Last week on Twitter, I saw a link to a Catholic site calling itself Fix the Family, which had posted an essay titled 6 Reasons to NOT Send Your Daughter to College. It was so hilariously over-the-top that I wondered at first if it was a parody. But after perusing the site for a while, I’m persuaded that it’s for real.
At the beginning of the essay, the author responds to what he sees as the obvious objections:
“You believe in taking away opportunities for women and trapping them into a subservient role.” False. We believe in women making wise prudent choices for themselves.
Which is why their essay is called “6 Reasons to NOT Send Your Daughter to College”, as if that were entirely the decision of a girl’s parents.
“You believe in oppressing women.” False. The Church teaches that husbands and wives are of equal dignity, but with different roles.
And it just so happens that those “different roles” allow men to pursue any career they aspire to, whereas women should be limited to the one role of wife and homemaker, regardless of how they personally might feel about it! (Remember, they don’t believe that women should be “oppressed”, just that they should be “submissive”. Totally different.)
But I’m sure you’re eager to hear the compelling reasons why women shouldn’t go to college. And so, without further ado, here they are:
She will attract the wrong types of men. I share the common concern addressed to us, again mainly by angry women, that there are so many lazy men in our society… What she did that was looked upon to be the “responsible thing ‘just in case'” ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy because of the type of man she married.
The argument here, such as it is, asserts that the nation’s fat, lazy men can loaf around the house drinking beer and watching television because they know their educated wives will support them. If they knew they couldn’t count on women to be their safety net, they’d have to whip themselves into shape.
You only have to look at this for a second to see the obvious flaw in it, which is that it’s completely backwards. A woman with no career and no college degree, who has to depend on the income of a husband, by definition can’t afford to be selective about who she marries. (It’s not as if she can put off eating or paying bills while waiting for Mr. Right to come along and sweep her off her feet.) A woman with an education, who can afford to be choosy and to delay marriage if there are no suitable partners around, has more bargaining power.
She will be in a near occasion of sin. Just think of the environment that college-age students live in. You have a heavy concentration of young people all living together without the supervision of parents at the most sexually charged state of life they will experience. How can one expect that anyone would be able to avoid these temptations, even on a Catholic college campus much less a secular one?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but did they just say that Catholic abstinence-only education doesn’t work?
Catholic OB-GYN Dr. Kim Hardey notes that a woman is naturally very observant of a man’s faults as long as she is in a platonic relationship with him. Once she becomes sexually active with him, she releases hormones that mask his faults, and she remains in a dreamy state about him. We can see why God would arrange things in such a way so that when in a proper state of holy matrimony, she would be less sensitive to his faults and thereby less tempted to be critical of him.
I’ve seen some pseudoscience in my time, but this one has to be a serious contender for the gold medal. This marriage-makes-you-high hypothesis rivals the right-wing kooks who claim that looking at porn creates “erototoxins” that scramble your brain like the fried egg in those old anti-drug commercials.
But wait a minute! In the very last paragraph, the author wrote that “what mystifies me is why girls continue to marry” lazy, irresponsible men “and then live to complain about them”, which puts “very strong stresses” on families. Doesn’t he see that his cargo-cult science contradicts his stagnant gender stereotypes? After all, if marriage releases bliss hormones that keep women in a dazed stupor, how is it possible that they’re still capable of nagging their fat slob husbands?
The cost of a degree is becoming more difficult to recoup. Like anything that is subsidized by the government, the cost of a college degree is inflated. That being the case, it can often be difficult or impossible to get an adequate payoff for the investment.
Aside from the obvious point that the most unsustainable tuition costs are at private colleges, not public ones, it’s true that a college degree isn’t as valuable as it once was. But it’s hard to see how a family’s making less money is supposed to help with this, especially considering that people without college degrees have lost even more ground. If anything, the rise of two-income households has been driven more by economic necessity than by philosophical arguments for feminism. It’s just not realistically possible, in many parts of the country, to support a family on a single income.
If you don’t like this, you could fight for a more progressive tax scale, or an increase in the minimum wage, or a strengthening of labor unions – all things that make work pay more. But, as you can tell from all the author’s sneering and dog-whistling about the government, that strategy is anathema to religious-right finger-waggers who prefer to believe that societal breakdown always stems from character flaws of the individual, and never has anything to do with social policy that shapes and constrains the choices open to them.
It could be a near occasion of sin for the parents. In our culture many parents feel an unnecessary obligation to pay for the children’s college tuition… So parents may avoid having more children with contraception, sterilization, or illicit use of NFP to bear this cost.
Remember, mom and dad, if you feel any obligation whatsoever to provide for your children’s futures, you may be tempted to use evil contraception so as not to have more kids than you can afford to care for. Don’t listen to those thoughts! They come from Satan, who wants to bring about the ultimate evil: a world of human beings who are all loved and wanted and born into families that can provide for their needs. And we all know how awful that would be. So resist! In the name of Holy Mother Church, it’s essential that you pump out as many children as your body is physically capable of bearing, without regard for your ability to feed, clothe, house or educate them!
She will regret it. The more we talk about this prudent option for girls, the more we have women who are willing to admit to the regret they possess for having bought into the lie of the dual-career family… We are not surprised that more and more women are coming forward to tell their stories of regret for having by-passed the more meaningful things in life to opt for the approval of feminists who cared nothing more about them than being statistics to reinforce their agenda. All the while they regret neglecting their children and restricting their childbearing to such an extent that they don’t want to even think about it.
The claim here is that having children is “more meaningful” than having a career and making money. Fine, I’m sure many non-Catholics would agree with that. But if that’s true, why does this argument apply only to women? Why don’t men also want to participate in the more meaningful pastime of raising a family? Why don’t men regret neglecting their children’s upbringing in pursuit of the almighty dollar?
As always, these rigid and antiquated gender roles insult and degrade both men and women, but women most of all. They may mask their misogyny in a cloying cloud of false concern, but what they’re really advocating is that women should be ignorant, subservient, and dependent on men. The reason they hate and fear women’s education so much is transparent: women who have the knowledge and the perspective to choose for themselves will see that what this theology offers is a life of poverty, dependence, and renunciation of one’s own happiness – in short, a bad bargain.
Image credit: The Oncoming Hope