Asking Jill Biden to Drop "Dr." From Her Name Is Telling All Women to Dumb It Down
I would like to say that I raged with anger when I read Joseph Epstein’s WSJ Op-Ed “Is There a Doctor in the House? Not if You Need an M.D.,” which urges the First-Lady-elect (or as he calls her, “Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo,” to drop the “Dr.” from her name.
In his opinion piece, Epstein writes that he’s making the suggestion (“think about it, Jill, and then forthwith drop the doc”) because PhD’s aren’t impressive any more—that real academics like him consider them “bush league.” And furthermore, he insists, it feels “fraudulent and comic” to use the title, given that she’s not a medical doctor, but a doctor of education.
However, I suspect that his concern is less that Dr. Jill will be unable to perform CPR should someone need it at a White House briefing, and more that he, Joseph Epstein, non-PhD, is not comfortable with women flaunting degrees other than an M.R.S.
Given that conviction, I wish I could say that my first reaction to his condescending recommendation was to burn with righteous anger at the centuries of men telling us not to get too full of ourselves—that it’s not an attractive quality in a woman, particularly a blonde like Dr. Biden who’s so pretty when she smiles.
But I didn’t rage. Instead, I laughed. It's force of habit; laughing when men move the finish line after we win the race, or kindly explain why our hard-won achievements aren’t how they prefer to evaluate us, the implication being that their assessment is the only one that matters. It's what women have been doing for...oh, ever. If we raged with fury every time someone “kiddo-ed” us, literally or figuratively, we’d have no energy left to get degrees in the first place.
And we do get degrees—in 2019, 52.9 percent of all doctoral degrees awarded in the U.S. went to women.
Epstein’s argument took me back a decade or so to a time when a kindly older man gave me some avuncular advice that was not dissimilar. I was 32 or 33, and a guy in my social circle asked me to dinner—it may have been a date, it may have been a “friend thing.” This was in a time (the late aughts) and a place (New York City) when it could be hard to tell.
He ordered champagne for both of us (date!), then leaned over the table and said, “I’ve been thinking about why you’re still single.” (Friend thing! But given that he was 10-15 years older than myself, maybe he had some genuine insight.)
“Oh?” I said.
“Do you ever think men are intimidated by you?” His forehead wrinkled, bent out of shape by the seriousness of the topic.
I laughed. “I’m only 5 feet tall. I’m not that intimidating.”
“No.” He crouched forward again. He was over 6 feet; given the height difference, he may have been concerned that the words would float over my head. And I needed to hear this. “I guess what I’m trying to say is...do you ever think you should just dumb it down?”
I was stunned into silence for a moment. Then I burst out laughing.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “Let’s say that is my ‘problem.’ If I dumb it down successfully enough to attract a man I want, then manage to trap the poor sap into marrying me, what happens when we’re supposed to spend the rest of our lives together? I wake up the morning after the wedding and say, ‘Guess what? I’m not dumb. You’re dumb that you thought I was dumb!’ And then we live happily ever after in our web of lies?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You probably couldn’t do it.”
Not smart enough to play dumb, I took his advice back to my hive of equally “intimidating” girlfriends. Was this what men really wanted? A woman who was smart enough to build a resume to impress mom and dad, but not so smart as to be, somehow, “intimidating.”
Naturally, two of my girlfriends and I spent part of a drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco that New Year’s outlining the chapters for a playbook called “Dumbing it Down: A Girl’s Guide to the Good Life.” It would be like The Rules, a horribly sexist bestseller that guaranteed you could get what you wanted (a man, naturally, a ring, definitely) if you could just suppress your true self long enough to lock it down.
The first rule of Dumbing It Down ™ was that you couldn’t actually lie, because what kind of foundation is that for building a relationship? I was in the process of writing a novel and teaching undergrads while getting my MFA at Columbia. But Ivy League schools cancel each other out in the plus/minus columns, writing is boring, and teaching little kids is noble, yet telling adult men how to improve their term papers is strident. So, according to the guideline of the imaginary book, I would simply tell people I was in art school. It wasn’t a lie, and it might inspire images of the pot-throwing scene in Ghost. Patrick Swayze’s character may have been undead, but he was not intimidated by Demi Moore, not when she got behind that wheel.
My friend who was driving the car was a producer for a business network. But producing is man’s work and, obviously, so is business. She sometimes voiced the internet segments she produced. So we decided instead, she’d say she did voice-overs.
The woman in the back seat worked in a lab; she’s a biochemist. There’s just no sexy-dumb way to spin that, so we had to focus on her leisure activities. She took yoga classes fairly regularly, so we agreed that if a man ever asked, "What do you do?" she would just say, "Yoga. I do a lot of yoga.”
We never got to the second rule of Dumbing It Down ™. Making up alternate jobs and fake personalities and describing them in breathy, Marilyn Monroe voices stopped being fun, fast. We started out amusing ourselves, but after a while, it began to feel like we were still trying to please every professor handing back a paper with a raised eyebrow and a shrug, every boss speaking over us, every man parsing our words to mentally swipe left when things got…un-fun, every adult who ever warned nobody likes a know-it-all.
But I’m still laughing about Joseph Epstein, taking the time to explain to those of us non-academics why PhD’s aren’t what they used to be, and to advise the future First Lady to “forget the small thrill of being Dr. Jill” and focus on the “larger thrill” of being First Lady, a role defined by who she is married to, not what she has achieved. Because unlike a teacher handing out grades, a boss assigning tasks, or even a man pouring champagne while trying to puzzle out if you’re worth the effort, Joseph Epstein has no power over Dr. Jill. (And not much power over anyone, any more; in the wake of his essay, Northwestern University issued a statement noting that he hasn’t taught there since 2003.)
Joseph. Joey, kiddo. You have nothing Dr. Jill wants. Dr. Jill has her career. Dr. Jill has her title. She has a husband, too, so just because you don’t find her PhD appealing, your implied threat that no one else will is empty. In fact, it seems that Mr. Jill Biden has no problem with her being “Dr. Jill.” In fact, I'd bet he kind of likes it. And guess what? He’s about to be sworn in as President of the United States.
Dr. Jill is not running for office, and she doesn’t have to play nice while a predator creeps on her shoulder like the Secretary of State did in the last election. She doesn’t have to worry about whether or not her lipstick is too dark, her words are too intimidating, or her voice is too loud. Whether Epstein and his ilk like it or not, the doctor is in.
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