Quote:
Originally Posted by All-American
3. What was the nature of this institutional repression? How did it manifest itself? Who were its primary conveyors? What happened to those who tried to buck the trend?
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A-A, I'd tread carefully here. Take a dozen thirty-year-old LDS women and ask them how they feel about the freedom (or lack thereof) they were afforded. Ask the ones who dropped out of college to have babies. Ask the ones who got graduate degrees that they never used. Ask the ones like BBB who chose career over family and have to justify that decision every single day.
You're talking about an institution whose law school sent me official material reassuring me that it's okay to get a law degree and then stay home in the end. (This is true, of course, but you'd think that a law school would also want to point out that it's okay to get a law degree and then, you know, practice law!!) I am an outsider, but it is my impression that the cultural forces shaping the LDS young woman's understanding of herself and her role in society are real and powerful. What is perhaps most dangerous is that those forces are rarely so explicit as they were in the leaflet I was mailed.