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What woman wants to spend three decades wondering "Who needs me?" Surely not the U.S. college girl of 1961, says Mary Bunting: "She won't model herself on anyone who has rejected good family life or who has rejected an intellectual life to be a housewife in suburbia. What she needs to see is the person who has managed both." The girl must find marriage, but she must also find what Mary Bunting calls "the thing that's most important—having something awfully interesting that you want to work on awfully hard."
"Fur-Lined Domesticity." The marriage part of this twin-goal life seems to be no trick at all. Largely as a consequence of better nutrition, girls mature earlier than ever; the average age of puberty has dropped by 1½ years since 1940. The average American woman marries at 20. Once the married college girl was a bit of a freak, perhaps the wife of a war veteran back to finish his education, or perhaps even trying to keep her marriage a secret. Now the campus marriage is increasingly common; last year at the University of California, for example, 36% of the day students were married. At the end of this school year, 147,000 girls will graduate from U.S. colleges, and most will marry soon; some colleges report that 90% of their girl graduates marry within three years.
But early marriage is perhaps largely the effect of unexpectation. Schoolgirls soon accept the idea that to be married is to be satisfied with life. Schools steer girls away from science and math because "you won't need it." Girls more than ever go to college "not to pursue learning but to learn pursuing." They slip, in the phrase of Anthropologist Margaret Mead, into "a kind of fur-lined domesticity.''
Ambition for a career recedes. That "interesting little job in New York for a few years before marriage" seems less and less attractive: the girl whose eager mind plumbed Milton pictures herself glumly making coffee for the boss. Business, she finds, snaps up young men for their potential, but hires women only for what they can do—temporarily. Don't all working girls soon quit to get married?
The effect on girls is what sociologists call "a self-fulfilling prophecy." Marriage looks like salvation. Vague fears about the Bomb make it more so. What a girl expects from her education drops back from high goals of professional, intellectual or artistic attainment to a desire for "finish" and for the graces of motherhood.
Something Meaningful. "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection." said St. Paul. From those who agree with him to those who love their wives as they are, men are likely to give Mary Bunting a hot argument. So what's wrong with motherhood? Nothing, says Mary Bunting; nor does she insist on "careers." She simply believes that countless women are dying to do something more meaningful. "They are busy." she says. "They are exhausted. But they are not happy." They are not doing something important enough, hard enough, engrossing enough to make life worthwhile.