Really. I'm not kidding. Take a minute and read the letter. The link's just up there. I'll be here when you get back.
(Tapping fingers. Twiddling thumbs. Counting to thirty.)
Now that you've read it, would you like to sit down for a moment? Are you shocked? Sputtering?
I am at such a loss for anything critical, valuable or thoughtful to say — I just don't even know where to start! — that
Princeton Mom to Female Students: Find a Husband
Some Poor Kid's Mom Wrote a Letter... Begging Girls to Date Her Son
Mother Scolds Princeton Women for Not Marrying Her Sons
And letter-writer Susan Patton's attempt to dig herself out of the hole by digging deeper:
Princeton Mom Wishes She Married a Princeton Man
Actually, it's not that I can't think of what to say (although as I said, the question of Where to begin, even? poses a challenge); it's that there is nothing contained in this letter that actually merits a serious response. It's so transparent and so stupid and so tone-deaf. Yet I'm offended as the alumna of a peer institution, and I'm troubled as someone who teaches men and women in the target age demographic who have a whole range of personal and professional aspirations. I'm a big proponent of showing people up by the simple act of living well, so I shall spill no more ink on the matter, get back to my exciting and over-brainy existence and just back slowly away from this bizarre wormhole to 1950 before it sucks in any more feminism. Turns out we don't actually have that much to spare.
And here, in Ms. Patton's rebuttal, may lie the kernel of the problem: But she does wish she'd married a Princetonian. "Yes! Yes. Yes, I wish I married someone who went to Princeton," she replied when I asked. "That way I could have embraced Princeton for the thirty years that I stayed away from it because my ex-husband had no respect for the hoopla, the traditions, the allegiance, the orange and black ... It wasn't until both of our sons became Princetonians, and my marriage ended, that I was able to again embrace the university, and I did so with both arms."
ReplyDeleteSome fundamental differences in what she and he value and an inability to embrace what the other values.
Bizarre. What happened to the notion that people in college are really still too young to get married? In the mid-eighties, a lot of my classmates at a "Public Ivy" were sprouting engagement rings, but I could not work out who they were marrying---I didn't know any boys who were up for that, except one very nerdy computer scientist who had skipped college entirely and was looking for a capital-W wife. I would have wanted someone who would follow me to grad school and then to a job, and it really seemed we were all in pretty much the same situation, and getting the same advice that there was plenty of time.
ReplyDelete