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TODAY women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor's degrees and more than half of master's and Ph.D.'s. Many people believe that, while this may be good for women as income earners, it bodes ill for their marital prospects.
如今幾乎60%的學士學位、超過一半的碩士和博士學位是由女性獲得的。很多人相信盡管這也許能幫助女性多賺取些收入，但對他們的婚姻前景卻不妙。
As Kate Bolick wrote in a much-discussed article in The Atlantic last fall, American women face "a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be 'marriageable' men — those who are better educated and earn more than they do." Educated women worry that they are scaring away potential partners, and pundits claim that those who do marry will end up with unsatisfactory matches. They point to outdated studies suggesting that women with higher earnings than their husbands do more housework to compensate for the threat to their mates' egos, and that men who earn less than their wives are more likely to experience erectile dysfunction.
正如凱特·鮑力克去年秋季發表在《大西洋月刊》上一篇廣為討論的文章中寫道的那樣，美國女性“正面臨著傳統上適婚男性急劇減少的狀況。這些男性受到的教育良好，而且賺得也多。受過良好教育的女性擔心他們會讓潛在的伴侶望而卻步，專家聲稱最終那些結婚的人婚姻都不盡人意。他們暗示過去的研究顯示 收入比丈夫高的女性做的家務多，這樣可以彌補對男性伴侶自尊的威脅，而且收入比妻子地低的男性更有可能患勃起功能障礙。
Is this really the fate facing educated heterosexual women: either no marriage at all or a marriage with more housework and less sex? Nonsense. That may have been the case in the past, but no longer. For a woman seeking a satisfying relationship as well as a secure economic future, there has never been a better time to be or become highly educated.
要么不碰婚姻，要么就是婚后家務不斷、且鮮有性生活，女異性戀者的命運就該如此嗎？胡扯。過去也許是這樣，現在變了。女性想要有個滿意的伴侶和穩定的經濟未來，沒有比提高教育水平更好了。
For more than a century, women often were forced to choose between an education and a husband. Of women who graduated from college before 1900, more than three-quarters remained single. As late as 1950, one-third of white female college graduates ages 55 to 59 had never married, compared with only 7 percent of their counterparts without college degrees.
一個多世紀以來，女性通常不得不在教育和丈夫之間做出選擇。1900年前，女大學生中超過3/4 的人單身。1950年時，年齡在55至59之間的有1/3擁有大學學歷的白人女性從未嫁人，相比沒有大學學歷的對照組，這一比例僅占7%。。
Some of these women chose to stay single, of course, and that choice has always been easier and more rewarding for educated women. But the low marriage rates of educated women in the past were also because of the romantic and sexual prejudices of men. One physician explained the problem in Popular Science Monthly in 1905: An educated woman developed a "self-assertive, independent character" that made it "impossible to love, honor and obey" as a real wife should. He warned that as more middle-class women attended college, middle-class men would look to the lower classes to find uneducated wives.
其中有些女性選擇單身，當然，這個選擇對受過良好教育的女性是容易做的、也是值得的。但是過去受過良好教育的女性結婚率低也是由于男性的浪漫和性別偏見。一位內科醫生在1905年的《大眾科學期刊》上這樣解釋這個問題：受過良好教育的女性形成了“自信、獨立的品質”，這樣她們就沒有了現實生活中妻子應有的熱愛、尊重和服從的性格。他警告到：越來越多的中產階級女性去念大學后，中產階級男性將向更低的階級去尋找那些沒受過教育的人做老婆。
That is exactly what happened in the mid-20th century. From 1940 to the mid-1970s, the tendency for men to marry down educationally became more pronounced and the cultural ideal of hypergamy — that women must marry up — became more insistent.
20世紀中葉的情況就是如此。從1940年至20世紀70年代，男性娶的女性受教育的水平沒自己高的現象比較普遍，高攀（女性嫁給比自己好的男性）的文化理想也是一貫堅持的。
Postwar dating manuals advised women to "play dumb" to catch a man — and 40 percent of college women in one survey said they actually did so. As one guidebook put it: "Warning! ... Be careful not to seem smarter than your man." If you hide your intelligence, another promised, "you'll soon become the little woman to be pooh-poohed, patronized and wed."
二戰后的約會指南建議女性，要抓住男人的心，女人得“裝傻充愣”，在一份調查中，40%的大學女性稱他們就是這樣做的。一本手冊如此建議：“當心！...... 別讓自己看上去比你的男人聰明。” 如果能隱藏你的智慧，“很快你就會變成小女人，被男人憐愛和保護，并步入婚姻。”
Insulting as it may have been, such advice was largely sound. Studying national surveys on mate preferences, David M. Buss, a psychologist at the University of Texas, and his colleagues found that in 1956, education and intelligence were together ranked 11th among the things men sought in a mate. Much more important to them was finding a good cook and housekeeper who was refined, neat and had a pleasing disposition. By 1967, education and intelligence had moved up only one place, to No. 10, on men's wish lists.
盡管聽起來不太順耳，這些建議大體上還是正確的。研究全國的擇偶喜好調查之后，得克薩斯大學的心理學家戴維·布斯和他的同事發現，1956年時，在男性尋求伴侶的品質中，教育和智力并列排名第11位。他們更想找的是找個好廚師和家庭主婦，她得待人禮貌、舉止高雅、心情開朗。 1967年時，男士的意向榜單上，教育和智力支上升了1位，排到第10位。
Men in the postwar period were threatened by the thought of a woman with more or even as much education as they had. One man who taught at a women's college in the 1950s told me his colleagues used to joke that once they knew a woman had earned a Ph.D., they didn't even need to ask what she had specialized in: clearly, it was in "Putting Hubby Down."
二戰后，一想到有個女人的受到的教育比自己多，甚至一樣多，男人就會覺得受到威脅了。20世紀50年代曾經在女子學院任教的一位男士告訴我說，知道一個女性有了博士學位之后，他們甚至不會問她從事什么專業研究，就開玩笑地說專業是“把相公比下去。”
But over the past 30 years, these prejudices have largely disappeared. By 1996, intelligence and education had moved up to No. 5 on men's ranking of desirable qualities in a mate. The desire for a good cook and housekeeper had dropped to 14th place, near the bottom of the 18-point scale. The sociologist Christine B. Whelan reports that by 2008, men's interest in a woman's education and intelligence had risen to No. 4, just after mutual attraction, dependable character and emotional stability.
30多年過去了，這些偏見大部分已經不復存在了。1996年時，智力和教育狀況已經上升到男人尋求伴侶理想的品質排名的第5 位。找一位廚師和家庭主婦已經降到第14位，接近一共18個排名的底部了。社會學家克里斯汀·威爾蘭（Christine B. Whelan）稱，2008年時男性對女性的教育和智力狀況的興趣已經上升到第4位了，僅次于彼此的吸引、可靠的品質和穩定的情感。
The result has been a historic reversal of what the economist Elaina Rose calls the "success" penalty for educated women. By 2008, the percentage of college-educated white women ages 55 to 59 who had never been married was down to 9 percent, just 3 points higher than their counterparts without college degrees. And among women 35 to 39, there was no longer any difference in the percentage who were married.
這個結果是對經濟學家埃萊納·羅斯稱為受過良好教育女性的“成功”懲罰的歷史性顛覆。截止到2008年，55歲至59歲的始終未婚的受過大學教育的白人女性比率已經下降到9%，只比沒有大學學位的白人女性高3個點。而且，對于35歲至39歲的女性來說，有沒有受過大學教育不再有區別。
