Educated in Romance

Women, Achievement, and College Culture

Dorothy C. Holland, Margaret A. Eisenhart

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780226349442
  9780226349435
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226218496
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Is romance more important to women in college than grades are? Why do so many women enter college with strong academic backgrounds and firm career goals but leave with dramatically scaled-down ambitions? Dorothy C. Holland and Margaret A. Eisenhart expose a pervasive "culture of romance" on campus: a high-pressure peer system that propels women into a world where their attractiveness to men counts most.

Part 1

Introduction

1

Why Study Women’s Responses to Schooling?

In 1979 the United States National Institute of Education (NIE) wanted to know why so few women were becoming scientists or mathematicians. We received some of their funds to investigate this question in two southern universities: a predominantly black university that we have called “Bradford,” and a predominantly white university that we have called “Southern University” (SU). About halfway through the first part of the study—the ethnographic portion—we designed and administered the second part—a survey—to randomly selected samples of women at each school. The ethnographic sample had been skewed toward women with strong academic records and career aspirations; from the survey sample we learned that the ethnographic findings could be generalized.

As it turned out, the study went beyond the question of why so few American college women were going into the high-paying traditionally male-dominated fields of math and science. It revealed young women’s paths into traditional female positions in society in general. When the women in our ethnographic sample began their college careers, they had reputations as good students, and approximately half said they would major in a math- or science-related field. All stated that they expected to pursue a career after graduating from college. Yet from following these women’s unfolding lives—during the study (1979–81), when the women were due to graduate from college (1983), and again when they had begun their adult lives (1987)—we know that less than a third of these bright and privileged women met their own expectations for the future. By the time they left college, they had arrived at practices—to put the outcome in terms of the critical educational and feminist literature—that are key in sustaining women’s subordinate positions in the society. Most had ended up with intense involvements in heterosexual romantic relationships, marginalized career identities, and inferior preparation for their likely roles as future breadwinners. The cases of Linda and Paula illustrate the pattern.

WHY DID LINDA AND PAULA DROP THEIR CAREER PLANS?

When Linda began college in 1979, she told us, she was determined to do well academically, to get a degree she could “use,” and afterwards “to have a professional career.” She said: “I’m going toward a professional career that I will use the rest of my life. I’m going to college to establish a career that I can use to help people . . . and to make a decent living.” She intended to become a physical therapist.

Once in college, Linda had difficulty maintaining the high grade-point average she had come to expect of herself in high school. She spent long hours laboring over schoolwork. “I’m working all the time,” she told us. “I even feel guilty if I’m not studying.” After barely a semester at college, she decided that despite her hard work she could not make the grade-point average required to get into the specialized therapy program she was interested in. She was very much disappointed. After discussions with her parents, friends, and other adults, she chose to aim for a specialized nursing field instead. Because a somewhat lower average was required for admittance into the program, Linda was hopeful she would make the cut. She continued to work hard during her freshman and sophomore years, and by the middle of her sophomore year she had been admitted to the nursing program she wanted. She was excited and relieved, and she began to anticipate the next hurdles and her future as a nurse. “If you don’t have your B.S. in nursing, you’re not going to get a decent job. You’re going to be stuck on late night shift, emptying bed pans, and that’s not what I want to do. . . . I’m hoping for private practice or a special hospital . . . so it would end up satisfying as a career.”

Linda also seemed to realize that she and her boyfriend, whom she planned to marry someday, would soon be on their own financially. Speaking about the two of them, she said: “We’re getting older and closer to careers and being completely independent of our parents. In three or four years we’re going to be looking for jobs to support ourselves and then a family of our own. It’s kind of scary to be completely independent.”

To us, Linda seemed seriously committed to pursuing a career and, at least compared to others in our study, well-informed about the steps she needed to take and the course she needed to be on in order to achieve the kind of career she desired. She had difficulty with her schoolwork, but she kept at it, and she kept her career goal in mind. For these reasons, we were surprised when one day near the end of our study, Linda said: “If I had to make a decision between my family [my husband and children] and my career, then there’s no question—my family. If I have to give up my career, that’s fine. . . . If I had to choose, it would be family over career, with no qualms at all.”

Subsequently Linda married her college boyfriend and took a full-time hospital job. When we interviewed her in 1987, she explained that her marriage had ended in divorce, but that she was engaged to be married again within the year. Asked about her career goals, Linda said, “I’d like to work half-time for a while, then quit and have at least two children.”

When we first met Paula, she had come to college with a straight-A average from high school and planned to major in biology and become a doctor. During her freshman year she did not find her courses, including calculus and chemistry, particularly difficult, but she did find them “boring.” Often she could not make herself go to class or study. By the end of her freshman year, she decided to switch her concentration to nursing, “because my grades aren’t high enough for med school.” During the first semester of her sophomore year, she missed the deadline for application to the nursing program and decided instead to try for an education degree. In the middle of her sophomore year, Paula had this to say about her career-related decisions during college: “Since I’ve been here, I’ve changed my mind about a thousand times. . . . And, like right now, I feel like . . . just not working would be the greatest thing in the world—just take care of children and not studying.”

Paula eventually settled on a social-science field as her major and graduated in 1983. After graduation she enrolled in a management-trainee program, worked in a department store, and got married. In 1987 she had this to say about careers: “[My husband and I] want to have successful careers . . . his is a career, where I feel like mine is a job. So, my career goals are for his career more so than mine. . . . I’m trying to be there to help [him] when I can.”

Linda’s and Paula’s actions, as well as those of many other women in this study, would seem to reproduce the traditional gender roles and system of male privilege in the United States. They seem to have willingly scaled down their aspirations for careers and entered into marriage in economic positions inferior to those of their husbands.

If we want to account fully for the continuation of male privilege, we must ask why Linda and Paula “chose” such paths for themselves. This question is an essential question of social reproduction theory. Why do working-class people, women, and members of racial minorities willingly accept positions that are inferior, accept jobs that yield a low standard of living, and continue in jobs that endanger life and limb? Paul Willis, a contributor to this literature, refers to this question in the title of his book Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977, rev. ed. 1981b). In a more recent study about clerical jobs, which are mostly held by women, Valli (1983:3) poses the question directly: “Why, then [given the negative aspects of such jobs], would students consciously prepare themselves to become office workers?”

Feminist scholars would go beyond these issues of jobs and ask: Why do women enter into positions of economic and emotional dependency on men? Why do women, even college women who supposedly have the means to escape, enter without a fight into the domestic labor market in a one-down position? Why, Adrienne Rich (1980) might ask in an even more radical vein, do they accede to “compulsory heterosexual relations”?

STRUCTURE, CULTURE, AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

The issue of young women’s “choices” and willing entry into low-paying occupations and traditional domestic roles is closely interlocked in the critical education and feminist literature with the question of the role of schools in society. As presented in detail in chapter 3, social reproduction theorists (e.g., Althusser 1971; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Bowles and Gintis 1976) have argued that in countries such as France and the United States, schools reproduce structures of class privilege. The same has been argued for the reproduction of male privilege (e.g., Barrett 1980; Deem 1978; Wolpe 1978).

According to the usual rhetoric, schools are the gateway to social and economic opportunity for those who are willing to study and learn. In the critical literature, the reverse is argued: schools maintain class, race, and gender structures. They do so, the argument goes, by differentially training students and by supplying ideologies that mystify the systems of privilege in this society.

This picture of the school’s role in social reproduction has been significantly modified and refined over the years. As originally presented, it was far too simplistic. The early versions implied by omission that students are simply ciphers, that they passively absorb school ideologies and docilely acquiesce in school practices. The theories left out a crucial element that ethnographic studies of schools have revealed all along, namely that students come to school from homes and communities where they have developed values and orientations not encompassed by the schools.¹ As revisors of the early formulations of reproduction theory (e.g., Apple 1982; Apple and Weis 1983; Giroux 1981; MacDonald 1980; Willis 1977, 1981a, 1981b) pointed out, working-class students, including girls and young women, react to and sometimes oppose the ideologies and practices they meet in school.² School ideologies and practices do not fully determine their reactions. Rather, students bring values and understandings from other realms of their lives and, together with fellow students, generate a system of meaning and practice in response to the social barriers they face.

This latter-day reproduction theory—which itself is currently undergoing revision—does not at all deny the schools a crucial role in social reproduction. In the case of gender, for example, it is certainly important that school materials reflect a gender bias, that patterns of staffing and treatment of the mostly female teaching staff reflect nationwide patterns of a gender-based occupational structure, that teachers treat girls differently from the ways they treat boys, that schools valorize skills, talents, and ways of knowing that are associated with males and not females. Rather, the revised position is that the values and orientations of the working class, women, and racial minorities are not fully determined by the schools. Students have some autonomy in their reactions, and their reactions affect how and even whether class, gender, and race hierarchies are maintained. The students’ reactions may, in the end, despite the students’ opposition to and “penetration” of school ideologies, lead them willingly to embrace stereotyped roles (e.g., working-class jobs, as in the case described by Willis 1977, 1981b). Yet in other instances, their reactions may seriously challenge the existing system of class, race, or gender privilege. Even when they ultimately pose no threat, students’ responses to schooling are clearly a part of the dynamic struggle over societal structures that must be taken into account.

WOMEN’S RESISTANCE TO THE GENDER HIERARCHY

Comparatively speaking, we know little about the roles of schools in reproducing gender hierarchies. Social reproduction theory, in its early stages and as modified since the early 1970s, has first and foremost considered the reproduction of class structures. But patterns of class reproduction are not easily transferred to gender. Feminist scholars have conclusively argued that gender hierarchies cannot be collapsed into class hierarchies (See chapters 3 and 4). Gender structures are differently constituted. Not surprisingly, women’s patterns of resistance to the gender hierarchy have not turned out to be simple analogues of working-class patterns of resistance to the class hierarchy. There are several directly relevant studies of schoolgirls and young women, including those of McRobbie (1978a, 1978b), Lees (1986), and Griffin (1985) in Britain, Thomas (1980), Connell, Ashenden, Kessler, and Dowsett (1982), and Kessler, Ashenden, Connell, and Dowsett (1985) in Australia, and Weis (1988) and Valli (1986) in the United States. Piecing these studies together with ours, we find some important points of difference between the mediation of class hierarchies in schools and the mediation of gender hierarchies in schools. The primary difference has to do with the role of the peer group. For class, the ideologies and practices promulgated by the school and reflected in texts and classroom materials are the targets of working-class opposition. For gender, agemates are more virulent purveyors of gender privilege than school authorities and school materials.

As we followed the women’s experiences during the period of our study, we found that the peer system promoted and propelled the women into a world of romance in which their attractiveness to men counted most. The women were subjected to a “sexual auction block.” In the shadow of the peer society, academics commanded only limited attention. The women were more or less left on their own by the university, by their peers, and to a lesser extent by their parents, to develop—or not—careers, to prepare themselves—or not—as future breadwinners.

Our study revealed a pattern of women’s opposition that may be fairly common. None of the women in the study participated in any rebellious counterculture groups that opposed gender structures. Yet despite their superficial acquiescence, it would be a mistake to assume that they neither criticized male privilege or were lackadaisical about gender issues. To the contrary, they very actively tried both to avoid the parts of the peer system of romance that they disliked (one woman even temporarily dropped out of it), and to maneuver their status within romantic relationships. They had various critiques—some quite radical—of the consequences of the gender hierarchy. And they were actively engaged with those internal divisions and factions within the peer community that struggled over competing constructions of feminine and masculine attractiveness.

This book traces the paths of Linda and Paula and the other women in our study, through college into adulthood. We describe their college experiences, their academic strategies, their responses to the systern of male privilege that they encountered, and the effect of their responses on their life courses. We also relate their cases, and our general findings, to issues within the critical education and feminist literature on gender and schooling, including the question of how the culturally constructed world of romance relates to women’s school careers.

2

The Odyssey behind the Case

It is customary to cast a scholarly book as though it is solely a turn in an ongoing rational dialogue. The corollary is that more personal debates—internal and external—are omitted. Yet these are the ones that give life and drama to the questions that researchers have traditionally reported so matter-of-factly. Further, in the social sciences especially, these more personal debates are too integral a part of the research to be omitted.

For a variety of good reasons, more recent practice in our own discipline of anthropology—as well as in feminist research (see McRobbie 1982; Weiler 1988)—dictates that the personal be made public and that the traditional scholar’s guise of total objectivity, emotional uninvolvement, and implied superiority to “subjects,” “respondents,” and “informants” be dropped. In matters of meaning—and in anthropologists’ view human behavior always involves meaning—the subject of study must be recognized and treated as a partner in a sort of dialogue, not as an object under a microscope. All researchers are fettered by the taken-for-granted meanings that they bring to their projects and impose on those they would understand. A researcher can only begin to break the fetters if she allows her informants’ words and deeds to break through her preconceptions. The guise of the all-knowing, “objective” researcher simply does not serve for such a task. Good ethnographers have recognized all along that their “native informants” were partners; the difference is that the research reports no longer need to be written as though the research had been conducted otherwise. In fact, for the report to be complete and accurate it must reveal the researcher’s foundation for understanding. Otherwise, how is the reader to know the researcher’s contribution to the research dialogue? How is the reader to assess the researcher’s likely blind spots?¹

For us the immediate impetus to describe the course of our unfolding understanding came from the reactions that we received when presenting the findings of our research. Many, including students in our classes, found the parts of women’s lives that we described enlightening and engrossing but did not much enjoy the description of the difficult theoretical debate in which the study is embedded. Except to readers or listeners who were well-versed in the subject, the theoretical material often seemed opaque and even annoying. Many of the women who participated in the study would no doubt react in the same way. We hope we have fairly presented some of the dilemmas they faced ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part 1. Introduction
• Part 2. The Theoretical Framework and Existing Studies
• Part 3. The Study
• Part 4. Gender Relations
• Part 5. Academics
• Part 6. Conclusions
• Appendix: Research Design and Methods
• Notes
• References
• Glossary
• Index