I wanted to know what all the brouhaha was about “Marry Smart,” the book recently written by Susan Patton ’77, so I bought it as an eBook last week, figuring that I would transfer the least money possible from my bank account to hers (thankfully, my local library did not waste a dime of its budget on the book). To say she gives mixed messages is an understatement. Marriage and career are not, as we have all discovered, mutually exclusive. Like Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80, many of us raised in the 50s and 60s have come to believe that “you can’t have it all,” but I feel like my friends and I have come pretty darn close. Those of us educated in the late 60s and early 70s at Ivy League institutions like Princeton stood on the shoulders of our mothers and grandmothers who went to college and, in some cases, grad school, but graduated with no career opportunities due to their gender. The outstanding women from classes of the 90s I met at the Women in Leadership Conference at the University last week are standing on our shoulders, confident and ambitious, taking the goal of professional and marital success for granted. They chair foundations, practice law and medicine, head divisions of major entertainment corporations, preside over institutions of higher learning and are now sending daughters of their own to Princeton.
The undergraduates I met at the conference were confused and offended by Ms. Patton’s message — but more confused than offended, as it’s hard to take a sophomoric self-help book terribly seriously. I’m not surprised. It’s a confusing message, and it took me a while to sort out in my own mind why so, exactly. Apart from the multitude of deeply offensive and simplistic advice and attitudes expressed in her little Miss America-like manifesto, her major claim of somehow representing the women of Princeton University in the 70s just isn't honest. She simply trades on the fact that she attended Princeton, which therefore qualifies her as an authority on life’s most vexing issues, much the same way that she boasts of having a best friend in college who was a wealthy White Anglo-Saxon Protestant from Fairfield County, Conn. A friend of mine who was the dean of students at a New England preparatory school complained once, “The trouble with so many of the parents I deal with here is that for them [the school]is just another BMW in their garage.”That says it all.For Ms. Patton, Princeton, like her Westport wasp, is just another BMW in her garage.Her fine liberal arts education seems simply a red herring, totally irrelevant to her distasteful drivel.
I am a mother and a college health center physician. Adolescence is confusing and challenging enough as is without returning it to the 1940s. Regrettably, Ms. Patton’s mother did not have the opportunity to attend college. She was busy trying to stay alive in a concentration camp. My mother, who attended Vassar College in the early 1940s felt under constant pressure to find a husband from the meager group of men too old or disabled to go off to war, and said she felt like the oldest woman in the world when she married at age 22 and gave birth to me at 25. Ms. Patton needs to speak to some of these women and reconsider her revisionist views of the good old days of1940sAmerican collegiate life.
If you have issues with intimacy, seek the professional care of a therapist. If you have issues with infertility, go to a reproductive endocrinologist, but please, oh please, do not go to Ms. Patton for any reliable advice whatsoever on how to plan your life during or after Princeton.
Sincerely yours,
Katherine P. Holden, M.D.
’73 P’13
Litchfield County, Conn.
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