College Educated Women Face a New Crisis!

Wendy McElroy writes:

I suspect that a social problem is in the process of being manufactured. At every juncture in women's lives today, sociologists and hype-hungry media seem eager to discover a social crisis. We're too thin; we're too fat. We're career obsessed; we're quitting work to become housewives. Now, after decades of urging girls to become Ph.D.s, women are suddenly discovered to be too educated for their own good.

The increase in well-educated women should elicit sustained applause that is tempered only by concern about equal access to education for males. There is no more of a "marriage crisis" now than there was when male students dominated campuses. Moreover, the perceived problem is self-solving. When the Australian newspaper The Age, reported a similar "problem" — "there are an astonishing 47,000 more women than men with degrees in this age group [age 25 to 29]" — it included the solution. Census figures for 2001 showed that 12 percent of women aged 25 to 29 with university degrees married men without them. Marriage is a healthy institution that adapts quickly to circumstance; marriage patterns may be shifting to adjust. There is a "marriage crisis" only for women and in-laws who demand an attorney or doctor for a husband and do not wish to welcome a plumber or mechanic into the family. This is their personal problem, not a social one. Indeed, if marrying down constituted a crisis, society would have collapsed long ago from the tendency of men to wed "below their station." Marrying down is called a social crisis only when women's choices appear to be limited. This reflects both hypocrisy and elitism.