The College Fix

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.

Nathan Harden is editor of The College Fix and author of the book SEX & GOD AT YALE: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad.

Follow Nathan on Twitter @NathanHarden

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