If you're interested in the current state of feminism/equality of the
sexes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?pagewanted=1&e...
25600

I'm including the article below so you can read it without having to
actually go to the NYTimes site, but it's going to make this e-mail hugely
long. Sorry.

Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood

By LOUISE STORY
Published: September 20, 2005

Cynthia Liu is precisely the kind of high achiever Yale wants: smart (1510
SAT), disciplined (4.0 grade point average), competitive (finalist in
Texas oratory competition), musical (pianist), athletic (runner) and
altruistic (hospital volunteer). And at the start of her sophomore year at
Yale, Ms. Liu is full of ambition, planning to go to law school.

Emily Lechner, at home in North Potomac, Md., with her mother, Carol, is a
student at Yale who plans to become a lawyer, but who says her career will
take a back seat once she starts having children.

So will she join the long tradition of famous Ivy League graduates? Not
likely. By the time she is 30, this accomplished 19-year-old expects to be
a stay-at-home mom.

"My mother's always told me you can't be the best career woman and the
best mother at the same time," Ms. Liu said matter-of-factly. "You always
have to choose one over the other."

At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their
place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for
granted that, just as they make up half the students at these
institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with
their male classmates.

There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that
is not what they want.

Many women at the nation's most elite colleges say they have already
decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising
children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children
and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms.
Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood
their main commitment.

[Some readers have asked about the reporting that went into this article.
The reporter, Louise Story, explains in a separate article published Sept.
23.]

Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force
to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in
college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their
daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to
suspend or end their careers when they have children.

"At the height of the women's movement and shortly thereafter, women were
much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine
full-time work with child rearing," said Cynthia E. Russett, a professor
of American history who has taught at Yale since 1967. "The women today
are, in effect, turning realistic."

Dr. Russett is among more than a dozen faculty members and administrators
at the most exclusive institutions who have been on campus for decades and
who said in interviews that they had noticed the changing attitude.

Many students say staying home is not a shocking idea among their friends.
Shannon Flynn, an 18-year-old from Guilford, Conn., who is a freshman at
Harvard, says many of her girlfriends do not want to work full time.

"Most probably do feel like me, maybe even tending toward wanting to not
work at all," said Ms. Flynn, who plans to work part time after having
children, though she is torn because she has worked so hard in school.

"Men really aren't put in that position," she said.

Uzezi Abugo, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania who hopes to
become a lawyer, says she, too, wants to be home with her children at
least until they are in school.

"I've seen the difference between kids who did have their mother stay at
home and kids who didn't, and it's kind of like an obvious difference when
you look at it," said Ms. Abugo, whose mother, a nurse, stayed home until
Ms. Abugo was in first grade.

While the changing attitudes are difficult to quantify, the shift emerges
repeatedly in interviews with Ivy League students, including 138 freshman
and senior females at Yale who replied to e-mail questions sent to members
of two residential colleges over the last school year.

The interviews found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said
that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop
working entirely. About half of those women said they planned to work part
time, and about half wanted to stop work for at least a few years.

Two of the women interviewed said they expected their husbands to stay
home with the children while they pursued their careers. Two others said
either they or their husbands would stay home, depending on whose career
was furthest along.

The women said that pursuing a rigorous college education was worth the
time and money because it would help position them to work in meaningful
part-time jobs when their children are young or to attain good jobs when
their children leave home.

In recent years, elite colleges have emphasized the important roles they
expect their alumni - both men and women - to play in society.

(Page 2 of 3)

For example, earlier this month, Shirley M. Tilghman, the president of
Princeton University, welcomed new freshmen, saying: "The goal of a
Princeton education is to prepare young men and women to take up positions
of leadership in the 21st century. Of course, the word 'leadership'
conjures up images of presidents and C.E.O.'s, but I want to stress that
my idea of a leader is much broader than that."

She listed education, medicine and engineering as other areas where
students could become leaders.

In an e-mail response to a question, Dr. Tilghman added: "There is nothing
inconsistent with being a leader and a stay-at-home parent. Some women
(and a handful of men) whom I have known who have done this have had a
powerful impact on their communities."

Yet the likelihood that so many young women plan to opt out of
high-powered careers presents a conundrum.

"It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country:
when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women,
what kind of return do we expect to get for that?" said Marlyn McGrath
Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean
for coeducation in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed.
The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who
will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be
full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic
necessity.

It is less than clear what universities should, or could, do about it. For
one, a person's expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of
their life choices 10 years later. And in any case, admissions officers
are not likely to ask applicants whether they plan to become stay-at-home
moms.

University officials said that success meant different things to different
people and that universities were trying to broaden students' minds, not
simply prepare them for jobs.

"What does concern me," said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, "is
that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few
students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn't
constructed along traditional gender roles."

There is, of course, nothing new about women being more likely than men to
stay home to rear children.

According to a 2000 survey of Yale alumni from the classes of 1979, 1984,
1989 and 1994, conducted by the Yale Office of Institutional Research,
more men from each of those classes than women said that work was their
primary activity - a gap that was small among alumni in their 20's but
widened as women moved into their prime child-rearing years. Among the
alumni surveyed who had reached their 40's, only 56 percent of the women
still worked, compared with 90 percent of the men.

A 2005 study of comparable Yale alumni classes found that the pattern had
not changed. Among the alumni who had reached their early 40's, just over
half said work was their primary activity, compared with 90 percent of the
men. Among the women who had reached their late 40's, some said they had
returned to work, but the percentage of women working was still far behind
the percentage of men.

A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates found that 31 percent
of the women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 who answered the
survey worked only part time or on contract, and another 31 percent did
not work at all, levels strikingly similar to the percentages of the Yale
students interviewed who predicted they would stay at home or work part
time in their 30's and 40's.

What seems new is that while many of their mothers expected to have
hard-charging careers, then scaled back their professional plans only
after having children, the women of this generation expect their careers
to take second place to child rearing.

"It never occurred to me," Rebecca W. Bushnell, dean of the School of Arts
and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, said about working versus
raising children. "Thirty years ago when I was heading out, I guess I was
just taking it one step at a time."

Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood

(Page 3 of 3)

Dr. Bushnell said young women today, in contrast, are thinking and talking
about part-time or flexible work options for when they have children.
"People have a heightened awareness of trying to get the right balance
between work and family."

Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American
Family class last fall approved of women's plans to stay home with their
children.

"A lot of the guys were like, 'I think that's really great,' " Ms. Currie
said. "One of the guys was like, 'I think that's sexy.' Staying at home
with your children isn't as polarizing of an issue as I envision it is for
women who are in their 30's now."

For most of the young women who responded to e-mail questions, a major
factor shaping their attitudes seemed to be their experience with their
own mothers, about three out of five of whom did not work at all, took
several years off or worked only part time.

"My stepmom's very proud of my choice because it makes her feel more
valuable," said Kellie Zesch, a Texan who graduated from the University of
North Carolina two years ago and who said that once she had children, she
intended to stay home for at least five years and then consider working
part time. "It justified it to her, that I don't look down on her for not
having a career."

Similarly, students who are committed to full-time careers, without
breaks, also cited their mothers as influences. Laura Sullivan, a
sophomore at Yale who wants to be a lawyer, called her mother's choice to
work full time the "greatest gift."

"She showed me what it meant to be an amazing mother and maintain a
career," Ms. Sullivan said.

Some of these women's mothers, who said they did not think about these
issues so early in their lives, said they were surprised to hear that
their college-age daughters had already formed their plans.

Emily Lechner, one of Ms. Liu's roommates, hopes to stay home a few years,
then work part time as a lawyer once her children are in school.

Her mother, Carol, who once thought she would have a full-time career but
gave it up when her children were born, was pleasantly surprised to hear
that. "I do have this bias that the parents can do it best," she said. "I
see a lot of women in their 30's who have full-time nannies, and I just
question if their kids are getting the best."

For many feminists, it may come as a shock to hear how unbothered many
young women at the nation's top schools are by the strictures of
traditional roles.

"They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they're accepting
it," said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women's and
gender studies at Yale. "Women have been given full-time working career
opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.

"I really believed 25 years ago," Dr. Wexler added, "that this would be
solved by now."

Angie Ku, another of Ms. Liu's roommates who had a stay-at-home mom, talks
nonchalantly about attending law or business school, having perhaps a
10-year career and then staying home with her children.

"Parents have such an influence on their children," Ms. Ku said. "I want
to have that influence. Me!"

She said she did not mind if that limited her career potential.

"I'll have a career until I have two kids," she said. "It doesn't
necessarily matter how far you get. It's kind of like the experience: I
have tried what I wanted to do."

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."