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Friday, April 07, 2006
"A highly-educated woman... ...who chooses to stay at home and not to work - that is destruction of capital," Dijksma said. "If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at the cost of society, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished." UD’s friend Cold Spring Shops quotes this; he found it quoted by UD’s friend Photon Courier (who's indignant about it). It’s from a Dutch labor party member of parliament, Sharon Dijksma, and it’s a good way to begin peering in to the very elite can of worms the events at Duke have opened. The Duke thing has exposed not merely the barbarianism at the heart of various elite university subcultures; it has, more broadly, made manifest the seething anger of ordinary people living among the extraordinarily privileged. These people are angry because the rich are thumbing their noses at them in a number of ways. Here’s one: Growing numbers of women who’ve enjoyed extremely expensive graduate educations in law, business, and medicine, are working for four or five years and then quitting the world of work entirely to raise their children. Middle-class women don’t have this option; it’s only an option for the wealthy and privileged, which is to say for the women who’ve taken places in the best undergraduate and graduate schools away from middle-class women who have also applied for them. Because they are rich, these women have thrown their expensive professional educations away when they felt like raising children. Elite-graduate women who drop out of the workforce do it because they can -- because their families are already wealthy, or because their husbands are making enough money to support everyone on one income. Most middle-class women are guaranteed to keep working. They have to. So while middle-class women are slaving away at a couple of jobs to afford night classes at the local third-tier law school, they watch wealthy women get subsidized through the best law schools and then nonchalantly throw the immense social investment that’s been made in them away when it no longer interests them. Dijksma’s wrong, of course, to say such women should be “punished.” But they should certainly be judged. Here, for instance, is Linda R. Hirshman. |