The Joys and Woes of Women in University

"It is hard to be twenty," I reflected today. "It is also hard to be twenty-one. It is hard to be a undergraduate woman in general, actually."

I was drawing mostly upon memory, mind you, since my twenty-something's undergrad days are long behind me. But I remember them as a restless, anxious time when I tried to balance jobs and classes, Catholicism with popularity, my wishes with the wishes of others and productivity with what I now realize to have been full-blown clinical depression. Many young women dread turning 25, but I can honestly say I am glad I have seen the back of 25 and will never see 25 again.

Interestingly, I did get a second chance at being an undergraduate. When I went to theology school to do an M.Div./STB, I think I got the "undergraduate experience" that I had wanted the first time: a smaller community, professors who had hours of time for me, a less frenetic social life, manageable challenges and, primarily because I was spared from depression, better grades.

There are women who become so involved in their studies that they barely look up to see if there are any cute men around. I envied these women. Women like them tend to get top grades. They are determined to succeed. They are singleminded and successful. They do not read Goethe's The Sorrows in Young Werther and sit around gloomy quadrangles thinking sad thoughts. They get on with their work. Eventually they get good jobs and great salaries and buy houses and it-bags.

Then there are women who want to know where the boys are. Goethe is not so much someone to study but a guide to life. I remember actually quoting from Doctor Faustus (Marlowe's, though) to encourage a hottie I had a huge crush on to mend his ways. He didn't. Sadly, such women seek their happiness not in their absorbing studies or burgeoning careers, but on their social lives and the general thrills that being like by boys provides. Oh, alas. C'etait moi at twenty.

If I could do undergrad all over again... Oh wait, I did. Well, if I had a daughter about to begin her undergrad, I would draw her aside and say, "Never mind about the boys. You're probably not meant to marry until 30 anyway, so just stick to your books and make friends who stick to their books." Hmm. Maybe I should work on the wording.

Women who succeed at their studies are more likely to get professorial encouragement nowadays than when women first bravely stormed the universities. The annals of women-in-science are full of utter horror stories of male research scientists determined to keep women rivals and colleagues down by any means, including stealing their work.* We have the example of Lise Meitner, who was not just a woman but Jewish in early-20th century Austria. Lise Meitner discovered nuclear fission. She should have been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize with her college Otto Hahn, but she was not. She did, however, manage to get out of Austria before the Nazis got her, no thanks to colleague Kurt Hess.

So today, as I think about how difficult it is to be an undergraduate woman, I salute those women who found their happiness in the highest echelons of thought despite the machinations of others. And as Lise Meiter was one such woman, she is our Seraphic Single of the Week.

*Of course, they have probably done this to fellow male scientists, too.

Update: Welcome, sailors, from Ship of Fools!

Eccentric Heroines

My earliest readers remember when I strove to post a Seraphic Single of the Day, not just the Week. The list on the right is mostly compiled from these Singles. And when I first shopped my MS to publishers, I felt a little embarrassed that there was so much me and not enough them in it. But to my great surprise, publishers did not like my Seraphic Singles of the Day. One American editor went so far as to pick apart the characters of the Singles. Dorothy Day (unsurprisingly) was fine, but Muriel Spark was deemed unpleasant to her son. And Greta Garbo was hardly a good role model, etc, etc.

I was very surprised. Having been brought up on both Heroines of God and stories of Famous Canadian Women, I thought a collection of stories about Famous Single Women would be a wow. (And maybe it would outside the "Christian" market.) But what I didn't factor in was that for Catholic publishers, models are almost always Saints. Saints, I say! And most Catholic female saints were either nuns or mistakenly lumped in with nuns. (St. Catherine of Siena was a third-order, not second-order, Dominican, so she's one of you, my little Singles!)

Maybe this is not super-orthodox, but when it comes to the Single life, I am more interested in how celebrated Singles coped and prospered than in their personal holiness. In days of yore, it was even tougher for non-priests to be Single instead of Married or in Religious Life than it is today, so I find celebrated Singles of the past deeply inspiring. And because there are relatively few of them, I have been willing to look the other way in regards to their sexual sins, especially if they were in theatre or at least kept clear of open scandal.

With (Simone Weil), one does not have to overlook sexual sins, since she didn't seem to have had any, ever. Sins of the flesh were not Simone Weil's style, since the flesh itself was not Simone Weil's style. St. Jerome could have been Simone Weil's homeboy. And, like St. Jerome's disciple Blaesilla, Simone Weil finally died of her excessive fasting.

But Simone Weil was one of the most intelligent (and pigheadedly consistent) Frenchwomen of her generation. She placed first in the entrance examination for her class in the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. (Simone de Beauvoir came in second.) She taught and wrote philosophy. A pacifist, she made herself take part in the Spanish Civil War because she cared about the outcome and thought anyone who did ought to fight, and not leave it to other people to suffer in one's place. A socialist, she made herself take a gruelling factory job which damaged her health. A mystic, she became deeply Roman Catholic and yet refused to be baptised because she preferred to stay on the margins.

Simone! The woman died almost sixty years before I was born, but she drives me nuts. You can't be a Christian without even the desire for baptism, Simone! Argh! Starving yourself in solidarity with the French under the Vichy regime doesn't help anyone, Simone! Argh!

But because many Single people, especially Single people who are geniuses, do drive their wellwishers crazy with their stubborn adherence to their eccentricities, Simone Weil (1909-1943) is our Seraphic Single of the Week.

A Book and Its Cover

Most of us know the story now. A middle-aged woman with an intellectual disability got on the stage at a televised talent show organized by a man known for his cruel remarks. She was portly, frumpy, beetle-browed. The judges asked her about herself. She said she had never been kissed and sulked in a would-be flirtatious way. She shook her hips suggestively. The audience, used to a parade of no-hopers, rolled their eyes. (At home, watching on the internet, I rolled my eyes, too.) And then Susan Boyle sang.

We cried.

Was this astonishing about-face spontaneous or a set-up engineered by an entertainment genius? I don't know. I don't think it matters. Susan Boyle touched thousands of people by overturning their expectations. She could really sing. She opened her unkissed lips and beauty poured out.

We can learn two things from this astonishing televised event:

1. People judge a book by its cover.

2. People shouldn't judge a book by its cover.

Susan Boyle intrigues me because she shows the world not only that lifelong Singles have a lot to offer, but that there ARE lifelong Singles, including women (and men) who have not married because they have a social, physical, mental or intellectual handicap of some kind.

The reaction of the world to the purity of Boyle's voice versus the oddity of her appearance intrigues me because of this passage from Isaiah:

See, my servant shall prosper;
he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high
Just as there were many who were astonished at him
--so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance--
so he shall startle many nations...

...[H]e had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces,
he was despised and we held him of no account.
(Isaiah 52:13-15, 53:2b-3)

Christians recognise Isaiah's Suffering Servant as a prefiguring of Christ. And Susan Boyle, who surprised us all, reminds me of the surprise of the Suffering Servant and the surprise of the Baby Jesus. Few expected the Messiah to come as a little baby, born to a carpenter's wife. And nobody expected God to take on human flesh. The expectations of people like Peter, like James and John, were completely overthrown. And I wonder if somewhere, deep in our Christian and post-Christian psyches, we all caught a glimpse of Christ in a homely singer from Scotland.

And that is why I have decided that the Seraphic Single for this week, the week in which Christmas falls, should be the expectation-overthrowing Susan Boyle (b. 1961).