People Are Either

Big, broad-beamed Lynn White Jr. is a cherubic-looking medievalist who is something of an expert on the 13th Century origins of the mechanical clock. Ever since 1943, when he became president of lively little (enrollment: 800) Mills College (for women) in Oakland, Calif., he has also been something of a maverick in the world of higher education. So far as women are concerned, says he, higher education is a flop. Last week, in a new book called Educating Our Daughters (Harper; $2.50), he told why.

Woman's lot these days is not a happy one, White says, and her education is to blame. Her colleges, founded during the first flush of feminism, were modeled after men's, and the belief persisted that "higher education is something like spinach which can profitably be absorbed without reference to the gender of the absorbent."

"Just a Housewife." As a result, women have clung to the "biologically fantastic notion that to be different from men is to be inferior to men." Having no respect for themselves, they seem to prefer to have men speak at their clubs, to work for male bosses, and to vote for a second-rate man in an election rather than a first-rate woman. Since they no longer churn the butter, make the candles, plow the fields, or even bring their husbands a dowry, they are deeply plagued by a "sense of parasitism."

They seem compelled to get jobs, no matter how grubby, in order to feel they are "doing something." Raising a family is apparently not enough: that is being "just a housewife."

A new crisis comes when the woman reaches 40 or 50 and her children are grown. She then resorts to "bridge, chatter, shopping expeditions, aimless clubs and, in extreme cases, to alcohol to gain an illusory sense of activity."

Not Even Co. To remedy all this, says White, the woman's college is doing next to nothing. As for the coeducational school, it is not even co. There are almost no women professors, and in many institutions, no dean of women, just a women's counselor. Coeducation has not even recognized the obvious fact that girls mature physically and emotionally faster than boys, and for that reason alone should follow separate programs.

White argues that the college must give women "a vision of the family and the rewards it offers." It must teach them to be able to apply themselves when the family is grown, to extend their housekeeping beyond the home--to their towns, states, and to the nation. "We must agree with the feminists that 'women are people,' " says White, "yet hold to the supplementary truth that 'people are either women or men.' " One of the first tasks of the woman's college, says he, is to educate women to be proud that they are what they are.

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