quote:In an e-mail response to a question, Dr. Tilghman added: "There is nothing inconsistent with being a leader and a stay-at-home parent. Some women (and a handful of men) whom I have known who have done this have had a powerful impact on their communities."
Yet the likelihood that so many young women plan to opt out of high-powered careers presents a conundrum.
"It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?" said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970's and early 1980's.
quote: For many feminists, it may come as a shock to hear how unbothered many young women at the nation's top schools are by the strictures of traditional roles.
"They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they're accepting it," said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women's and gender studies at Yale. "Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.
"I really believed 25 years ago," Dr. Wexler added, "that this would be solved by now."
Solved? I didn't know it was something that needed to be solved. We pay them to give us an education. Right? The opportunities should already be open. If they ever ask a woman in an admissions interview if she plans to be a stay-at-home mom (implying that she's 'wasting' the education she's getting at their school), then they need to start investigating all of their male graduates too. How many of them aren't 'leaders'?
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Well, Dr. Wexler's comments were pretty obnoxious, but the article as a whole seemed pretty balanced to me. I particularly agreed with this:
quote:University officials said that success meant different things to different people and that universities were trying to broaden students' minds, not simply prepare them for jobs.
My personal feelings have always been, if I were going to go to the trouble of having children, I wanted to raise them myself.
I am a stay-at-home-mom. My husband currently works in retail, but we are doing everything we can to work towards a future when he can be home, too. That is the ideal for us: both of us home to raise our children and work at things that interest us.
posted
still, this is good reading for those that think Mr. Card is shooting at straw men when he talks about intellectual elite who are hostile to the family. Wexler's comments as quoted here are more than obnoxious, they are out right hostile, viewing women choosing to be stay at home moms as a problem to be "solved" rather than a potential boon to their children.
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Oh, I'm sure that a lot of people would see her comments as more hostile than obnoxious. I'm just really thick-skinned, so it didn't bother me too much.
quote:"is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn't constructed along traditional gender roles."
Or maybe some women actually have a powerful desire to be stay-at-home-moms. Maybe they really do want that *more* than they want to be in a career. I find it insulting that someone would suggest that that is a result of not being "able to think outside the box".
Since I am not a career-woman, I view college as an opportunity to become more educated because being educated has value in and of itself--rather than just preparing to fill a career. I agree with Narnia, *we* are the ones paying for the education, we should be allowed to decide what that education is for.
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quote:Originally posted by beverly: I find it insulting that someone would suggest that that is a result of not being "able to think outside the box".
It's not just that; the assumption seems to be that if they're choosing to stay at home, they're not even thinking.
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I do feel strongly that women who choose to be stay-at-home-moms *should* have a college education. I am all for encouraging that. Children benefit *so* much from having a well-educated primary care-taking parent. Their parent is their first education and suppliments all of their public education. The parent shapes their desire and hunger to learn.
Plus being around small children ALL THE TIME *can* cause your brain cells to atrophy. You need all the brain-fostering you can get!
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My mother has a master's degree (in traffic management, no less, to go with her Geography Bachelor's) and has only ever worked in that field for a couple of years. The rest of the time she's been rearing her own children as well as exploring the field of young children's education. Her degree actually has very little to do with what she is interested in.
However, whether she is a leader or not is beside the point. She has led the way to small changes in the various schools we (her children) have passed through. She's run a few children's and parents groups, such as a Sparks (little guides) group. I think the definition of leadership is quite as narrow as these people think.
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All it shows is that universities (and private educational institutions even more) are meat markets and perpetuate a form of class segregation, where the incoming students are already mostly stratified by the tuition costs at the institution of higher learning. (I will recant this when you can show that the number of full academic and ethnic diversity scholarships equals the number of students paying full tuition (this includes students with loans, because the colleges still get their tuition fees).)
quote:still, this is good reading for those that think Mr. Card is shooting at straw men when he talks about intellectual elite who are hostile to the family.
I'm kind curious as to why that would be. One person expressed an opinion. I fail to see how this constitutes an "intellectual elite who are hostile to the family."
I don't think anyone here has denied that people who hold extreme opinions like this exist, but this hardly constitutes evidence that this is the prevailing idea across an entire class of people. Do you have any reason for us to consider that she is representative of even a significant minority in this population?
I mean, I'm a member of the intellectual elite and I am overjoyed that people are realizing that having both parents working full-time jobs is not a good thing for the children. I hope that society comes to realize that many non-Ivy League graduates don't really have the luxury of this choice due to their economic situation and make changes so as to bring it more into their reach.
Who knows, maybe I'm more representative of the "intellectual elite" than Dr. Wexler. That certainly seems to be the case from my empirical experience.
Of course, I also (edit: don't) think that women's sole role of value is to be mothers and that any one who doesn't become one lives a life of lesser value than one who does. Nor do I think that it's necessarily the mother who should stay home with the kids while the father goes out to work. Form what I can tell, these are opinions OSC holds and, again, I feel my way of looking at these things is representative of many people in the "intellectual elite".
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I don’t think that "that this would be solved by now" applies until we do think outside traditional gender role verses career women. Women should be given equal opportunities for education and careers. They should also be free to choose to stay at home with their children.
I also think that men should be given this choice. Although it is possible, men do get stigmatised if they stay at home while their wife works. This is very wrong as men are fathers just as much as women are mothers.
Too many people on both sides see this as an issue about what women should do – career verses family, not how individual sets of parents can best raise their children. For some this will be stay at home mum, for some stay at home dad, for others flexible working for both parents and for others both parents working and good quality child care.
Lets stop arguing about what women ought to do and give families of all types (I’ve focused on traditional father and mother families here, but other families should have the same options) the chance to find the best solution for them.
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quote:I hope that society comes to realize that many non-Ivy League graduates don't really have the luxury of this choice due to their economic situation and make changes so as to bring it more into their reach.
For all but the poorest of the poor*, it's within reach. All it requires is basic financial education and the self-discipline to spend less than you earn.
The first is a fairly simple matter, the second is the tough one. My sister-in-law has a similar income to us (a teacher vs a retail manager), and her rent is about the same as our mortgage payment. Yet she keeps going deeper into debt, while we manage to pay down our debts and save money. We have three people, three cats, three goats, a dog, six birds and a rabbit to take care of; she only has herself and one cat. The big difference is self-control.
My point is that even non-Ivy league graduates can get by on one income, if they really want to.
*Please note that I would call poor many who consider themselves to be middle class, simply because their debts overshadow their assets by so much. Of course people in this position have greater leverage to get out of debt than those with smaller incomes, but until they do that they are poor.
quote: I do feel strongly that women who choose to be stay-at-home-moms *should* have a college education.
I used to think that too. Now that I'm actually in a major university, I'm not so sure. Maybe I'm just having a bad semester but I'm not seeing much value in what I'm doing, it's just a means to an end - to be able to get a better job. In fact, I'm seriously considering not going back next semester.
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What I want to know is, when is it really going to be acceptable for us males to be stay-at-home parents?
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Sorry to hear that, Belle. Going to college to be educated and going to college in order to qualify for a certain kind of can be very different experiences.
Of course, it is practical to go to college in order to qualify for a certain kind of work. People need to make a living and be prepared to. Sometimes the "hoops" you have to jump through are exhausting and don't bring much in the way of true education. I would be frustrated with that too.
One of the reasons I chose the major that I did (Speech-Language Pathology) was that it *could* provide a decent career if necessary, but also it combined so many things I found fascinating. I had a hard time choosing a major was that it meant I couldn't also study something else that fascinated me. I seriously considered both Illustration and Micro-Biology, and was sad to have to let go of those possibilities.
I think that local community college courses are a nice solution for a parent who wants to gain more education. You can take classes that follow your interests rather than just serve the purpose of qualifying you for work. Unfortunately, a person is a lot less likely to get financial aid for that, so this is too "expensive" an option for many.
Thankfully, libraries and PBS are free. (Mostly.)
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quote:I'm kind curious as to why that would be. One person expressed an opinion. I fail to see how this constitutes an "intellectual elite who are hostile to the family."
Of course, Jim-Me didn't say an intellectual elite. He said "intellectual elite."
Are these women who were quoted examples of intellectual elite? Yes.
Do they represent hostility to the family? I would argue yes but could see arguments that they might not. Were I trying a case where these persons' "hostility to family" was an issue of material fact, I'd certainly introduce these statements to bolster my case.
So this is pretty good support for OSC when "talks about intellectual elite who are hostile to the family." At minimum, it's two good examples to bolster his case.
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I'm just in the phase of wondering "Why am I doing this?" And it's not because anything bad has happened, as far as I know my grades are excellent so far this semester, but I only have one class where I feel like I'm learning anything, and I'm looking at the requirements to graduate and seeing how many classes I'm going to have to take that don't have any practical purpose at all and that gets me questioning why I'm spending the money. I mean, it costs a lot for me to go to school, we don't qualify for financial aid so it's all out of pocket.
The tuition is crazy but I could live with that - it's the service fees and parking fees and every other fee in the world. They require me to buy a membership in the college's gym and recreation center even though I'll never use it. I just go to class and come home so I can be here when the kids get home, I don't have time to go climb their new rock wall even if I wanted to (or was able to) Next semester they're telling us every student, regardless of year or residency status will be required to purchase a meal plan. I don't need a meal plan, I don't eat on campus. The prices are too high, I pack my lunch and I eat supper with my family.
If I felt like I was getting something really worthwhile I might be able to tolerate all these fees and all this money but I just don't feel like I'm getting anything out of it. And I see what we're sacrificing in order for me to go to school - I don't think it's worth it.
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Does anyone else get the feeling that there is this whole 'other' society that's incredibly gender biased that they've never actually seen? I'm not saying there isn't gender bias in the US, I just don't think it's nearly as great as we assume. For example, this weekend I was at a leadership retreat and in a discussion about gender the question came up, "What games do little girls play?" The responses from the audience were what one would expect, "house, tea party, barbies." The thing is, while I played all of those games, I also played 'Escape from the evil orphanage', 'Dueling', 'Wagon Train to the West' with my brother and our two female neighbors. I'm wondering how many people actually played those 'typical girl games' as children, and how many just say they did because that's what's expected.
I grew up with a stay at home mom, and yet I was never given the impression that anything I wanted to do with my life was closed to me because of my gender. It wasn't until my senior year in high school that I actually grokked that sexism was related to me. And then it was only because I finally realized that all of those people telling me I could be anything I wanted to be were saying so because they thought I would be worried about sexism.
Nowadays, I do understand that there's a glass ceiling, that it's a lot tougher to be a female CEO or Senator. But I don't see any of that as having the ability to actually stop me if I wanted to do any of those things.
*shrugs* Or maybe I'm just incredibly naive.
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Belle, it was unfortunate, but as I got deeper into my major of Speech-Language Pathology I seemed to be passing out of the really fascinating stuff (grammar class--yes I loved it--, phonetics, physiology & anatomy, psychology) and more into what seemed to be the politics and philosophies of the field, some of which I felt was agenda being stuffed down my throat. It definitely turned me off, making me feel that in order to become a speech therapist, I'd have to sell part of my soul.
I wonder if most career paths make a person feel that way.
quote:They require me to buy a membership in the college's gym and recreation center even though I'll never use it.
Wow. Now that is just weird.
quote:Next semester they're telling us every student, regardless of year or residency status will be required to purchase a meal plan.
As is this!
Do you have other opportunities? Maybe taking classes correspondence so you don't have to deal with these silly university policies?
quote: And I see what we're sacrificing in order for me to go to school - I don't think it's worth it.
I imagine it must be really hard to push through. My sister's husband tried to finish his Bachelor's after they had kids. He finally gave up. It was so hard, and the graduation date always seemed impossibly far away. He makes a decent living so he just couldn't justify the amount of sacrifice for what he would eventually get out of it.
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Squick, I was merely pointing out that there *are* people who think like that and that OSC is not making them up in his own mind... that's all I meant to say.
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quote:Originally posted by Belle: Next semester they're telling us every student, regardless of year or residency status will be required to purchase a meal plan.
That's ridiculous! Is that even legal?
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The only exceptions, as I understand it, are people who take classes online - but they must be enrolled in an online class and online degree program of which there are only two at the university. You get to be exempt from all those fees, but they tack on a $75 per course "online course fee" to your tuition.
Right now the fees we pay are:
Student service fee: $37 + $8 per credit hour Parking: $80 Building Fee: $32 + $3 per credit hour Rec center fee: $48 per semester if taking less than 12 hours, $72 per semester if taking 12 or more
The minimum meal plan they offer is $100 per semester. Already anyone who resides on campus is required to have a meal plan as well as incoming freshmen. Next semester they're talking about extending it to all of us.
I'm sorry to hijack the thread, like I said, I'm just frustrated as hell with the whole process.
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I am obviously not in college, at an age when many of my friends still are or have graduated (or dropped out for a high-paying job instead, in some cases.) I don't, at this point, want to go for a degree, really. I wouldn't mind getting a certification as a preschool teacher, just as a hedge against disaster and because as a mother I think child-development classes would definitely have some merit. But really, I'd love to just take whatever classes I want without worrying about a degree. The problem is, every time I've inquired about that, they keep trying to push me into "core curricula" classes, pre-requisites for higher math and stuff I'll never take. They let seniors take classes just for fun and self-improvement, why are they so reluctant to let a young mother do it? (Not that we can afford it right now, anyway. We just moved here, so we'll have to wait a year before we get resident prices at the local schools, and then our priorities are for Jeff to finish his degree first. But still.)
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Belle, try talking to whichever office is in charge of the mealplan. When my brother was getting ready to go to the university, they tried to make the mealplan mandatory for freshman. He had already worked out his own mealplan that was significantly cheaper, so my mom called them and got him out of the required one. I think they figure that enough people will acquiesce without a murmur that it makes up for the ones who stand up for themselves.
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What bugs me is they'll put up flyers advertising some event - like a "Back to School Pizza Party" and it will have on it "FREE PIZZA!" then at the bottom in fine print you see "Paid for by your student services fee."
Well, then it isn't exactly free, now is it? And what if I don't like pizza? Or I'm not on campus that day? Please, I'd rather they not throw back to school pizza parties at all and do away with the stupid fees.
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mph, the vast majority of students at UAB are commuters. Vast majority. It's smack dab in the middle of downtown, not a typical college campus. That's why this is so annoying, they KNOW that a lot of the people that are paying for this stupid campus recreation center aren't on campus long enough to make use of it.
I just want to scream sometimes. I actually tried to withdraw, last week, because I just got to the point where I didn't see the value in continuing, only to find out when I filled out the withdrawal slip that I would still have to pay full tuition. I decided I may as well go to class if I'm paying for them.
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I wonder if you can get a petition going. I wonder if the college student council has any "real" power and might be sympathetic to your situation. Certainly there are others with similar situations.
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When I read this article this morning, this particular quote bothered me:
quote: "It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?" said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970's and early 1980's.
It seems to me that she is saying that these educational opportunities are not worth opening up to women unless the women are planning to use them to go into high power careers. So, if I want to be a stay-at-home mom (which I was for a number of years, in spite of having two degrees, and acquiring another when my kids were middle to high school age), I shouldn't bother to get a college education? Or does she just mean that it's not worthwhile for those women getting Ivy League educations who later become stay-at-home moms?
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Jim, If that's all you meant to say, I don't understand how it pertains to OSC at all. OSC talks about the liberal or intellectual elite as a class. When he says that the intellectual elite is anti-family, it doesn't mean that there are a few extremists in it that are anti-family, but that this is a prevelant attitude across that class.
When people accuse OSC of straw-manning with this, their objections don't rely on denying that any of these people exist, but rather his description of the people he's attacking is not at all accurate.
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quote:I grew up with a stay at home mom, and yet I was never given the impression that anything I wanted to do with my life was closed to me because of my gender. It wasn't until my senior year in high school that I actually grokked that sexism was related to me. And then it was only because I finally realized that all of those people telling me I could be anything I wanted to be were saying so because they thought I would be worried about sexism.
Nowadays, I do understand that there's a glass ceiling, that it's a lot tougher to be a female CEO or Senator. But I don't see any of that as having the ability to actually stop me if I wanted to do any of those things.
I felt that way too blacwolve. Which is why this statement from the article just blew my mind:
quote:"It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?"
the fact that she's implying that a school that works to have equal opportunities available for women deserves a return of 'leaders' and success stories....the steam rises.
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Ela, you're too fast. I said the same thing you did. (or at least I tried to be as articulate as you were!) Posts: 6415 | Registered: Jul 2000
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Maybe it is just my prejudice speaking, but I'm not sure I'd get any better "education" at an Ivy League university than at other decent universities out there. But it *would* look far better on a resume and cost me tons more money.
So if I were wanting a boost in a career, I'd go Ivy League. If I wanted an education, I'd go somewhere where I didn't have to pay so frickin' much.
That's just me, though.
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Belle, I'd send them a letter and explain that next semester they can have a choice between having your tuition and the Parking and Building fees or nothing at all. Maybe the Student Services one, too, if you're feeling generous. You could also point out that their policies are incredibly hostile to non-traditional students and not likely to help them maintain diversity in their student body. That's ridiculous.
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Squick, I'm interested in hearing more about how you personally came to a knowledge of being a member of the intellectual elite, and also about how you know you are pretty representative. I was going to say average of the elite, but that's an oxymoron.
Belle- I once helped a woman opt out of the Air Force meal plan (and get an allowance instead) by doing a nutritional analysis of the foods and doing a write-up that demonstrated that she couldn't be expected to maintain the weight they required on the food they served. Of course, the University doesn't have a weight requirement, so that strategy might fall apart at that point.
bev wrote: "It definitely turned me off, making me feel that in order to become a speech therapist, I'd have to sell part of my soul.
I wonder if most career paths make a person feel that way."
I hope this doesn't come across wrong, bev, but I know you're a bit of an idealistic sort and it's possible that andy career field might have caused you to feel that way. I faced that exact same problem with linguistics, though.
P.S. Going to college is also a job. I don't think it is appropriate for women to be going to college when they have preschoolers, if these same women wouldn't want to work.
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quote:bev, but I know you're a bit of an idealistic sort and it's possible that andy career field might have caused you to feel that way.
I suspect it is probably the case. That is one of the reasons I am quite happy to not have to have a career.
I imagine different careers have different sorts of politics you have to deal with. Speech therapists have to accept certain ideologies within the field in order to "fit in". I would not have enjoyed that.
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Back on topic - I think what is significant about the struggle toward equality is that women now have a choice. It used to be so many career fields were closed to them they had no real options. Now that we have so many options available to us, I think we should celebrate whenever a woman chooses the option that is right for her, and be glad that we (as women) DO have choices and opportunities our grandmothers didn't even if we choose the same lifestyle she did. In our case, it's a conscious choice in her case it was just what was expected of her. Big difference.
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(Of course, I'm the first in 5 generations of women on my mom's side not to work outside the home after marriage...)
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quote: Going to college is also a job. I don't think it is appropriate for women to be going to college when they have preschoolers, if these same women wouldn't want to work.
I think it depends on how many hours they are taking. My sister is a stay at home mom who is currently working towards getting a real estate certification (she already has a bachelor's). She plans to only take one or two classes a semester, and as many of them online as possible. I think this is completely compatible with not wanting to work. If she were trying to take a full course load, I would agree that there is a contradiction between beliefs and actions.
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quote:Originally posted by beverly: Maybe it is just my prejudice speaking, but I'm not sure I'd get any better "education" at an Ivy League university than at other decent universities out there. But it *would* look far better on a resume and cost me tons more money.
So if I were wanting a boost in a career, I'd go Ivy League. If I wanted an education, I'd go somewhere where I didn't have to pay so frickin' much.
That's just me, though.
I think you can get an excellent education at a state university or a community college, depending on your teachers, the quality of the curriculum and texts used, and your own motiviation. Certainly, many people with these types of educations have successful and satisfying careers.
Having a degree from an elite universities (which I don't, by the way, but my husband does ) does open doors, but I don't think that's their only value. Due to the fact that Ivy-league and other elite universities and colleges are very selective in picking out top students from a variety of backgrounds, I think it puts you in an intellectual environment and offers learning opportunities that are not available at many state universities and community colleges.
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quote:Due to the fact that Ivy-league and other elite universities and colleges are very selective in picking out top students from a variety of backgrounds, I think it puts you in an intellectual environment and offers learning opportunities that are not available at many state universities and community colleges.
Kind of like being in the "smart-kids" class?
I actually was thinking that because of their stature as elite schools, they are probably able to get the best of everything to make available to their students as well.
I'm sure there are valid advantages beyond just the "brand name", but they have never been worth the extra cost to me. So I went generic. Posts: 7050 | Registered: Feb 2004
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I'd argue that BYU is a "brand name" that adds prestige. It's just only useful in certain circles. Posts: 1947 | Registered: Aug 2002
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