Half-Changed World has more on the NYTimes article pitting working moms against stay-at-home moms that Jill discusses here.
One of the stories that floated around when I attended is that Yale used to have a goal of admitting “1000 Leaders of the Future” each year. Then they decided to admit women (in 1969!), but they didn’t want to stop admitting “1000 Leaders of the Future,” and they didn’t think women could be “Leaders of the Future,” so the class size was increased by 250. The story isn’t entirely supported by the data, but it’s certainly believable.
Rumors like this kill me. They tacitly support gender divisions decades after they should have died.
Perhaps the most telling quote in the story is at the end:
Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids.
‘I accept things how they are,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind the status quo. I don’t see why I have to go against it.’
After all, she added, those roles got her where she is.
‘It worked so well for me,’ she said, ‘and I don’t see in my life why it wouldn’t work.’
The scary thing is that Ms. Ku is right. Conformity has worked very well for her so far. Fundamentally, you don’t get into Yale by bucking the system. You get into Yale by sitting in the front row in class, and doing your homework, and doing very well on tests that involve filling in circles with number 2 pencils. You get into Yale by playing a musical instrument or being on the debate team or organzing a major charitable event, or preferably all of the above.
If Yale is still interested in developing the “Leaders of the Future,” it needs to figure out a way to admit some more kids who do mind the status quo. And it needs to shake some of the complacency out of the ones who don’t.
If you haven’t checked out Half-Changed World, you should. It is one of my favorites that regularly deals with gender, class, and the work-family divide.
Unfortunately I think that Yale and similar institutions are structured very intentionally to maintain the status quo.
It worked so well for her so far – maybe. But she’s 18. Let’s see what she thinks when she’s 60. I hope she finds a path that works for her.
Am I right in thinking that this is clearly a classist trend? I mean, would a woman attending Chico State to become a physical therapist even think that she could snag a partner whose income would allow her to choose to stop working? It strikes me that this isn’t really a story about gender at all, but rather a story about the outrageous privilege of the upper class.
Nevermind a woman attending Chico state, what about a woman who had to borrow obscene amounts of money to attend Yale?
I went to a very good law school, and I graduated 9 years ago, but I’m still paying it off. No way, unless I happened to marry some man with no debt load and an investment banker’s salary, could I afford to stay home. And I make decent money (not fabulous, but I purposely dropped out of the fabulous-money realm because I couldn’t do big firm life). I also have very little debt from undergrad. What about someone who has to pay loans from not only undergrad but also grad/law/business/medical school?
I do understand women who drop out of, say, law firms to be home with their kids. The hours at big firms are brutal. But most of the women I knew who did that did so reluctantly, or tried to do part-time first. They certainly didn’t go into practice thinking that they’d just drop out after a few years (or, at least, they didn’t admit that to anyone).
Some women I knew in law school got asked during interviews, despite the fact that it was illegal, whether they planned on having babies, because “you women have babies and it’s a waste of time and money for the firm.” Women like the ones interviewed in the article just make it harder for the rest of us.
i went to yale, and i’m not at all familiar with this rumor. i’m also not convinced that all of us who attended were the sort of conformists the author describes.