ursula | (no subject)

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A link from

greythistle on feminism, housework, and choices that aren't makes me wonder about the liberal arts & ambition-- there's no particular reason why an English or sociology degree should doom you to life as a secretary, but so many of my non-math friends seem to feel stuck between temping and grad school . . .

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I think that, as with lots of other things, it depends on why one chooses the liberal arts degree and what one expects pursuant to it.

For that matter, contrast my old acquaintance the math major who pulled decent grades from the same good research institution I attended as an undergrad, then worked a few years looking up numbers for actuaries because he couldn't think of something more interesting / ambitious he wanted to do. Dunno what he does now.

Yeah, it's less that I think math is special and more that my math acquaintance consists largely of other grad students, so the default stop-going-to-school option is teaching community college somewhere.

Eep. I wasn't poking at your choice of major in particular; he was just the first contraindication who came to mind.

But really, there's a ton of newly fledged lawyers who panic upon realizing (for the first time, oddly) that they can't necessarily find jobs to offset their $90k of debt--and so on.

Yeah, I TAed for a math Ph.D.-turned high-powered consultant-turned lecturer after very early retirement who said that he saved up firing lawyers as a special treat for bad days . . .

Just wandered through your comments. Your set seems angrier than my set, maybe because I expect

alsoelsewhere to call me bourgeois, or maybe because my flist doesn't include as many parents. For me, questions of children are extremely hypothetical, so the issues are more housework (I tend to concur that tolerance for messiness is a feminist virtue, but my own mental tolerance appears to be more than my health can take, and we haven't quite sorted that one yet) and choice (in the sense that we want to think of ourselves as agents rather than victims, and haven't found a good way to talk about situations where both descriptions hold).

<nod> Much seems to depend on personal engagement--whether an individual feels they've already made some choices relevant to what Hirshman discusses or whether the individual is (simply?) reliant upon others' anecdotes. Relative age, or something, in terms of likelihood of having had to confront certain issues. Now I'm making up some sort of maturity paradigm that I don't like or particularly agree with, but in broad strokes I think the "depends whether" bit isn't wrong.

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