It’s almost enough to make you give a somewhat serious reappraisal to otherwise obviously backward, fundamentalist loonies like this poor young lady, who writes:

 

In general I would not recommend college to other women. I think, in general, that young women would make better use of their time and spiritual development by pursuing studies on their own and serving their family and their church during their years of singleness.

 

Only “almost enough,” of course, because there’s really no question that even if one were to grant some credence to the validity of sentiments like hers (I don’t), it’s totally laughable (not to mention probably morally wrong from any reasonable perspective on gender equality) to turn back the clock toward a society like what Suzy Homemaker wants. ~Peter Suderman

I don’t mean to dwell overmuch on patriarchy and the Forbes article on career women today, but Mr. Suderman’s post makes some interesting points that I would like (in as non-Ender-Wiggin-like fashion as I possibly can) to discuss further.  First there is the problem of Mr. Suderman’s condescension towards Ms. Garrison, the “poor young lady” (as if she is deranged or in need of medical attention), and the characterisation of her as an “obviously backwards, fundamentalist” looney.  The young lady does seem to be a fundamentalist, or at the very least a very traditional Christian woman, which does not seem to me to make her either looney or “backwards” (one of those terms, like hidebound or obscurantist, that conservatives should take care in applying to others when it can so readily be applied to them).  She is one of those people who adheres to a living religious tradition (whether or not, as a fundamentalist, she thinks of it in terms of a tradition) and actually submits herself to its requirements rather than skipping over the bits that she finds inconvenient.  For some reason, quite a few modern Christian conservatives develop a visceral dislike of people who actually live the tradition that they, the conservatives, talk about all the time as the very thing that they, the conservatives, want to try to preserve.  It is almost as if there is an unspoken rule: traditionalist rhetoric, si, lived tradition, no.  And if the young lady is “backwards,” what, one might ask, is terribly appealing or admirable about being “forward-thinking” in this case?  Perhaps there is some happier middle ground between the two extremes (the time-honoured tradition of women’s colleges preparing young ladies for their MRS. degrees has often been a successful, if much-mocked compromise), but the young lady’s view is neither so bizarre nor so unreasonable as Mr. Suderman would have us believe. 

Her determination that college is largely useless for young women who hope to be wives and mothers is fairly unusual in our time, and particularly in my generation (in all honesty, I have never once met a young woman who held this view, but then there would obviously not be a lot of these women roaming the UofC campus), but in holding this view she is a) more like most generations of women, including most of our ancestral mothers up till a very recent time and b) more or less right. 

First of all, it seems to me that we declare her “backwards” and “looney” at the risk of denouncing our grandmothers or at least our great-great grandmothers.  Someone will say, “Not so.  My great-great grandmother ‘had no choice’, but this young woman does and so must be a looney to prefer the role women have traditionally held.”  That is quite a strange position to take in the way that it peremptorily dismisses the habits of generations with the flick of the wrist.  We could also denounce Xenophon as backwards and looney for his Oikonomikos and his portrayal of a wife’s proper role, or we could consider what in the Oikonomikos is reasonable and true and what, if anything, is looney.  Indeed, as conservatives it is incumbent on us to justify our particular, personal views in the light of the traditions to which we belong. 

She is more or less right that college education has nothing to do with being a good wife and mother (quite a few women have managed these things very well without college); if she believes this is what her proper and main role in life is, she is making a fairly rational decision to not waste time–as she sees it–on developing skills that will be of little use to her while developing other skills that will have limited application in her real life.  Not surprisingly, the young lady’s rational choice and her calculation of costs and benefits in living her own life don’t seem to count for much in this case for Mr. Suderman, who could pass over them in silence (or not mention them at all) but feels obliged to declare her sentiments as potentially morally deviant (she strays from the true path of gender equality–aiee!) and dismiss the implementation of her view as “laughable.”  Why?  Do we, as conservatives, actually believe that something called “gender equality” exists?  Do we believe that equality even exists?  If so, in what sense does it actually exist and how does it even necessarily pertain to the question at hand?  (Does a woman who opts for a life simply as a wife and mother in lieu of other avenues forfeit this equality?  Does she lose the dignity and respect that men are obliged to show a lady?  Is she somehow less reputable, less worthy of respect?  Are we supposed to believe that this traditional arrangement actually degrades and oppresses women across the board?)  If we do not believe that these things exist (and I have to say that I think very few of us really believe it when it comes to our own lives), why would we form opinions or judge others’ opinions as if we thought they did?  

I have some mixed feelings about the young lady’s view, since it seems to me that Christian women who aspire to teach their children, particularly those who wish to homeschool, ought to have as much education to their credit as they can.  Of course, I must be careful and not make an assumption here.  The young lady clearly states that she is not recommending opting out of education and learning (which is surely the only thing that Mr. Suderman could find offensive about this view), but opting out of college, and the two are very different things.  I am also keenly aware that most of what passes for “education” in most colleges has less and less to do with the sort of things that good Christian women (there’s a quaint phrase!) would want to be teaching their children.  Certainly the social atmosphere at many colleges and universities is often downright hostile to living a faithful life.  Once upon a time, the idea of sending your daughters off to university would not have simply seemed bizarre or socially unacceptable for other reasons, but would actually have been seen as detrimental to the moral character of these women.  The modern vast moral wasteland that includes many American universities and colleges (there are assuredly a few exceptions–typically limited to the backwards fundamentalist looney corners of America) is a testament to how right that view would have been.  In the present age, perhaps the only thing as important for a father to do for the sake of his daughter’s future as keeping his daughter “off the Pole,” as the saying has it, is to keep her out of university.  If you think I am engaged in hyperbole or that I am being ridiculous, you have evidently not lately been to an American university. 

There is an argument to be made in the present age of rampant divorce that, because marriages are so unstable and the protection it provides women so uncertain, a woman would need a degree at the very least as something she could rely on to support herself if and when the marriage dissolves.  Indeed, the young lady quoted here finished her degree to provide just such a “fallback position.”  But here we encounter the rather grand irony of the whole thing: the Forbes article warns against marrying professional women because their own careers create tensions and strains that make divorce more likely, but the response of a young woman to avoid becoming one of these professional women–thus giving herself a better chance of remaining in a stable, lasting marriage–is decried as backwards and looney.  Near as I can tell, it is supposed to be backwards and looney because it is motivated by religious injunctions about a woman’s place in the home and in society, which, as We All Now Know, can’t possibly be true or good–or can they? 

This young lady, Ms. Garrison, states certain inconvenient truths about Biblical teaching on the role and place of women, and she applies this teaching rigorously–more rigorously, indeed, than the members of most churches today.  Perhaps in her rigour she has gone astray somewhere, and we could talk about that without dismissing her outright.  These are truths that the people who believe the onward march of egalitarian democratic capitalism as God’s will or the people who are ready to bow before Equality but not prostrate themselves before an icon of Christ do not appreciate.  Since I would like to think Mr. Suderman is neither one, he might refrain from belittling the young lady’s beliefs quite so enthusiastically.  As someone who presumably takes Biblical teachings rather seriously (when was the last time you read an account of a young woman this distraught over failing to honour her parents’ wishes?), this young lady seeks to live her life in accordance with them, which rather necessarily means ignoring shibboleths of gender equality, progress and all those other entertaining fictional stories that liberals tell their children at bedtime.  I find her attitude rather creditable; it is certainly not entirely unreasonable. 

We might consider whether, from a conservative or indeed a Christian perspective, the young lady is actually wrong, or if she has simply stated something we would rather not address because it would force us to say things about revered “gender equality” that would be controversial.