Will Someone Tell Susan Patton a.k.a The ‘Princeton Mom’ To Shut Up?
If you live under a rock or just try not to read things that may infuriate you, maybe you haven’t heard of Susan Patton, a.k.a the “Princeton Mom” and her fabulous advice for college-aged women. Sorry to burst the bubble of serenity you have been living in before the knowledge of her existence, but she just won’t shut up so I’m going to have to tell you a little bit about her.
She garnered a lot of attention with her now infamous letter to the editor in The Daily Princetonian. She spoke of her experience attending a “Woman In Leadership” conference at the university. She had some advice for female college students. I’ll sum it up in one of her quotes:
Clearly, you don’t want any more career advice. At your core, you know that there are other things that you need that nobody is addressing. A lifelong friend is one of them. Finding the right man to marry is another.
Sure. Why give the soon-to-be female professionals who are graduating from Princeton any real career advice. They have vaginas, so obviously the only thing they care about is finding the right man to marry. Ms. Patton, your time machine is double parked out front.
Well, for some reason she was invited back to Princeton this week to speak (what the hell?). From NJ.com:
During a lecture hosted by the university’s American Whig-Cliosophic Society, Patton said she wrote the letter to the campus newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, expecting to reach 200 people.
The day after its publication she learned there had been over 100,000 searches for her name on Google. She said the media attention has only reinforced her opinions.
”I am absolutely delighted with the response,” she said. ”Educated women should not feel ashamed or uncool or unpopular by saying, yes, I want to be married and have children someday.”
I don’t think that acknowledging that some women want to be married and have children is the same thing as telling women they will never be fulfilled if they don’t. Interestingly, the poster woman for marriage is divorced and works as a professional executive coach. Methinks she’s using this whole “marriage is happiness who cares about a career” schtick to further her career. Oh, the irony.
She said yesterday that she was surprise [sic] by female undergraduates’ focus on their professional rather than their personal lives.
”They are receiving so much information about career planning, and they don’t need to hear any more of it,” Patton said.
Yes, why give soon-to-be Princeton graduates career advice? How stupid. Whose idea was that? Graduation should be sponsored by Match.com so these women can get what they really need.
Patton said that while the men who graduate from Princeton grow more desirable with age, the women carry a ”burden.”
”If we do want to marry men who are our intellectual equal, we’ve almost priced ourselves out of the market,” she said. ”Finding a husband as smart as you is going to be hard if you don’t find him at school.”
”A woman looking for a husband in her 30s gives off total desperation,” Patton said, likening the effect to a ”man repellent.”
Yes, ladies. Please spend your precious college years looking for a man instead of taking full advantage of the almost $60,000 a year education that you are getting. Because marriage is the only thing that will make you truly happy, says divorced Susan Patton.
I’m done.
(photo: Tatiana Popova/ Shutterstock.com)
