I’ve conceded Susan Patton didn’t do a good job conveying her message. But I think you and Andrea Marcotte misread it.
Patton specifically wrote that she’s not worried about her sons: “My older son had the good judgment and great fortune to marry a classmate of his, but he could have married anyone. My younger son is a junior and the universe of women he can marry is limitless.”
She also wrote that she herself is a Princeton alumnus. Her message is a warning to her fellow women that are in the same situation she was in.
I actually did go to college with some people who weren’t total retards. And it wasn’t even an Ivy League college.
Yes, it’s very important to get that life experience:
Take that jr. assistant associate editor job at Condé Nast.
Move into an East Village walkup with two of your friends and one random
Spend the next several years hanging out in bars and clubs every weekend, having one night stands with 2nd year law associates and junior VP investment bankers
Rent some dilapidated East Hamptons beach house for the summer (quarter share)
Freak out on your 29th birthday because you are still single with no prospects and only a associate senior assistant editor at Condé Nast.
First of all, I don’t see a whole lot of evidence that most Princeton students are awe-inspiringly brilliant. I bet a good chunk of them got in because they were legacies (i.e. their parents went there), and another good chunk did well at the ‘right’ prep schools. I’d be interested in a reality check on this, but I’d guess that <25% of Princeton students are public school grads with no familial connections to Princeton.
If there’s a target audience for Patton’s missive, the women in that (assumed) <25% are it.
Second, I bet she’s wrong about them. These very intelligent women are going to be either going on to jobs where they’ll be working with other very smart people, or to top graduate or professional programs (and then going on to work with other very smart people).
Thinking of my own experience, I didn’t graduate from anywhere that classy, but when I went back to get my doctorate at a middlin’ state university, there were a lot of smart people there. I can tell you that women who are smart enough to get a master’s, let alone a doctorate, in math are pretty damned smart. (The one I married certainly is!) And where I work now, I’m surrounded by plenty of extremely smart people of both sexes, even though we have hardly anyone here with Ivy League degrees: I’m far from indispensably smart here at the office. And it’s not like the average Princeton guy is much smarter than I am.
So I think Patton is full of it. I don’t know what opportunities were available to her, coming out of Princeton in 1977, so maybe she didn’t have any opportunities after that to hang with people as smart as she was. But the world has changed since then.
Once you get out, you still tend to flock with your like. Frankly, any woman who wants a career shouldn’t be husband hunting at 21 or 22 anyway. Looking in grad school, maybe. But two highly ambitious people (and you don’t get into Princeton withough being highly ambitious). What happens when she decides law school at Stanford and he picks Wharton for his MBA?
And the implication here is that smart women can’t marry a limitless supply of men. Because women are more interested in marrying a breadwinner than men are. The 1980s called, they want their feminist meme back.
I know a lot of guys without college degrees married to women who have them. I don’t see why a woman with her degree from Princeton can’t meet a perfectly nice Wisconsin Badger and fall in love. She might outclass him intellectually, or maybe she doesn’t. And either way, maybe it doesn’t matter.
Again, I don’t think this was her message. She never said or implied that a woman needs to a husband to take care of her or make her complete.
What she said was: “Smart women can’t (shouldn’t) marry men who aren’t at least their intellectual equal. As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market. Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are. And I say again—you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you.”
The woman has it right. Find love with a rich person if you can. Why the fuck not. You can marry money and have a carrier too. They are mot exclusive of the other.
I went to an Ivy but not Princeton. This isn’t 1960 anymore. Only 11.3% of Princeton students have a parent that went there and 57.3% went to public high school. The Ivy League schools work very hard to make sure they get a fair representation of students from all kinds of different circumstances. Being the child of an investment banker from NYC works against you more than anything especially compared to somebody brought on a farm in Iowa who has the same scores. You would be surprised how diverse those schools are and they can control it because many of the top people from all groups want to go there and they still reject the vast majority of them.
I agree with the article to a large degree and have said many similar things myself. If you want to get married and have kids, that should be a priority and many people don’t realistically plan for each step involved. That is why you see so many women in their 30’s reaching for whatever man they can find and then quickly cycling through the steps of trying to get pregnant on their own, fertility treatments and then to adoption. It isn’t what most of them had in mind but it is usually their own fault because they decided they wanted to focus on their ‘career’.
I have no idea why some women love to use the words ‘career’ and ‘fulfillment’ especially in the same sentence. I have a career and it is just a job that pays that the bills. There is nothing more to it than that and I never expected there to be. Being a parent is whole lot more ‘fulfilling’ than working ever will be.
Nor was that my message. My message was she is playing to a old double standard. Men like dumb women and won’t marry their intellectual superior. I don’t buy that.
I thought women were supposed to “lean in” and put their career ahead of everything else.
Well, Princeton has an acceptance rate of 8.5%. It’s tied with Harvard as the number 1 undergrad university by US News. The top 25% of enrolled students have perfect SAT scores in Math and Writing and scored of at least 790 in Critical Reading. The average high school GPA is a 3.9/4.0. So yeah. I think overall they are probably pretty fucking smart.
Here’s the thing. Women have a much shorter window to get pregnant and have kids if that’s something they want. So as a purely practical matter, going to a good school, meeting a well educated man and getting married might be a better idea than spending your 20s on your career or trying to be “30 and fabulous”. It’s not like Wall Street and Corporate America isn’t going to be there in a few years if you want to have a career later.
A friend of mine who waited ran an experiment on a well known national dating site. This woman is quite attractive, well traveled, etc. Bluntly - a good catch. Her biggest downfall? She has a PhD and is a member of faculty.
She ran two profiles:
Profile 1: With the Phd
Profile 2: Removed the PhD
Profile 2 received 10x the attention.
Sadly, there are a ton of my fellow men who are intimidated by a highly educated woman.
So, yes, the Princeton women might have challenges dating men once they are beyond Princeton. They might focus on the various Ivy dating groups, and singles groups for their alma mater. Because there are going to be a fair number of guys who get scared off.
I’m sure that man who is just moments away from happily getting married to a hot young bimbo would have been an incredibly supportive spouse to a sharp, ambitious, career oriented woman.
Older ladies have been sternly warning me since high school that having ovaries means that wanting a family and career (“it all”) is going to lead to sure ruin. So far, this is yet to come true. I call it up to sour grapes.
Alright even sven, you know I like and respect so maybe you can explain something to me. What is the fascination having ‘it all’ among a certain demographic of women when the ‘it all’ is a just a small subset of possible human endeavours.
In your case, I can see how serving in the Peace Corps would rewarding and now you do have a husband and a child on the way but you aren’t that old either. I tend to think the stereotype much more closely fits women that want to be a corporate or academic titan and postpone marriage and kids well into the danger zone of their mid to late 30’s and get forced into hard choices because of that. I don’t think that applies to you that well even though your background is interesting and admirable.
I have a career in corporate America and fulfilling or rewarding wouldn’t be one of the top 10 terms I would use to describe it. It is just a job. They all are no matter how much money you make. I fail to understand why certain women seem to think that type of thing is pinnacle of possible human activities to the exclusion of much more important ones.
Nurses and teachers are professionals who technically have careers too but I never see people in those using the same terminology probably because they don’t have the same outlook. What is mindset that generates that type of thinking?
What is the fascination with a certain demographic of men with “having it all?” Most of the male senior executives at my organization have children (and I think this holds true at most places). Why isn’t anyone grilling them about why they want to work so hard when having a family is so perfectly fulfilling?
That’s what bugs me. It’s not “having it all” for men, it’s just ordinary ho hum life that doesn’t even merit debate. But when we want to do it, it’s somehow some absurd “fascination.”
Some people are very career oriented, and get off on the whole climb to the top thing. Others are very family oriented, and would gladly quit their jobs to stay home with the kids. Most people are a bit of a mix. But if men have the choice to pursue intellectually fulfilling work without automatically giving up their family life, why is that too much for a hard working woman to expect? Yes, there is biology, but most maternity leave is all of six weeks. Biology is pretty as much a hurdle as you want it to be.
Anyway, we all make trade-offs and none of us get out of this world without some regrets and some “might have beens.” Women are perfectly capable of processing this concept and making choices based on their priorities. Getting married later and bearing fewer children is associated with massively better financial outcomes, and of course it comes with risks that you may not marry or have children. It’s turning out that a lot of women are pretty darn okay with that. I’m not surprised- marriage and child-rearing has often been a pretty raw deal for a lot of women (and, Shagnasty, I’m sure you’d agree that same goes for a lot of men). But again, it’s all about whatever miss you find personally fulfilling. Yes, when it doesn’t work out perfectly some people are going to end up with regrets, but that goes for everything. Do you think any 50 year old person, male or female, doesn’t have a few regrets?
In any case, the author is telling college freshman who are a solid SEVENTEEN YEARS from 35 that their clock is ticking. Fuck that.
