Despite the fact that my high breasts and I do not have a man with an MBA to take care of us, we have yet to be crushed by the unbearable weight of the human experience. This may sound like preposterous brag coming from a 20-year-old Ivy-League student: how could I have lived long enough to be convinced of life’s tragedies, hardships, and the benefit of having a partner who went to business school? According to 27-year-old Grazia Sophia Christie, however, I’m already behind on feeling these burdens.
At my age, Christie declared in her recent viral essay “The Case for Marrying an Older Man” that she already understood the problems she was to face. She also realized that the best way to avoid them — for her and for those around her — would be to wed a man who was her senior. While this personal essay can be read as just another silly example of a writer unintentionally revealing their delirious worldview, her message to female Ivy League readers reflects an unconscionable acceptance of status-quo sexism and a serious lack of accountability for our duty to use our educational privilege productively and selflessly.
In The Cut, Christie details her realization, as a junior at Harvard, that being a young and beautiful woman was the highest place in society to which she would ever rise. Thus, she set out on a quest to marry an older man, a quest she happily fulfilled. And now, she proudly displays her success as an example of what (straight) young women should aspire for: a partnership in which she has had the freedom to explore herself and slip into adulthood before she takes on the daunting role of being a mother. “There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest,” she writes. “By opting out of partnership” Christie declares, she achieved a “compartmentalized, liberating selfishness.”
This selfishness cannot be legitimized by claiming that it is the only way for women to live happily in an intractably unequal world. Telling Ivy League women similar to her to simply accept that achieving true success on our own is impossible enables us to justify maximizing our own luxury at the expense of other women who don’t have access to such luxuries. But those of us who have been given the immense power of accessing the endless resources of schools like Princeton and Harvard must strive to do better. When we, as women, consider how to achieve contentment, we must consider strategies that improve equal access to fulfilling lives for all, not just those able to attract a rich man.
With her article, Christie is joining a long lineage of privileged and educated women who, noticing that life is not fair and life as a woman also is even more unfair, encourage others like them to work the system for the best possible personal outcome. Princeton women got their own version of this stunted feminism in 2013, when Susan Patton ’77 told us to find a husband while we were around our intellectual equals, as post graduation, we’d only be around men who were intimidated of our intelligence or around whom we would be bored.
In these essays, we are told that, unlike our male counterparts, our degrees and the aspirations which may accompany them are not enough to fulfill us. Indeed, Christie argues that climbing the corporate ladder as a woman can only lead to misery as the attempt to fit everything in — success, marriage, motherhood — inevitably fails. Thus, we must be pragmatic about how we live and maximize our potential for individual happiness.
But what about the happiness of womankind? Christie and Patton would tell us to stop worrying about these larger issues, as it will only detract from our ability to experience lasting joy and puts us in a battle against nature, one that we can never win. Their vision of joy, however, is so selfish that it loses all merit. While an individual woman may find happiness by following these directions, suggesting that this way of life should be a universal ideal only serves to preserve expectations and standards that promote female unhappiness.
Although she acknowledges that “women really do have a tragically short window of power,” Christie tells us to take advantage of our youth and “plausible deniability when it [comes] to purity” while it lasts, not to fight for a world in which women are appreciated, desired, and valued beyond their youth. She bemoans the fact that “when we decided to be equal to men, we got on men’s time.” But she does not tell smart and educated young men and women to use the vast resources available to them to rethink this system and figure out ways in which women can have “pregnancy, children, [and] menopause,” without fitting them “impossibly in the margins.” Instead, she tells us to leave the men where they are and remove ourselves from the professional game, allowing them to care for us while we only focus on our personal happiness.
Christie argues that young men require young women to teach them how to be people — “to call their mothers, match colors,” and more — and as such, smart women should find older men who have already completed training. Thus, her ideal rests on using unjust systems in which women — crucially, other women — are faced with unfair burdens so you can increase your personal gain. But we should expect more from our Ivy League sisters and cannot stand by when those like Christie justify closing off this elite circle by telling ourselves that, as women, it’s the only way in which we can be content. For that is what Christie wants: not for us to take the spoils of our expensive education and share them with the world, through labor and lived experiences, but to guard them jealously, using our existence in elite circles to satisfy our desires.
After all, what is pursuing higher education all about? Achieving your personal ideal of a life? Or living one that is meaningful and contributes to the larger world? If those two do not align for some, it’s certainly not wrong to want the former: it is a perfectly reasonable goal to provide comfort and luxury for oneself, achieving a lifestyle that is enviable and as untroubled as possible. But these institutions exist not as a marriage market for smart women to take advantage of, but to give students the chance to pursue the heights of human intellectual excellence and learn how to live in a way which can benefit others.
Far be it from me to suggest that homemaking and childrearing are not crucial contributions to society, nor to proclaim that in obtaining an Ivy League degree, a woman gives up the right to choose such a life. But the suggestion that we, as privileged Ivy League women, should choose these paths because they will lead to greater happiness than the alternative — i.e. using our education to aspire to gender-nonconforming achievements — demonstrates a willingness to quit the feminist project which we, collectively, have a duty to dispense.
If you want to “consider a thing called ease,” as Christie does, fine. But don’t pretend that you have unlocked a secret door through which all women can find ease. Christie’s privilege is what allows her to remove herself from “discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal,” in ways that are both material and ideological, and her piece tells the lie that all women have the capability to do the same.
Abigail Rabieh is a junior in the history department from Cambridge, Mass. She is the public editor at the ‘Prince’ and can be reached via email at arabieh[at]princeton.edu or on X at @AbigailRabieh.
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