March 22^nd

 

Today we’ll look at George Will’s column. George is concerned because “millions of female-led households are being established by women who by focusing on their careers are delaying motherhood partly because of a shortage of suitable partners.” Well, maybe, but the key weasel word here is “partly.” I think George is looking back wistfully to the days of yore when the ideal life for a woman, even a professional woman, was to breed and serve her husband. What percentage of college educated women are not marrying because they cannot find “suitable “partners George doesn’t say…and he doesn’t say because he doesn’t know! I would maintain that many bright, well educated women who are not marrying and having children are not doing so because they aren’t the least interested in doing so.

He then includes a riff from another Princeton alum, a woman who counsels the undergraduate women of Princeton to find a husband from among the males at hand because they will never again have as good a chance to find a husband as intelligent as they are. This advice has been given to undergraduate women for as long as I have had any connection with colleges and that is a very long time indeed.

Will continues by calling attention to “assortative mating.” Simply put this means we tend to marry people like ourselves. Will claims that this process concentrates advantages in the children of those favored by genetics and culture to take advantage of opportunities. This leads him to “privilege theory” which makes the obvious claim that some men are born with advantages. Then he says that the notion government can do anything to equalize this situation is “dubious.” Finally he cites one Joy Pullman who writes for The Federalist and who maintains that this attempt at equalization is “incompatible with freedom.” How is helping disadvantaged people incompatible with freedom?  Perhaps it’s incompatible with the children of privilege feeling free to be superior to everyone else.

How does increasing the opportunities for those not born to the purple decrease the benefits and freedoms for those who were? Could it be that whatever success you inherit is diminished if I am successful too? Surely even a conservative wouldn’t stoop to believing that! But then I could be wrong.