Career or Marriage? The Eternal Question.

“The new element in the approach of young college graduates in the 1920s was freedom of choice; whether to marry or not, whether to have children or not, were matter to be decided by the individual, and no judgment was passed on these various options.”

-Barbara Miller Solomon (175)

The idea that educated women are forced to balance between work and marriage, between careers and children, is certainly prevalent today, as it also was back when William & Mary began educating women. Popular culture tends to embrace the existence of “choice” that Solomon discusses in the epigraph, but rarely does it turn this dichotomy between home and public life on men. Advertisements, political punditry, and other elements of pop culture are often obsessed with the idea of woman as balancer: cooking dinner and excelling in the workplace, giving the kids a bath while her Blackberry buzzes in the background. This commercial for Crockpot fits the mold perfectly, with the family coming home after busy days at work for Mom and Dad and school for the kids. The mother has taken it upon herself to prepare dinner before leaving for work, picked the kids up from school, and served the food to her family, while her husband merely shows up for dinner. The old concept of the double day, of women working in the public office and in the home, is very present in modern advertising.

Still, Solomon notes, “always the problem persisted of justifying women’s new options” (Solomon 173). This can still be seen today, especially in the current political environment. When the women of The View discussed Sarah Palin’s candidacy, it was her experience as a mother, not as a governor or mayor, that these women kept coming back to in order to justify her candidacy. At the beginning of the clip, when Elisabeth describes her friend’s reaction to Palin with her identity as mother and “now we have a woman who I really feel has a realness to her” it is incredibly interesting because in the act of choosing to have a family and a career, Governor Palin’s choice of motherhood is still the one that we as a culture choose to embrace and we push her career to the fringe. I can name all of Governor Palin’s children, but never in a million years could I name the three male candidates’ children. It is not because her children are young – Senator Obama’s are in the same age range – it is because she is a woman and therefore seen as their natural keeper over their father.

This tension the crops up time and time again has really raised questions for me as we complete the documentary portion of our independent study. During our interview with Dr. Carolyn Whittenburg, she described Martha Barksdale and how she went to work for the College after graduation and continued to do so for the rest of her career in education. I don’t believe that Barksdale ever married (there are no internet records indicating marriage and she did not change her name during her career at the College), which places her as an interesting example of those who made the choice to have a career over a family. Our culture tends to consider women who do not rank motherhood as the be-all to end-all experience of life somewhat confused, as advertising and punditry demonstrate, yet William & Mary women were making strides when the first class of them graduated. Go girls.

-Cate Domino