A History of the Wife (58 page)

Employers, be they large or small businesses, academic institutions, or government agencies, have only begun to address the needs of the two-paycheck family. Shared jobs and flextime are still very rare, and part-time work, when available, often marginalizes the person who chooses that option. Maternal leave is short and unpaid, even with the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which requires companies with over fifty employees to grant up to twelve weeks of job-protected leave per year for family and medical reasons. These include the birth and care of a newborn child, the placement for adoption or foster care of a child, and the care of an immediate family member (spouse, child, or parent) with a serious health condition.

In this respect, we are far behind certain European nations, for example, Sweden, which offers an eleven-month
paid
leave for working mothers or fathers after the birth of a baby, and Denmark, with a year and a half, twelve months of which are fully paid. England has only thirteen weeks of parental leave, though the wife of the current prime minister—Cherie Blair, a prominent employment rights lawyer and

four-time mother—put the subject of parental leave squarely at the heart of national politics when she pressured her husband (unsuccess- fully) to take time off following the birth of their last child. Most Euro- pean countries also have some kind of subsidized day care centers (
crèches
), following the French system inaugurated more than a half century ago. Neither the United States nor Japan, the two leading industrial nations in the world, provides paid childcare leave or afford- able childcare services to meet the demand.
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American mothers are often obliged to string together vacation, sick and parental allowances to get a proper maternity leave of twelve weeks, and, when they return to work, they usually have to spend an onerous part of their income on childcare services.

One hopeful American sign may be seen in the after-school pro- grams that are springing up throughout the nation for children needing care from 3
P
.
M
. to 6
P
.
M
. Sponsored by coalitions of businesses, founda- tions, and the federal government, these offer a variety of learning experiences, ranging from music and math to cooking and construc- tion. With 78 percent of mothers of school-age children now in the workforce, these programs are a godsend for working parents.

American wives and mothers, most of whom work inside and out- side the home, are constantly improvising and juggling to provide ade- quate day care and schooling for their children, comfortable housing, wholesome meals, decent clothing, weekly entertainment, and sum- mertime vacations. Little wonder that they complain and that some return, when economically feasible, to full-time homemaking.

Yet, as Stephanie Coontz argues in
The Way We Really Are,
wives and mothers will continue to work outside the home for more than finan- cial reasons. Most women enjoy the satisfactions offered by their jobs. “They consistently tell interviewers they like the social respect, self- esteem, and friendship networks they gain from the job, despite the stress they may face finding acceptable childcare and negotiating household chores with their husbands.” In support of this position, Coontz points to a 1995 Harris survey reporting that less than a third of working women would stay at home, if money were no object.
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There are several reasons married women like to work. In the first place, they do not want to be economically dependent on their hus- bands. They have absorbed the lessons of early feminists—Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Simone de Beauvoir, among others—arguing that

women will always be the second sex as long as they depend on men for support. Some remember their own mothers asking their husbands for allowances and having little say in how the family income was spent. Many feel that earning an income puts them on an equal footing with their husbands, as expressed by one dual-career wife in the fol- lowing manner: “I’m in the relationship because I want to be, not because somebody’s taking care of me.... I feel like I don’t have to say, ‘Well, you’re bringing in the money that’s putting food on the table, that’s keeping me alive.’ I’m putting in money, too.”
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Most women understand intuitively the theory of “bargaining power” outlined by gender theorists Strober and Chan. Put succinctly, “the more resources, particularly economic resources, a spouse brings to a marriage, the greater is his or her bargaining power.”
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Bargaining power affects the decisions couples make about almost everything, from the advancement of one partner’s career over the other’s to the division of household tasks. This hard-nosed, economic view of spousal relations is by no means the exclusive purview of academic the- ory. Even women’s magazines have become more forthright about the clout a wife commands when she, too, brings home a paycheck. Clini- cial psychologist Judith Sills, writing in that bastion of domesticity
Family Circle
(March 7, 2000), states bluntly, “The power balance in a marriage changes when one person either stops or starts earning money.... Power automatically accrues to the one who earns the money.”

Some wives and husbands keep their income in separate accounts. With divorce an eventuality for half of all marriages, both parties feel they must be cautious in money matters, just in case. Even women in secure marriages, who would like to take time off when they have young children, are afraid of losing both salary and seniority, because, if they divorced, they would find themselves in dire financial straits.
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Social Security also penalizes the person who takes time off from work. One CPA wife and mother, who stayed at home when her chil- dren were little, accurately observed: “For every quarter a mother stays home to take care of her kids, she gets zero on her Social Security. And all those zeros will be averaged into her final payment.... I froth at the mouth every time I get my statement from Social Security. Every zero year is factored in.”
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A second, and in my opinion, equally important reason why mar-

ried women choose to work is that they do not want to be confined to the perimeters of the home. They do not want to operate within the cagelike frame of traditional domesticity. Greater education for women has meant that their horizons extend far beyond the kitchen, the parlor, and the garden. Once again, we must remember that higher education for women is a relatively recent phenomenon. The American women’s colleges and most coed universities were a late- nineteenth-century creation admitting only a very small percentage of females, mostly from the upper and middle classes. As late as 1950, there were three male students granted a BA for every female college graduate.
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Today, females receive educations comparable to males— 55 percent of BAs, over 50 percent of law and medical degrees, and 45 percent of PhDs. Like the men in their college courses, they expect to use their minds for the rest of their lives. Paid employment can present a challenge to one’s intelligence, as well as to one’s interper- sonal skills. It allows a person the opportunity to interact with others in the workplace, and sometimes even to make a difference in their lives.

I have no illusions about the nature of work in general. It does not always challenge the intellect, and rarely allows for innovation and imagination. It can produce stress and pain and damage to private life. Yet I cannot imagine the world of the immediate future without it. Wives, like husbands, look to the work world for satisfactions that few can find within themselves or within the four walls of their houses. Most husbands today assume that their wives will have a commitment outside the home, and many husbands are credited with being their wives’ “strongest supporters.” In addition, many husbands count on their wives to share the economic burdens of supporting a family.

Of course, there are some women who refuse this scenario, some wives who prefer to be the domestic anchor for their husbands and children. They find satisfaction in caring for their children, driving them to and from school, attending their soccer and baseball games, cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing, gardening, sewing, shopping, and taking care of a parent or sick relative. Theoretically, housewives, especially those with the means to pay for a maid or a team of house- cleaners, should have more time than employed women to read, answer E-mail, surf the Internet, look at television, play tennis, do yoga, go to the gym, take hikes, practice the piano, listen to music,

paint, entertain, write letters or creative literature, do volunteer work, meet with friends, and follow their own rhythms. But few full-time homemakers, especially those with children, think of their lives as leisurely. Obligations to home, family, and the community always seem to expand into the hours one tries to sequester for oneself, perhaps because homemaking is, by nature, always open to the unpre- dictable—a sick child, a broken washing machine, storm damage to the roof. Moreover, without the extra income of a second wage earner, housewives often have to sacrifice material rewards in order to stay at home. For some women, being available to their children when they are small is reward enough. The life of a housewife (or house husband) can be fulfilling if it is freely chosen, if the other spouse’s income is adequate, or if the wife has sufficient assets of her own. A relatively small percentage of married women today are economically able to choose this life.

With the increased longevity of women, the child-raising period takes up a relatively short part of the life span. If a woman waits until her late twenties to have a child, as many do, and lives until she is eighty, as statistics say she will, she will spend only a third of her life in the active phase of mothering. Before and after her child-rearing years, there are long stretches of time for paid employment or sustained vol- unteer work. Most wives, even those who take time off when their chil- dren are young, work for economic reasons, and many wives, even those who do not have to, work because they want to.

Every societal revolution has a conservative reaction that eventually forces it to retreat partially, if not wholly, from acquired ground. The backlash symbolized by the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 and invoked in the battle cry “family values” undid some of the victories claimed by the sexual and feminist revolutions. During the eighties, abortion rights began to be curtailed. ERA was all but buried. Androgyny gave way to a renewed femininity featuring sexy underwear, breast implants, and push-up bras. Expensive weddings with brides in elaborate white gowns came back into fashion. Women’s paid employ- ment came under attack, with wives accused of undermining their hus- bands, and mothers indicted for sacrificing their children on the altar of professional success. The popular press remained skeptical over wom- en’s ability to have both a successful marriage and a successful career,

and castigated the working woman who wanted to “have it all.”
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Documenting the backlash in 1992, author Susan Faludi exploded

some of the antifeminist myths that had proliferated during the eight- ies.
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Magazines and newspapers eager to discredit women’s gains exploited questionable research, such as the 1986 Harvard-Yale mar- riage study announcing that unwed women over thirty had very little likelihood of ever marrying at all, or sociologist Lenore Weitzman’s 1985 finding that divorced women had a 73 percent drop in their stan- dard of living a year after divorce. Subsequent research proved both of these findings to be greatly exaggerated. The gloom-and-doom picture of liberated women promulgated by the media and the glowing pictures of mothers who had chosen to give up demanding careers in favor of domesticity were clearly intended to stop the clock and send women scurrying back to the safety of home.

Yet, according to historian Ruth Rosen’s assessment, “By the end of the 20th century, feminist ideas had burrowed too deeply into our cul- ture for any resistance or politics to root them out.”
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Even those who lamented the excesses of the sexual and feminist revolutions were not about to ask their daughters or sweethearts to remain virgins until mar- riage or to retreat full-time to the kitchen once they had become wives. Increasingly, men sizing up prospective spouses expected them to carry their weight in both the bedroom and the boardroom.

One sign of the times is that the old jokes about nagging, frigid, dumb, unattractive wives have run their course. Remember comedian Henny Youngman’s repertoire of wife jokes? “Take my wife, please!” “My wife has a black belt in shopping.” “She got a mudpack and looked great for two days. Then the mud fell off.” “I’ve been in love with the same woman for forty-nine years. If my wife ever finds out, she’ll kill me.” Wives are no longer the targets of such easy ridicule coming from husbands confident of their superiority. If anything, jokes about hus- bands have become more numerous, as in the following examples cur- rently circulating on E-mail:

“I think—therefore I’m single.” Attributed to Lizz Winstead.

“I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon and a cat

that comes home late at night.” Attributed to Marie Corelli.

“Behind every successful man is a surprised woman.” Attributed to Maryon Pearson.

In the vein of the last witticism, here is a joke that was frequently repeated in 1999. “Hillary and Bill Clinton drive into a gas station. The man at the pump is particularly warm toward the First Lady, and when they drive away, she tells her husband that he had been one of her first boyfriends. Bill says smugly: ‘Aren’t you glad you married me instead of a gas station attendant?’ To which she replies, ‘If I had married him, he’d be the president.’ ”

INTIMATIONS OF THE NEW WIFE

The story of Hillary and Bill Clinton played out on the national stage some of the ambiguities inherent in the role of the new wife. Like 1990s soap operas, theirs was a dramatic saga of dual-career ambitions, mar- riage, infidelity, forgiveness, and love. In 1992, America was not ready for Hillary Rodham Clinton. After Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush, women who had incarnated the traditional wife par excellence, a lawyer first lady on a par with her husband was just too threatening for much of the American public. They viewed her political activities with suspicion and felt vindicated when her health care plan went down to defeat. During Clinton’s first term in office, Hillary was constantly changing her tactics and her hairdo so as to meet public approval. But whatever she did, there were numerous Americans who made no secret of the revulsion they felt for her.

All of this changed, of course, when she became an injured wife. As the gross details of President Clinton’s marital infidelity with Monica Lewinsky became daily pap for the media, and Hillary maintained her dignity in spite of everything, her popularity with the American people soared. She became the woman who “stood by her man,” a wife with whom other American women could identify. The damage to Clinton’s reputation did not spill over similarly to his spouse. She emerged from their sensational story with a determination to pursue her own career, even at the expense of abandoning the role of first lady during her hus- band’s last year in office. As I write these pages, she has just been

elected to the United States Senate. Is the American public now ready for wives who are as well educated, assertive, and as ambitious as Hillary Rodham Clinton?

Fundamental aspects of the new wife can be observed in those reli- able standards, the women’s magazines. At the start of the new mil- lennium, they focus on homemaking, recipes, diet, health, work, children, love, and sex. The most venerable of these magazines known as “the seven sisters” (
Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, Woman’s Day,
and
Better Homes and Gardens
), originally oriented toward traditional wives with children, have been obliged to move with the times. Today, they are claiming the sexually explicit content that used to be the exclusive purview of magazines intended for single women (e.g.,
Glamour, Cosmopolitan,
and
Mademoiselle
).

“101 Ways to Sex Up Your Marriage,” in the January 2000
Ladies’ Home Journal,
assumes that spouses occasionally need to bring “more sizzle” into the bedroom, and that it’s the wife’s responsibility to make this happen. The February
Redbook
presents “Your 39 Most Embarrass- ing Sex Questions” in graphic detail, as well as an insightful piece titled “What Happy Couples Know about Marriages That Last.”
More,
the magazine for older women put out by
Ladies’ Home Journal,
offers a sur- prisingly frank and relatively guilt-free article titled “I Am the Other Woman,” confessing the trials and tribulations of an anonymous woman in love with a married man.

Even financial matters have to be sexy. An article titled “Creating Financial Intimacy: A Couple’s Guide to Getting Rich” ( January 2000
Good Housekeeping
) insinuates sex into the process of buying stock. It reads:

Consider buying a stock for your beloved. It’s surprising how sexy ( yes, sexy) such a gift can be. . . . Sneak off to a financial seminar together one evening instead of to a movie; sit in the back, dress up, and wear your best perfume. Scan the newstand for a financial magazine that features an article reflecting your family’s situation, and share it during a quiet moment alone. All powerful and positive acts, acts that will help you and your money grow, and you and your husband grow closer.

While the sexed-up prose is downright silly, the article does point

to the central nexus of sex and money in the maintenance of a mar- riage. It argues convincingly that shared responsibility for money matters makes for a powerful bond between spouses. Whereas men once had total control over families finances, today, in more egalitar- ian marriages, both sex and money are often considered joint ven- tures capable of drawing spouses more closely together—that is, if they don’t drive them further apart. It’s not surprising that the year 2000 began with paeans in the popular press to both sources of empowerment for wives, with sexual performance hyped far beyond any other wifely virtue. Kinsey’s midcentury belief that good sex is indispensable to enduring unions has by now become an American cliché, and, like most clichés, one that tends to obscure competing truths. While sexual satisfaction is generally recognized as a sensitive index of marital happiness, especially in the early years, there are undoubtedly some good marriages with bad or minimal sex, and some bad marriages with great sex.
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And what of love, that romantic feeling that gained primacy in the early nineteenth century and that has been claiming special status ever since? In the past, at least among middle- and upper-class couples, love was supposed to precede sex, indeed, to make sex possible. Today it is usually the other way around. Young people engage in sex with several partners, then “fall in love” with one of them. Subsequently some com- bination of sexual desire and romantic love impels the couple to vow to stay together forever. But sex and romance do not, in and of them- selves, cement a relationship, at least not for a lifetime. Common inter- ests, values, and goals, mutual respect and moral commitment, may, in the long run, prove as valuable as sex, love, and money in the preserva- tion of a union.

Young women today, marrying on average around twenty-five, often have at least some college education and work experience behind them when they become wives. They enter into marriage on a relatively equal footing with their husbands, and expect to maintain this parity for the rest of their lives. The old ideal of companionate marriage has been reformulated under such new labels as egalitarian marriage, equal part- nership, and marital equality.

Unfortunately, married life today is not yet truly equal. According to a 1997 research study, which follows the lead of sociologist Jessie

Bernard in
The Future of Marriage
(1972), “his” marriage continues to be better than “hers.”
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The data on marital satisfaction, garnered from surveys, interviews, and personal assessments, indicate that husbands have a more positive view of marriage than their wives, and that wives fall behind husbands on numerous measures of marital satisfaction. One consistent finding is that single men do
worse
than married men on almost all measures of mental health (e.g., suicide, depression, nervous breakdown), whereas single women do
better
than married women on these same measures.
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All agree that wives experience greater stress than husbands from their career/family obligations, and that women put more time into caring for children, aged parents, and sick relatives.

When couples divorce, it is almost always the ex-wife who loses out financially. According to the latest statistics, divorce produces a 27 per- cent decline in women’s standard of living and 10 percent increase in that of men.
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This represents an almost 40 percent gap between what ex-wives and what ex-husbands experience financially in the aftermath of a divorce. Part of this difference is attributable to the fact that moth- ers, in the great majority of cases, are granted custody of the children. Even when the mother is awarded child support, it is frequently insuf- ficient and not always forthcoming. Another factor is the lower earning power of women on the whole—75 percent of what men earn. Many women are still segregated in low-paying jobs and hindered in advancement by home and childcare responsibilities, as well as by the sacrifices they have made promoting their husbands’ careers rather than their own.

In addition to the disadvantageous financial consequences of divorce for many women and their children, the emotional distress is often deep and long-lasting. While no-fault divorce, first instituted in California in 1970 and subsequently adopted in most of the United States, was intended to remove the blame and acrimony from pro- longed adversarial litigation, today’s divorces are still often as bitter as those of the past. Divorce continues to be a major family disruption with prolonged consequences for the spouses, their offspring, and extended kin.

Here is how Susan Straight, an articulate ex-wife and mother of three school-aged children, described the devastation that divorce brought into her life, a devastation she shared with her best friend, who had

been widowed.

My best friend on the street, Jeannine, whose four kids had baby-sat mine and played with them, lost her husband, too. He was killed in a car accident. Jeannine and I were both thirty-five that year. We couldn’t believe we had to do this alone. Seven kids. Old houses with flickering electrical wires and flooding basements and overgrown hedges and missing shingles. Jeannine was in her last year of nursing school. I was working. We were stunned.

. . . Some nights we were both mad. She’d met her husband at four- teen, like me. After we talked, I would lie in bed, my body aching, my hands raw from dishes and floors and branches and baby shampoo, thinking that when I got married, I always assumed I’d work hard, have kids and a house and some fun. . . .

And when my husband first left, I thought, So I work a little harder. But now, the realization has set in, piled high and crackling as the mul- berry leaves falling from those spear straight branches one more year; I have to do all of this forever. Fix the vacuum cleaner, kill the spiders, correct the spelling and make the math flash cards and pay for pre- school and trim the tree. Trim the tree.

Now, sometimes, I feel like a burro. A small frame, feet hard as hooves, back sagging a little. Now the edges of my life are a bit ragged, and things don’t always get done as they should.
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Susan Straight’s story is, unfortunately, writ over and over again in the lives of myriad American mothers whose husbands have left them, or who have themselves chosen to leave an unhappy marriage, or who never had a husband in the first place. In her words, she and the other ex-wives have no “backup,” and backup is “what marriage is really about.” So if she and her children look “slightly askew,” she asks us not to blame her. “When you see us, don’t shake your heads and think, How irresponsible. Responsible is all I’m good at any- more.”

In serial marriages, the husband often “marries down” in terms of age and is far more likely to start a new family. The ex-wife who remarries has a selection of males usually her own age or older, but fewer candi- dates to choose from, since there are more older women than older

men. For the same reasons, widows remarry less frequently than wid- owers. Another difference between older men and older women lies in the ability to reproduce. After menopause, a woman is unable to become pregnant (without technological intervention), in contrast to men, who usually can go on reproducing in their fifties, sixties, and beyond. Whether this is advisable, given the father’s probable death when his children are still young, the ability to reproduce at any age does confer a fundamental existential advantage to men.

At the same time, females have certain advantages over males. They live approximately seven years longer. They have the amazing possibil- ity of carrying babies within their bodies and of establishing a unique connection to their offspring through pregnancy and lactation. They are probably more flexible than men in terms of sexual orientation, moving more easily between heterosexual and same-sex relations (though not everyone will see this as an advantage). They more fre- quently establish close bonds of friendship with other women that are sources of deep pleasure and ongoing support, whereas men, in gen- eral, have fewer intimate friends.

One thing many women have learned during the past twenty to thirty years is that wifehood is not one’s only option. With women no longer economically dependent on men, they do not have to marry for the mere sake of survival. Business and professional women tend to defer marriage during early adulthood and sometimes do not marry at all. Susan Faludi’s assertion that “the more women are paid, the less eager they are to marry” should not surprise us.
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And even more than marriage per se, motherhood has become problematic for working women, given the “mommy gap” in wages between mothers and non- mothers. While the hourly wages of women without children are roughly 90 percent of men’s, the comparable figure for women with children is 70 percent.
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Thus women concerned about their present and future economic well-being are obliged to consider the effects of both marriage and motherhood on their working lives.