Wellesley College is the setting of Jenny Fields’s brief college experience and a recurring shorthand for the future her family wanted for her. Jenny leaves after concluding that her education is being directed toward marriage, a decision that helps shape her independent life and her choice of nursing.

Jenny’s Departure

Jenny’s older brothers had recommended Wellesley to their parents because its students were regarded as respectable and as having strong prospects for marriage. Jenny came to see that reasoning as evidence that college was not being valued for her own intellectual development: her education seemed to her a polite way of preparing her for a husband. She had entered with English literature as her declared major, but left when she felt that many classmates were chiefly learning the poise and sophistication expected in dealings with men.

Nursing offered a different purpose. Jenny had completed nursing school at the head of her class, and she preferred work whose study could be put into immediate practice, without the ulterior motive she associated with her college experience. Leaving Wellesley therefore marks more than a change of subject: it is Jenny’s rejection of an education she understood as serving a prescribed marital future.

Family Conflict and Aftermath

Jenny’s brothers invoke Wellesley when they visit after her arrest for wounding a soldier in a Boston movie theater. One tells her to imagine how differently things might have gone had she stayed there; another repeats the college’s name when advising her that she should have friends. Their appeals frame Wellesley as the respectable path Jenny ought to have followed, while her own answer—that a woman alone must protect herself—asserts a different account of her choices. The college thus becomes part of a family disagreement over women’s independence and the expectations attached to respectability.

A Recurring Measure of Independence

Wellesley remains a reference point in the story even after Jenny has built a life outside it. Her family’s repeated appeals to the college contrast with her nursing career and her determination to act on her own judgment. Later, her book gives Robert Muldoon courage to pursue sex reassignment, and Jenny supports Roberta’s effort to be considered for work as a football commentator. These later episodes do not make Wellesley a direct cause of Jenny’s activism; rather, they show the larger pattern established by her departure: Jenny repeatedly supports people seeking lives that conventional expectations would deny them.