A Woman's View

BY JULIE HAYDEN

FOUR years to read, discuss, shut yourself away in your room, start a coffeehouse or a left-wing movement, stay up all night writing a paper, fall in love, eat sandwiches by the river, have mononucleosis, act, date, write, study, rebel, talk, talk, talk — and suddenly you’re educated. “Another batch coming out of the oven,” announces the head of the English department at the senior class luncheon, and somebody whispers, “Oh, I hope they put me in the window right away!“

But which window? Are you marketable? What makes you think you’re up to sample? In fact, what makes you think you’re done at all?

I started asking myself these questions the first time I was turned away from a job for being “overqualified.” Very gently the personnel manager at Hook and Swindle, the advertising agency where I’d applied for a secretarial position, indicated that they didn’t — well, didn’t believe I’d find life in the office pool sufficiently stimulating, with my knowledge of Greek and all (an achievement I subsequently learned to conceal). It gave me pause. Could being able to read Sophocles in the original (albeit with frequent recourse to a translation) really not be in my favor? After all, I demonstrably knew how to type and was proud of my ability to transcribe dictation at nearly 100 words a minute. This feat, I should add, made me practically unique among my classmates, many of whom had mastered old German script or Italic cursive, but few of whom knew, or cared to know, the difference between an invoice and a PBX machine.

Naively, I’d considered myself to be practical and worldly-wise in acquiring these skills. Friends and advisers had warned me that an A.B. was not a magic carpet to a heady editorial career. And I’d listened. Many of my peers were less fortunate, or even more naive. They soon discovered they weren’t even overqualified. “I graduated cum laude!” wailed my sister. “I was a Wellesley Scholar! I’m unemployable!”

One year away from college, for a woman with a good liberal arts education, it is impossible not to feel a sense of injury, directed either against the institution that gave you so false an idea of your own importance or a world that doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with you.

During those four years you didn’t ask yourself what you could do. You were in a state of becoming — becoming the books, the plays, the discussions, the iconoclasm, the idealism, the courses, the friends, and the mysterious inner quest for “identity" that surrounded you. I carried much the same attitude into my postgraduate life. My trade was learning, and I thought I could learn anything. Exaggerative by temperament, I managed to exaggerate one Wanderjahr into almost three, during which I was self-supporting but little else. Yet I haven’t fingers enough to enumerate friends of mine who, equally bewildered, made just as many false starts, half commitments. Some drifted from job to job, others from country to country. Many, of course, are in graduate school, and many more are married; but graduate school is often just a way of postponing decisions, while marriage — well, nobody can spend all day cleaning a three-room apartment, and most couples need the extra salary check a wife brings home, small as it’s likely to be.

I speak, naturally, of the ones I know. If I learned anything at Radcliffe, it ought to have been to shun the generalization as I would the Jabberwock. Still — and here’s the point — education is inextricably bound up with the institution that traffics in it. If I believed (as I think I did) that I could outgrow Radcliffe, I soon found that my education dangled from my neck like an albatross whenever I tried to forget about it.

Oh, yes, we stick together; we’re a kind of Group. Shamefacedly we’ll turn up, if not at our fifth, then at our tenth or twentieth reunion, to keep a suspicious and loving eye on our contemporaries. Each of us may be a different shape, but we were all baked in the same oven. How many of us keep suitcases under our beds (in a small apartment you’re always pressed for space) to pack for weekends away? In whose bookcase don’t the paperbacks and textbooks acquired in college outmass the ones bought since?

The patterns, the ideals and values, the expectations of college are for most of us impossible to discard. And for a very good reason: A good college is a kind of model society where the educative process is both formal and intrinsic. People come to college from unequal scholastic backgrounds. For many the first year is traumatic — far more so than the first year out; and some give up the fight then or later. We’re all familiar with the syndrome called sophomore slump. Emotional problems rear their ugly heads. The food is terrible. Courses are dull, and so are deans.

Nevertheless, Harvard was a world in miniature, one just a little too good to be true. That is the problem, of course, for those who must leave it or any place where they were happy. A model environment is necessarily an artificial one.

Yet some are more artificial than others. At Harvard you could lead a fully integrated life, where you passed easily from classes to the dramatic club to a study date at Widener Library followed by discussions over coffee, and there was no disparity between the activity in your head and your emotional reactions to those around you. All were part of one context. Such is not the case at most colleges for women (nor, I suppose, at colleges for men, but I am not concerned with those now). An institution that excludes the opposite sex creates a separation between the life of the intellect and the rest of the world that can seriously interfere with its educational function. At a nearby college for women which I had some acquaintance with, this separation was so strictly enforced as to create a desperate dichotomy — study, study, study all week and play, play, play over the weekend.

Colleges for women exist only because when the idea of higher education for them gained favor, no men’s colleges were willing to take them in. I can see no other reason for their existence. How can a woman learn to enjoy the company of the opposite sex if she must forever be competing for it? Who really prefers to spend all day listening to other women? Finally, a woman had better learn sooner than later that if she seeks any sort of life outside her home, she will be working with and competing with men. Thus, while to some extent all competition at college is unrealistic because it’s based strictly on merit, at least a woman in a coeducational institution doesn’t have to graduate absolutely uncertain of how well she can acquit herself in a working world that’s unfairly weighted anyway. She has some guide to her own capacities.

THERE are other flies in Arcadia. Take the burden of curfew hours and dormitory rules which most college women chafe under. I still can’t understand why young women should not be as free as men to decide their own hours. If after graduation you can stay out as late and often as you please, why not before? I realize that such rules exist not so much for the protection of the students as to placate the girls’ parents and relieve the college of responsibility. But that is a risk I feel colleges should be prepared to take. To have to sign in or out at ten o’clock, or (at some places) to have to introduce your escort to your housemother to prove you’ll be safe, imposes an arbitrary and humiliating fetter on a girl’s independence. You may have the mind of an adult, it says, but you are not capable of making decisions about your own welfare.

I have spoken as though I believed women should have exactly the same sort of education as their brothers. I do. Ideally you have four years to see the light, to hypothesize your own values, which list in favor of broad-mindedness, taking the large view, and the unflinching pursuit of excellence. Material rewards, except in the form of scholarships and grants, are absent. Your youth inclines you to idealism, and you can afford to indulge it. You rebel against the values of your parents, the family business, the DAR.

Now, all along you have been dimly aware that the study of the early Jacobean theater, your thesis topic, has really only equipped you to laugh in the right places at a production of Bartholomew Fair. You don’t want to sit on a veranda for the rest of your life chuckling over The Alchemist; you want to contribute, you want, possibly, to create. Not only that, you have a very natural instinct to shine.

I know somebody who, filling out an application inquiring about his educational background, answered the question Why did you major in your chosen field? (philosophy): “Sheer greed.” If you really want to continue in such a field, you have only one choice — teach it. Your reward will be in heaven. But surely all philosophy (English, history, classics) majors will not become teachers. What will be their occupation and their reward?

For men, the reward of an A.B. can be measured these days in cash. They can go to business school, medical school, law school, enter a managementtraining program, and be assured of a commendable starting salary whenever they do decide to start. Working in advertising or public relations they can console themselves for their lost idealism with the delicious fruits of capitalism. Getting rich is, for men, a not unrespectable occupation. But who ever heard a woman say that her greatest ambition was to make a lot of money?

President Bunting of Radcliffe has spoken of a prevailing climate of low expectations among women college graduates and students. She did not, I think, refer to their financial expectations, and that tells more about the situation than not. Little girls may grow up admiring the things that money can buy, but not the money itself. If they aspire to success, their models must be women in fields other than moneymaking: social workers, scientists, and, of course, teachers. The monetary double standard is so formidably entrenched that women have fought it only halfheartedly, the more so because everything in their upbringing inclines against it. Thus there is an air of extreme highmindedness about many presidents and deans of colleges for women. Their graduates are urged to be “useful,” partly because they will never be rich, and partly because there is something faintly nasty about seeking material rewards anyway. Whatever “usefulness" is, it isn’t lucrative.

So many girls, married and unmarried, find themselves in the marketplace with neither the rewards of idealism nor the rewards of cash. They are the Kafka readers in the typists’ pool, the seekers after truth making coffee. Their lights are hidden under a bushel. Was their education then worthwhile?

I SHOULD like to call attention to the other side of the coin for a minute: a woman doesn’t have to make money; she can marry it. Therefore she is really more free than a man to choose an occupation whose reward is intrinsic. She can be a social worker, teach English, work for a magazine (a field that pays so poorly that it is said one must have either a husband or a private income). She can volunteer her services to a charitable organization, work for a poor but promising political candidate, man the barricades for peace, write a book.

But that doesn’t mean more women shouldn’t apply to law school, medical school, business school than do now, if such is their inclination. (It doesn’t mean, either, that they should be paid less for doing a man’s job, but that is a social problem and outside the scope of this essay.) It is the duty of all those who advise women students to make these options clear. Girls should not, on the other hand, be encouraged to learn shorthand well, or to expect that being a secretary can be in any way intellectually satisfying. It is a means, not an end, and an uncertain one at that. As for juggling marriage and a career, most people seem to manage.

In the final analysis, what you do is merely an aspect and expression of what you are. What you are depends to a large extent on the kind of education you had and your reactions to the particular form your education took — the place that educated you. It is folly to imagine that the world beyond the groves of academe can ever fully resemble them, but it is insanity to turn your back on them and pretend they don’t exist.

I have learned, too, that there is no such thing as education; only educations, one per person. Therefore it is futile to talk about education as a thing to be used. You use your mind, your talents. Did anyone ever learn anything in a college course without which she could not have been hired for a job? Who even remembers most of the facts and theories with which she filled her blue books? ( A well-known professor of history told us about an alumnus who greeted him effusively at a Harvard reunion. “I’ve never forgotten your History 186, professor,” he said. “It was the best course I ever took.” Feeling a bit contrary, perhaps from the punch, the professor challenged his ex-student to recall a single fact from History 186. The alumnus searched the depths of his memory. “Well,” he blurted after an embarrassing pause, “I remember that there was a French king who could curl his feet all the way around his stirrups.”)

If education is anything, it is a process, one that is far from terminated after four years. The rigor of mind you brought to your college life will be carried into everything you do afterward. You may miss the perfection and pleasure of your academic days, but you will never cease to learn.

The question of the benefits of higher education for women has been shelved, at least temporarily. Whether it makes us more or less contented I leave to the Friedans and McGinleys. The by-products of education ought to be clear-sightedness and compassion, the ability to recognize another’s pain, and the determination to do something about it. Its formal content — all those liberal arts courses — has no real benefit except to the takers. Whatever drives men and women to unearth facts and formulate theories about their surroundings, it is not the expectation that they will somehow make them happy. It is homo sapiens’ inquisitive itch, the desire to leave no stone unturned. That knows no distinction of sex, and is the only reason cities of learning are built in the first place. But isn’t it enough?