If I propose that women focus on marriage and family first, and basically skip any college education, does that mean that women should be uneducated? Not at all: young women, whose ambitions went beyond a public high-school education, would be educated at their father’s house. Actually, not much education is happening in universities these days anyway (besides vocational training), so even today, the only decent general education (“liberal arts”) that a woman gets is likely to be on her own time. This is true whether she has only a high-school diploma, or is a graduate of Princeton.
The daughters of the wealthy typically had private tutors. But, any woman today can get a good education from readily-available materials. I am a fan of the Harvard Classics. This is a fifty-volume collection, produced in 1909, that represented an in-depth undergraduate liberal arts education of that time. It was compiled by Charles Eliot, president of Harvard University, with the help of some associates. If a woman today began to read the Harvard Classics at age 18, and finished at age 21, she would have a better general education than 99% of women today, including the graduates of Harvard. A young woman can do this living at her father’s house, or as a young housewife. You can buy a used print copy of the Harvard Classics for less than $300 today (that’s $6 per book). Or, as it is now in the public domain, you can get it online, in free .pdf format, here.
In the past — the 1920s through the 1960s — many women went to college. In 1960, 54% of young men and 38% of young women attended some sort of college. But, one of the main reasons that women attended college in those days was to meet a good husband; and also, to meet the expectations of a high-value wife, which was to have some higher education, which she would then pass on to her children. This was a time when the median age of first marriage was about 20. Commonly, if a woman was married before she finished her undergraduate degree, she would quit her formal studies.
If college once served as a way to get married to high-value husbands in the past, today I would say that women follow the general principle of studiously avoiding any commitment that might lead to marriage while they are at university. It is expected that any relationships during this time are transient. After graduation, a man and a woman’s path are expected to go separate ways, as they pursue different careers, in different cities, or attend a graduate school of some sort.
The same principle serves during the high school years. A woman who might go to a four-year residential college expects that any relationships formed during her high school years are transient.
In the past, a woman might begin her search for a husband at age 15. Laura Ingalls, the author of the Little House on the Prairie series of books, began “courting” Almanzo Wilder at age 15. (She also had a job as a schoolteacher at that time.) Almanzo was ten years older. They were married when she was 18. This is how women got married at age 18 — by starting at age 15. Today, that process is short-circuited by the expectation that all romances at this age will turn to dust; and then, all romances during the college years will also turn to dust. A woman does not even begin to search for a husband (if that happens at all) until age 22.
The women today who do manage to get married before age 30 often find their future husbands around this time, age 22-25. They begin monogamous long-term relationships, in effect junior marriages, often involving cohabitation, which they formalize into actual marriages around age 28 when they are “old enough.”
Instead of forming stable, long-term monogamous relationships, a woman has in effect been “training for divorce.” Her relationships during the age 15-21 period, a time when important habits and precedents are formed, have been transient by design. No surprise then that her first relationships after college, beginning around age 22, are also transient by design, as a long-term “boyfriend.” Often this works out and the couple gets married around age 28. But, sometimes it doesn’t work out (since they are transient by design), and a woman finds herself single at age 28.
To that we must of course add the incredibly harmful environment that universities have become today, of alcohol abuse and “hookup culture” combined with feminist/SJW brainwashing of the most toxic sort. If this weren’t bad enough, we also see that virtually no meaningful education takes place, except perhaps for some vocational training. A parent who is concerned about their daughter’s ability to form a successful family should recoil in horror at this spectacle; and certainly not send their children there, at great expense. But, this is apparently not a priority; instead, it is apparently all justified by what little vocational training their daughters receive. Because, with her ability to find a husband and form a family now seriously in doubt, she is going to have to make a living for herself.
Cornerstone 