By Louise Connelly

For The Times

PRINCETON — Princeton University mom and alumna Susan Patton, who drew national attention last month with a letter urging women students to find a husband at the university before they graduate, defended her position during a talk on campus last night.

“You’ll never have a better concentration of outstanding men to choose from,” Patton, whose son attends the school, told an audience of about 200 students. “After college, your pool of men will shrink dramatically.”

During a lecture hosted by the university’s American Whig-Cliosophic Society, Patton said she wrote the letter to the campus newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, expecting to reach 200 people.

The day after its publication she learned there had been over 100,000 searches for her name on Google. She said the media attention has only reinforced her opinions.

“I am absolutely delighted with the response,” she said. “Educated women should not feel ashamed or uncool or unpopular by saying, yes, I want to be married and have children someday.”

Patton, who is divorced and works as a professional executive coach, and said she has been solicited by several literary agents and will be writing a book.

Patton said she had attended a discussion of women and leadership in February where Anne-Marie Slaughter, a professor whose writing on work-life balance has drawn wide interest recently, and university president Shirley Tilghman spoke. She said yesterday that she was surprise by female undergraduates’ focus on their professional rather than their personal lives.

“They are receiving so much information about career planning, and they don’t need to hear any more of it,” Patton said.

She urged women students to plan for their personal happiness the way they plan for their professional careers.

“Use your time on campus to do many things,” she said. “But multitask a little further and look around you to see who among these guys you’d want to spend the rest of your life with, maybe.”

Patton said that while the men who graduate from Princeton grow more desirable with age, the women carry a “burden.”

“If we do want to marry men who are our intellectual equal, we’ve almost priced ourselves out of the market,” she said. “Finding a husband as smart as you is going to be hard if you don’t find him at school.”

Patton also said women should not wait until their 30s to get married because of potential difficulties in finding a spouse and bearing children at that age.

“A woman looking for a husband in her 30s gives off total desperation,” Patton said, likening the effect to a “man repellent.”

“The fallacy of gender equality is that men can take a lifetime to marry and have children, and women cannot,” she said. “That is a hard and cold bulletproof fact.”

Patton criticized the feminist movement, arguing it was “bullying” and “intimidating” women into repressing their desire to enter a traditional marriage and to have children.

“They went too far and crossed over to the dark side, putting forward messages intended to tear down the male power structure,” Patton said. “We need a new post-feminist manifesto that enables women and empowers women to want all that they want for themselves.”

Adressing women students who will graduate this spring without a potential Princeton husband, Patton suggested they keep their eyes open, regularly attend a house of worship and stay involved with alumni affairs.

“Stay in touch with these guys,” she said. “You never know what will evolve over time.”

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