Does an off-the cuff remark by the first lady signal that
brilliant, career-focused women still see their lives as defined by marriage to
the right man?
It’s no surprise that Michelle Obama was hands-down the
favorite speaker at the Apollo Theater in Harlem on Tuesday at the
Glamour-organized “Let Girls Learn” Global Conversation.
Academy-award winner Charlize Theron and former Australian
Prime Minister Julia Gillard couldn’t hold a candle to FLOTUS, who earned
massive applause with “Compete with the boys. Beat the boys.”
But Obama ultimately sent mixed message to ambitious young
women.
“If I had worried about who liked me or who was cute at your
age, I wouldn’t be married to the president of the United States,” Obama
proudly declared.
Claps and cheers ensued, perhaps without any of the young
girls or the highly accomplished women on stage thinking through the
implication.
While the first lady’s remarks were clearly meant to
encourage young women to be ambitious in their educational and professional
pursuits, they also strongly implied there were “ulterior motives” of female
higher education: namely, that the true reward and the ultimate endgame for
focusing on one’s studies as a teen are to grow up and become the kind of woman
the president of the United States would want to marry—rather than be such a
leader herself.
Such a sentiment is disappointing for a variety of reasons,
not least of which is because it belies Obama’s accomplishments prior to
entering the White House.
A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School,
she met the man who would become the commander-in-chief because she was his
mentor at the prestigious law firm, Sidley & Austin.
More importantly, it speaks to a larger problem that goes
far beyond Obama’s one-off remark. Even as we are well into the 21st Century,
the belief that higher education is just another elite finishing school for
young women to be groomed to wed the right kinds of boys is remarkably
pervasive.
Last year, Susan Patton aka Princeton Mom released an advice
book, Marry Smart, after earning widespread fame for blatantly encouraging Ivy
League-educated women to hook a husband before graduation day.
In school newspaper the Daily Princetonian, Patton bluntly
advised female students to “Find a husband on campus before you graduate.”
She went on to explain that for Princeton men, like her
sons, “the universe of women [they] can marry is endless.” Meanwhile, Princeton
undergraduate women should realize that “you will never again be surrounded by
this concentration of men who are worthy of you.”
On the other side of the pond, there was a similar
declaration that young women should go to the finest institutions of higher
education for the express purpose of meeting Mr. Right.
Journalist Rachel Ragg proudly wrote in the Daily Mail last
year that she and her husband hoped their 9-year-old daughter Matilda would
attend the illustrious Oxford “not because it will be her launching pad into a
stellar career as a lawyer, doctor, or magazine editor,” but because it is “the
ideal place for her to find a husband with the right background and career
prospects to make enough money so Matilda can become a stay‑at-home mother.”
As ludicrous and clickbait-y as Ragg’s article was, some of
her final remarks tellingly alluded to the source of the resurgence of this
“college as a finishing school” mentality.
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“I don’t want her to suffer the fate of my generation,
miserably trying to juggle careers and home life before their relationships
collapse,” she wrote of her little Matilda.
It echoed Patton’s own belief that the messages of the
Women’s Liberation movement had misguided women.
She lamented in her letter how “in the mid-seventies, the
200 pioneer women in my class would talk about navigating the virile plains of
Princeton as a precursor to professional success,” rather than finding a
spouse.
In Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How
Love Conquered Marriage, historian Stephanie Coontz wrote about how higher
education was seen as an extension of Miss Porter’s in post-World War II
America.
“Two thirds of women who started college in the 1950s
dropped out, usually to get married,” she writes. “In 1952, an advertisement
for Gimbel’s department store wryly defined college as the place ‘where girls
who are above cooking and sewing go to meet a man so they can spend their lives
cooking and sewing.’”
For obvious reasons, feminists of the 1960s and 1970s pushed
against this view of college as an elite cocktail party, rather than, you know,
a path towards academic and professional enrichment.
The passage of Title IX further corroborated the message
that men and women should be exploring the same education and professional
development.
But we’re somehow regressing—or, perhaps, we never left—the
mentality that women should be educated for the express purpose or earning
their MRS degree.
Anecdotally, I notice this when former neighbors talk about
how they wish their daughters would go to grad school so they could meet
someone, or when I observe the meat market mentality at Ivy League happy-hours.
The underlying message seems to be, put your degree to use
by netting a man of high caliber.
Some of that may be well-intentioned, stemming from the
not-incorrect belief that smart women deserve intellectual equals as long-term
romantic partners.
But it perverts the purpose of higher education when this
quest becomes the end goal of a woman’s learning. Viewing college as a
glorified mixer does a disservice to men, women, and the institutions
themselves.
I highly doubt that it is how Michelle Obama would want her
own daughters viewing their educational futures—and I am even more certain her
daughters don’t.
Eldest Malia has been interning on the set of HBO Girls this
summer. Something tells me she is not interested in majoring in
husband-hunting.
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