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By Root 2003 0

women—if not the majority—seem to be incapable of dealing with future long-range intellectual interests until they have proceeded through the more basic phases of their own healthy growth as women…. To be well done, the mother’s job in training children and shaping the life of her family should draw on all a woman’s resources, emotional and intellectual, and upon all her skills. The better her training, the better chance she will have to do the job well, provided that emotional roadblocks do not stand in her way: provided, that is, that she has established a good basis for the development of adult femininity, and that during the course of her higher education, she is not subjected to pressures which adversely affect that development.…To urge upon her conflicting goals, to stress that a career and a profession in the man’s world should be the first consideration in planning her life, can adversely affect the full development of her identity…. Of all the social freedoms won by her grandmothers, she prizes first the freedom to be a healthy, fulfilled woman, and she wants to be free of guilt and conflict about it…. This means that though jobs are often possible within the framework of marriage, “careers” rarely are…5

The fact remains that the girl who wastes—as waste she does—her college years without acquiring serious interests, and wastes her early job years marking time until she finds a man, gambles with the possibilities for an identity of her own, as well as the possibilities for sexual fulfillment and wholly affirmed motherhood. The educators who encourage a woman to postpone larger interests until her children are grown make it virtually impossible for her ever to acquire them. It is not that easy for a woman who has defined herself wholly as wife and mother for ten or fifteen or twenty years to find new identity at thirty-five or forty or fifty. The ones who are able to do it are, quite frankly, the ones who made serious commitments to their earlier education, the ones who wanted and once worked at careers, the ones who bring to marriage and motherhood a sense of their own identity—not those who somehow hope to acquire it later on. A recent study of fifty women college graduates in an eastern suburb and city, the year after the oldest child had left home, showed that, with very few exceptions, the only women who had any interests to pursue—in work, in community activities, or in the arts—had acquired them in college. The ones who lacked such interests were not acquiring them now; they slept late, in their “empty nests,” and looked forward only to death.6

Educators at every women’s college, at every university, junior college, and community college, must see to it that women make a lifetime commitment (call it a “life plan,” a “vocation,” a “life purpose” if that dirty word career has too many celibate connotations) to a field of thought, to work of serious importance to society. They must expect the girl as well as the boy to take some field seriously enough to want to pursue it for life. This does not mean abandoning liberal education for women in favor of “how to” vocational courses. Liberal education, as it is given at the best of colleges and universities, not only trains the mind but provides an ineradicable core of human values. But liberal education must be planned for serious use, not merely dilettantism or passive appreciation. As boys at Harvard or Yale or Columbia or Chicago go on from the liberal arts core to study architecture, medicine, law, science, girls must be encouraged to go on, to make a life plan. It has been shown that girls with this kind of a commitment are less eager to rush into early marriage, less panicky about finding a man, more responsible for their sexual behavior.7 Most of them marry, of course, but on a much more mature basis. Their marriages then are not an escape but a commitment shared by two people that becomes part of their commitment to themselves and society. If, in fact, girls are educated to make such commitments, the question of sex and when they marry will lose its