? Their families? The world?

“My sense is they are struggling with how to put all the pieces together of a meaningful and fulfilling life,” said Wellesley President Diana Chapman Walsh, a 1966 graduate, of the college’s younger alumnae. “There are so many trade-offs they’re having to face, how much of their energy and effort to put into building relationships and building careers. And the choices seem pretty decisive, as though they are laying foundation stones for the rest of their lives.”

Members of the class of 1950 say they envy the range of choices for younger Wellesley women, and none in the class of 2000 wanted to trade places. But junior alumnae like Jessica Durrum, who has worked at a community center since graduation, say they admire their Wellesley predecessors, who made the most of the opportunities they were given. “They were the women kicking open those doors so we can be stressed out about all the options we now have,” she said, laughing.

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Question 11: Do you believe in life after death? Class of 1950: 30.1 percent. Class of 2000 46.9 percent.

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It’s perhaps the most surprising finding of the survey; it’s the younger alumnae who are more likely to believe in life after death.

“Maybe the closer you get, you deal with it differently,” says Kitty Bassett, sitting in the living room of her farmhouse in Arundel, Maine. “They haven’t lost mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters,” she says of 2000.

Bassett has lost one of her three children, and, last November, her husband. He had been sick so long that death offered “a sense of release,” she said. She kayaks, works in a library, and oversees the tree farm and herd of cattle her husband managed.

With every reunion, the tone of 1950’s record book darkens. Entries this year catalog the hardships of aging – accounts of falls, failing eyesight and medications – and of loss.

“My husband, George, died from complications of pneumonia,” reads one entry this year. “I really miss him. We had been married 48 years.” Another says simply: “Widowhood is a horrid condition.”

At least 100 class members have passed away. In recent months, Degen lost a roommate and a close friend. She missed reunion for the first time.

“I just couldn’t go back,” she said.

But there are also tales of renewal – new homes, new projects, new grandchildren. “I have just won the International Autoharp Championship,” reports one member. “On the plus side, I had a lovely affair for several years,” says another. For about 15 years, Degen, who lost her husband in the 1980s, has been seeing a retired submarine captain, though they have no plans to marry.

Many still look to each other for guidance in difficult times.

Miriam Alexander, credits her roommate, Flynn, with getting her through a difficult freshman year. They lost touch but became great friends again later in life. Now, Alexander is caring for an ailing husband and the two talk often.

“There are three or four (Wellesley) friends who, I really feel, when I see them, we’re the same people,” Alexander said. “We pick up right where we left off. There’s a freedom in the relationship that’s particularly wonderful.”

They are all pleased that, unlike other schools that went coed, Wellesley has adapted its mission for a world where single-sex colleges are just one option for the brightest women. They are jealous of the choices of younger Wellesley women – of classes, majors and careers – and somewhat perplexed by the idea that choice can produce stress.

They advise those who followed them that there are a million and one ways to put their Wellesley educations to use.

“They don’t have to be lawyers and doctors. They can do a lot of others things,” Bassett said. “Life is full of choices, which is wonderful.”

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On the Net:

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AP-ES-07-30-05 1323EDT