Bridging the Gap

It's late August and school has started around the state. Next week, the college students return to my own Macon State College -- who are mostly women, it seems. The front page of Sunday’s paper contained an article entitled “Bridging the Gender Gap,” detailing admissions offices response to the rise in women attending local area colleges. Mercer University is 65 percent women and Macon State College is 70 percent women. It seems this trend has become a cause for concern. Although men aren’t being privileged in admissions, they are being privileged in recruitment. Terry Whittum, Mercer’s senior vice president for enrollment management said “We are all struggling to find more male students.”

My question is “why?” If as many women as men are heads of households and our children are reliant upon their earnings for food, clothing, housing, health insurance and education, isn’t is a good thing that more women are getting sufficient education to provide those things to their children?

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women extols reason as a necessary precedent to virtue, and education of women’s minds necessary to their ability to properly reason. Notice that she didn’t say “football” or “masculine hair” or “lesbianism” or any of those critiques of feminisms we get from the easily agitated. Wollstonecraft was a delight of a human being, revolutionary, free-thinker and mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the novelist who at 17 wrote Frankenstein. The younger Mary was educated in her parent’s library and in her father’s late night philosophical discussions, became steeped in the ideas and ideals of her time, and both explores and challenges those in her novella. Shelley’s monster speaks quite a bit about these ideals, their failure, and his role in the society that has spurned him. The horror of the novel is doubled in the murderous revenge the creature takes as well as the nasty underbelly of a society that tortures him because he is ugly.

The cultural capital of this novel is clear in those green Halloween masks that we see every Fall, though we may owe as much to to Boris Karloff’s makeup for the 1931 film. These are big ideas writ large on a green man, made clear for the masses, but invoking multiple important sources and ideals. Mary Shelley is Wollstonecraft’s own vindication – proof in the pudding of the pudding-maker’s recipe: smart education makes for smart women.

For years, men outpaced women in college attendance and performance although young women traditionally did better in high schools. Now that the ladies have come to college, this is a basis for concern? Perhaps the schools are concerned that there won’t be enough men for the ladies to date and that their enrollment will drop? Perhaps the schools are worried that they’ll be perceived as a less prestigious institution if the ranks become feminized. Nationwide, women make up 57% of the total college population. At Harvard, women’s enrollment is 44% of the total, up from 11% in 1970, at Princeton they make up 39% of this years’ class, and the Engineering and Applied Science program boasts 32%. MIT boasts 44% enrollment in it’s undergraduate class and 32% in the graduate programs. The ladies are getting educated.

Perhaps some of the difference in male and female enrollment can be traced to the perceptions that fuel ads like a Gymboree ad I saw recently. The cover depicts girls in suit jackets and the boys in sporting clothes. The interior features the same suit-jacketed little girl and a young boy wearing a shirt that says “football” and clutching the same. This is one ad in the whole back-to-school pantheon, but it might say something about the sensibilities with which we are using to prepare our young men versus our young women. Even when hula-hooping these little girls -- I repeat, little girls -- are in suit jackets and look like they’re there to study. The little boys are in sports clothes and look like they’re there to play. For years it has been a question of the girls being serious about school, but the boys going off to college to have big ideas and get good jobs. It seems the worm is turning.

But we mustn’t slide back into ignorance and complacency. I haven’t read Rousseau in years, written a treatise against the death penalty or for immigration since I left college and even now struggle to keep the TV off, the pulp novels on the bedstand, the good book list rolling and the computer screen open to that daunting blank page. Let’s just keep it up, Ladies. The stakes are high and the prizes worth it, especially when we think of what books we’d like our daughters to write.