Marry Early, Learn Later

The U.S. college girl, says Instructor Carolyn G. Heilbrun in the Columbia University Forum, "is driven by a force which, compounded of her own instincts and the pressures of society, is irresistible: the desire to find a man." And to Mrs.

Heilbrun, a Wellesley graduate, a mother of three and a Ph.D., pursuing a bachelor while pursuing a bachelor's degree makes no sense. Her plan: let women go to college in their early 30s--after marriage and motherhood.

Because U.S. colleges were designed for men, says English Teacher Heilbrun, "women are having their education and their children at times which could not be more inconvenient for the development of their own lives, the needs of society or the comfort of the men to whom they are married." Under Mrs. Heilbrun's plan, "the young woman will not have been dropped from the heights of Olympus to the depths of the washing machine.

Rather the years of her children's babyhood can be experienced and enjoyed in the knowledge that beyond lie the years of the mother's professional life." As for how college men might meet and marry girls destined for a deferred education, Mrs. Heilbrun says "these are matters that arrange themselves." She also argues that college does not make girls better mothers of "very young children," who need love, time and attention, gifts better given undiluted with resentment." To clinch her argument, Mrs. Heilbrun points at the mature women she teaches at Columbia's School of General Studies.

Like the returned G.I.s of World War II, the older women are "extraordinary students." If all this encouraged housewives to feel that college was unimportant, actually producing fewer U.S. college women, Teacher Heilbrun would not worry: "If the woman is without the desire to return, she is without the qualifications--a conclusion that is straightforward, if unsentimental."

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