Why did Ann feel like Carmen Delacorte, that her husband’s job—and really his life—came first, when Frank and Robert, though very loving, did not talk in the same way about their wives? Carmen’s belief in male superiority is more easily understood as cultural programming: Given her working-class, Catholic background, her lack of training and career opportunity, it was unsurprising that she held these beliefs. But Ann had all along been groomed to be the highly successful career woman she had become, and her belief in male superiority didn’t so neatly fit her circumstances.
When I put this question to her, Ann gave two answers. First, Robert was more intelligent, she said. He had more potential. He had been at the top of his college class.
Now perhaps Robert was, in fact, more intelligent than Ann. It is still true today that most women marry men who are more educated and more professionally accomplished than themselves, while men marry women who are less so. Women marry “up” and men marry “down,” a pattern that the sociologist Jessie Bernard calls “the marriage gradient.” As a result of this pattern, there are two pools of unmarried people—highly educated and professionally accomplished women and uneducated, low-status men. Perhaps the same pattern holds for intellectual development: If Robert is a genius, given this “marriage gradient,” he didn’t marry another genius. In the realm of intelligence, Robert may have been looking “down” and Ann looking “up.”
On the other hand, maybe Ann was just as smart as Robert. After all, she had earned straight As through college even while working thirty hours a week. Who knows what she might have done with thirty hours, more study each week? Maybe Ann can’t bring herself to honor her own “potential.”
The second reason Ann gave for why Robert’s time mattered more was that her work felt “unreal” to her. [7]
seriously, but when I meet a woman who takes a business career seriously, I cant relate to her.
So having children almost provides me with a convenient out. I have to take something seriously. And I do take seriously what were doing this Saturday [shopping for the bureau]. I don’t question that. I might be afraid that my sense of unreality will creep into my life at home.
Anns sense that only home was real even caused her, she thought, to want more children, to make them into her “achievement.” She explained: “If Гт going to be the parent at home, well,
I want to have a real challenge. If I have half a dozen children, I can show that I can really do it well. Anybody can raise two.” Perhaps Anns feeling that her career was “unreal” resulted from the meanings she attached to it. As a child, Ann had moved a great deal. Living in a different town each year of high school, she found it hard to make friends; and from age fourteen on, work became a refuge from friendlessness. Her level of involvement in work became an indication to herself of her personal failure. Perhaps the unreality of work for her also had to do with her fear that she was not “feminine enough.” All through her twenties and early thirties, Ann hadn’t wanted children. When she confessed this to her father, a Catholic father of six, he had stormed out of the room, throwing at her the remark, “One would question your femininity.” Ann said, “I took that seriously. I said to myself, ‘Maybe that’s right.’” Perhaps her work also represented “outdoing” her father, a man with whom she strongly identified and who had done a bit less well in the same profession. If work meant being unable to make friends, if it meant outdoing her father and being “unfeminine,” then she might have felt afraid of seeing her work as “real.”
Whatever the cause, Ann’s sense that Robert’s mind and work were more meaningful than hers led her to want to assume the second shift while she worked full time, and eventually led her to quit. One episode seemed to say this very thing. During a visit to the Myersons’, I found Elizabeth and her mother sitting in Elizabeths walk-in clothes closet playing grocery store. Ann was passing a series of empty spice jars across the ‘counter” and Elizabeth was telling the “grocery clerk” what was in each one—marinated artichoke hearts, condiments, Hungarian paprika, raspberry conserves. Since her mother was already the grocery clerk, and since I was sitting on the floor apparently unemployed, Elizabeth made me into the nanny. “I hope you can carry my baby,” she said winsomely. Maybe because she saw herself in her daughter, Ann interjected with feeling, “But youre the mother. You carry her.”
All in all, Ann was less interested in sharing the work at home than Nancy Holt, NinaTanagawa, most of the women I am about to describe, and most of the women in this study. Most women wished their husbands did share the work at home, but didn’t put that wish first, or didn’t dare push. Due to a complex set of motives, Ann Myersons man wasn’t “getting out” of the second shift. She wasn’t letting him in.
The positive side was that Ann’s class advantages allowed her to have what she wanted, more time at home. Living a less pressured life, there would be more moments like tending store with Elizabeth, and few moments in which she answered to a string of anxious demands.
But there seemed to be an emotional cost to her devaluation of her own work and consequent claim to the second shift. At the end of our last visit, I asked her if she had any advice for young women about to enter two-job marriages. Ann mused for a while, then concluded that since she had given up “having it all,” she really had none. She moved in a perfunctory way over the agenda of liberal reforms—part-time work, flex time, job sharing—that would make it possible to have more time at home, and shared this parting thought.
It’s really sad that I have two girls. They’re going to be pulled into the same world I’ve coped with. They’re going to have to care about what I’ve had to care about. They’ll never have a
chance to really make a contribution to anything unless they fight against the odds all the time. No matter how smart they are, how driven they are, they will ultimately feel the same conflict. I don’t think things are going to change so much that my girls wont be torn. They might be able to succeed if they shut out the idea of having children and family. But then they would miss something. Society would react negatively to them. But if they do have children, they cant manage to do it all and not be torn. I wind up thinking that my husband is an incredibly gifted person and it’s almost a shame he didn’t have a son. It would be nice to have a boy who didn’t have to face this conflict, who could just benefit from being a man, who could use all those brains. I suppose it’s sad I feel this way.
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