An Altarnative Education
Regina Wellington is an intimidating presence. With piercing blue eyes and sharp, pointed features, she is confident, well-spoken, and meticulously put together, with a penchant for fine scotch and cashmere. Vocal and confident, unapologetic in her views—a Miss Porter’s girl trained in the arts of conversation and high society, with friends in all the right circles. Last week, she says, she nearly made a boy cry when he dared to disagree with her point in class. She has powerful connections, interns 35 hours a week, and has just landed a coveted summer position at one of the top financial firms in the city. This is the kind of girl who seems to be going places.
But Regina, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, has other plans.
According to the Barnard junior, she came to college with the sole intention of becoming a wife. “It’s not that I want to get married and not do anything, which is the popular view. I mean, if you want to be the super-wife who raises the greatest kids and is on every social committee, and is the perfect social wife for your husband and always does all of the right things, that’s a lot of work. It still takes being superwoman. And that’s exactly what I want to be.”
While her views represent the far end of the career/life balance spectrum, Wellington is part of a small but vocal minority of girls on college campuses across the country who are unafraid to say that they came to school not for the education, but because they wanted to find husbands. And even for those with less extreme views, Ivy League universities like Columbia—where large numbers of potential bachelors are likely to strike it rich as lawyers, doctors, and Wall Street financiers—are opportune grounds on which to stage the hunt.
The idea of the MRS Degree dates back to the 1950s, when the gloss of Leave It To Beaver’s domestic perfection dominated the cultural imagination. Pronounced M-R-S, like the acronyms of standard college degrees, the term was used to describe women who went to college primarily to find a husband who could provide for them later in life. According to Barnard history professor Rosalind Rosenberg, who teaches a course titled American Women in the 20th Century, the term was typically used as a criticism, implying that a woman was choosing a man at the expense of her education and relying on him instead of supporting herself.
For Regina, the priorities are clear: a relationship always wins out over school work. “I definitely choose guys over my academics. Absolutely,” she says. As a result, her once top-notch grades have noticeably suffered. Nonetheless, she believes the trade-off is reasonable. “Grades are important for getting a job. And since I would rather be married as a job than have a job, it makes sense to prioritize that,” she explains.
Yet she also expresses some regret. “Sometimes it makes it harder, when I’ve had breakups, to look at it and see my grades and be like, ‘Wow, my grades suck because I was dating someone, and it didn’t work out.’ And that can make me repentive. But I still do it,” she says. Wellington doesn’t seem to think much of her education. “I sort of think that college is only socially legitimizing. I don’t think it’s actually useful, and I don’t think I’ve learned anything since I’ve been here,” she says.
So why bother? Why submit to the stress of classes and papers and deadlines and exams, not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and residence fees? “I can’t get my head around it,” concedes Wendy McKenna, a psychology professor who teaches a course at Barnard on the psychology of women. “Nobody… almost nobody’s gonna spend all that money and make all that effort. Even if you’re rich to begin with and you don’t have to spend money. You have to work hard to stay in and be a good student,” she argues.
While Regina may not be interested in education for its own sake, a Columbia degree is well worth the investment. What matters to her is the social capital that comes with graduating from a prestigious, brandname school. “For any of the life partners I would want, they wouldn’t want to marry someone who didn’t go to a college like ours,” she explains. Attending an elite school gives women an entrée into circles that would otherwise be socially inaccessible, Regina says. She describes her experiences at Dorian’s, a bar on the Upper East Side, as an example. “When you go to Dorian’s, everyone immediately asks, ‘Oh, where did you go to school? Who do you know?’ And it’s an immediate connection or an immediate disconnect.” A response of Columbia, she says “creates a conversation with the type of people you’d want to meet.”
For those with less prestigious diplomas, the encounters are less promising. “I have a friend who wentto Syracuse, and when we’re at Dorian’s with her, she says she went to Syracuse, and it just kind of ends the conversation.” For many men, Regina says, a sub-par graduate may be good enough take home and sleep with, but would simply not be considered as a potential girlfriend or marriage partner. About that friend of hers, Regina says, “Once I actually heard a guy say, ‘Well, like, who would get serious with her?’ ’Cause I mean, like, you wouldn’t want your kids to be like, ‘My mom went to Syracuse’,” she recounts, mimicking the condescension with a laugh.
While most women at Columbia are more concerned with finals than prenups, for Regina, a highpowered career comes a distant second to a traditional domestic role. “I always have wanted to have that nuclear, stereotypical, conservative family. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing to want,” she says. “I think that’s a harder goal than saying that I want to be a progressive woman with a real career.” The stakes, she insists, are much higher with motherhood than any other job. “It’s scary. Because if you fail, you really fail ... It’s not like you just get a crappier job.”
She points to uninvolved parents, too busy with work to know what’s going on in their children’s lives, for many of the problems affecting today’s youth. “The way that it is now, I just look around and see so many of my friends who are just so messed up and have so many emotional issues and, you know, are on tons of drugs and a billion different things,” she says.
Growing up on the West Coast, Regina was the only child of a single mother who worked long hours as an accountant. “I had a mother who worked all the time and I hated it.” She recalls how much she envied friends who lived the traditional family life she lacked. “I have a lot of friends who are Mormon and have big families, and we’d always go over after school and their moms would have apples and caramel sauce, fresh-heated, and everything. And I’d stay for dinner, and we’d all pray before dinner started. They made us just sit at the table for hours and hours with their family,” she remembers.
“I totally thought that that was wonderful.” As a result, she questions the value of “progress” and says that she wishes that the world were a little bit more like the ’50s. “I idealize that, and perhaps I shouldn’t,” she says. “But that’s what I would like. That’s sort of the world that I would prefer to live in.” Unlike Regina, Lindsey Brooke, CC ’08, did grow up in a traditional family, with a “stay-at-home, housewife mom” and a “successful dad” who themselves met while enrolled at Columbia.
While she would like to have some sort of career after graduating, the Florida native with an infectious smile says that her career will always come second to her family. “The most important thing for me is having a stable and happy family life,” she says. She values the “traditional female role” and envisions a future “nurturing, care-giving, cooking food, cleaning up after your husband, taking care of him,” she says. “I guess a part of me is interested in that whole [idea of] being the perfect housewife.”
Lindsey came to Columbia expecting that she would find a husband, just like her mother had decades ago. When she was applying to college, she says, she made a chart of all the schools she was considering. First came the school’s name, then its location. And then came the school’s male-to-female ratio. “Columbia was the only one with more men than women and, I mean, I ended up here,” she says. Lindsey missed just one crucial factor: “I didn’t know about Barnard at the time, so that totally wrecked that ratio,” she laughs.
Regina and Lindsey are not alone.
In September of 2005, the New York Times ran an article, titled “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood.” According to the article, female college students are increasingly reporting that they plan to suspend or end their careers following the birth of their children.
The article reported that roughly 60 percent of 138 first-year and senior female Yale University students surveyed said that they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely when their children were born. Only two of the women interviewed said they expected their husbands to remain at home while they pursued their careers, while two others said that which partner stayed home would depend on whose career was most lucrative. As the article points out, “there is nothing new about women being more likely than men to stay home to rear children. ... What seems new is that while many of their mothers expected to have hard-charging careers, then scaled back their professional plans only after having children, the women of this generation expect their careers to take second place to child rearing.”
While the research techniques used for the study have come under question, perhaps more important than the findings was the controversy that they stirred among academics who had long professed the importance of developing women for leadership positions in business, government, and science. “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?” Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, and dean for coeducation in the late ’70s and early ’80s, told the Times.
Statistics show that the women of our generation will enter the workforce in higher numbers than ever before. They will receive more education, be married for less time, get married later, and have fewer children than those in past generations. They have equal and often higher admission rates to the top colleges and graduate schools and land careers in high-paying fields. Nonetheless, according to the U.S. Census, the number of children being cared for by stay-at-home mothers has increased nearly 13 percent in less than a decade, while the percentage of new mothers returning to work has fallen from 59 percent in 1998 to 55 percent in 2000. Two-thirds of mothers who work do so fewer than 40 hours a week, and only 5 percent work 50 hours or more—an expectation in many high-power fields.
As Barnard President Judith Shapiro told graduates and their families in her 2004 commencement speech, “Your diploma is a ticket—a piece of paper that, as such, has no intrinsic value. It’s only good if you use it.” She added, “We’ve given you these tools, and now it is your responsibility to use them.”
But what does is mean to “use” one’s degree? Is a woman who chooses not to enter the workforce in effect “wasting” her education? Is motherhood compatible with leadership? What becomes strikingly apparent after speaking with Columbia women is that these are issues that they are longing to discuss. “Nobody gets to talk about this. You’re not really allowed to ask these kinds of questions,” complains Amy Glass, GS, whose name has been changed at her request. She expressed frustration that the fear of coming off as intolerant often stifles necessary discussion. “I’m not even allowed to explore whether that’s true or not, essentially because everything is so politically correct,” she says.
Regina, of course, has heard all the criticism: “You need to want to be so much more. How can you just wanna be a mom? You’d be bored. That’s such a waste.” Yet she and others who share her views assert that what they make of their education, as well as of their lives, are their choices, and their choices alone.
But professor McKenna disagrees. “It’s not a personal choice when only one gender does it. What it is is an example of what Kate Millet said 30-some-odd years ago, that the personal is political. If only women do it or if only men do it, it’s not a personal choice,” she asserts. Personal choices, she says, are not based overwhelmingly on one social category, like gender or race. “If indeed it’s a personal choice, then more power to them. But it’s not.” However, McKenna also questions whether a woman who comes to college to find a man is really all that different from those with other, more widely accepted motivations. “Is it any different from a guy saying, ‘Well, I came to Columbia so I could make good business connections?’” she asks. Annette Kahn, BC ’67, says that if a woman wants to stay at home to raise her children, she should be allowed to do so without fear of accusations that she is betraying her education. “The feminist movement was supposed to give us choices,” she says. “That was the whole point. You have to allow people to think the way they want to think.”
Dean Dorothy Denburg, who herself has been a working mother for 30 years, says that most women at Barnard with whom she has spoken over the years expect to have fulfilling personal and professional lives. She believes that even when a woman chooses not to work, an education is never wasted. “One of the things that an education does is prepare you to live comfortably in your own head. One doesn’t have to be working to live a satisfying life,” she asserts.
But many students take issue with Regina’s plans.
“It’s almost wasteful for someone to come to an academic institution like this with the intention of getting married and not the intention of having a real college experience and getting a valuable education,” Liz Dellheim, BC ’07, contends. On the other hand, she praises stay-at-home mothers and credits much of her own success to her own stay-at-home mom’s involvement and attention. “People can use their knowledge and do things that are meaningful and impactful in a variety of different situations,” she insists.
The contradictions here are obvious. Women are free to make their own choices, but the choices they make are political. They are told that raising children is a valuable contribution, but those who try to stay at home to raise them are often made to feel as though they are wasting their lives. At the same time, many young women who watched their mothers try to juggle the rigors of family life with a high-powered career are realizing that “having it all” may be a liberal feminist fantasy.
“We still live in a world in which it’s extremely difficult to combine family and work,” professor Rosenberg explains. “We still live in a world in which that burden of balance is expected to be borne by women more than men. This is a problem that remains unfairly a women’s problem, and something that we have to figure out,” she says. “We have to create a society in which it’s possible for everybody to have a full life.”
Kathryn Wittner, Columbia associate dean of student affairs, says that she has seen the pendulum of women’s aspirations swing from one extreme to another over time. “In the 1950s, the ideal was Joan Cleaver with the apron and home-baked cookies. Then, in the ’70s, it was women burning their bras, going into the workforce, saying, ‘I want to have it all’ and trying to figure it out.” Now, she says, she has observed a “pushback,” where women “often make the decision to step out of the race,” at least temporarily.
“This was not the way it was supposed to be,” laments Lisa Belkin, author of Life’s Work, in her article, “The Opt-Out Revolution,” published in the New York Times Magazine in October 2003. “Measured against the way things once were, this is certainly progress. But measured against the way things were expected to be, this is a revolution stalled,” Belkin writes. “There was a time when women were determined they could have it all,” Wittner explains. “They couldn’t. You have to adjust your expectations.” Today, she says, women are increasingly aware of the hurdles they face and must consider their priorities. “What’s the real barometer to measure success?” she asks. “Managing a Fortune 500 company or raising 3 healthy kids?” The two, of course, need not be mutually exclusive.
From professor Rosenberg’s perspective, the changes in values are also likely part of a recent cultural shift to the right. “I do think that these feelings wax and wane with feminism. Certainly the idea of defaulting to marriage and children was less popular in the 1970s than it was as conservatism became a more powerful political force in the country,” she says. But Regina and others say that they have experienced significant hostility for their views, both within and outside of the classroom. Regina says that in her first-year seminar at Barnard, she was “attacked by my professor and all of the students in the class about how my opinions are wrong.”
She complained that her personal life was inappropriately brought into the classroom as a source of discussion, and that she received lower grades for papers that included her more traditional opinions. “It’s definitely hard to be a minority. And at times I wish I would have gone to a different school,” she says.
Lindsey has also found that, while the idea of an MRS degree is not defunct, it is very much looked down upon by students at the school, and that even her friends have difficulty relating to her aspirations. “They can’t understand, I guess, why I would value a relationship with a person over becoming a highly successful, driven career person,” she says. However, she says, “Even if girls don’t admit that, maybe that is part of why they’re here.”
Even Regina’s mother disagrees with her traditional views. “She hates it. She gets so mad when I say anything. We’ll get in huge arguments. She’ll just be like, ‘I’m not paying for you to go to school to just meet a husband,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, you are.’”
But Regina’s assessment that an education is less about books than boys may not be that far from the norm. In Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement, and College Culture, anthropologists Dorothy C. Holland of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Margaret A. Eisenhart of University of Colorado, Boulder, argue that, for women today, higher education is often less about enriching one’s mind than finding amate.The researchers followed a group of 23 women at two pseudonymous universities through their college careers and found that many women soon “come to accept the fact that grades on sexual attractiveness are more important than their grade-point average.” A woman’s real value in college, they write, “will be determined by attractiveness and proximity to high-status men.” In this sexual environment, Holland and Eisenhart found that young women’s career aspirations “evaporate, go underground, or get derailed.”
They begin to narrow their professional ambitions and put their boyfriends’ dreams ahead of their own, soon “fall[ing] into reliance on men for marriage and economic support.” In the long run, once aspiring doctors become nurses, future-professors become teachers, and once-promising women fail to maximize their earning potential.
Whitney Hall, SEAS ’08, who also subscribes to traditional family roles, reports that she has watched herself scale down her career aspirations while trying to accommodate boyfriends’ goals. When she came to college, the Alabama native wanted to be a doctor. “I was gung-ho about going to med school,” she says. “End of story. Nothing was going to stop me.” But then came a relationship. He wanted to go to grad school, so she decided to search for alternative jobs and postpone or forgo medical school altogether. “I kind of started putting him as a priority, and our relationship as a priority, over my dreams.”
She says that her ex never would have done the same for her. “They’re gonna do what they wanna do,” she says of men.
Hall says that when she arrived on campus, she was surprised to hear how prominent a role the MRS degree plays in Columbia’s culture. “When I very first came here, freshman year,” she describes, “I started hearing all these rumors about how all these girls were here to get their Missis Degree, to find Mr. Right, for finding, you know, that rich guy to marry to be the trophy wife and all that kind of stuff.”
Perhaps the popular tagline that “all Ivy League women become housewives” is more true than most of us would like to admit. A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates from the classes of 1981, 1985, and 1991 found that only 38 percent of women surveyed were working full-time. A 2000 survey of Yale alumni from the classes of 1979, 1984, 1989, and 1994, conducted by Yale’s Office of Institutional Research, found that, among the alumni surveyed who had reached their 40s, only 56 percent of the women still worked, compared with 90 percent of men. And the stereotype has become a popular campus joke at Columbia.
Last year’s Varsity Show featured a memorable scene depicting a group of girls having a slumber party with English professor Margaret Vandenburg. “I want a husband!” screamed one of the giddy girls, upon hearing mention of a guy. This month’s edition of The Fed includes a parody eulogy to Anna Nicole Smith, which ends with the kicker: “Following this tragedy, President Shapiro and the Barnard community mourned the death of this fine example of a strong, successful woman. She managed to achieve what all Barnard women strive to do: marry rich and pop out a few babies.”
But according to professor Rosenberg, author of Changing the Subject: How the Women of Columbia Shaped the Way We Think About Sex and Politics, the MRS degree has never played a prominent role at this school. “This was never a place to come in order to get married… The point of college was to prepare for productive work in the world, to make a contribution to the world.”
According to Rosenberg, in the period immediately following World War Two, “there was a great deal of commentary throughout the country about the importance of colleges fulfilling their responsibility to their female students, by teaching them not only the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, but also how to make a good Basque paella.” She says that then-Dean and later President Millicent MacIntosh and others “were very troubled by what they saw as an anti-feminist backlash in the 1940s” and “worked particularly hard to make sure that Barnard was not a place that fell victim to that kind of ideology.”
But according to Kahn, who now works in the Barnard Office of Alumnae Affairs, during the ’60s, when she was a student at Columbia, marrying in college was pretty much expected. And, she says, the same holds true today. “I honestly don’t think that it’s changed that much. I think the idea of an MRS degree… maybe it’s gone underground and people don’t talk about it as much, or they feel maybe they shouldn’t talk about it. But,” she says. “That’s just the way
things happen.”
It is important to note that not all women at Columbia on the search for husbands are interested in motherhood. For others, the search for Mr. Rich-and-Successful is less about traditional family values than about the impending reality of sky-high New York rents and acquiring the means to sustain an affluent lifestyle post-graduation.
Dellheim never thought she would consider marrying for money when she enrolled at Barnard nearly four years ago. But as the short and spunky senior with dark hair and cats-eye glasses nears graduation, the prospect of a husband has become more attractive—if not necessary. “I always joke that I want to be a trophy wife. But I definitely didn’t come to college with that idea at all. I didn’t come to college with any notion of that,” she says. “All that said, as I’m approaching graduation, I’m definitely thinking about how I’m going to live.”
For many who grew up in well-to-do homes, the harsh realization that pursuing their passions may not support the lifestyles they’ve grown up with comes as a shock. “It’s scary and weird. Even graduating from an excellent educational institution, it’s weird to think that this probably isn’t gonna cut it.”
Liz wants to work in the arts. But after growing up in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country, the pay cut seems overwhelming. “I know there are a lot of girls who come to this school with plans of meeting a rich husband. Those people want to be moms and stay at home and have kids and be a wife. And while I guess having a rich husband is totally appealing to me, it’s appealing for a completely opposite reason.” For Liz, instead of serving as a means of avoiding a career, snagging a rich husband would be “a way for me to pursue what I really want to be doing.” And if it means giving up love, Liz is open to compromise. “Shit, man. I need to find a reasonable income as much as love.”
Like Liz, Isang, CC ’09, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, has no intention of abandoning her career for a husband and family—she plans to go to medical school after college. Nonetheless, she says that she feels a great deal of pressure to marry a wealthy man in order to ensure financial security. She watched as her single mother struggled to raise a family on her own and now believes that men provide a necessary, reliable source of income. “You need a man,” Isang says. And she believes that Columbia is a great place to find one. “Women are shoppers,” she asserts. “And this is the best place to shop.” Glass has been there before. At 37, she’s turned down five marriage proposals to date, but she has seen many of her friends succumb to the temptation of a well-to-do man and witnessed the fallout that followed. She is skeptical about the idea of the MRS degree. “It’s a very expensive dating service, isn’t it?” While she said that although she understands the appeal of being taken care of by a well-off guy, she questions whether it is worth the sacrifices that, in her experience, come when people settle for someone who has a big checkbook but isn’t necessarily the best match. “They have stuff,” she agrees. “But at what cost?”
Regina herself has experienced difficulty achieving her goal of landing a husband by graduation. When she arrived at Barnard, she had a clear and definite plan: she would a meet a successful Wall Street up-and-comer by sophomore year, date him until May of senior year, and then be engaged by graduation. She hoped to be married and to have given birth to her first child within two years of receiving her diploma.
But that plan was driven off course when she and her boyfriend, an investment banker with whom she lived for two years, ended their relationship. Now, faced with just over a year until diploma time and a bare ring finger, she has had to drastically alter her plans—or at least push them back a couple of years. “That’s something I think I kind of regret at school,” she says. “I think I too much counted on the plan that I would be, like, married or at least engaged by the time I graduated. And now that I’m not, and I’m a junior, it’s sort of like, ‘Oh no. What do I do with myself?’” Her new strategy is to get into business school, where, she says, the prospects of meeting a husband are more certain.
The day before speaking to The Eye, she accepted an internship at one of the most prestigious financial investment firms in the country to boost her chances of admission. “Since the whole undergrad one didn’t work out, I figure I’ll do that [finance work] for two years, so I’ll get into a good business school. And that’s a really good place to meet husbands, because they’re like the right age,” she says. “I guess that the women’s movement just made you have to wait a little bit longer.”
Interestingly, Regina had previously turned down the same internship to take a less demanding job at a non-profit, a field she speaks about passionately, last summer when she was still in a relationship. “I was like, ‘Well, I already found the guy I’m going to marry. Why would I do that? Why would I be at work all the time? Like, I can do whatever I want now,” she says.
“I feel a little bad about the fact that like I’m taking a job at [the firm] just so I can get into business school and get a husband. I’m sure there are probably lots of girls who would have liked that job because they would like to do business crap,” she adds.
But, for Regina, the search continues.