Education: One Woman, Two Lives

• Share

(7 of 10)

Neither God nor politicians are wildly popular. College girls are moved by causes —sit-ins are big—but not by presidential campaigns. They intellectualize religion, but cannot quite feel it; "I believe in God, but it doesn't affect my life," says one Radcliffe senior. Except among Roman Catholics, churchgoing is erratic, especially after Saturday night dates.

Security in Dates. Few girls start college with reasons any better focused than Mary Bunting's line of least resistance. A consequence of this is the why-am-I-here "sophomore slump," which is likely to make girls oversleep, overeat and sometimes go overboard. Before, during and after sophomore slump, girls struggle with the problem of men. They desperately want men; colleges tend to get rated by their nearness to the supply. Says a Saint Mary's girl: "Notre Dame is ten minutes by bike, 15 minutes at a dead run, and 22 if you just walk." University of Texas coeds are described as "bluntly aggressive with men." A sociology professor reports that "15 or 20 years ago a college girl would invariably reply, 'Career,' if you asked her what she saw in her immediate future. Today she would reply, 'Marriage and children.' "

Girls meet men more easily than they used to; Antioch, for example, lets men visit girls in their dormitory rooms, provided that they yell "Man on!" as they enter the corridor. "Playing the field," Betty Coed style, is as outdated as the raccoon coat; boys nowadays want "dating security," and since girls want boys, the universal solution is "going with," "going along with," or, in a squarer phrase, "going steady." A boy often signals this understanding by giving a girl his fraternity pin, following up with roses delivered to her sorority house during a candlelight ceremony. Dating security leads at least to the doorstep necking or the kiss before class that sometimes is known as P.D.A.—public demonstration of affection. The authorities frown on P.D.A. "We don't want to discourage kissing," says the University of Miami's Assistant Dean Louise Mills. "But we do try to tell the girls they shouldn't do it in public."

Going steady also leads a statistically indeterminable number of girls to bed, generally with fears and trepidations rationalized by "he insists and I love him." Most girls' mothers suspect this situation and stay calm. "It is fathers," says Psychiatrist Carl Binger, "who need to be protected against the facts of life." If the upshot is a marriage while a girl is still in school, she often counts her education a success. "I NEVER, NEVER expected to leave without being married," writes a still unmarried Wellesley girl. Girls who get to be seniors without a man sometimes panic and hastily turn themselves into teachers, but the great majority keep cool and go on to marriage after graduation.