Erin Callan helped perpetuate (or, perhaps, 'perpetrate') the financial crisis, as the Lehman CFO who reported that her firm was healthy when it was, in fact, dead bank walking. But her bigger regret seems to be that her job came before her relationships and herself, according to her own words:
Sometimes young women tell me they admire what I’ve done. As they see it, I worked hard for 20 years and can now spend the next 20 focused on other things. But that is not balance. I do not wish that for anyone. Even at the best times in my career, I was never deluded into thinking I had achieved any sort of rational allocation between my life at work and my life outside.
On the other hand, Susan Patton is drawing the ire of feminists and the politically correct police with her letter on how women do need men, and need to compete hard for the good ones. It looks like the internets have crashed The Daily Princetonian after publishing her letter. A cached version can be found here. From Patton's piece:
Men regularly marry women who are younger, less intelligent, less educated. It’s amazing how forgiving men can be about a woman’s lack of erudition, if she is exceptionally pretty. Smart women can’t (shouldn’t) marry men who aren’t at least their intellectual equal. 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. And I say again — you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you.
Of course, once you graduate, you will meet men who are your intellectual equal — just not that many of them. And, you could choose to marry a man who has other things to recommend him besides a soaring intellect. But ultimately, it will frustrate you to be with a man who just isn’t as smart as you.
Here is another truth that you know, but nobody is talking about. As freshman women, you have four classes of men to choose from. Every year, you lose the men in the senior class, and you become older than the class of incoming freshman men. So, by the time you are a senior, you basically have only the men in your own class to choose from, and frankly, they now have four classes of women to choose from. Maybe you should have been a little nicer to these guys when you were freshmen?
If I had daughters, this is what I would be telling them.
Mrs. Cav heartily agrees with Patton, and has saved this for our daughters to ponder when they are closer to college age.
The Bible and science agree: making healthy babies who will make more healthy babies is a prime directive that cannot be denied, no matter how many protestors march on Washington.
UPDATE:
All the newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will of course at first defame what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it: and the highest compliment, man ever receives from heaven, is the sending to him its disguised and discredited angels.--Ralph Waldo Emerson
UPDATE: Ed Glaeser weighs in, affirmatively. Anecdotally, this blogger met his wife at Cornell, where we were both undergraduates.
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