A History of the Wife (57 page)

A fifty-eight-year-old grandmother, married at age twenty-six, remembered: “The double standard was very strong in those days, so although he had had a lot of sexual experience he expected to marry a virgin. And he did. He was my first and only lover until six months ago... .” At that point she met a man who shared more interests with her than her husband, and they began an adulterous affair. Although she said she did not feel guilty, she added: “I could never leave my husband. After all these years of our being together, I think it would kill him.”

Sometimes the affair led to the breakup of the first marriage and to a second relationship, that was more satisfying. Consider the following

four examples.

It took me five years and three affairs to get up the gumption to let go of my first marriage. Now I’ve been married for the second time for five years, with no affairs. Why? Because I love my second husband. —A thirty-two-year-old woman from Georgia

I had been programmed, in my typical middle-class Catholic upbringing, to believe that the ultimate life goals were being a faithful wife and a devoted mother, and having a beautiful suburban home. No divorce. No working mothers. . . . I was miserable. What could I do about it? Since I had six years of solid secretarial experience behind me, work seemed the most logical place to start. . . . I went to call on a prospective client, one thing led to another, and suddenly this nice 27- year-old wife and mother found herself in bed with someone’s else’s nice husband. . . . Six months later I left my husband and moved in with my lover. I am still with him now. —A secretary from Texas

My spouse asked how I could have kept such a vile secret from him. . . . When we’d watch TV, or even when we’d make love, he’d ask how sex had felt with my father. . . . Later, all hell broke loose. He began to stay out late and come in staggering drunk and accuse me of infidelity and beat me, even in front of our three tiny babies, who screamed and screamed in fear. Finally I came to the realization that I did not deserve this punishment, that what I had done with my father wasn’t my fault. And finally, slowly, I determined to live alone and raise the babies myself. I moved out. And I started a new job. Within months, I began to gain confidence, and the day even came when I allowed another man into my life. I emptied out my problem to him right from the beginning, and his only reply was, “I love you and all of that doesn’t change my love one iota.” This man and I have presently been married for three years. Our love grows greater daily. —A woman from Col- orado

After three years of being single since a divorce at age 27, after three years of being sexually liberated and having a large number and vari- ety of lovers, several threesomes, and always no commitments, no tomorrows, I’m in love. And my lover is in love with me! I’m 30 years

old, a good mother, a successful business woman and now, much to the shock of my friends, a one-man woman.

I am gladly leaving the battleground of the sexual revolution— A thirty-year-old raised in Iowa

When we think about these letters in comparison to those sent to the
Daily Telegraph
in 1888, it’s as if the two sets of women came from dif- ferent planets. In less than a hundred years, wives had gone from think- ing of marriage as a religious duty to an arena for sexual satisfaction. And if the husband wasn’t satisfying enough, he could sometimes be exchanged for a lover or second husband. Without denying that the two sets of letters were instigated under very different circumstances— the first in response to a staid British newspaper article on the failure of marriage, the second in response to an American women’s magazine questionnaire designed for sexually liberated women—still, the con- trast is staggering.

How much of the exuberance exhibited by the 1980 letter writers was grounded in the availability of birth control pills? How much was traceable to the legalization of abortion that resulted from the 1973
Roe

1. Wade
   Supreme Court decision? Surely access to effective contracep- tion and legal abortion made it possible for many women to enjoy sex without worrying about the risks of pregnancy. But that is by no means the whole story.
   

   The letters indicate that even at the height of the sexual revolution, most wives were asking for something more than good sex. They wanted love, warmth, respect, friendship, common interests, commit- ment. Or, put another way, good marital sex presupposed a good rela- tionship. As for the younger wives, most of whom had slept with their mates prior to marriage, they at least knew whether they and their part- ners were minimally compatible in bed, and hoped that marriage would not only afford continued sexual gratification but also other forms of fulfillment, such as companionship, economic stability, and children. Or else, why marry?
   

   One of the revelations of the
   Cosmo Report
   was that the sexual revo- lution was not confined to younger single women. The new sexual per- missiveness had spilled over to older married women, some of whom started new relationships in their forties, fifties, and sixties, and one of whom was explicit about the joy she and her husband derived from sex
   

   in their seventies. There was little expression of guilt associated with extramarital affairs for either the younger or older wives.
   

   Some of the darker secrets, gingerly alluded to by Victorian wives, came out in the open a hundred years later. Drink was still associated with what Victorians euphemistically alluded to as “brutality” and what the generation of 1980 frankly called wife beating and rape. Father- daughter incest was also confronted by adult women whose marriages were often marred by the lasting effects of their traumatic childhood experiences.
   

   The openness to sexual experimentation and the willingness for women to discuss such matters in a public forum put an end to Victo- rian repression. In its place, however, new societal problems were in the making: the rising incidence of teenaged mothers, the spread of venereal diseases, including AIDS, and the increase in divorce and sin- gle parenting.
   

   THE WORK REVOLUTION:
   

   THE RISE OF THE DUAL- EARNER COUPLE
   

   The greater sexual freedom women experienced from the sixties onward was paralleled by, if not intertwined with, their greater partici- pation in the workforce. As we have seen, both of these trends were already in motion earlier in the century, but they accelerated during World War II, and developed exponentially in the context of the post- war political movements, especially the women’s movement. In 1960, 30 percent of wives were in the labor force. Twenty five years later, it was 54 percent. By the mid-1990s, 60 percent of American families had dual earners, 30 percent followed the traditional breadwin- ner/homemaker model, and 10 percent had either no earners or one part-time earner. European women were also following this trend, especially in the Scandinavian countries, France, and Great Britain, where employment for wives has by now become the norm.
   39
   

   Between the 1960s and the 1980s, the growing number of wives working outside the home began to alter the fabric of American mar- riage. It was not only that more wives had become breadwinners, since some working-class women had always contributed to the family income. What began to change in the 1960s was the belief that a wife’s employment had to be secondary to her husband’s, that she had to sub-
   

   ordinate her professional needs to his. Indeed, by 1969 the term “dual- career family” had been invented to designate a type of family structure in which the husband and the wife both took their work seriously and did not necessarily advance his at the expense of hers.
   40
   As opposed to the “two-person career couple,” where the wife traditionally devotes herself to promoting her husband’s career, the dual-career couple osten- sibly invests equally in both the wife’s and the husband’s professional development. Even with time off for childbirth and the nurturing of small children, many wives from the sixties onward began to think of their work outside the home as a “career” demanding long-term com- mitment, rather than as a piecemeal series of jobs. Sometimes, promot- ing both partners’ careers means that couples have had to live apart, and even well-intentioned individuals have discovered that not all mar- riages can survive under those circumstances.
   

   Despite the egalitarian philosophy underpinning dual-career fami- lies, wives have continued to bear the greater burden of responsibility for homecare and childcare, and this disparity has been an ongoing source of contention for working couples. Back in the 1970s, the femi- nist slogan “the personal is political” led many women to believe that societal change would begin in the household. While wives became lawyers, doctors, computer programmers, cab and bus drivers, man- agers, and mayors, husbands were asked to become housecleaners and baby-sitters. Understandably, many men balked at performing these low-status occupations traditionally relegated to the feminine sphere. Yet gradually, some began to help around the house: taking out the trash, shopping for groceries, and doing the dishes were the first stages in the domestification of the American husband.
   

   Another revolution was taking place, one that was not heralded as much as the sexual revolution, but one that had (and has) the promise of fundamentally transforming family life. The sons of fathers who had rarely lifted a housekeeping finger in the fifties were learning to put food on the table and clean up after themselves during the seventies and eighties. It’s been a slow revolution, counted in hours and percent- age points by social scientists, who keep reminding us that the men are not yet pulling their full weight.
   41
   Yet inch by inch, many husbands are getting used to the idea that they, too, are responsible for housekeeping, even if they spend less time on it than their wives.
   

   Friction can and does arise between spouses over housework. A
   

   1989 study of husbands’ and wives’ perceptions of the division of labor disclosed “a major discrepancy between expectations and behavior.”
   42
   Both husbands and wives saw themselves participating more than their spouses thought they did. They agreed, however, that husbands were primarily responsible for money management, household repairs, and yard work in the majority of cases, and that about a third of the hus- bands performed some regular household tasks.
   

   Highly educated husbands were more likely to take on the responsi- bility for housework than husbands with little education.
   43
   A 1991–1992 Stanford University questionnaire sent to members of the class of 1981 deemed they were were “at the forefront of change with regard to shar- ing household tasks,” with almost half the husbands and wives perform- ing household tasks about equally with their partners.
   44
   Since highly educated husbands often have working wives with similar educational backgrounds and earning power, these men have little grounds for maintaining a traditional male wage-earner/female housekeeper model.
   

   Equally radical changes have taken place in the ideals and practices of fatherhood. Beginning with the pregnancy of their wives, men have been encouraged to participate more actively in the childbirth process. Once they were shunted out of the delivery room, indeed considered taboo. Today they help their pregnant wives learn breathing techniques and are often present at the birth of their babies. Many are involved in feeding and changing their offspring on a regular basis. One sign of the times are the babies’ changing tables in men’s restrooms at airports throughout the nation.
   

   Fathers carry their infants in frontal pouches that seemed odd just a decade ago, but now cause no second looks. They take hikes with their babies in front- and backpacks, push their toddlers in a variety of wheeled contraptions, strap their youngsters into car seats, and bicycle with children in tow.
   

   Once upon a time a father charged with tending a baby was merci- lessly ridiculed. The French caricaturist Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) made fun of the bluestocking’s husband shown cradling his baby and explaining to a top-hatted visitor: “Monsieur, my wife is inspired this morning . . . impossible to see her. I am, as you see, obliged to give my attention to the last work we collaborated on” (
   Moeurs Conjugales,
   no. 46). By the late nineteenth century, hundreds of cartoons and satirical images, such as the German and American illustrations reproduced in
   

   chapter 7, ridiculed the reversal of spousal roles.
   

   Even with such films as
   Mr. Mom
   (1983)
   Three Men and a Baby
   (1987), and
   Mrs. Doubtfire
   (1993) that poked fun at men performing traditionally feminine tasks, Americans in the last decades of the twen- tieth century have gotten used to the caretaking father and the bread- earning mother. Two new terms have crept into the vocabulary: the “househusband” and the “stay-at-home dad.” He may be an artist or writer or just an unemployed bloke, whose wife is a successful lawyer, doctor, dentist, businesswoman, engineer, manager, or academic. Nei- ther of them may be fully satisfied with the situation, but it does not necessarily lead to the breakup of a family.
   

   The are currently around 2 million fathers looking after children full time while their wives work, and another 3 million who do part-time day care. Conventions, support groups, newsletters, and web sites now cater to the needs of “At Home Fathers” (
   New York Times,
   January 2, 2000). While many of these men speak of the satisfactions they find in their new role as primary caretakers, they also complain of isolation, depression, and lack of status—complaints that have been voiced for a long time by innumerable American housewives.
   

   In response to the
   Times
   article, a letter on the op-ed page ( January 5, 2000) from a stay-at-home dad expressed the belief “that the rearing of children is the most difficult and thankless job there is.” He added: “After three and a half years at the helm of a household, I can attest to the truth of the adage ‘A woman’s work is never done.’ ” This father had come to appreciate “the vital role that mothers play in the shaping of a civilized world” through assuming that role himself.
   

   It is still rare for an employed woman to have a househusband. Most wives negotiate, with difficulty, their two “shifts” in two different locales. Especially when there are children, work/family conflicts pro- duce continual problems that are never definitively resolved. Psychol- ogist Ruthellen Josselson, studying a group of thirty women including thirteen working mothers over a twenty-year period beginning in 1972, reports that all women with careers and children feel squeezed between professional and parental obligations, especially when their children are young. Yet those working mothers are, according to Josellson, “happier with their work than the non-mothers.” They enjoy the variety of their life experiences, however hectic, and do not feel they would have been more successful in their careers, had they not
   

   had children. If anything, their family life motivates them in the work- place.
   45
   

   Josellson’s sample was a small one and her interpretation may reflect the bias of its investigator, who, like many social critics of the moment, including myself, tend to see paid work for married women and moth- ers not only as inevitable, but also as beneficial. Yet there is undoubt- edly another point of view, one held by wives who choose to be full-time homemakers. A member of the Stanford class of 1981, elect- ing to stay home full-time with her children, wrote on her 1991–1992 questionnaire: “[Homemaking] is not prestigious, but it
   is
   important. Putting the welfare of one’s children before one’s own self- aggrandizement is worthwhile and should be recognized.” Another full-time homemaker from this cohort was less grandiloquent: “I decided that it is too difficult to work and raise children at the same time, so I quit my job.”
   46
   For the most part, the full-time homemakers were satisfied with the decisions they had made, though they some- times missed the intellectual challenge and the adult interaction of the workplace.
   

   The authors of the Stanford study, Myra Strober and Agnes Chan, noted little difference in the income of the husbands of stay-at-home mothers and the husbands of employed mothers. There was, however, considerable difference in the class origins of the wives. Coming from an upper-class family “made them more likely than their classmates to become full-time homemakers,” perhaps because they had internalized the model of an affluent family with a successful father and because they could fall back on their parents in the event of divorce.
   47
   

   Only a third of the Stanford mothers from the class of ’81 were full- time homemakers, and of these, most expected to return to the labor force after their children were grown. The majority of women were combining careers and/or marriage and/or motherhood. Many of the wives spoke of the concessions they had made to their husbands’ careers at the expense of their own. For example: “I was offered an excellent promotion in a small company in Chicago, but turned it down to relocate with my spouse.” “I was transferred to Boston. I turned it down to remain in Washington, D.C., with my husband.” “I quit a job to move to New York for 2 years so my husband could go to business school. Then I quit another job to move back to California.”
   48
   Although flexibility of this sort is probably necessary for couples to stay
   

   together, it is usually the wives who make the sacrifices, ending up with diminished salaries and lesser careers than their partners.
   

   For the most part, the Stanford graduates were struggling with the same problems that dual-earner couples are facing throughout the nation at every level of society: how to manage job and home and chil- dren in a society still geared, in many ways, to the notion that every breadwinner has a stay-at-home wife. (Think of package deliveries, home repairs, and children’s illnesses and medical appointments.) The effects of dual-earner stress on working couples has become grist for the mill of myriad journalists, psychologists, and moralists in forums of every sort. Along this line, a column on family and work titled “Cou- ples share suggestions for how to cope” (
   San Francisco Chronicle,
   Janu- ary 16, 2000) summed up the letters of 150 readers who complained of toxic job spill into their personal lives. Long stable marriages crashed or almost crashed under the stress of unrealistic demands that managers placed on workers or that workers placed on themselves. Tips from the letter writers included the benefits of couples’ therapy, church atten- dance, and family vacations. Conscious efforts to order priorities and to put the marriage at the top of the list were helpful to some of the cou- ples. In an overscheduled world, scheduling time together may, para- doxically, be one way of salvaging a marriage.