“
But the low marriage rates of educated women in the past were also because of the romantic and sexual prejudices of men. One physician explained the problem in Popular Science Monthly in 1905: An educated woman developed a “self-assertive, independent character” that made it “impossible to love, honor and obey” as a real wife should. He warned that as more middle-class women attended college, middle-class men would look to the lower classes to find uneducated wives…
Postwar dating manuals advised women to “play dumb” to catch a man — and 40 percent of college women in one survey said they actually did so. As one guidebook put it: “Warning! … Be careful not to seem smarter than your man.” If you hide your intelligence, another promised, “you’ll soon become the little woman to be pooh-poohed, patronized and wed…”
Certainly, some guys are still threatened by a woman’s achievements. But scaring these types off might be a good thing. The men most likely to feel emotional and physical distress when their wives have a higher status or income tend to be those who are more invested in their identity as breadwinners than as partners and who define success in materialistic ways. Both these traits are associated with lower marital quality. Few women really want to marry a man whose penis rises and falls in tandem with the size of his paycheck or the prestige of his diploma.
”—
The M.R.S. and the Ph.D. by Stephanie Coontz
The apparent fragility of the male ego never ceases to amaze me
(Source: The New York Times)
