The media is on a mission to depress women of our generation. The lives that await us after graduation have become fodder for cover stories and oped musings. Telling us just how little we have to look forward to has become a cottage industry.
Princeton alumna Lisa Belkin started a firestorm in 2003 when she wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine about mothers who "opted-out" of the workforce. Since then, writers in The Times have opined on the demands of modern motherhood, the regrets of women who chose career over family, the tendency of men to marry down the corporate ladder and the advent of high-priced matchmaking services for females eager to complete their M.R.S. degrees.
The women I know at Princeton are just beginning to look for apartments and jobs, to anticipate lives that require paying utility bills and cooking dinners. We are deciding if our relationships have staying power or if we want to be in relationships at all. For the first time in our lives, there is no accolade-lined path to follow, no logical next step. We will have to make decisions for ourselves.
If one believes the conventional wisdom, what we choose is of little consequence. Ten years from now we will be lamenting the dearth of datable men and shelling out money to Internet dating services that promise the impossible dream: straight, available, Ivy League men looking to settle down. We will be successful at work and desperate at home. If we do manage to attain the Holy Grail that is matrimony, we will find ourselves unable to balance the demands of work and parenting. We will be forced to choose between career and family.
I don't buy it. If we know anything about conventional wisdom it's how wrong it can be. My female friends and I pass these articles back and forth by email. We spot the nuggets of truth buried among anecdotes and interviews. We may hope to marry someday, but the desire does not consume us. We may be goal-oriented, but we do not tackle dating with checklists and how-to guides. We may wonder at the challenges of motherhood, but we have not given up on the idea that we can have it all.
This is not to say that our choices are simple. At 21, my friends and I sometimes wonder how much of our independence we should cede for significant others, what we can reasonably be asked to give up. More than once I have found myself fitting in a call to a boyfriend between meetings, assuring him that I will have more time after a thesis chapter is turned in or a project completed. Conservative commentators would tell you that feminism failed me, failed the women of my generation. They would tell you I would be happier if I did not bristle at the thought of giving up my ambitions for someone else, if the path before me was already set: a young marriage, children raised by a mother who stayed home, a nonthreatening job in philanthropy or retail after the kids went to school. I would tell you that I am richer for all I do, no matter how little time I have to fulfill the role of traditional girlfriend, and that I could never love a man who thought otherwise.
Feminism didn't fail us. We are better for being able to choose what we want to do with our lives, even if not all the choices are perfect. It is better that both men and women are asked to compromise. The truth is, feminism isn't finished. For the first time in our lives, we are making our own choices, and we can choose not to accept the wisdom that says we will obsess over finding a husband, that we will allow ourselves to be forced out of a workplace built for men with wives at home. We can choose to demand that employers adopt family-friendly policies, that executives realize having a child isn't the same as having a lobotomy. We can choose to marry our equals. We can choose not to marry at all.
The media is on a mission to convince us that our choices will be our downfall, that we can fully expect to turn into a series of depressing anecdotes. But the women who make up 50 percent of this University have been models of achievement for much of their lives. Now, we can forge our own path as we collectively choose to prove the conventional wisdom wrong. Katherine Reilly is a Wilson School major from Short Hills, N.J. She can be reached at kcreilly@princeton.edu.
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