A Fisher of Women by Linda Hirshman

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"I'm going to stay home and raise babies," one of my female students announced in my philosophy class in sexual bargaining at Brandeis. As part of our unit about applying negotiations theory in marriage, I had been asking the class about their plans after college.

Well, you could have knocked me down with an eraser (we still had erasers in those days). Here she was, one of the brightest in the class cross listed as Women's Studies no less. Upon close Socratic examination, she revealed that the attraction was the delicious way they smelled after a bath. For a long time, I thought she was just a weird outlier in the generation of young women for whom Sixties feminism had opened the world.

But of course she was not. As I report in "Get to Work," the work force participation of married mothers with children has been going down since 1997 or ‘98. Educated ones leaving at the fastest rate. When I did the interviews for the book, a lot of the women, mostly in their 30's and 40's, revealed that they had held the opt-out dream as early as college. One of the "rules" for women in my book is to use college to prepare for a lifetime of work (the infamous "don't study art").

Now that I have been in the public eye on this issue for over a year, I have turned my attention to these young women, girls almost. They are making decisions in college that will push them out of the work place, even if it's years later. The book is out in paperback, and I am very anxious that college teachers use it in their courses, to lay out for the female students why it is that they should aim for a life that includes both love and work. College girls have not yet married men who outearn them or gone from job to job without gaining much career traction. They are stem cells. There is still time.

But not much. To my amazement, the estimable American Association of University Women just published a study showing that women earn only 20% less than men do the first year out of college. And that most of the difference is not discrimination, which is only 5%, but the decisions the women make themselves. And the first decision the AAUW study mentions is the choice of a major. Women educators make far less than women engineers. But women engineers make about the same as male engineers, if they would only study to be engineers.

Whenever I write that women should take their college seriously and prepare for a life of work, the papers publish a bunch of letters from arts students or stay at home moms about how terrible I am. But you never see the letters that come to me, so I'm going to use this blog to share with you some of the amazing, moving and life-affirming stories that I hear. You don't see them, because they come from people too busy to blog about their every thought. Or the papers don't publish them, because they want the negative letters for "balance."

Here's a letter about a college girl, Maxine Turner, which I received last week after I wrote about the AAUW study in the Washington Post: "One thing you missed in your research was that there was a brilliant young lady who was graduating, with a degree in Chemical Engineering from VATECH, who was one of the casualties of that murderous day! In the course of her studies it became obvious that engineering of any kind was not kindly towards female aspirants. So she and several others established Alpha Omega Epsilon, a sorority to provide women in engineering an anchor to windward when needed."

I looked up the tributes Virginia Tech published, and there were many for Maxine Turner. Here's my favorite line: "Maxine was passionate about her Chemical Engineering career long before she entered Tech, and she knew that someday she would invent something that would change the world for the better."

Inspired by many letters like this, I send my book out in its bright-colored paperback cover to college students and their professors, hoping they will swim to its lure and when school is not kindly and they need an anchor to windward they will be reinforced in dreaming as big and ambitious a dream as any man at any college they attend.

(Photo Credit: Virgina Tech)

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Linda Hirshman, Get to Work, Penguin Books, feminism, women and work, glass ceiling books