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By Root 1996 0

government and social welfare. This college had an ex-feminist woman president, who was perhaps beginning to suffer a slight guilt at the thought of all those women educated like men. A questionnaire, sent to alumnae of all ages, indicated that the great majority were satisfied with their non-sex-directed education; but a minority complained that their education had made them overly conscious of women’s rights and equality with men, too interested in careers, possessed of a nagging feeling that they should do something in the community, that they should at least keep on reading, studying, developing their own abilities and interests. Why hadn’t they been educated to be happy housewives and mothers?

The guilty woman college president—guilty personally of being a college president, besides having a large number of children and a successful husband; guilty also of having been an ardent feminist in her time and of having advanced a good way in her career before she married; barraged by the therapeutic social scientists who accused her of trying to mold these young girls in her own impossible, unrealistic, outmoded, energetic, self-demanding, visionary, unfeminine image—introduced a functional course in marriage and the family, compulsory for all sophomores.

The circumstances which led to the college’s decision, two years later, to drop that functional course are shrouded in secrecy. Nobody officially connected with the college will talk. But a neighboring educator, a functionalist crusader himself, said with a certain contempt for naive wrong-thinking that they were evidently shocked over there that the girls who took the functional course got married so quickly. (The class of 1959 at that college included a record number of 75 wives, nearly a quarter of the girls who still remained in the class.) He told me calmly:

Why should it upset them, over there, that the girls got married a little early? There’s nothing wrong with early marriage, with the proper preparation. I guess they can’t get over the old notion that women should be educated to develop their minds. They deny it, but one can’t help suspecting that they still believe in careers for women. Unfortunately, the idea that women go to college to get a husband is anathema to some educators.

At the college in question, “Marriage and the Family” is taught once again as a course in sociology, geared to critical analysis of these changing social institutions, and not to functional action, or group therapy. But in the neighboring institution, my professor-informant is second in command of a booming department of “family-life education,” which is currently readying a hundred graduate students to teach functional marriage courses in colleges, state teachers’ colleges, junior colleges, community colleges, and high schools across America. One senses that these new sex-directed educators do indeed think of themselves as crusaders—crusaders against the old nontherapeutic, nonfunctional values of the intellect, against the old, demanding, sexless education, which confined itself to the life of the mind and the pursuit of truth, and never even tried to help girls pursue a man, have orgasms, or adjust. As my informant elaborated:

These kids are concerned about dating and sex, how to get along with boys, is it all right to have premarital relations. Maybe a girl is trying to decide about her major; she’s thinking about a career, and she’s also thinking about marriage. You set up a role-playing situation to help her work it out—so she sees the effect on the children. She sees she need not feel guilty about being just a housewife.

There often is an air of defensiveness, when a sex-directed educator is asked to define, for the uninitiated, the “functional approach.” One told a reporter:

It’s all very well to talk big talk—intellectual generalizations, abstract concepts, the United Nations—but somewhere we have to start facing these problems of interpersonal relations on a more modest scale. We have to stop being so teacher-centered, and become student-centered.