The Feminine Mystique
The Sex-Directed Educators
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| The Sex-Directed Educators I t must have been going on for tenor fifteen years before the educators even suspected it—the old-fashioned educators, that is. The new sex-directed educators were surprised that anyone should be surprised, shocked that anyone should be shocked. The shock, the mystery, to the naive who had great hopes for the higher education of women was that more American women than ever before were going to college—but fewer of them were going on from college to become physicists, philosophers, poets, doctors, lawyers, stateswomen, social pioneers, even college professors. Fewer women in recent college graduating classes have gone onto distinguish themselves in a career or profession than those in the classes graduated before World War II, the Great Divide. Fewer and fewer college women were preparing for any career or profession requiring more than the most casual commitment. Two out of three girls who entered college were dropping out before they even finished. In the s, those who stayed, even the most able, showed no signs of wanting to be anything more than suburban housewives and mothers. In fact, to professors at Vassar and Smith and Barnard, resorting to desperate means to arouse students interest in anything college could teach them, the girls seemed suddenly incapable of any ambition, any vision, any passion, except the pursuit of a wedding ring. In this pursuit they seemed almost desperate, as early as freshman year. Out of loyalty to that more and more futile illusion—the importance of higher education for women—the purist professors kept quiet at first. But the disuse of, the resistance to, higher education by American women finally began to show in the statistics in the departure of the male presidents, scholars, and educators from women’s colleges in the disillusionment, the mystified frustration or cool cynicism of the ones who stayed and in the skepticism, finally, in colleges and universities, about the value of a professorial investment in any girl or woman, no matter how apparently able and ambitious. Some women’s colleges went out of business some professors, at coeducational universities, said one out of three college places should no longer be wasted on women the president of Sarah Lawrence, a women’s college with high intellectual values, spoke of opening the place to men the president of Vassar predicted the end of all the great American women’s colleges which pioneered higher education for women. When I read the first cautious hints of what was happening, in the preliminary report of the psychological-sociological-anthropological Mellon Foundation study of Vassar girls in 1956, I thought, My, how Vassar must have deteriorated.” Strong commitment to an activity or career other than that of housewife is rare. Many students, perhaps a third, are interested in graduate schooling and in careers, for example, teaching. Few, however, plan to continue with a career if it should conflict with family needs. As compared to previous periods, however, e.g., the feminist era few students are interested in the pursuit of demanding careers, such as law or medicine, regardless of personal or social pressures. Similarly, one finds few instances of people like Edna St. Vincent Millay, individuals completely committed to their art by the time of adolescence and resistant to any attempts to tamper with it… 2 A later report elaborated: Vassar students…are further convinced that the wrongs of society will gradually right themselves with little or no direct intervention on the part of women college students. Vassar girls, by and large, do not expect to achieve fame, make an enduring contribution to society, pioneer any frontiers, or otherwise create ripples in the placid order of things. Not only is spinsterhood viewed as a personal tragedy but offspring are considered essential to the full life and the Vassar student believes that she would willingly adopt children, if it were necessary, to create a family. In short, her future identity is largely encompassed by the projected role of wife-mother…. In describing the qualities to be found in an ideal husband, the majority of Vassar girls are quite explicit in their preference for the man who will assume the most important role, that is, handle his own career and make the majority of decisions affecting matters outside the home. That the female should attempt, in their thinking, to usurp the prerogatives of the male is a distasteful notion which would seriously disrupt their own projected role of helpmate and faithful complement to the man of the house. 3 I saw the change, a very real one, when I went back to my own college into live fora week with the students in a campus house at Smith, and then went onto interview girls from colleges and universities allover the United States. A beloved psychology professor, on the eve of his retirement, complained: They’re bright enough. They have to be, to get here at all now. But they just won’t let themselves get interested. They seem to feel it will get in their way when they marry the young executive and raise all those children in the suburbs. I couldn’t schedule the final seminar for my senior honor students. Too many kitchen showers interfered. None of them considered the seminar sufficiently important to postpone their kitchen showers. Download 2.16 Mb. Share with your friends:
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