Feminist Response to "Marry Smart"

Susan Patton, left, created controversy by suggesting young women plan for family
they way they plan for career. Today, we look at a young Feminist’s reply, which
sounds convincing, but shows how they have been fooled.

by Henry Makow Ph.D.

At first glance, Emma Gray’s rebuttal to Susan Patton makes a lot of sense.

She says Patton’s advice that “I need to buck up and find a damn husband” isn’t doing educated young women any favors.

1. Most of us are looking for love. As many single women can attest, there is a vast gulf between being open to love and going on dates, and actually finding a person who you mesh with, who you care about and who cares about you. The women I know put aside time out of their busy weeks to date and to push themselves into new situations where they might meet potential love interests. We sign up for Tinder and Hinge and OKCupid and JDate, half out of boredom, but, ultimately, with an air of hopefulness. With each swipe or like or match we wonder whether this will be the one that works — and often, it’s not.

2. We also are dedicating considerable time and energy to our careers — but it’s not a waste of time.
Not only do most of the single women I know love their jobs,… but also, for most of us, work is and will always be a necessity for survival. …Most of us will not marry a partner who can afford to take on the full financial burden of his family. … In fact, highly-educated, successful women are just as likely to get married (if not more so) than other women, they just tend to do it a few years later.

3. Having — and enjoying — sex does not prevent us from finding true connection.
“Men won’t buy the cow if the milk is free,” Patton writes, sounding more out of touch than I thought was humanly possible. I know women who have slept with men right away thinking it would be completely casual, and ended up marrying those men years down the road. I know women who did everything “right” and by “the rules” with a potential partner and ended up dumped.

4. We don’t devalue marriage or motherhood. And a lot of us still want those things.
Feminists do not “think that being a wife or a mother is a bad thing, some don’t want to be either wives or mothers, and many are single and still want both. Not spending every waking moment wishing for an MRS. degree … doesn’t preclude a desire to find a life partner or have a baby.” We  “choose not to define our ultimate worth by our relationship status. Yes, we are single… But we are also so, so much more.”

FOOLED

Emma Gray’s response reflects the Feminist view that young women can “have it all” and I don’t blame them for trying. But often they can’t.

Marriage and motherhood are a frame of mind.  When a woman love a man, she dedicates her life to him. She wants children to replicate him. I doubt if many young women can think like this. They have been taught that self-sacrifice is both a form of self betrayal and extremely risky.

Marriage and family used to be their career.  My mother was proud to be “Mrs David Makow” and share in my father’s successes. She didn’t need a career to feel fulfilled. She got it from her family. She did have a successful small business to help out, but quit when my father became established and asked her to focus on the home.

No wonder women today feel they cannot trust a man, they are flitting from one bed to another. A woman who makes marriage her first priority consecrates her body for her future husband. Her vagina is not a public utility or an amusement park ride. Her womb is where her children will be conceived and grow.

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All Susan Patton is saying is, “Ladies get your priories straight. You can always have a career. You need to be young and fit to attract a lifelong mate and have children.”

April Alliston, a Comparative Literature professor at Princeton is an example what goes wrong when career is first priority. The woman misses out on marriage and family because her whole character becomes incompatible.

“As a
heterosexual woman who put my ambition to earn tenure at Princeton
before my desire to have a family — which as a result has not
happened — and as a woman who has gone through two husbands and
grueling IVF treatments only to find myself now single and childless,
neither of which was part of my youthful dreams, I thank Ms. Patton
for this chance to address an issue that’s so central to so many
women’s lives and can be a source of so much anxiety. … The last time I was married, my husband and I would both
(simultaneously) wander around our house with arms upraised,
lamenting, “Where’s the wife? Where’s the wife?” because
that’s what we both really needed.“