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By Root 1962 0

Adolescent boys also have sexual urges whose fulfillment may be delayed by college. But for boys, the educators are not concerned with sexual “phantasy” they are concerned with “reality,” and boys are expected to achieve personal autonomy and identity by “committing themselves in the sphere of our culture that is most morally worthwhile—the world of work—in which they will be acknowledged as persons with recognized achievements and potentials.” Even if the boys’ own vocational images and goals are not realistic in the beginning—and this study showed that they were not—the sex-directed educators recognize, for boys, that motives, goals, interests, childish preconceptions, can change. They also recognize that, for most, the crucial last chance for change is in college. But apparently girls are not expected to change, nor are they given the opportunity. Even at coeducational colleges, very few girls get the same education as boys. Instead of stimulating what psychologists have suggested might be a “latent” desire for autonomy in the girls, the sex-directed educators stimulated their sexual fantasy of fulfilling all desire for achievement, status, and identity vicariously through a man. Instead of challenging the girls’ childish, rigid, parochial preconception of woman’s role, they cater to it by offering them a potpourri of liberal-arts courses, suitable only for a wifely veneer, or narrow programs such as “institutional dietetics,” well beneath their abilities and suitable only for a “stopgap” job between college and marriage.

As educators themselves admit, women’s college training does not often equip them to enter the business or professional world at a meaningful level, either at graduation or afterward; it is not geared to career possibilities that would justify the planning and work required for higher professional training. For women, the sex-directed educators say with approval, college is the place to find a man. Presumably, if the campus is “the world’s best marriage mart,” as one educator remarked, both sexes are affected. On college campuses today, professor and student agree, the girls are the aggressors in the marriage hunt. The boys, married or not, are there to stretch their minds, to find their own identity, to fill out their life plan; the girls are there only to fulfill their sexual function.

Research reveals that ninety per cent or more of the rising number of campus wives who were motivated for marriage by “phantasy and the need to conform” are literally working their husbands’ way through college.17 The girl who quits high school or college to marry and have a baby, or to take a job to work her husband’s way through, is stunted from the kind of mental growth and understanding that higher education is supposed to give, as surely as child labor used to stunt the physical growth of children. She is also prevented from realistic preparation and planning for a career or a commitment that will utilize her abilities and will be of some importance to society and herself.

During the period when the sex-directed educators were devoting themselves to women’s sexual adjustment and femininity, economists charted a new and revolutionary change in American employment: beneath the ebb and flow of boom and recession, they found an absolute, spiraling decline in employment possibilities for the uneducated and the unskilled. But when the government economists on the “Womanpower” study visited college campuses, they found the girls unaffected by the statistical probability that they will spend twenty-five years or more of their adult lives in jobs outside the home. Even when it is virtually certain that most women will no longer spend their lives as full-time housewives, the sex-directed educators have told them not to plan for a career for fear of hampering their sexual adjustment.

A few years ago, sex-directed education finally infiltrated a famous women’s college, which had been proud in the past of its large share of graduates who went on to play leading roles in education and law and medicine, the arts and sciences,