As a little present to you all, I give you the latest bomb thrown in the national conversation about women and work. Kathe forwarded it to me a couple of days ago and I should have posted on it then. I had to watch Naomi Wolf and Caitlin Flanagan go at it on the Today show this morning. Damn it. One of the perks of the blog is getting in the first word.
OK, here's your Friday present.
Michael Noer writes in Forbes.com:
Guys: A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career.Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women--even those with a "feminist" outlook--are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner....
If a host of studies are to be believed, marrying these women is asking for trouble. If they quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003). They will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Social Forces, 2006). You will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2001). You will be more likely to fall ill (American Journal of Sociology). Even your house will be dirtier (Institute for Social Research).
The guy seems to be saying that women should be kept uneducated, because educated women cheat. The best way to keep your wife from cheating is to prevent her from meeting other men outside the home. He is certainly not suggesting that men pick up any of the housecleaning slack. Read the whole thing and rant away in the comment section. Merry Christmas.
The grain of truth in the article -- dual career families are very difficult to maintain. He cites studies such one by Gary Becker who found that life gets harder when both people work.
In classic economics, a marriage is, at least in part, an exercise in labor specialization. Traditionally men have tended to do "market" or paid work outside the home and women have tended to do "non-market" or household work, including raising children. All of the work must get done by somebody, and this pairing, regardless of who is in the home and who is outside the home, accomplishes that goal. Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker argued that when the labor specialization in a marriage decreases--if, for example, both spouses have careers--the overall value of the marriage is lower for both partners because less of the total needed work is getting done, making life harder for both partners and divorce more likely.
If both people work 80 hours a week, they aren't going to know each other very well. Outsourcing the housework and childcare doesn't mean that there is no work to do in that department, and it is usually the woman who picks up those chores. Until government and businesses make some important changes in their structure, dual career families will continue to be under stress.
One theme running through this article and through this comment thread is the fear that men have become superfluous. If 20% of women now outearn their husbands and the husbands still fail to do their share of the housework, some women are going to dump the dead weight. That's got to put some fear into guys and they might start looking for women that need them.
Another theme is the longing for the past. Sometimes the past isn't so far away. After spending an evening with my folks and watching my dad who has no responsibilities other than the lawn and his writing, even my super enlightened husband might may make a comment about the good old days. "Where's my slippers and a pipe?", he asks. "Have you looked up your ass, dear?" Oh my, our marriage is doomed.
UPDATE: Think Progress has the FOX News reaction.
Some possible alternative titles to this piece:
"Warning: free your indentured servant and she may leave you!"
"Keeping your wife barefoot and pregnant as the road to marital success"
"Why change your ways when you can just find a woman too stupid to know any better?"
"Divorce: always the wife's fault"
Or as Rebecca Traister suggests:
"If You Are Really Self-Loathing and Weak, Try to Find Someone Who Doesn't Work and Will Consent to Live With You Out of Financial Desperation for the Rest of Her Life"
Posted by: jen | August 25, 2006 at 10:34 AM
Page 133 of this paper has some interesting divorce statistics from Norway. It is better to marry someone with a high level of education, even if you are a man with a low level of education. If I am reading the chart right the high/high (wife/husband) education level has about 1/4 the divorce rate of the low/low education level.
Additional education while married, especially additional education by the wife, leads to an increase of the divorce rate. I think because it is destabilizing.
Posted by: joe o | August 25, 2006 at 12:06 PM
Reminds me of the old Seinfeld routine:
Damn straight, Jerry.
Posted by: Camera Obscura | August 25, 2006 at 02:21 PM
I'm a young career wife, I suspect Noer is right.
In my 3 years of marriage we've had it three ways: me at home and him at work, him at home and me at work, and careers for both of us.
Being a 2-career couple is tremendously stressful. It greatly increases exhaustion, aggravation, household disorder, and general martial strife. We have trouble coordinating transportation and vacation time, we have lots of schedule conflicts, and we spend Saturday nights doing chores. (These conflicts disappeared when either one of us was as home.) My husband wants to start a family; I'm relucant now because it's bound to affect my career.
My husband constantly has to compete with my job for attention and energy. We both come home to a cold house, microwave dinners, great piles of laundry, and a worn-out spouse. Both of us have to compete with co-workers who have an at-home spouse, and who can work late hours because their homes, lawns, meals, and paperwork are taken care of. I can certainly understand how the pressure of maintaining two careers could contribute to divorce.
Laura, I think there's a distinction here between being careerist and being educated. Most of us didn't marry or start serious careers until our education (at least undergrad) was finished, and not everyone goes to college with the intent of having an intense (or even full-time) job.
Posted by: Mrs. Ewer | August 25, 2006 at 03:59 PM
"If both people work 80 hours a week, they aren't going to know each other very well."
Why do both people work 80 hours a week? Is that what it means to be careerist?
I think that's overkill. Basically, assume it takes 80 hours a week of paid outside-the-home work to maintain a household. One spouse can do all 80 and the other can stay at home. And the spouses will spend 80 hours a week apart. Or, they can split it 40-40 and work at approximately the same times, and they will spend only 40 hours a week apart.
My husband and I both love our jobs. I in particular am a bit Type A. And neither of us works 80 hours a week. Even when he stayed at the office till 9 in order to get a project done before Fed Ex closed (back in our Manhattan DINK days), he'd be working 60 hours a week at most.
Posted by: WendyW | August 25, 2006 at 04:14 PM
2 career famiilies are very tough to maintain. Though I've been home nearly full time since the kids were born, I've always worked part time either teaching or doing research. I kept breathing life into my career with the plan of returning to it as soon as I could. Which meant that I work in the evening and the weekends. The kids always have one parent with them, but we don't all get to spend time together at the same time. It means rushed hands offs and quarrels when one parent isn't hushing the children, so the other can work.
My career, however feeble it is, has had a toll on the family. Especially since we don't need the money. We're very frugal and got used to living on air as graduate students. We don't need anything more. Sometimes I feel guilty.
I picked a career that I really do like a lot, so I'm going to try to ramp it up now. I think there are some minor for my family, if I'm content. For other women, careers bring some real benefits of security, power, and sanity. I've said before that there is a tension between the needs of a family and the woman.
This guy may be right that dual career family are tricky, but his solution is stupid. There is no returning to the wife who fetches the slippers. Dream on, dude. Instead, men could choose to stay home or both partners could slow down a bit.
Posted by: Laura | August 25, 2006 at 04:35 PM
yeah, wendy. careers come in different forms and with different hour requirements. If you influde commute time, my husband works at least 60 hours, but he's been getting hell for leaving early. His co-workers put in 80 hours. He said that one guy at his office sleeps with his blackberry and regularly answers e-mails in the middle of the night. I could just have skewed Manhattan picture of careers.
Posted by: Laura | August 25, 2006 at 04:39 PM
Well, that's just it. A wife who works full-time, pulls down half or more of the couple's income, AND still has to do most of the housework, child care, kin work etc. while hubby enjoys loads of "me time" is probably going to question whether this is worth it.
This dynamic is not new (see Katie Nolan in "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn") but increasingly, wives are not going to put up with lazy husbands.
Conversely, I don't know any men who want to marry uneducated women. IME - and I can back this up with social studies statistics, and I would be happy to find links and cites if need be - men want educated women with careers, or the potential thereof. Even if the wife takes some time off for childrearing, she can still start her career afresh once the kiddoes get to school age. In this day and age, it's good to have two incomes, or at least a backup earner if the primary breadwinner loses his job.
Finally, an excellent reason for a woman to get an education and have skills - she won't be a burden on her kids when she gets older. I've heard people talk about how they have to support mothers who have no skills and little hope of re-entering the job market, and have been left destitute due to widowhood or divorce. Not fun for Mama nor for the burdened adult kids.
Posted by: Ailurophile | August 25, 2006 at 09:17 PM
I think Becker has it wrong - at least for us, two careers and three school children. Each of us would be desperate if we divorced: we get the 'nonmarket' work done by marketizing some of it (au pair, cleaning lady) and by scheduling carefully. I leave for work early, she late, I pick up the kids after school, she gets them out the door. If we were trying to do this in two households, it would be nearly impossible. We think we need each other MORE, as a two-worker marriage with kids, than if we had one worker.
Posted by: dave s | August 26, 2006 at 08:06 AM
The Forbes author sounds like a total ass.
I'm not the least bit conservative, but the two-income family thing got to be too much for me. I'm at home now, teaching part time and making a lot less money (barely anything, really). But I am much happier, and our life as a family is much calmer. Plenty of people make it work...and we did it for 11 years (some of those w/o kids). I have a lot more energy for the kids, the house, my husband, and intellectual pursuits than I ever did when I was working fulltime. My husband also tries to limit his work, but some of the guys in the office work constantly. He is often expected to work evenings, etc. I think it's helped our family a lot to have me home more. I miss my paycheck, though.
Posted by: Maddy | August 27, 2006 at 10:45 AM
Yeah, I expect that most of the 'educated women leaving marriages' factor comes down to 'woman gets stuck doing most/all of the housework in addition to her job, so gets out' combined with 'educated woman can survive without husband easier than non-educated woman'.
Unless one partner WANTS to do most of the housework, which is rare these days, a two-career marriage is going to have a lot of trouble because the typical job leaves one with little to no desire to do work around the house. Especially if one or both of you work jobs in which you work over 40 hours a week. (Though hiring people to take over some of the work with your extra income can be a huge help.)
I expect more two career marriages would last longer with a fairer distribution of the housework/child-care work.
Posted by: John Biles | August 27, 2006 at 03:35 PM
But, all these stories of women who are staying at home seem to involve men who are working more. Do men work more away from home when they become the sole earner? I mean, do a husband and wife really know each if the husband is working 80 hour weeks?
bj
Posted by: bj | August 27, 2006 at 09:37 PM