Hey career girl, forget all about climbing the slippery ladder and get thee a clever husband. While it sounds like advice straight from a 1950s handbook, Susan Patton’s open letter to the editor of the Daily Princetonian is dead earnest.
In an article in the Huffington Post, the Princeton alumni has been gaining lots of flak for her retrogressive tips to young women. Though Patton herself was surprised at the fallout from her letter, she defended it as “honest advice from a Jewish mother.” (Or rather, from the mouth of an embittered divorcee—don’t do what I did and marry your intellectual inferior.)
According to Patton, the pool of prospective partners is at its greatest during college years, and young women should carpe diem post haste all the way down the aisle:
“Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are,” she writes. “And I say again—you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you.”
So we’ve come full circle. It’s not enough to focus on growing your own career; you’d be better served making a career out of nabbing the right husband before the pickings get too slim.
In Patton’s view, marriage is more strategic game rather than random art. There is no magic number when it comes to tying the knot. It’s not as though you can control when and with whom you fall in love. Says she who married at the ripe age of 21, and has never once looked back… Many people warn against getting married young. But many others argue, as this writer in the Daily Beast, that finding decent marriage material gets harder as you grow older.
Pity Patton's Princeton sons, then. If they had trouble scoring a date before, imagine their prospects now, in the wake of their mother’s outmoded rant.
Do you think Patton needs to get with the romantic times, or does she have a point about marrying young?
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