I won’t be reprinting any more oldies again this summer, as a regular posting schedule resumes on Monday. Alas, the links in the post below no longer work.
This post originally appeared Friday, March 11, 2005.
Stephanie links to this article in yesterday’s Independent: Desperate to be housewives: young women yearn for 1950s role as stay-at-home mums. An excerpt:
Research into the attitudes of 1,500 women with an average age of 29
found that 61 per cent believe "domestic goddess" role models who
juggle top jobs with motherhood and jet-set social lives are
"unhelpful" and "irritating". More than two-thirds agree that the man
should be the main provider in a family, while 70 per cent do not want
to work as hard as their mother’s generation. On average, the women
questioned want to "settle down" with their partner by 30 and have
their first child a year later.
Vicki Shotbolt, deputy chief executive of the National Family and
Parenting Institute, said: "This is the generation of young women who
have seen the ‘have it all’ ethos up close and personal, and they have
realised that it doesn’t work.
"Their own mothers may have tried to juggle motherhood and careers,
and it may have been the children who feel they lost out … I think
women really are coming of age now, and are accepting that it is
virtually impossible to have it all."
Stephanie writes in response:
I would have to agree, it’s very hard to try and have it all. In some
ways, I think I may have given up on the dream myself. That is a
problem. But I think the either/or solution we’ve resigned ourselves to
seems more likely to breed resentment than anything else. I don’t see
much point in agreeing that the best way to organize society is for men
to be the breadwinners and women the childrearers. That just
potentially limits everyone to a lifetime of unfulfillment. I know from
experience that unhappy parents make lousy parents so I’d argue that
doesn’t do the kids much good either.
I’m always encouraged when folks start questioning false dichotomies, as Stephanie does here. One important role feminists play in society is that of dreaming out loud; it’s vital that we have change agents questioning whether the given paradigm ought to be accepted as is. And in terms of social policy, it’s clear that much can be done to make it possible for both men and women to better balance family and work obligations.
That said, the title of the article bugged me. Obviously, it’s a riff on the TV show "Desperate Housewives." But I see nothing in the article that says that these young women actually want to return to the "1950s." (For what it’s worth, I’m tired of both sides in the culture war dragging in the 1950s. Conservatives need to stop idealizing it; progressives need to stop demonizing it. It was one decade, folks, and a complex and interesting one at that.) More to the point, why is it that we assume that the yearning for marriage and motherhood is somehow defective?
Feminists are often tarred as "anti-family", a charge that is, in general absurd. Most feminists desperately want to strengthen families by giving parents more time, more choices, more state and social support. But it’s true that among at least some in the women’s movement (and their male allies), there remains an ugly, patronizing, dismissiveness towards young women who genuinely aspire to marriage and motherhood. Mark, who commented at Stephanie’s place, wrote:
A disturbingly high number of women in college (at least in SE Ohio/N
Kentucky), do not want to work after graduating…
(Bold emphasis is mine.) This raises the question, is college really only about preparing people for the work force? (I sure hope not, because I have no idea how next week’s lecture on the Peloponnesian War is going to help anyone.) What about college as an opportunity to engage new ideas, a place to be challenged, and a time to discover what one really wants? And what about the possibility that some rational, intelligent, interesting and creative young women might conclude "Hey, the more I think about it, the more I realize that nothing is likely to be more fulfilling to me than raising a family." Why must we assume that she is a victim of low expectations? Is it not possible that such women have weighed their options, considered their choices, and made a heartfelt decision? As feminists and pro-feminists, should we not be interested in empowering young women to live out their hopes and dreams?
More specifically, are we so sure that if high-quality, subsidized day-care was widely available, every woman who wishes to stay home would suddenly change her mind? Mind you, I’m a big believer in high-quality, low-cost day care! But I’ve known enough women who could afford the best day-care, and chose to stay home anyway, to know that not all mothers approach the issue in precisely the same manner.
I’ve written a few times that I want to raise up young feminists and pro-feminists. I want my female students to be aware of the tremendous, varied possibilities for their lives that may not have existed for their mothers and fore-mothers. I want them to challenge themselves and take risks. But I don’t presume to tell them that a high-paying career in the workforce is superior to building a loving home and raising children. My goal is not to empower them to live out an ideological agenda; my goal is to empower them to lead lives that will be both personally fulfilling and socially beneficial. I don’t know what each one of them will find fulfilling, but I am damn sure that different choices will please different people in different ways. And to those young women who want to prioritize children over career and marriage over management, I say "Good on you." It’s the same exact thing I’ve said to young women who pledge never to marry, and devote their lives to public service. But when it comes to the future dreams of my students, I will not create a hierarchy of wants, in which certain desires are validated and others are shamed. To do so would go against everything I have been taught that real feminism is.
And you know, when it comes to time and children and life itself, we really can’t have it all our way all the time. I know it’s Friday, but the best lines on this subject come from the great W.B. Yeats:
The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.
It’s clear where Yeats’ sympathies lie. And mine.
Thank you for re-posting this. I wrote about my genuine desire to be a stay-at-home mother a couple of days ago over at my place. Getting engaged rather young does make me think about these things a lot more than most of my friends my age.
I find a lot of encouragement at conservative Christian blogs, such as Crystal of Biblical Womanhood, because they are really uplifting for future homemakers. You can’t really find that in the mainstream feminist blogsphere as often. Of course, I don’t want to dedicate my entire life to being a homemaker, but I plan on it while my kids are little.
I want to learn how to knit, make homemade pies, cook great meals, garden and all that domestic stuff. I REALLY like doing those kinds of things. I also love going to school and preparing for my future career. It helps that my fiance is open to being a stay-at-home dad, too. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
“Is it not possible that such women have weighed their options, considered their choices, and made a heartfelt decision?”
See, the thing is, it would be possible if women weren’t being pushed to do just this all the time, since they’re born. Parents push for grandchildren; everyone asks “so, when will you be having kids?” once you’re married/you have a boyfriend/etc. (Heaven forbid you’re a lesbian, too.)
Personally, I think this has more to do with the awful economic system we’re in. Capitalism isn’t much fun, especially for the people at the bottom. And once you’re at the bottom, it’s REALLY hard to get up to the top, given that most of the power and money has been consolidated into – what was it, 1% of American society? Yeah, something like that. I don’t want to work; screw that! I’m the kind of person who goes from one thing to the next, like a butterfly to flowers, finding the next passion and the next and the next – I’m NOT cut out for the same old thing everyday. And I don’t want kids. But you can’t be a “valid” housewife if you don’t have kids – and besides, with my tastes swinging towards the feminine side of the spectrum, I couldn’t force my partner to support us both, especially with the pay gap (up to $.76/$1 in 2005! Whoohoo!).
So I think you have to look at all sides of this issue. Capitalism is no fun, so given the glamourisation of motherhood, the latter seems like an ideal choice. Ya know?
Especially, Hugo, as women have started to pick up on the fact that many men (including your own self) who glorify homemaking and being at-home full time don’t make that fulfilling, honorable choice themselves.
“Isn’t it possible” is a cop-out; anything’s possible. But as any good feminist knows, choices aren’t made in a vacuum. Are you encouraging your male students to wonder about how they will “have it all”? Do you tell your male students that they need to put a hold on those career ambitions and think about, maybe, giving it up for the more fulfilling work of being at home with their kids full-time? Do you warn your female students that nobody ever, on their deathbed, said “I wish I’d spent more time scrubbing baby vomit off the floor”?
(Mermade, none of this is meant as a criticism of your wanting to be at home, btw. The issue isn’t the choice that’s made; it’s the process of choosing and the pressure to make certain choices.)
Thank you, mythago. I appreciate your imput on this, knowing that you have a career and three kids. And thank you very much for that last sentence.
What mythago said. There are many men who have no interest in joining the rat race and would love to stay home. Maybe some day our culture will be more accepting of that. Because of how I was raised, in a military family, I always assumed I would get married and have kids and be the homemaker and fill the support role. Thank God my first engagement in my early 20s to a med school student didn’t pan out!
Given the opportunity to mature before marriage was key for me. I want children but have no interest in being a traditional homemaker – not my cup of tea. Had I not had the chance to find that out about myself I would have followed the path of least resistance and would have ended up miserable. I love outside-of-the-home-work and am rather good at it.
My mother was a homemaker, a great one, but after 32 yrs of marriage my parents divorced and it sucks for her. Given the realities that most people deal with, isn’t it time to move on from this stereotype?
Luckily I waited to find the right partner, someone who is open to doing whatever is best for our future kids.
If you read the piece carefully, folks, I’m writing for those women who have considered their other options — I’m not endorsing blind acceptance of a culturally-imposed paradigm!
And in my men and masculinity class, you’re darned right we look at what it means to be a stay at home husband who does the largest share of housework and child care…
Hugo, “looking at what it means” is not the same thing as encouraging men to make that choice, or discussing being an at-home dad as something equally, or more, fulfilling than being Mr. Bacon-Bringer. It’s also not the same as your female students thinking about why “can I have it all?” is not a question their boyfriends or husbands are asking themselves.
In principle, I don’t see any problem with a young woman–or a young man–deciding that what he/she wants to do with his/her life (or at least the next 20 years of it) is to keep house for the spouse and raise kids. However, as mythago points out, the decision is not made in a vacuum. Many people, including yourself, glorify childrearing in ways that only those who have never done it full time would even consider. There are considerable social pressures on young women to sacrifice themselves so that their partners’ careers can flourish or they can raise the accepted 2.5 children or so that their aging parents or grandparents don’t have to live in a nursing home. Men, for the most part, are less subject to these pressures.
But putting that aside, suppose that the choice is made freely and without coercion. There is still another issue to consider: Being a homemaker/childrearer is a high risk job. No job security at all is given–the husband (using for the moment the male=breadwinner, female=homemaker assumption for simplicity’s sake) can divorce the wife at any moment, leaving her with little recourse and little chance of getting alimony or child support. The husband can die. If either of those things occur, the now ex-housewife will be on the job market with out-of-date skills and no experience. Not very likely to be able to earn a good living. If the above occurs while the children are young, she may get some sympathy, but if, say, a 55 year old woman with 3 children aged 20, 23, and 25 is divorced by her 58 year old partner after being his unpaid maid/nanny for 30 years, and she seeks alimony, rather than try to find a job, possibly for the first time in her life, how will she be seen? As a lazy, whiny woman who just wants a free ride. Even worse, what if the money making partner is abusive or cheats? Can the wife even get alimony and child support if she asks for the divorce? So a woman who decides to be the unpaid servant of her husband puts herself at risk of getting trapped in an abusive situation. Of course, being an unpaid job, there is no social security, no unemployment, no disability…Really, as jobs go, it’s terrible.
Until there is some acknowledgement that women who spend their time raising children and supporting their husband’s careers (or men who do the same for their wives) are contributing economically and otherwise to the world and some way of compensating them for doing so, I don’t see that staying home and raising kids is going to be a very safe or responsible option. Hence, the need to romanticize it to make it attractive. Having “a yearning for marriage and motherhood” sounds so much better than “stuffed so full of propoganda as to be willing to surrender control of her life to a stranger”. If someone does want to do so, fine, that’s their choice. But they ought to know the facts about what it’s really like to be in that situation, not the flowery and false promises that the media puts up to pretend that it’s all so lovely.
The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
Oh, and I’d be more impressed by Yeat’s sympathies if he’d married Maud, given up poetry, raised her kids, and spent his spare time supporting her work as a protector of the poor in Ireland. As it is, Yeats chose the first and is simply waxing nostalgic for what he doesn’t have. A common behavior for people, but one that obscures the reality.
Hugo said: ” But when it comes to the future dreams of my students, I will not create a hierarchy of wants, in which certain desires are validated and others are shamed.”
What about the desires of those of us who choose not only to avoid having kids, but also who do not want to support other peoples’ lifestyle choices, e.g., subsidizing their kids’ childcare so that they can chase the dream of ‘having it all?’ It’s mighty selfish of people to make other folks shoulder the burden of their personal lifestyle choices. For example, I might want to quit my job, hang out and learn to play the banjo, and who knows, maybe even contribute some lasting cultural benefit to society in the form of enduring art, but why should you and others subsidize my choice to do so by forking over cash so I can buy, in my case, ‘adult care?’ Similarly, if/when I am compelled to fork over dough to raise a kid, do I also get some say into how the kid is raised so s/he doesn’t end up a crackhead, criminal, etc., and thus, a further burden on society? Sorry folks, but life is a zero sum game: We’re only given so much time on earth and we can’t rewind it, so our choices matter.
And it’s easy for people of privilege like Hugo and mythago (who on her website one time blogged about being raised with household servants, etc., such that she had never had to vacuum a floor until her second or third divorce) to ‘talk the talk’ re. subsidizing daycare via taxing people. Well-to-do leftist yuppies seem to regularly suggest such things (maybe they secretly go along with the “only the little people pay taxes” riff) but for most of us budgets are tight. And I’m not talking about trying to figure out how to fit the next vacation to Europe, South Africa, South America, etc., the next membership fee to the health spa, country club, etc. I’m talking about people like me who work on budgeting things like rent/mortgage, taxes, food, more taxes, transportation, more taxes, etc., and still have the money left over to go to a concert (do you appreciate how costly tickets are these days?) once in a while. The last thing I need is for such people to saddle me with more taxes.
And finally, Hugo, I hope you’re just a quick to encourage women to get out and earn family income equally to their husbands (the so-called “pay gap” is a myth, it’s an earnings gap) if they expet him to do equal housework. But somehow, I doubt it.
her second or third divorce
Uh, dude. Wrong blog.
Maybe I should get divorced again, though. Apparently on the MRA Planet it’s a ticket to female riches, and I could afford that vacation to South America instead of worrying about rent!
Many people, including yourself, glorify childrearing in ways that only those who have never done it full time would even consider.
And in ways that only those who would never consider doing it full-time would even consider. Hugo’s made it plain in the past that the glorious, wonderful and honored work of childrearing and caretaking are things he’s more than happy to leave to others.
To be fair, mythago, I’m also happy to outsource a great many other things, like the growing of my food and the changing of my oil and the cutting of my hair.
I’m with you on this post, Hugo (and bet you’re horrified to hear that!). OF COURSE, you will never convince the people living in mythological-land that any woman “really” educated about her options will not choose multiple divorces and misandry as a way of life.
But this is all really a minor side issue to the point I made, isn’t it?
As for your remark to Hugo re. leaving chores to others, do you still eschew cleaning, etc., and make your househusband do it along with the childcare, or do you both get the benefit of housekeeper as well as a Nanny or Au Pair? For that matter, do you cut your own grass, change the oil in your car, clean the catboxes, take your trash to the dump, etc.? People like you who grew up with wealth and privilege really have no business lecturing others about hiring other people do at least some of the less desirable work that we might otherwise do.
The only thing is, mother/father is NOT paid. MRA types are even trying to get rid of community property, so it’s not even INDIRECTLY paid. If you have a gap in your work history, or you admit that you’re a mother, you are not going to be able to make a lot of money. As a society, we need children, but we don’t value it enough to put a dollar amount on it. It’s considered a frivolity, and not a necessary component (a la Mr. Bad, thank you very much).
So, you’re basically encouraging poverty.
But this is all really a minor side issue to the point I made, isn’t it?
Oh dear. And here I thought you were a stickler for accuracy. Are you confusing my blog with Table Talk again?
or do you both get the benefit of housekeeper as well as a Nanny or Au Pair?
Well, there’s the French au pair, but that’s only when we visit our chateau in the Loire. When we’re at one of our West Coast homes I’m afraid we have to make do with just the housekeeper and the butler–we’re not rich, you know.
To be fair, mythago, I’m also happy to outsource a great many other things
Do you also tell your working-class students how wonderful it is that they can make the fulfilling choice of working as auto mechanics or daycare providers, while teaching your middle-class or wealthy students to have a little perspective on what their servants are doing?
The issue isn’t whether we respect people who do jobs we aren’t or won’t do. The issue is that you’re preaching a gendered, rigid message of “fulfillment” and pretending that those choices are made in a vacuum, without any cultural or familiar pressure on women to be primary caretakers (and on men to be primary breadwinners).
Don’t make the common mistake of deciding that things you like are outside the lens of feminist discourse.
Well myth, I explained how I got to your blog, but since Hugo saw fit to censor it the line you’re responding to (the second paragraph in my original post) appears to be a non sequitor. Suffice it to say that it was indeed your blog, even if you won’t admit that I was there, posted, and unless you were asleep at the wheel, saw my post. But no matter, just pull a Marcotte and re-write history!
Mr. Bad -
We need the next generation, without it we’d be in real trouble, for example – how old do you think your care staff will be when you’re geriatric? I’m not sure if euthenasia is legal in the US but if not you will have to rely on those ”lifestyle choices” you currenty have no interest in supporting. I’m sure they won’t be queueing up to tend to your every bodily necessity either – but lets hope for your sake that if the need arises, and the odds are that at some point it will, they do. So even if, as individuals, we’re not responsible for producing any children, their welfare and that of those who care for them is a universal responsibilty. Parenting has to be the most important, if often not the most glamorous, contribution a person can make on this earth and if done badly (as you have pointed out Mr. Bad) or without necessary support is disastrous.
Hugo –
I’m often perplexed by this issue and have sometimes thought that a wage and working status for whoever parents children full – time (man or woman) could be the answer, but of course this system would be open to abuse and burreacratic curruption. I suppose the only answer is to be in a relationship with someone who you trust implicitly not to do the dirty and land you high and dry at the end of it. But who can guaruntee that. I really admire people brave enough to do this, but for myself, I think shared responsibilty would have to be the only way. I wouldn’t want to leave my kid/kids with someone else, for me the whole point of having them is to raise them yourself – otherwise I’d just sponsor a load of starving kids in Africa or some equivalent
I suppose the only answer is to be in a relationship with someone who you trust implicitly not to do the dirty and land you high and dry at the end of it. But who can guarantee that
That’s just it — some of what we’re talking about here is rooted in a sense of vulnerability, which in turn is rooted in an expectation of male irresponsibility. That expectation is, often, well-founded. And thus transforming men (back to my old favorite issue) is the key. We are all — male and female alike — more willing to be dependent on those who are dependable.
I also meant men who want to be full-time parents being able to trust women not to leave them high and dry… I think one of the biggest problems with this issue is that our culture does not openly understand or value the parenting role. It’s acceptable to abandon the full – time parent.
Suffice it to say that it was indeed your blog
I have no idea whether you were indeed at mythago’s blog, but are wildly misremembering the contents, or whether you are accurately remembering the contents of a completely different blog, but I’m pretty darn sure that what you’re describing isn’t mythago’s life. It sounds more like somebody’s satirical take on Caitlin Flanagan, with a couple more divorces. FWIW.
Well myth, I explained how I got to your blog
I assume you clicked on my name like anyone else, but as there doesn’t seem to be a comment by a “Mr. Bad” there (plus the confusion about ‘third divorce’) I still think you’re confusing your bloggers. And I’m really not sure why you’re trying to derail the thread with rants about taxes and outsourcing.
That’s just it — some of what we’re talking about here is rooted in a sense of vulnerability, which in turn is rooted in an expectation of male irresponsibility.
Or rooted in a sense of reality. Even the most responsible man can unexpectedly die, or develop a mental disorder, or become unable to provide for his family. Yes, insurance and planning help with these things, but the fact is that in a one-earner family, when one paycheck goes away, you don’t lose half the family’s income; you lose ALL of it.
myth, you are the one who made an issue about “outsourcing,” i’m simply calling you on it because people of privilege like you and Hugo are the ones who contribute the most to the outsourcing in the service industry sector of our economy, yet at the same time ask those of us of lesser means to take the hit via taxes and otherwise support your inane ideas. As for taxes, since Hugo and others advocate subsidized daycare, etc., in my book that means taxes, unless of course you are trying to make the case that what you/they really mean is private entity support for daycare (and other) subsidies to social ‘safety net’ programs. Yeah, like that’s gonna happen any time soon.
The only way I might be seen as “derailing the thread” as you call it us that I’m not singing in the feminist choir, yelling “amen sister” to all and sundry comments supportive of feminist and PC suggestions, and otherwise towing the Party Line.
Too bad – my allies and I are here to stay, whether you like it or not. Get used to it.
leapfrog, the reality is that without social support for “the next generation” there still will be plenty of people to carry on and have kids, and IMHO those will be the truly responsible ones who able to do so in a, well, resposible manner and not foist their choices onto the rest of us. In fact, I’m with the First and Second Wave feminists who think that there are far too many humans on planet earth and thus birth control (including abortion) is a reasonable and IMHO necessary thing. Even without the “welfare queens” as Reagan called them, there still will be pleny of babies to take care of you, me, et al. No, I don’t buy for one second that I need to contribute to the maintenance of another single mother family on welfare (whether that be public assistance or private welfare, i.e., court-imposed so-called ‘child support’): In fact, since single mother families produce the majority of criminals, I’d be happy to see them eliminated. Let responsible people who can afford to raise kids have those kids and stop enabling deadbeats to do so via the dole. I know: Blasphemy!! Heretic!! Burn Mr. Bad at the stake!!
Mr. Bad, given that this is a feminist blog, I think it’s time for you to take another break. The MRAs seem to be drifiting back, and as I’ve said before, the focus of this blog is a pro-feminist one. Comments need to be respectful of that.
You and the lads can do your thing at Stand Your Ground, but take a break from here.
Wow. That’s a new standard for spinning off into incoherence.
Hugo, still waiting for you to address the ON-topic discussion.
That’s just it — some of what we’re talking about here is rooted in a sense of vulnerability, which in turn is rooted in an expectation of male irresponsibility. That expectation is, often, well-founded. And thus transforming men (back to my old favorite issue) is the key.
Male irresponsibility is one problem, but not the only one or even, IMHO, the key one. The most responsible man in the world can die, leaving his work-inexperienced partner and children without needed support, financial and otherwise. (Yes, a responsible man would have life insurance, but insurance at a level that will truly replace his income for life or even until the children are adult is often prohibitively expensive.) And it also sets up a potentially nasty double bind for both partners. Suppose one or the other is miserable in the marriage. Not because the other partner is abusive, disloyal, or even unpleasant, just because they are no longer in love and don’t like living intimately with someone that they don’t love. But the wife is stuck because she has no work history and therefore no reasonable expectation of being able to support herself and her children if she leaves. The husband is stuck because, being a responsible guy, he doesn’t want to leave his wife destitute and possibly emotionally devistated and feeling like a failure. So they continue on their miserable way, making their children miserable as well because they feel they have no alternative. Responsibility is wonderful and I agree with you entirely that teaching men (and women) to be more responsible is a good thing. But being independent beats being dependent, no matter how responsible and reliable the person you are dependent on. Bluntly put, your dependent is never really your equal and having an intimate relationship with a non-equal is not the ideal, no matter how responsible you are.
I’m also happy to outsource a great many other things, like the growing of my food and the changing of my oil and the cutting of my hair.
Outsourcing is one thing. But outsourcing without compensation is quite another. Do you ask the farmer growing your food to grow the food for free out of love and because farming, being close to the earth, is so much more fulfilling than anything you do and not to worry, you’lll provide them with whatever they need (as a gift, of course, not because they earned it through their work, but out of your own benevolence)? Do you try to convince young people from lower class backgrounds that they should become (unpaid) farmers because they are biologically meant for it? Do you go around saying that we shouldn’t assume that having a high powered career is more fulfilling than living off the land and that the only problem with the system is that the consumers are sometimes “irresponsible” and don’t support farmers as they should?
Mr. Bad – even responsible people with good jobs need support when bringing up kids, and do you really think many of these off spring of wealthy, supportive parents who you hold as an ideal will want to spend their professional lives as low paid carers/bin men etc. Especially in this Reaganite/Mr. Bad vision of the future where they won’t be allowed to have children because they don’t have enough money. Children of high achieving parents are also, on the whole, high achieving and are not usually keen on devoting themselves, professionally, to other peoples’ basic needs. Wealth is not a good deciding factor of who should be able to reproduce – we’d end up with a very inbalanced society. Btw, I have no intention of pursuading you of anything – I just enjoy fine tuning my opinions.
I am so glad Dianne brought up the independence issue. Every time I’ve argued this point with people I’ve been told in one way or another that I’m attacking “love†and am doom- and-gloom in my pragmatism, the biggest buzz kill ever. Hello – the divorce rate?? Best intentions and all, pu-leeze.
As I said my parent’s divorce did not benefit my mother, the homemaker, the amazing woman with a degree in journalism. As we moved around the world following my father’s various Navel Officer’s assignments, my mother played her role spectacularly. She never was able to get a job in journalism, in those days military wives were not seen as good potential employees – having to move around and all that. Just before their divorce my father, retired from the military, was laid off from his government contractor job and decided to just pack it in. He now lives in a mobile home; he lives a life of leisure. No alimony there. Since the divorce my mother became an ESL teacher, which is a part time job in our state. She expects to have to work until she dies.
So in today’s work climate of mergers, closures, outsourcing, smartshoring, and now in my fortune 500 company “homeshoringâ€, it seems that virtually no job outside the service industry is ‘secure’. I think couples need to have major contingency plans in place to account for the instability of America’s current situation if only one person is working and you have children.
All the women who pointed out the fragility of the life of a homemaker, how it hangs on a thread, and hangs on one in a way we never truly ask men’s lives to hang–yes, you said it.
Only to girls and women does our society truly say: “You have a choice of working, if you want to. But if you don’t want to, and you are lucky enough to have a man fall in love with you, you can let him support you and any children you may have. I don’t mean that he will give you money as recompense for what you give him–I mean, he will pay all the bills for your life BECAUSE he loves you and you love him. You will have no money of your own, nothing you can truly say is yours and that you need account to no one for. But you wil have a promise of support in return for love. Which is, unfortunately, subject to withdrawal at any time if the man should die, become incapacitated or just plain fall out of love with you. And of course, if you fall out of love with him, you’re on your own, dear.”
Honestly, it’s a wonder more women don’t look at this whole concept with a more critical eye than they do. Why do we let ourselves get blinded by romance?
It’s no different from the argument put forth by some slaveowners that slaves were actually better off than free black men because they were given free living quarters, food, clothing and medical care by their masters, whereas a free black man had to go out and find a job and pay for all those things for himself or he ran the risk of being starving, naked and homeless. The fact that one man was getting his livelihood supplied to him free, while the other had to pay for it, was NOT THE POINT. The point was whether or not one man should have absolute ownership and control over another. If you believe it is morally wrong for men to own other men, you cannot condone slavery. You just can’t.
Women who choose to become homemakers may not be slaves–no one forced them into their servitude–but the way I see it, they are a kind of indentured servant. Only the contract they sign is for life, or whenever the other party sees fit to broach it, whichever comes first.
We need to strip the romance off the labels we choose to affix to the relationships men and women choose to form if we want them to get any better. And if that makes me sound like a radical feminist, too bad. I don’t have a problem with anyone, male or female, choosing to be a homemaker; what I have a problem with is how that seems to make them magically no longer worthy of being paid for their choice, but dependent entirely on an arrangement in which they get free room, board, etc., but all is doled out by the generosity of the laboring person with whom they have chosen to pair themselves.
One interesting aspect of gay palimony suits (such as there have been) is how they strip away the male-female role-playing expectations we have of couples and are decided on the basis of what evidence there was that one of the parties in the relationship truly agreed to support the other in return for such chores as housekeeping and child rearing, and whether or not the supporting party owes something to the supported party if and when the relationship ends. Sometimes it’s a matter of one party’s word against the other, with one claiming “I quit my job because he promised to support me” and the other saying “Not so–we both agreed that if we parted we’d each take out what we came in with.” If the supported party wants to prove he’s lost his earning power through voluntarily leaving the workforce with expectation of support, or that he deserves a chunk of the financial wealth his ex partner has, he has to supply hard evidence of it.
It’s easy to recognize that a gay man or a lesbian who trusts his or her partner to suppport himr or her and quits a job to care for their home, etc., without having such an arrangement written in a contract, is taking a huge risk. Why is it not so for husbands and wives?
Some wives think they are protected by the marriage laws of their state, and that they would never find themselves in the trouble that gay people who cannot marry may find themselves in if a partner dumps them. Then they come in for a rude awakening when their husband wants a divorce and their lawyer tells them what those laws really are.
Nothing about that is very romantic at all.