Superior Girl 1984

[Amice Golden]

ForMiss Adams, applying her elegant, rhythmic style to the form, the challenge lies in making it new, fitting it to her own literary place and our time. Her ''group'' is one not of sisters but of college friends (the modern analogue of sisters). Mary McCarthy's women were Vassar classmates; these are Radcliffe girls - those best and brightest of Betty Coeds. Miss Adams will draw them, and us, through four crowded decades, in and out of wars and uneasy peaces, losses of virginity and hope, crises of midlife and identity. We know from Miss Adams's earlier novels and beautifully crafted stories that there will be tenderness and bite, awkward sex that turns graceful with a stroke of wit and a surprise inside every smile.

Five girls five: one Catholic and sad; one Jewish and intense; one thin, rich snob; one poor, sexy, talented dreamer; one fat, dateless oddball. We can tell they are superior, even in their teens, by the simple fact of Radcliffe. In the 1940's and 50's, getting into Radcliffe, choosing to go there, was so vivid a mark of excellence and ambition that it could, like serious acne, scar a young woman for life.

cum laude, and the others will drop out for marriage. Fat, odd Peg, in fact, will get pregnant and have to marry her first, only and dreadful blind date. Abortion, for a superior woman, is out.

By now we have begun to discern the complexity of Miss Adams's tune. Each of the women must come, we understand, to a series of bad ends, and the author, with a fine, wry logic, will make us see that disappointment, bitterness, waste, all come with this territory. Is it the terrible cost of being superior - or wanting to be? But she is at pains to tell us these women don't feel strong, don't want to scare away their men, their happiness; it just works out that way. (This book could bring aid and comfort to the new conservatives; isn't it a cautionary tale about what awful things happen to young women with a higher education?)

Perfect Lavinia marries beautifully and is bored, even with her glamorous adulteries and dining room furniture; she gets no kick from champagne. It is poor, sexy, talented Megan who observes - it is always Megan who observes - that rich people often don't like champagne. It's the originally poor, like herself, who think it's wonderful.

Intense, Jewish Janet marries brilliant, nasty, non- Jewish Adam, a playwright, who whisks her off to Paris for a while but then dumps her in White Plains with their child, who bites people, while he runs off with a beautiful black model. Janet goes back to school, becomes a doctor; her son turns out to be a homosexual. Big, miserable, marriage-trapped Peg has so many children she doesn't know what to do; a nervous breakdown, shock treatments and the civil rights movement of the 1960's finally help her escape to her old, odd self. There is an occasional, distressing confusion when the outside world intrudes on these private lives; a fashionable 1956 party has hard rock music, marijuana and ''blockbuster writers''; hippies appear on the streets of New York in the early 60's.

Meanwhile, wry, Catholic Cathy manages to finish graduate school and become an economist but then commits a shocking sin of the flesh in California with a priest and condemns herself to unwed motherhood, loneliness, cancer and death. She will not help the economy. Miss Adams has told us Cathy's story before, movingly, in the short story ''What Should I Have Done?'' In both tellings, it is the waste of Cathy's life that haunts us and the author, far more than the figure of Cathy herself or the priest or the fatal love affair.

In college, nursing her early wounds, Megan planned to write a thesis about the significance of private incomes in Henry James. It makes us smile - the author is joking? But she rarely does. The final trick of Miss Adams's melancholy chorale is that her subject is not, after all, superiority or growing up or even friendship - they were friends, the dying Cathy says, ''who possibly never really liked each other.'' The novel is rather about the severity of America's class system and the futility of outsiders' dreams. Rich, poor, fat, thin - even, perhaps especially, superior - women are outsiders. Still, if Miss Adams had had the good fortune to meet Henry James, I think they would have had fun, clamming.

In Florida in 1969, Lawtis Donald Rhoden was convicted of one felony sex offense involving a child under the age of 14 years and sentenced to 14 months in a state mental hospital and 12 years in state prison. While on parole from Florida, Mr. Rhoden sexually assaulted three children in California. While the California crimes were under investigation, Mr. Rhoden went to Nashville, Tennessee where he sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl in December 1984 and was convicted in October 1985 by a jury of rape and use of a minor for obscene purposes. The State of Tennessee sentenced him to 20 years in state prison.

Mr. Rhoden was subsequently extradited to California for prosecution. He was first prosecuted in Orange County for a sexual assault he committed against a 17-year-old on June 2, 1984 in the City of Anaheim. He was convicted by an Orange County jury of rape by force, forceful sexual penetration, and sexual battery in March 1988. The Orange County Superior Court sentenced him to 17 years in state prison (later reduced to 12 years on appeal).

Following prosecution in Orange County, Mr. Rhoden was transferred to Los Angeles County. There, he was prosecuted for sexual assaults he committed against two 14-year-olds on April 24, 1984 and June 18, 1984 in the City of Bellflower and another area of Los Angeles County, respectively. On May 20, 1988, Mr. Rhoden pled guilty to two counts of forcible rape in Los Angeles County Superior Court and was sentenced to six years in state prison, consecutive to his state prison sentence from Orange County.

Members of the public may attend in person and speak to the court or may speak remotely. Additionally, members of the public will be subject to a three minute time limit when providing comment to the court in person or remotely.

Sandra Day O'Connor (b. 1930) donated the first of her papers (71,475 items; 1963-88) to the division in 1991, ten years after her appointment to the Court. These relate to her first five years on the Court and to her career in Arizona as a state senator (1969-75), a Maricopa County Superior Court judge (1975-79), and a judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals (1979-81), with the Supreme Court files making up the bulk of the collection. These are divided into three subseries: administrative files, case files, and docket sheets. O'Connor's handwritten notes of the major issues, oral arguments, and opinions of her colleagues highlight her case files, including those relating to Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, a 1982 gender discrimination case; City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, a 1983 abortion rights case; and Grove City College v. Bell, a 1984 Title IX sexual discrimination case. Her incoming correspondence is also of interest. As the first woman justice, O'Connor received hundreds of letters in 1981 from well-wishers, including many from women and girls of all ages inspired by the justice's appointment. In 1988, following her surgery for breast cancer, she received numerous cards and letters from women who had also undergone mastectomies. The O'Connor Papers are not yet open for research use.

More than fifty years before O'Connor and Ginsburg began their judicial careers, Florence Ellinwood Allen (1884-1966) became the first woman to sit on an American court of last resort when she was appointed an associate justice of the Ohio Supreme Court in 1922. From 1934 to 1959, she served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and was thought by many to be worthy of a Supreme Court nomination. Her papers (2,700 items; 1907-65) relate to her judicial career, her activities on behalf of suffrage and women's rights, and her interest in peace through international law.

Deputy attorney general for Pennsylvania Regina Clark McGranery (1907-1975) and her husband James P. McGranery, attorney general of the United States (74,800 items; 1909-75; bulk 1943-75) were active in the Democratic Party and the Catholic Church. Regina's papers reflect the political role of women during the New Deal and document her career as a lawyer and a leader in the Girl Scouts and Woman's National Democratic Club. The couple's law office files contain material on birth control, sterilization, and women's religious organizations.

The following collection titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content, including finding aids for the collections, are included when available.

Parker had been convicted earlier on felony charges and was placed on probation in Fulton County on May 15, 1984. The probation was transferred to Douglas County that day, and he was scheduled to meet with his assigned Douglas County probation officer on June 1. He failed to appear then, but he did meet his probation officer on June 5, and asked for permission to leave the state.

Parker was arrested on these warrants. After talking further with law enforcement officers, he told them he would take a polygraph examination, provided that he was allowed to talk to his attorney beforehand.

Parker had called an attorney prior to his arrest and had made arrangements to meet him that day. Now Parker called him again, and the attorney met him at the FBI Atlanta office, where the examination was to take place.

The attorney testified that he discussed the situation with Parker, who adamantly denied any involvement in the disappearance of the girl. They agreed, then, that Parker should go ahead and take the examination.

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