Staying on the career track is important to the women of ‘85. When Julianne Markow’s husband was accepted to the University of Chicago Law School-he’d followed her to Washington-Markow left her job as an international-relations specialist for a U.S.Soviet trade company. She considered giving up her career to devote herself to raising a family. “My husband was very supportive,” she says, “if that was what I wanted to do. But he also said, that’s not the person he married.” She got her M.B.A. and is now a technical analyst for Sara Lee.
But Karen Chen, who knew Owada well at Harvard and has kept in touch, thinks Owada’s new job “is not totally different from what she’s been preparing to do. A lot of the skills she acquired in her diplomatic career will serve her well.” Says Chen, who has a Ph.D, in the neurosciences, “Maybe, in a different way, she’ll still have an effect on policy.” She won’t be in the Clinton mode, though. “I don’t know that Masako will have as much opportunity as Hillary to be her own person,” says Nina Donnelly, a distributor at Miramax Films who lived with Owada.
Owada will have to make adjustments: the woman who liked to go to parties–even if she rarely threw her own–had lots of male friends in college. But most men apparently saw her more as a confidante than a girlfriend. During Owada’s years, Lowell House had Harvard’s highest grade-point average; Owada herself was a serious student. That never changed: after college, Chen recalls, Masako agonized over passing the Foreign Service exam. Masako’s letters also mentioned that Prince Naruhito was in her life-so Chen wasn’t surprised by the engagement. “I think she was always well acquainted with what that kind of life entails.”
Classmates who’ve spent almost a decade in highpowered, high-prestige jobs can share Owada’s new priorities. “When you come home at 10 every night and your husband comes home at 10, you don’t have a marriage,” says Elissa Kraut, who gave up her job at Goldman, Sachs to help her husband establish his medical practice. Their new “partnership,” she says, is more satisfying-and she sees why Owada might want the same thing. And anyway, Kraut jokes, the royal wedding is bound to enhance their alma mater’s reputation. “We haven’t had a president from Harvard in years,” she says. “I’ll take an empress.”
