Princeton girls told to find a smart husband at university

THE mother of a Princeton student has caused outrage by telling her son's female classmates at the prestigious US university to "find a husband on campus before you graduate".

Susan Patton

ANY young man studying at Princeton has among the brightest prospects of any student in the world. For one, however, those prospects may have been marred by the decision of his mother to write a letter to all his female classmates offering them dating advice.

Susan Patton, who graduated from Princeton in 1977, brought up two sons who gained places at the university and has spent her life training business executives. From this perspective - and after a divorce from a husband who was unfortunately not a graduate of Princeton - Ms Patton felt moved to offer some guidance to her younger son's female classmates.

“Here's what nobody is telling you,” she wrote in a letter to The Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper. “Find a husband on campus before you graduate. Yes, I went there.”

She warned that while men “regularly marry women who are younger, less intelligent, less educated”, clever women should not marry men “who are not at least their intellectual equal”. She added: “As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market. Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are ... you will never again be surrounded by this population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are.”

Ms Patton expected that her letter would be read by a few hundred of her son's classmates. Instead it has been discussed all over America. Some feminists believed it to be an April fool joke.

Nina Bahadur, another Princeton graduate who is now an editor at the Huffington Post website, had read the letter “more than five times”. “I remain dumbfounded,” she wrote. The website of The Daily Princetonian crashed apparently under the weight of interest.

“I'm stunned by how this has become the shot heard around the world,” Ms Patton said. “Everybody is terrified of voicing this opinion because it sounds anti-feminist ... But if the feminist movement truly accomplishes its mission, it will afford all women the opportunity to make any choice, even some that appear retrogressive.”

In her letter, she told the women of Princeton that her elder son, Daniel, had “the good judgment and great fortune to marry a classmate of his, but he could have married anyone”.

Nor could she guarantee that her younger son would choose one of them as his bride. “The universe of women he can marry is limitless,” she wrote. “It's amazing how forgiving men can be about a woman's lack of erudition, if she is exceptionally pretty.”

In an interview with New York Magazine, Ms Patton suggested that her own 27-year marriage may have suffered because her ex-husband was not a Princeton graduate. “He went to a school of almost no name recognition,” she said.

The Times