I went to a small, all-girl Catholic high school. I don’t remember ever considering going to the public high school when I graduated from eighth grade in 1967–the only question for me was which girls’ high school to attend. And that really wasn’t much of a decision, since my mother, my aunt, and two of my cousins had attended Saint Patrick’s. Going to high school didn’t excite me particularly, and St. Pat’s was the path of least resistance, so I took their entrance exam. It was given on the same day as all of the other girls’ schools—St. Xavier’s, St. Mary’s of the Visitation, St. Mary’s Bay View—preventing us from hedging our bets and applying to more than one school. We were forced to plight our troth with one and only one of them.

At that time Rhode Island was, and may still be, the most Catholic of the states. How Catholic? I remember my mother keeping the custom of visiting seven churches on Holy Thursday to say a prayer in each. Saint Lawrence, Saint Augustine, Saint Pius, Saint Casimir, Holy Ghost, Saint Thomas, Blessed Sacrament—all these churches (and more) within five miles of home. There were even two Catholic churches across the street from each other on Atwells Avenue. We’d usually be home within the hour.

I entered high school right after the “Summer of Love”, which was a cultural rather than a personal experience for me. Our mandate was to test the limits of authority, and there was no better setting for this than an all-female, Catholic institution. Saint Patrick High School was run by an order of nuns called the FCJ’s, the Faithful Companions of Jesus—women who took unusual-sounding names like Mother Fidelis or Mother Assumption and who seemed sturdier and less impulsive than my grade school nuns. Even their habit was forthright and uncomplicated. The school was a dour old building in an Irish working-class section of the city.

The poor FCJ’s were creatures of another time, completely unprepared for this generation. (Several of them had taught my mother thirty years earlier, and “we thought they were old then,” she remembered.) I remember one in particular, Mother Bernardine, instructing us to write the answers to our exams on “foolscap,” triggering an overreaction of titters from her teenaged students. We didn’t know what “foolscap” was but we knew it had gone the way of the horse and buggy, and the disconnect was hilarious to us. At that time, the nuns’ definition of rebellion was using hairspray or sneaking a smoke in the lavatory, which was also hilarious. I can still remember one nun’s stricken expression when one of my classmates refused to participate in phys-ed. “Mother, I have my period!” she protested loudly as the rest of us snickered.

The idea of the single-sex high school has also gone the way of the horse and buggy, but it had its virtues. Not having boys around freed us from the mating ritual, at least during the hours school was in session. In another sense, boys are always around at that age. In their physical absence we talked about them, worried about our looks, spent far too much time applying make-up and playing with our hair. But something of the essential “girl spirit” that often goes underground during puberty survived for us in their absence, and it emerged in an unembarrassed willfulness that drove the nuns crazy. And what sometimes began as the impulse to simply make trouble often ended up as healthy rebellion against ideas and customs that really needed to be questioned.

LaSalle Academy was the nearby Catholic boys’ school, and it provided social opportunities and boyfriends for girls at the orbiting girls’ schools, of which St. Pat’s was one. Saturday night mixers, basketball and football games: the girls owned these just as much as the LaSalle boys did. The nuns and priests realized that they could not split the schoolyard in half forever so they tried in their way to infuse our social events with their ideas of Christian wholesomeness, sometimes in a heavy-handed way.

When Homecoming rolled around in the fall, the seniors at each girls’ school would pick their nominee for homecoming queen and send her photo to LaSalle where the boys would then vote for their favorite from these nominees. I suppose this wasn’t very different from public high schools except that it was a little more diffuse. There were more social systems involved but the machinations were the same. The prettiest and/or most popular girl and boy were generally chosen to participate in this performance that allegedly signified something about girls and boys and the memories that life is made of. Whatever it meant, we were ready to make fun of it.

During our deliberations at St. Pat’s, a girl I’ll call “C.C.” nominated herself. C.C. was what we called a “ballbuster”: she was tough and funny and not afraid to rock the boat. She was also what one would politely call a “big girl,” which was not the usual homecoming queen body type. She didn’t wear make-up or spend a lot of time combing her hair. She was much more interested in shaking up the status quo by challenging the teachers and making the rest of us laugh.

I’m sure we all laughed at her nomination before we realized that here was the chance to give the figurative “finger” to the custom of picking a “queen.” I won’t say that this was a unanimous realization—my guess is that it was spontaneously embraced by those of us who had never expected to be nominated, and this momentum took everyone by surprise. It was a rejection and an acceptance, in one gesture. By nominating C.C. the “anti-queens” were symbolically sending one of our own, and if we could get enough of the LaSalle boys onboard we might make some waves.

So we voted C.C. our homecoming queen candidate. And the nuns immediately shot us down, not even realizing the trap we’d set for them. In order to reject our nomination they had to reject our nominee, which meant acknowledging that this was all about looks and their own sanitized version of youthful sexuality. We didn’t really expect to succeed but we had fun hoping, we had fun watching the nuns squirm before our vision of young womanhood.