Yes, and of course this plays into the hands of the right wing ideologues who want to say that the liberal arts are “feminine” – ie. for weak minds. But to the contrary, we others keep bashing our heads against all sorts of windows until something or somebody lets us in.

But in my mother’s generation, the concept was that women did not work. Your education was to get you a prestigious man, as piano lessons would in Austen’s time.

Both my grandmothers had college degrees, of a type which then existed, slightly beyond the B.A., and also jobs. One grandfather had gone to a technical college, and the other had not even gone to high school. Men could get work without being as educated as women needed to be to have middle class jobs.

There is a similar phenomenon now in some fields: white men can get lucrative employment after the B.A., with no need for more advanced degrees. The liberal professions, and the graduate programs, thus have more women, minorities and immigrants in them than they had formerly.

This kind of idea is interesting, and probably more narrow in its cultural aspects than you might think. Something I noticed in Australia — perhaps it was only a feature of the 80s and 90s — was that educated women GENERALLY had tradesmen husbands. I’m not sure that this kind of thing is still the case. It may have to do with the relatively lower prestige that is accredited to education here. Or it may have to do with certain ideals of masculinity.

The point was repeatedly made that women were barred from lucrative work and so must attach themselves to the most successful man possible, to ensure their own survival; we had to put up with a lot in that arrangement, but the one thing to make sure of was to clean up in the case of a divorce. We would never leave them but they might leave us, in which case we would need to fight tooth and nail to be sure we got good settlements.

In our suburb, all the men had jobs outside their homes and all their wives were domestic laborers in the homes. Women who also worked for pay only did so to supplement their husbands’ inadequate incomes, and were pitied, both for having to sully themselves with paid work and for having husbands who needed their financial contribution.

At least this was my mother’s dark attitude at the time, as it was communicated to me. She was apparently feeling very trapped, but then again she kept saying her main objective, was not to have to work a paid job, and she did hold onto that.

“Degree holders frequently serve as university teachers for 8 or 10 years before earning their doctorate…. Many degree holders have served as adjunct lecturers at other campuses, sometimes teaching master’s degree students and advising their theses en route to their own degrees. Some will have taught 30 to 40 sections…. During this time, they received frequent mentoring and regular evaluation…. A large fraction will have published essays and book reviews and authored their departmental Web pages. Yet at precisely the junction that this ‘preparation’ should end and regular employment begin — the acquisition of the Ph.D. — the system embarrasses itself and discloses a systematic truth that every recent degree holder knows and few administrators wish to acknowledge: in many disciplines, for the majority of graduates, the Ph.D. indicates the logical conclusion of an academic career.”

See Lumpenprofessoriat:
http://lumpenprofessoriat.blogspot.com/2008/01/survivor-issues.html