"Shut down your wife"

Good satire is alternatingly infuriating and enlightening.  This week's case in point is this playful piece by Michael Lewis from Sunday's Los Angeles Times: How to Put your Wife Out of Business.  Excerpt:

There was a brief time, from about 1985 to 1991, when high-powered males demonstrated their status by marrying equally high-powered females with high-paying jobs. That time has passed. The surest way for a man to exhibit his social status — the finest bourgeois bling — is to find the most highly paid woman you can, working in the most high-profile job, and shut her down.

Jeepers.  Even in jest, Lewis is going for a nerve. He offers his own experience as an example:

What men need, really, are role models. Other men who have done it and lived to tell the tale. Consider, for example, me. I hope I don't need to remind the reader, but I will anyway: When we met, my wife — Tabitha Soren — was a hotshot. She walked from her offices at MTV into Times Square and people shrieked her name and bayed for her autograph. She made pots of money. She couldn't swing a dead cat in the television business without hitting a job offer. And now — behold! Two children later, she has happily abandoned fame and fortune and is making a second "career" as a fine-art photographer.

Bonus points for those readers who remember Tabitha Soren.  I certainly do.

There's some considerable truth in what Lewis writes, in that most of us can think of a great many examples of successful women who, usually in their thirties, choose to focus on motherhood and homemaking while opting out of their careers.  I come from a large family; I've got half a dozen female cousins in their thirties or early forties to whom I am very close.  All are college-educated, most had considerable success early on in their twenties.  All have had children in the past decade, and have chosen to focus their time and their energy on their families.  If they do work outside the home, they do so in a part-time or volunteer capacity.

The problem with Lewis is that even in satire, he denies his wife (and other "shut-down" women) their own agency.   (He's got other problems, like crass class-ism, but we'll let that be for now.)  For Lewis, opting out of the business world is not presented as something his wife (or other successful women) chose because motherhood and homemaking spoke to their real desires; rather, it is something that he (and other successful men) made possible through their own power and financial resources.   The wives's choices are thus contingent on their husband's high status, rather than on the wives's genuine desire to place "family first."   Lewis is right about the end result, but vastly over-inflates men's role in it.

Judging from the experiences of family and friends (and societal trends at large), it would be hard to deny that there are a great many successful women who choose to leave high-status jobs (at least temporarily)  in order to focus on their families.  But anti-feminists make a mistake when they assume that these women have somehow magically "seen the light" by abandoning careers for domestic bliss.  Rather, many of my female friends and family seem conscious of a kind of seasonality to their lives and to their reproductive choices.  As they aged, their priorities shifted.   But those priorities will surely shift again as their children grow and become more autonomous.  Let me assure you that my dear female cousins who are homemakers at 35 have no intention of remaining clear of public life indefinitely!   Once one has had a child, one is surely a parent forever.  But the amount of time and energy parenting requires does, thankfully, seem to decrease somewhat as children mature and grow more autonomous.

I'll catch some flak for this, but in my opinion one of the greatest gifts a  husband can give his wife is the freedom to choose to what degree she wishes to remain in the public sphere after they've had children.   Obviously, if she'd like to continue to work outside the home, that will mean that he will have to take over a corresponding amount of domestic work.  (Unless they are wealthy enough to afford outside help.)  Her ability to continue to pursue her goals is contingent on his willingness to change diapers, do dishes, and take over child-rearing responsibilities.  Some couples may be quite happy with a very traditional arrangement, with husband as "breadwinner" and wife as "domestic engineer".  Others, motivated by desire or necessity, may find it essential to have two incomes even while their children are small.  The man's job, as far as I am concerned, is to do more than provide materially for his wife.  It is to make it possible for her to decide just how committed to her career she would like to be after motherhood.

Comments

[cmc]

Caitriona--

Thanks for the response! Again, I got nothin' against people working from home. I don't actually have kids myself (unless you count my very cute, very furry, 30 pound dog). It gets under my skin when people assume a) that I am definitely going to have kids, and b) that I am going to quit or go part-time to care for said hypothetical kids, when that's not necessarily the choice I would make. I don't think that the assumptions I deal with are that far off from the assumption that stay at home parents are stuck in the house all day!

[mythago]

Caitriona, I'm sure I don't have to point out that "lawyers who get to work from home" are not exactly the norm for that profession.

[Caitriona]

You're right, mythago, they're not the norm. They made their own way. I'm not saying working from home, being a SAH parent, or anything like that is the norm. But I am saying that there are ways to make it happen - IF that is what a person wishes to do and IF it's important enough to him/her.

Besides, who wants to be the norm?

[Shannon]

It all depends on what you want for your kids too. I don't think I could raise my kid in a small town. Not only am I a city person and am afraid of small towns, I could not see raising a kid with no diversity in the area or any of the community life you get in a city.

[mythago]

Caitriona, what I'm disliking about your posts is your seeming belief that a particular way of life is available and preferable to all, and anyone who says they can't have it simply isn't trying hard enough. Which is lovely for those of us who have safety nets, like generous employers, or families with ownership in farms that we can assume, but isn't simply something anyone who "wishes to do" in fact *can* do. Or, for that matter, should do.

[Caitriona]

By that same token, we are raising our kids in the midst of a very diverse rural community where people watch out for one another, and within driving distance of Austin, where we can go to any cultural events we choose. When I lived in the city, most neighbors didn't even know each other, let alone watch out for each other.

When we first moved out here, our daughter, then 11, complained that she couldn't do anything without someone seeing and telling us. Now she enjoys the fact that if she needs anything, people know her and know where to contact us.

I traded this type of community for the city once. That was enough.

[Caitriona]

mythago,

You said, "Caitriona, what I'm disliking about your posts is your seeming belief that a particular way of life is available and preferable to all, and anyone who says they can't have it simply isn't trying hard enough."

Well, isn't that a bit like the proverbial American Dream? Today, it's been twisted by the media so that most people think that the American Dream is to have a big house, lots of money, lots of power, but in reality, the American Dream was initially "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

The challenge for each and every one of us is to determine just what it is that will make us happy. Not what the media or our neighbors or our family or anyone else tells us will make us happy, but what each individual truly NEEDS in order to be happy. I mean *REALLY* happy, not just the filling in with things to make ourselves think we should be happy in which we all participate from time-to-time.

What makes me happy is totally different than what makes my friend Rachel happy, and what makes her happy is totally different than what makes my friend Heidi happy, and so on.

Anyone CAN achieve whatever it is that makes them happy, but first it takes identifying just what that is. After that, they have to find ways to implement their own particular dream.

You wrote, "but isn't simply something anyone who "wishes to do" in fact *can* do. Or, for that matter, should do."

Too many people limit themselves by thinking that life has to be lived a particular way, that they have to follow the same direction as someone else. But they don't. It's still alright, even in this day and age, for each person to forge his/her own path, to "think outside the box." But it's not easy.

And why *shouldn't* people look for ways to achieve the things that make them happy?

[mythago]

Um, I'm glad to have given you a starting point there, but I don't think you really addressed what I was getting at.

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