Bachelors Degree or a MRS. Degree? You Choose!

The beginning of my summer consisted of me setting up shop in my living room with my MAC in hand applying to numerous jobs day in and day out. Cover letter after cover letter, and resume after resume. After a while this routine got tiresome and stressful. I didn’t know the stress was knocking at my door until one day my grandmother made a comment that did not particularly sit well with me. Lets just say I went nuts. It seemed that my measly old bachelor’s degree was not the only degree that I should have returned home with. My grandmother’s best friend believed I should have balanced my efforts at attaining good grades with finding a mate/future husband. She specifically said I should have dated an engineer at Penn State. I was infuriated. Even if my grandmother’s idiotic friend said this, I felt that my grandmother must have believed it too or else she would have never repeated it. Was this really happening? Was a MRS degree also needed in addition to your bachelor’s degree for people to think you were truly a success story in college? Was I really just told my only reason for going to college, spending thousands of dollars in tuition and slaving away night after night over books was solely to meet a man. After sitting in numerous women studies classes where the MRS degree conversation definitely came up, I was always proud enough to exclaim that my matriarchal household including my mother, aunt and grandmother did not expect such traditional standards for me until I was ready. Although I am very content with my single life, I finally got the first slap of reality that deems the cycle of a woman’s life includes marriage and children whether you liked it or not and if you chose to opt. out on such expectations your almost looked down upon as inadequate.

As a black woman we are taught that we have to compete extra hard to attain status that other genders and races are handed on a silver platter. Our grandmothers and mothers taught us to be strong, intelligent and most of all independent. They taught us to be get our degrees and become success stories because these were opportunities that they were often times denied. Yet not once in our socialization from a girl to a woman did they ever say to chase a man, get married, get pregnant and depend on this man for the rest of your lives. And not once did they ever say you need to find a man while in college. But once we become too content in our studies and the inexistence of a love life is in the back of our minds, the alarm for concern starts ringing and the pressure to graduate from school, find a decent job, excel at this job and keep a man becomes apart of the expectations that our society predetermines for us. Yikes!