Highly-educated women are now as likely as women with less education to get married. This, I think, is supposed to make book-learnin’ ladies like myself really happy, because it means that despite having the opportunity to be relatively autonomous and successful, I’ll still be able to snag a husband. Boys do make passes at girls who wear glasses! Three cheers, etc etc.
But what would an article about women be without some sort of warning about how we’re collectively abandoning our God-given womanly duties and ohmygod our ovaries are shrivelling up as we speak? Gotta remind the girls that, despite their fancy educations, they shouldn’t forget that their primary duty in life is to repopulate the country (because apparently there aren’t enough people here already):
As children of egalitarian baby boomer moms and dads hit their 20s and 30s, high-achieving women now marry at the same rate as others, they just do so a few years later. The first part of that sentence is reason to celebrate. The latter is more worrisome. Later marriages tend to mean later and fewer births, and this country needs the bright kids bright moms raise. Though given how quickly society has changed on the first count, there’s every reason to hope that soon young women will succeed in changing the second part, too.
Forget that later marriages tend to be more stable and have lower divorce rates. We need more babies!
And let’s not ignore the thinly-veiled class issues here. We don’t just need more babies; we need more babies raised by “bright” women. “Bright” is synonymous with “highly-educated,” apparently, and if you’ve walked through a prominent graduate school lately you probably have some idea of what the highly-educated American woman looks like. You can probably guess that graduate students — and college students, for that matter — tend to come from middle and upper-class families. Heck, the only reason that I can afford to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans for law school is because my parents paid for my undergraduate education. Primary among the reasons that I got into a good undergraduate institution was because I went to a good public high school in an upper-middle-class suburb; my parents had the time and the education to help me with my homework and pay for private tutors when I was struggling; I could focus on school instead of being forced to work or watch younger siblings in my spare time. I work very hard, and I like to think that I’m not a complete idiot, but I don’t kid myself into thinking that I’m where I am because of hard work or intelligence alone, or that everyone else in this country has the potential to be where I am if only they’re smart enough and willing to work hard enough. That’s not the case.
And so I’m the kind of woman that this author would like to see getting married at a younger age and having some babies — because I was born with a certain degree of privilege that has enabled me to be one of those highly-educated future career bitches.
When women decide that they want to get married, they tend to make it happen. They approach dates with open minds. They ask to be set up. They seal the deal.
Until now, young women haven’t adopted that mindset in graduate school or in the early years of their big careers because they believe the myth that it’s impossible to have it all.
Or maybe because some of us don’t want to be married in graduate school or in the early years of our big careers because we just don’t want to be married yet.
I don’t know if I ever want to get married or not. I’m not necessarily opposed to it, but right now I’m 23, I’m in school, I’m living in Manhattan, I have all kinds of dreams and plans, and I’m having a pretty good time being single. I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about marriage. I know that right now, I don’t want to be dependent on someone else, and I definitely don’t want to be accountable to someone else. I want to be able to take my dream job, even if it requires me to move across the world. I want to be able to sleep alone when I feel like sleeping alone. I don’t want to have to “check in.” I want to be able to stay at the library until midnight and not feel like I’m neglecting someone.
That’s why I’m not married, and why I’m not even thinking about getting married yet. It’s why I don’t have a boyfriend, and don’t particularly want one right now.
Selfish? You bet. Immature? Probably. And my reasons definitely don’t apply to everyone, or even to most people. But contrary to the views of this author, it’s been my experience that women in graduate school aren’t putting off marriage and child-rearing because we think that we can’t have it all, or because we’re scared of damaging our careers. Many of us are putting off (or completely foregoing) marriage and childbearing because we don’t want to be married and/or we don’t want to be parents. Yet. Or ever.
That said, the reality of many women’s lives is that they do desire marriage and children. There’s nothing wrong with that — but I do take issue with the generalization that all women want these things, and that marriage and kids are the pinnacle achievements of a woman’s life. There are certainly women in graduate school who do want to get married and/or have children, but are institutionally discouraged from doing so. Parental leave in this country is not federally mandated, and is sorely insufficient even in most white-collar positions. You don’t see a whole lot of female partners in big law firms. And women are the only ones who are constantly told that we can’t have it all — to paraphrase Gloria Steinem, no one ever asks a man how he manages to balance work with family. So lots of women make choices. Some of us choose to forego grad school in order to have a family. Others choose to delay marriage and child-rearing in order to go to graduate school and work. Many, many women do manage to do both. Most women — those who don’t have the luxury of a partner to support them, or a job where they can work from home, or the ability to afford good childcare — balance work and family because they have to.
But my frustration is primarily with the idea that women having children later in life is some sort of failure, that all women desire marriage and kids, and that there’s a particular class of women who have an obligation to create smart children. The natural flipside of those arguments is that there are some women who, because they lack higher education, are not as smart and not as valuable as women like me. It assumes that women are essentially reproductive commodities, and that the “better” women (the white, wealthy, educated ones) are obligated to reproduce in order to counter the reproductive efforts of the lower-class women. It’s a tired, racist, classist, sexist message, wrapped up in “concern” for women. And I call bullshit.
Thanks to Jennifer for the link.