The Pressures on College Girls: A Mother Speaks

DEAR DR. BINGER:
I have a daughter twenty years old, a junior in college, and a son nineteen, a sophomore in a different college. They both read your article in the February Atlantic, “The Pressures on College Girls Today,” this weekend. The boy said nothing. I feared that he agreed that all his findings checked with yours, that he accepted your attitude for his own. The girl reacted personally, as a woman will anyway, and as a girl naturally would because the article was concerned with girls.
She began, “This is so true,” when she reached the part where you described the depression, the withdrawing from the performance of assigned work, and the oversleeping and cutting of classes. She cited instances of how many she saw doing that and said, “I’ve spent so many hours building up Polly and Beth and Susie, trying to get them into a mood to do their assignments, getting them up for classes they would have slept through,” and so she went on for a few minutes. She is an excellent student and by working hard has kept her head above water instead of yielding to this common feeling.
Then she came to the section in which you describe the problems of dating and finding a husband, and she read anxiously on, only to say at the end, “Well, he stated the problem. I commend him for that. But he didn’t offer any steps to correct it.” That section read as true to her as the preceding one, but in the problems of dating she had not been able to master the prevailing mood among college girls of confusion, harassment, and almost despair. It is a continual burden.
How my heart cried out in protest that you had written that article in the way you did. If they ask for bread, will you give them a stone? This girl has been brought up to be self-controlled, to take a longer view and think whether doing what she happens to be moved to do at the moment is going to bring happiness or unhappiness in the future. She thinks now that there is such a thing as being true to your own standards of conduct and actually of helping others to try to keep those standards too. By your attitude you are placing your knowledge of these problems and your prestige, both of which my children respect, on the side of those who would take the easy way of momentary release and an overthrow ol that control which psychologists praise as a sign ol inner strength.
At one point you say, “The foregoing description is of one kind of behavior, but of one only. It is difficult to generalize here, and not too satisfactory to try to create stereotypes.” But you do not trace an opposite path which it is possible to follow, of withdrawing from situations where the boy is able to achieve intercourse, or of not getting into them in the first place — a girl does not have to park half the night or stay in a boy’s room. You don’t say a word about using one’s head to avoid these situations as the more mature way to act.
To add the deathblow to any girl’s attempts to steer safely through the pressing problems of dating to a marriage in which she is not already pregnant, you refer to “idealistic, old-fashioned girls, perhaps with a religious upbringing, who want to keep themselves pure for the great love to come.” Those words were nicely chosen to do the maximum amount of destruction to any girl’s conception of herself if she is still a virgin. Do you have to push our poor lovely daughters into that much greater wreckage of peace of mind and ability to study which follows the identification of a woman’s spirit with that of the man’s if it has been a loving act? If he doesn’t marry her now, she is that much less herself.
There is the added hazard that she may adopt the theory of your implication that intercourse may be the most healthy procedure and allow boys that she doesn’t even care about to attain their goal so that they may both be “healthy.”
Thus, my son, who believes in self-control, has had one more nudge toward the path of sexual incontinence, and my daughter is more unhappy than before she read your article. No people was ever great, as a whole or individually, who had no ideals for their behavior, and sexual promiscuity is deleterious.
In Introduction to Realistic Philosophy by Professor John Wild, we find the paragraph regarding the decline of Hellenistic philosophy: “As is the case in similar periods of cultural decline, skepticism became increasingly influential. . . . The upshot of such skepticism is a deadening of purposive aspiration and a consequent falling back upon animal appetite and the purposeless drift into cultural decay.” Why do you wish to hasten this? You could have thrown your support behind those who have not given up but are still striving.
If there could be just one magazine article in 1961 that spoke to the hearts of college students of inspiration and courage! I’m not trying to pick a quarrel; I’m just sad and unhappy.

Dr. Binger Replies

I very much appreciate your letter. I have the feeling that you have placed me in the role of the devil’s advocate. Unless I am much mistaken, my values in the matters I discussed are not unlike yours. I wonder what in my article led you to believe that I am all for looseness and for breaking down decent standards. I suppose it was my comment “[They] may be right,” following the statement that many boys think it both more honest and healthier to have intercourse than to pet. For obvious reasons, I did not want to elaborate on the kind of petting now in vogue.

Your quote of John Wild is much to the point. I am familiar with his writings and have had the pleasure of knowing him at Harvard. Perhaps we are indeed witnessing a decline of our culture. By describing it, however, I am not condoning it. My responsibility as a doctor is, first and foremost, to tell the truth about what I observe so that college officials and teachers can face this truth and decide whether the way things are is the way they want them to be. I am not a social reformer.

Much of what goes on now is so compartmentalized that the left hand does not let the right hand know what it is doing. Parents and children move in different universes, which touch each other only tangentially. The standards and values of parents often have remarkably little influence on their young and sometimes provoke exactly the opposite kind of behavior from what they wish. I do believe there is an advantage to be gained by bringing some of these facts out into the open. Usually they are denied, or connived at, or condemned without proper understanding.

I myself am a parent of one son and two daughters. I think I have contributed to their direction and development, not, perhaps, by being moralistic, but by having helped them look facts in the face and learn not to deceive themselves. I am sure you have done the same with your children. I doubt whether an article such as mine will do them much harm. As Mayor Walker once said in discussing the censorship of literature, “No young girl has ever been ruined by a book. ‘