Dear Time-Reader

Among the letters I have received from you about TIME'S book on the U.S. college graduate was one from a woman reader (unmarried) in Georgia: "Having read with interest your column on They Went to College and your promise to discuss findings on the woman graduate later, I am writing in the hope of heading you off from an unremarked error in the folklore concerning woman and marriage.

"Folklore has it that all women wish to be married ... I truly believe that as many as 15 or 20% do not wish to be married . . . Having been enabled by college to remain single without being poor or unpleasantly occupied, the college woman has a real choice between marriage and singleness . . . two good ways of life."

As many of you may have already discovered for yourselves, co-Authors Ernest Havemann and Dr. Patricia Salter West (a ca-CHART)8 reer woman-housewife) recognized the possibility that marriage might be a matter of choice when they wrote: "It may be that the kind of woman who goes to college, and stays there until she gets her degree, is simply by nature the self-sufficient type who does not regard marriage as woman's ultimate destiny--and will not embark upon it except under the most promising circumstances."

And so goes the debate on home v. career. They Went to College does not try to settle the argument one way or another, but does offer some surprising facts about the married and unmarried Former Coeds.

Say the authors: "We have almost forgotten it, in this last half of the twentieth century, but the most important question about the coed at one time was simply this: Why should women go to college at all? A great many people believed, in all sincerity, that undue mental strain would cause women to have 'brain fever.'. . . Others, unable to imagine any other role for women but that of housewife and mother, felt that higher education was a complete waste of time and effort. And a third group, doubtless composed of the real benighted conservatives of the day, felt that college could only result in rendering [women] unfit or unwilling for marriage and motherhood." After reviewing the statistics, the book concludes : "By and large the Former Coed seems to be doing pretty well at marriage . . . Any theoretical fears that college might make a woman unfit for matrimony seem to be thoroughly dispelled by the facts." As our Georgia reader suspected, however, college women lag far behind the rest of their sex in the matter of getting married. Only 69 out of 100 were married when TIME made its survey, compared with 87 out of 100 for all women in the U.S. But, once married, the college woman usually stays married. Nine out of ten who were ever^married are still living with their husbands, compared with eight out of ten for all U.S. women. The authors explore a number of other subjects in the home v. career debate. After the coed graduates, for instance, is she more likely to settle down near home if she becomes a career woman or a housewife? Answer: career woman. Almost half of the col lege-graduate housewives leave their home states, while only a third of the unmarried working women move to jobs away from home. In the matter of leisure time, the authors found remarkably little difference between housewives and working women. A third of the women in each group reported that they had five or more free hours on the last weekday before answering the questionnaire. One group reads as many current books as the other. More wives than career women read at least three magazines regularly, but career women belong to more civic and social organizations. But whatever the differences between men and women graduates, married or unmarried, housewife or career woman, the survey showed that there was one area of almost universal agreement. Regardless of what has happened to them since they left college, graduates of both sexes are almost unanimous on one point: 98 out of 100 would go back to the campus if they had it all to do over again, with the men and women voting almost exactly alike.

JAMES A. LINEN

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