School Girls

...There are a few teachers at Marlbor-ough who might be interested in Too-ley's message that girls' strengths differ from boys...

...she hugs the child to her bosom, she keeps him warm in her arms and in her bed...

...Indeed, at Marlborough, the teachers try to ensure that women overcome whatever social pressures or natural inclinations may exist...

...But, as Karen Stabiner's smartly reported book, All Girls: Single-Sex Education and Why It Matters, explains, girls' schools these days are doing all they can to help their students compete with boys—on traditionally male terms...

...The chips must be used by the end of class, and no student can talk once she has used all her chips...

...It relieved me of any responsibility for thinking of her as a woman with different needs and desires than mine...

...The school opened a few years ago, to the great disappointment of NOW and the ACLU, which believe single-sex education backward and discriminatory...

...ing in a real "patriarchy," claiming that many of men's traits evolved as a result of women's desires...

...Ironically, it may be only through a system of single-sex education, in which women are taught to act more like men, that these poorer women can win the right for their daughters to be stay-at-home mothers...

...Girls at Marlborough are supposed to leave with the confidence to compete in a man's world...

...Citing another scholar, he explains, "The vast spatial measures showing male bias (e.g., mental rotations, map reading, maze learning) correspond to attributes that would enable successful hunting...

...When his girlfriend expressed interest in coming along, she was quickly admonished by friends for not having her own ambitions, but simply wishing to follow her man...

...Myranda Marsh, for instance, came to Marlborough "intending to revolutionize the history department...

...Drawing mostly on the just-so stories of evolutionary psychology, Tooley attributes the superior abilities of men in mathematics, for example, to the role of males in the Pleistocene period as hunters...

...BY NAOMI SCHAEFER In The Miseducation of Women, British education professor James Tooley writes that as a young man, he decided to go off to teach in Zimbabwe...

...In fact, he questions the entire notion that human beings were ever livNaomi Schaefer is an adjunct fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center...

...How convenient it all was for me, not to have to consider her well-being...

...Noting that many of today's feminist voices—those who don't want women to be just like men, but want women to be respected for what they are good at and what makes them happy—are being ignored, Tooley proposes revaluing "domesticity...

...The same cannot be said for the girls at The Young Women's Leadership School in Harlem, the other institution Stabiner describes...

...Instead, he argues that women are unhappy because they have been forced by feminists to give up being wives and mothers in order to compete with men in the workplace...

...It tries to take girls from poor inner-city families and turn them into college material, an uphill battle in a school system where fewer than 50 percent of students graduate from high school in four years and 30 percent never finish at all...

...Tooley quotes scholar Carolyn Graglia as saying, "Feminism's war against the housewife has pitted the best educated, most sophisticated, most aggressive, and most masculinized portion of the female population against women who generally possess less education, less worldly experience, who are more likely to be docile than aggressive, feminine than masculine...

...Here Tooley makes entertaining use of his knowledge of feminist literature...

...Stabiner suggests the hardest tests for them come in the form of peer pressure...

...These different needs and desires, Tooley argues, arose biologically...

...In the case of the girls at the leadership school, their only chance for making it out of a world of poverty and violence is to compete in the world of men...

...As Stabiner writes, "Although 44 percent of undergraduate math majors were women, the number dwindled to 24 percent at the graduate level...

...Ultimately, though, readers of Stabiner's book will conclude that the graduates of Marlborough will finish looking very much as though they had gone to a co-ed prep school...

...But Tooley has not undertaken this project because he thinks women should return to their natural state...

...Opponents of girls' schools blamed it on the social pressure to defer when boys were around as well as on the enduring assumption that girls were not good at numbers...

...Marsh doesn't think that girls excel at memorization, and so she favors a more "cooperative" learning environment...

...It doesn't matter whether they find it more or less fulfilling than domestic life...

...In history and literature classes, teachers try to get the girls to contribute more to discussion by giving each student a certain number of chips at the beginning of class, and asking her to give up one every time she makes a comment or answers a question...

...Here, for instance, is a passage from Betty Friedan: "I'm haunted by the women I work with who are thirty and thirty-five and not having children or are torn to the core about it...

...One option may be the return of single-sex education...

...As it turns out, nearly everyone in this camp has noted the problem...

...For these young women, a single-sex education means less time wasted on the high-school soap opera, less of a chance to get pregnant, and a sense that there is something more in store for them than the hoodlums their sisters are dating...

...Stabiner's book provides a stark picture of how the arguments regarding the role and education of women tend to break down along class lines now...

...And here is Simone de Beauvoir, extolling the joys of motherhood: "The mother murmurs almost a lover's words, and like a lover, she makes avid use of the possessive case...

...Stabiner usefully introduces readers to the families of these young women...

...The girls at the Marlborough School, a 112-year-old private school in Los Angeles (one of two that Stabiner profiles) are encouraged to take as many advanced math and science courses as possible...

...she employs the same gestures of possession: caresses, kisses...

...Aside from not pushing women to take advanced math classes and not fretting when they marry early, Tooley offers almost no substantive solutions...

...Longer school days, larger workloads, and the threat of dismissal are perhaps the easiest part of the equation for the girls at the school...

...Given the dismal state in which Tooley finds modern womanhood, his recommendations are surprisingly timid...

...That was our feminism...

...He writes of his own sort of awakening on this issue, "I was struck by incredulity that anyone could think that the world of work, politics, sport or whatever—even being an astronaut or President of the USA—could possibly compensate for the loss of any of this mystery and magic" of motherhood...

...Tooley also provides evolutionary reasons for the areas in which women excel...

...Statistics show it's usually the women in poor minority communities who are picking themselves up and leaving...

...Women may have more educational, job, and even athletic opportunities than ever before, but by the time they reach the age of thirty or so, career and independence are hardly enough to make them contented...