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Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Let's see how happy these wives are when they get traded in for someone younger and firmer
Posted by Jill | 6:25 AM

John Tierney is REALLY threatened by accomplished women. Right on the heels of yesterday's Paul Krugman column and recent reports about how middle-class incomes are falling, Tierney is beating the "stay-at-home wives are the happiest" drum:

But it turns out that an equal division of labor didn't make husbands more affectionate or wives more fulfilled. The wives working outside the home reported less satisfaction with their husbands and their marriages than did the stay-at-home wives. And among those with outside jobs, the happiest wives, regardless of the family's overall income, were the ones whose husbands brought in at least two-thirds of the money.

These male providers-in-chief were regarded fondly by even the most feminist-minded women — the ones who said they believed in dividing duties equally. In theory these wives were egalitarians, but in their own lives they preferred more traditional arrangements.

"Women today expect more help around the home and more emotional engagement from their husbands," Wilcox says. "But they still want their husbands to be providers who give them financial security and freedom."

These results, of course, are just averages. Plenty of people are happy with different arrangements — including Nock, who makes less than his wife and does the cooking at home. He says that nontraditional marriages may be a strain on many women simply because they've been forced to be social pioneers. "As society adjusts to women's new roles," he says, "women may become happier in egalitarian marriages."

But I'd bet there's a limit to egalitarianism. Consider what's happened with housework, that perpetual sore point. From the 1960's through the 80's, wives cut back on housework as husbands did more. In the 1990's, though, the equalizing trend leveled off, leaving wives still doing nearly twice as much of the work at home.

That seems terribly unfair unless you look at how men and women behave when they're living by themselves: the women do twice as much housework as the men do. Single men do less cooking and cleaning, because those jobs don't seem as important to them. They can live with unmade beds and frozen dinners.

Similarly, there's a gender gap in enthusiasm for some outside jobs. Men are much more willing to take a job that pays a premium in exchange for long hours away from home or the risk of being killed. The extra money doesn't seem as important to women.

In a more egalitarian world, there would be more wives mining coal and driving trucks, and more husbands cooking dinners and taking children to doctor's appointments. But that wouldn't be a fairer world, as Nock and Wilcox found.

The happiest wives in their study were the ones who said that housework was divided fairly between them and their husbands. But those same happy wives also did more of the work at home while their husbands did more work outside home. Nock doesn't claim to have divined the feminine soul, but he does have one answer to Freud's question.

"A woman wants equity," he says. "That's not necessarily the same as equality."


And why WOULDN'T a world in which there were women mining coal and driving trucks and husbands cooking dinner be fairer, Mr. Tierney? Because it doesn't fit into your worldview?

Now, I can't imagine anyone wanting to mine coal, but that aside -- a world in which couples are free to make their own rules, in which women don't feel they're "settling" if they marry someone who earns less and men don't feel emasculated if they aren't the primary breadwinner.

The housework issue has always been one which does nothing but cause fights, because most men really don't care all that much about housework. We have one bathroom that pretty much belongs to Mr. Brilliant, and every now and then he'll clean it. But I do not make myself nuts about it in the meantime, nor do I make myself crazy about housework in general, because the dust will just come back anyway, and why spend the day cleaning when you can go to a movie?

The fact of the matter is that for as long as I've been around, no woman has EVER been able to afford to rely entirely on a husband for sustenance. Divorce was around long before the feminist movement, as I know from my own childhood. My mother may have wanted me to marry a doctor who could support me in the style to which she wanted me to be accustomed, but she also always told me I should be able to earn a living. That I ended up as a control freak who was unable by disposition to delegate the responsibility for keeping a roof over my head to a high-earning male is beside the point.

As usual, Tierney oversimplifies the causes of the phenomena he sees around him. Yes, there are more women today than 20 years ago who want to be stay-at-home wives. I think much of this is caused by their observance of the exhausting 18-hour days that working wives put in. But instead of a more family-friendly, flexible workplace evolving as a result of the changing family, the exodus of career-path jobs has created a situation where most people don't dare take a day off to go to their kids' school play, lest they be seen as dispensable by employers just champing at the bit to send their jobs overseas. And what happens to the single-earner family when the breadwinner's job is eliminated? Ask the auto workers at GM and Ford. Ask the IT workers at HP and IBM whose jobs have been eliminated. Ask any number of men over 40 whose wives have never worked and who now find themselves tapping their 401(k) money to pay the mortgage. The single-earner family is no boon for men, either, I don't care what John Tierney says.

As for women not being willing to take jobs that pay a premium but involve more time away from home, I can tell you that business travel is still an uncomfortable experience for women. I'm at an age now where I can sit in a hotel restaurant by myself and order a nice dinner without feeling intimidated, and I certainly no longer get hassled by men. But I still wouldn't feel comfortable going out by myself at night in a strange town. Men have far greater mobility in terms of occupying their non-work time on the road, and I would guess they have far less reticence about occupying themselves in ways their spouses would probably not be thrilled to know about. When I'm on the road, I spend evenings holed up in a hotel room with nothing but a laptop, a WiFi card, HBO, and a Diet Coke for company.

But the biggest consideration for women who think that the life of a stay-at-home wife and mother is preferable isn't the boredom, or the limits to such a life. It's that age happens. No women knows when or if her husband is going to decide that she no longer reflects the still-youthful image he has of himself and trade her in for someone younger -- perhaps someone he met during one of those trips he takes for that higher-paying job. No women knows when her husband will tire of hearing "Jacob this" and "Jacob did that" and Jacob Jacob Jacob Jacob Jacob Jacob Jacob Jacob Jacob Jacob Jacob Jacob until he's ready to swat both his wife AND his son Jacob with a claw hammer.

Whether John Tierney likes it or not, the working woman is here to stay. She's here to stay because she has to be, because in the society that the party he admires has created, most families are two pretty damn insecure jobs away from poverty. In one-earner households, they are only one job away.
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