Arielle Pardes | Advice for the young women of Penn

In a letter to the editor published in The Daily Princetonian on March 29, Princeton alumna Susan Patton gave her two cents to the “daughters she never had.” The advice: Now that you’ve made it to the Ivy League, it’s time to start husband hunting.

“Here’s what nobody is telling you,” she wrote. “Find a husband on campus before you graduate. Yes, I went there.”

Yes, she did. And as soon as I read Patton’s editorial, I called my mom to thank her for never offering me this advice.

The idea that my time in college is best spent finding a suitable man is, frankly, insulting. But more insulting are the specifics of Patton’s advice: to begin the search as a freshman, since “every year you become older than the incoming class of freshman men” and to take advantage of fellow classmates since “as Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market.”

How exactly does she think the dating “market” works?

First of all, it’s absolutely not true that women can’t be happy with a partner who is younger or less successful — or without a partner at all.

Furthermore, the suggestion that smart women need to marry within the Ivy League is elitist and outrageous. Patton’s comment about being “priced out of the market” reinforces the idea that women need to dumb themselves down in order to be marriageable because no man wants a woman smarter than he is.

But what irks me most about Patton’s advice is her implication that I need to be wifed up by graduation, as if the whole point of being at an elite university is to find a husband.

We were admitted to Penn for our ambition, our intelligence, our passion for academia and extracurricular activities. The University made an investment in us, but we also made an investment in the University, and Patton’s editorial reduces the return on that investment to a rock on your ring finger. That is a seriously contrived view of what college has to offer.

It’s not that Penn doesn’t offer plenty of men who are marriage material — I think it does — and it’s probably true that my chances of marrying someone smart and successful are higher if I search within the Penn pool, but there’s so much more to gain from our four years as undergraduates than an M.R.S. degree.

Slate recently published an editorial from Julia Shaw, reflecting on her experience of marrying young. In it, she writes that while she’s happy that she married her college sweetheart at age 23, she sympathizes with the view that “relationships are, at best, not as interesting as a prestigious job opening at Cravath or a scholarship at Yale” and “at worst, relationships distract from these opportunities.”

The crux issue is not about whether or not we choose to engage in serious relationships during our time at Penn. It’s about whether we — especially women — should make those relationships the purpose of our Penn experience.

Since writing her op-ed, Patton was asked multiple times if her piece was intended to be satire, but in a response she wrote for The Huffington Post, Patton makes it very clear that the “letter was serious.”

Patton’s response reads: “I sincerely feel that too much focus has been placed on encouraging young women only to achieve professionally” and “yes, this is exactly the advice I would give my daughters.”

Notably, this isn’t the advice that she gave her two Princetonian sons.

Patton works as a recruiter for Conde Nast publications. As someone who wants to pursue a career in magazine journalism, I could easily encounter her in a future job hunt. I hope that if I ever do, she recognizes how much my hard work at Penn has contributed to my resume — not whether I’m a “Miss” or a “Mrs.”

That said, I could very well marry a fellow Quaker. But if I do, I sincerely hope that’s not my greatest accomplishment from four years at Penn.

Arielle Pardes is a College junior from San Diego, Calif. Her email address is ariellepardes@gmail.com. You can follow her @pardesoteric. “The Screwtinizer” usually appears every Wednesday.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.