Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement, and College Culture.

Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement, and College Culture Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement, and College Culture. Dorothy C. Holland, Margaret A. Eisenhardt. University of Chicago Press, $19.95. Jane Doe is a bright high school senior with a record of strong academic performance. She plans to go to college, and she has a specific career objective: to be an environmental biologist. Four years later, she gradutes from college with a degree in biology, marries a fellow biology student, and within a year is working as a part-time secretary. What happened to Jane?

Holland and Eisenhart's "anthropological and sociological analyses" of college women in the eighties provide at least a part of the answer: life at college centers on gender relations among peers. Gender relations are largely determined by what the authors deem the "cultural model of romance." In this culture, attractive women are treated well by men, and this good treatment is the measure of status and esteem. Although the corollary is also true--that is, attractive men achieve some status through receiving good treatment from women--men also achieve status and prestige from success in sports, school politics, and other arenas. But "women's prestige and correlated attractiveness come only from the attention they receive from men." Thus, the "cultural model of romantic relationships set[s] men up as the judges of women's claims to prestige in the peer system." Since attractiveness to men provides the rewards, being attractive, rather than having good grades or, ultimately, a career, becomes first priority for too many college women.

This conclusion is neither startling nor novel. Nonetheless, the study provides scientific evidence (limited though it is--focusing on 23 women in two colleges, both in the South) of the underlying phenomenon: the double standard is alive and well and flourishing on college campuses. Men are judged by one set of values, women by another. Let us not take false comfort from the large numbers of young women enrolling in college (6.9 millions in 1988, or 54 percent of all students). An inordinately large percentage of these (70 percent in Holland and Eisenhart's study) who began college with varied interests and ambitions will be forced to neglect their academic potential and abandon their career goals, caught in the snares of the "culture of romance" of their peers.

And those who escape? Certainly, as the authors document, there are women who avoid the worst of the psychological and emotional traps set by the culture of romance, do well in college, and begin professional careers. But for some women their initial escape is illusory. There are successful, powerful, wealthy career women who feel worthless because they lack a man to "treat them well." On others the lingering effects of the culture of romance are more subtle. For example, women are much more likely than men to leave their jobs so that their spouses can pursue the best career path. The double standard is still influencing these women's lives; when push comes to shove, a man's career is usually more important than a woman's.

And then there's the whole issue of parenting, the "Mommy-track," the trials a woman faces in balancing family and career. Of course, it would be much easier on women if the responsibility for parenting were shared equally by mother and father. So why do women accept more than their share of responsibility--and guilt--for child rearing? Why are women, but not men, being proselytized to reap the rewards of parenting rather than those of a career? Because of a culture that esteems one set of virtues in women, another in men. Woe to those who possess the "wrong" set.