Posted on 03/22/2014 8:48:53 AM PDT by servo1969
Susan Patton, aka “The Princeton Mom” has finally released her book, Marry Smart, based on the controversial letter she published last year in The Daily Princetonian, which advised young women to focus on finding a husband while in college.
Liberal feminists hate the book. I mean, they just hate it.
Which makes me want to read it, actually.
Anyway, Patton generates so much wrath because she points out one of the big lies behind modern feminism. The lie is this: that to be successful and happy you need to focus on your career and not marriage or children throughout your twenties and early thirties. In other words, the lie is that you can delay, and delay, and delay and still have it all.
Susan Patton has news for you–the biological clock is not a fiction cooked up by the conspiratorial patriarchy. It’s a reality.
In fact, if you are a woman and haven’t started having children by the time you are 35–you are very unlikely to have a successful pregnancy without serious medical intervention–IVF, surrogate pregnancy, etc–and the risk of birth defects increases dramatically as a woman approaches 40.
Those facts often come as quite a surprise to talented, highly-educated women–the kind of women who go to Princeton. They’ve been led to believe that they won’t have to sacrifice anything in the way of their professional careers in order to also be a wife and a mother. Just Lean In a little harder and it can all be yours.
Well, there’s no law that says any young woman should have to want to be a wife or a mother. But if a young woman does want such things, especially, the mother thing, it does require sacrifice on the career front.
Not fair? Well, maybe not. But men aren’t born with wombs–so there you go. And men will never, on average, be as interested in or as willing to do the work of childcare. They just won’t.
It’s called gender difference. It’s real, it’s biological, and it’s not a social construct, regardless of what your freshman year women’s studies professor might have told you.
Patton’s argument, as I understand it, has less to do with the motherhood issue, and more to do with the “wife” issue. She advises young women who want husbands to stop drinking so much and hanging out in bars and stop having sex with men who aren’t committed.
She advises them to treat their hunt for a husband as they would a hunt for a great job–with intention and planning. She advises them to dress well and put on makeup. Close their legs. “If you offer men sex without commitment, you eliminate the incentive for them to commit,” she says, plainly.
Sound old fashioned to you? If so, you may be well on your way to being single, middle-aged, and childless–no matter how smart or attractive, or worthy you are. Has nothing to do with those things. The fact is, the average man these days isn’t exactly rushing into marriage. The average age of first marriage for both sexes continues to climb every year. Meanwhile, the pool of marriageable men diminishes as a woman ages. It’s just simple math. So if a smart young woman wants to get married–why wouldn’t Patton’s advice make sense?
The fact that Patton’s advice doesn’t mesh with the feminist narratives of put-your-career-first and you-don’t-need-a-husband, doesn’t make her advice wrong for those women to whom marriage is a goal and top priority.
In truth, young men would do well to heed most of her advice as well–except for the part about wearing makeup.
It’s all a matter of what you want. No one says you have to want marriage. But if you are a young woman and you do want to get married, then you ignore her advice at your own peril.
Redundant - See 'Redundant'
Feminists need to deal with it.
Marriage, family, children. All anathema to leftists.
That Kids by 35 thing just isn’t true. I know plenty of woman who had kids in their late 30s and early 40s with no issues.
There offended because as feminists they believe that women don’t need a man. They just need big government to take from everybody else’s man and give it to them.
It’s remarkable what “..... Envy” has degenerated into...
“Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society” - Rush Limbaugh Undeniable Truth of Life #24
“The lie is this: that to be successful and happy you need to focus on your career and not marriage or children throughout your twenties and early thirties.”
Feminists believe that Mad Med is real; that women were slaving away at home while men were off having a big party in their careers. That big party is always just one more glass ceiling away. Nobody bothered to tell the girls that work quite often sucks. Careers are not always exciting or rewarding like on television.
Mad Men, not Med. Stupid fingers.
The other half of the equation I rarely see - young men need to be taught responsibility.
Even at my children’s “good” suburban high school, girls are often “bitchez,” and no one is teaching boys the meaning of respect or self-control. America’s ghettoized culture is allowed to flood society, such that everyone is forced to swim in it.
It most certainly is true, statistically speaking.
If an individual wants a certain effect,it is his or her responsibility to discover and enact the necessary cause.Substituting wishing and waiting for planning and doing is irrational.
I’m very happy for them. They beat the odds.
Most of the women I knew in college in the late 70s were working on their MRS degrees. Nothing wrong with that. They were nice girls for the most part and I enjoyed their company.
The women in your photo were not admitted into that program. They were also not invited to any of our social gatherings.
We cheerfully disregarded Limbaugh’s essential truth, and gave them no access.
That's going to be a problem, since the point of feminism is to NOT deal with it, while pretending to be the only one who's dealing with it.
First, one needs to define “success” in their own mind. What does it look like? What does it feel like? Specifically...how do you, as an individual define it...and recognize it when it’s achieved.
Once you have done that, without external input, can you really be happy.
If no one else can see that, who cares?
Personal anecdote isn’t evidence.
There are ample medical and historical data showing the drop in female fertility in relation to age. It is a biological reality that should be acknowledged rather than ignored or swept under the rug with happy talk.
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