Princeton alumna Susan Patton '77 caused a ruckus last week when she wrote a letter to The Daily Princetonian urging female students there to find their husbands now because the odds will never be as good for them in terms of finding smart men. The letter, which many people found offensive, went viral, causing the college newspaper’s site to crash.
Patton went so far as to blame her own failed marriage on her ex-husband not attending Princeton. From CNN:
Patton said that men have a broader time frame in which to build a home and a family. Women, on the other hand, have what she called a "shelf life."
"Unlike the men on campus, these women have a time clock," she said in an interview with CNN Money. That’s why she said she wouldn’t give the same advice to her two sons, both of whom are Princetonians.
"Women who spend the first 10 years after college… career planning find themselves in their thirties a little panicked,’ she said. ‘From a sheer numbers perspective, the odds will never be as good to be surrounded by all of these extraordinary men."
In short, Patton basically degrades the entire college experience for women to the first episode of The Bachelor.
Patton feels that women who attended Princeton and didn’t find husbands must have wasted their time studying, rather than seducing the smartest and best men in the world. They didn't use their shelf life responsibly.
I didn’t attend Princeton (though I did grow up down the street), but I did go to a great university and I have to say when I entered college the thought of marriage didn’t pop into my head. Finding a boyfriend was important to me, but I was not thinking long-term, and I really think that is okay. I was thinking long-term about what I was going to do after I graduated and where I wanted to be. Again, wasteful, according to Patton.
Since I didn’t go to Princeton, I decided to talk to some women who did. These women have not married Princeton alums (yet), but as far as I can tell, their lives are still going pretty well. But they had some explanations as to why Patton may feel this way.
Caroline McCarthy, a member of the class of 2006 at Princeton who works at Quartz, an Atlantic Media Publication, talked with Levo about the “orange bubble”:
“Schools like Harvard, Yale, and Columbia have law, medicine, and business schools (or two of the three) that are very high-profile and which fill the campus up with a lot of brilliant grad students who went to a ton of different colleges for their undergrad degrees. And at Princeton you don’t have that.
“And so it’s easy, if incredibly short-sighted, to come to the assumption that all the world’s brilliant people are contained within a few gothic courtyards in New Jersey and that you’re obviously going to meet your match there.”
Meaghan Byrne, class of 2010, told Levo:
“I just think the whole ‘I-made-the-wrong-choice-let-me-tell-you-how-to-live-your-life’ conversation is like a gossip-fest at this point and utterly useless. I like the lean in dialogue because I think that is useful for women to hear.”
Byrne’s sister is a senior at Princeton and she told me she had been joking with her after the article came out that she had to find someone before June or that would be her last chance.
It is great to be around smart men and smart women, but I don’t think anyone should tell someone their life is over or going to be not as great as it could have been because they didn’t start looking for their significant other the first day of fall semester. Women have made so much progress and this sends women right back to the 1950s when they were told the only reason to go to college was to get their MRS degrees.
Or as one woman told me who didn’t attend Princeton, but somehow managed to nab one of those Princeton men, “According to Patton, I am lacking in the requisite intelligence to be married to a Princetonian, and am probably unable to formulate a coherent thought. I have to get back to primping before my Princeton husband comes home.”