Is romance more important to women in college than grades are? Why do so many women enter college with strong academic backgrounds and firm career goals but leave with dramatically scaled-down ambitions? Dorothy C. Holland and Margaret A. Eisenhart expose a pervasive "culture of romance" on campus: a high-pressure peer system that propels women into a world where their attractiveness to men counts most.

Dorothy C. Holland is professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Margaret A. Eisenhart is professor of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder.