In 1973, NinaTanagawa was one of five women in her entire college class to go on to earn a master s degree in business administration. In the early 1970s, when just a few companies were beginning to see the profit in female talent from top business schools, Nina was hired to work in the personnel department of Telfac, a large and expanding computer company. The job was enjoyable, challenging, and it paid enough to put Peter through business school.
Nina leapt with astonishing speed through the managerial ranks from one promotion to another, until in 1982, her salary put her in the top half of 1 percent of women nationally. She was five years younger than the youngest employee at her level in the company, and one of the top three women in the entire company; the other two had no children. By either female or male standards, she was a fabulous success.
After Nina had worked for five years in the company, the Tana — gawas began their family. First came Alexandra. Nina took a year off to stay home with her. Looking back, she felt it had been the right thing to do. She sang songs to Alexandra, wallpapered her room in candy stripes, and sewed her tiny jumpers. But Nina also admitted to feeling bored taking care of the baby alone at home; she shouldn’t have felt bored, she thought, but she did. She also thought she was becoming boring to Peter. So her reason for going back to work, as she told me, was to “be a better wife.” Then, when her boss called to ask if she wanted to come back to work part time, she hired a housekeeper/baby-sitter and jumped at the chance.
When there was a fall in the computer market, Nina was put in charge of the company’s “unhiring” program in several offices, and her hours increased. In the evenings, after Alexandra was in bed, she would read reports and write office memoranda about her “unhired clients.” To maintain her managerial image, she arrived half an hour earlier than her staff in the morning and stayed half an hour later at night. When staff members stayed late, she bit her tongue and left first. Under the watchful eyes of conscientious coworkers and subordinates, her work hours steadily increased. As Nina recalled: “I came back to work three days a week, then four days a week. But the job grew too rapidly. I was running—Go, go, go! I’d drop into bed at night and realize I’d been working for seventeen or eighteen hours a day.”
After about two years of this, Ninas second child, Diane, was born. This time she stayed home for six months before she once again received a call from her boss and once again went back. But this time there was more to do at home and less of her to go around. As Nina put it: “The house got messier. There was that much more laundry with two kids. The dinner action and noise between the kids got worse.”
She had hired a housekeeper who insisted on “no windows, no floors” and leaving at five-thirty. So after long sieges of work during the week, Nina became the consummate housewife and mother on Saturdays. On Sunday mornings, when Peter played tennis, Nina washed the childrens hair, cut their fingernails, and cleaned the house. As she put it wryly, “Peter lets me take over a lot.” In one sense, though, Nina felt it was a relief to “take over.”
All the top brass of Ninas computer company were workaholics, actually or virtually single. At first she tried to pretend to be as involved as they were. But one day, just as Nina was beginning to feel she couldn’t pretend anymore, her boss burst into her office, smiling broadly. “Congratulations! You’ve just been promoted!” Well-wishers crowded into her office to celebrate, and Nina felt pleased and flattered. But as she drove home that night, what would prove a lengthy depression was already taking hold. She recalled hearing a speaker at an office seminar on work and family life declare, “I don’t know of a working mother who can balance a career, children, and marriage; one of these has to give.” Nina remembered secretly thinking, Гт proving you wrong. Now she wasn’t sure.
Peter supported Nina’s career, in the way “transitional” men often do. He talked with her about her problems at work, he soothed her brow at night. He worried about her health. He did a bit more here, a bit more there at home. But even these bits seemed to take reminders. As Nina put it: “I say to him, ‘Do you want to bathe the kids tonight or do you want to clean up the kitchen?’ That’s the way I usually put it to him, because if I don’t, he’ll go watch TV or read the paper. Usually he does the kitchen but he doesn’t want to do the bathing, so I end up bathing them and reading to the kids.”
Nina hinted to Peter that she needed more help. But she put it in such a way that her “circumstances,” not she herself, demanded help. Unlike Nancy, she didn’t say a word about “fairness.” She stuck to this new job offer: she didn’t want to say yes but how could she possibly say no?
Peter heard the hints, but took them as signs of “Nina’s problem.” So in time, Nina let her fatigued condition speak to him. Great rings appeared around her eyes; she had grown almost alarmingly thin. As she told the story later, she even began to move and talk listlessly. Finally, Nina confided to Peter that she was getting close to a certain emotional edge. Instead of having a nervous breakdown, however, she got pneumonia and took the first ten days of pure rest she had taken since Diane’s birth. It was as if her illness had said what she could not say directly herself: “Please help. Be a mother’ too.” However, although Peter was concerned about Nina, he considered the problem to be a conflict between her career and her motherhood.
Nina was changing. But Peter was not convinced that the foundations of Nina’s opinion of him as a man had been altered. In truth, Peter didn’t want to change, but because of his uncertainty about Nina’s perception of his role, he also didn’t quite dare.
In addition, another source of tension arose: the awkward fact that Nina was now earning much more than Peter. Nina felt fortunate to be able to add so much money to the family coffers. As she noted: “My salary would make it possible for Peter to get out of technical books, if he wanted, and go into psychology. Sometimes he talks about wanting to become a therapist. He’d be wonderful at it. I’ve reminded him he can if he wants. We can afford it.” By offering to be the main provider for a while so he could get into work he loved, Nina was offering Peter a gift.
Peter appreciated the spirit of Nina’s gift, and the opportunity. Her salary also allowed them a new home, a new car, and a private school for Alexandra—even when he was not quite settled in his career. But Peter felt uneasy about Nina’s salary. He certainly didn’t feel as grateful to Nina as she would have felt to him, had their salaries been reversed. This was not because Peter thought Nina was “competing” with him. He put it this way: “Nina is successful, but she isn’t ambitious. I’m more ambitious than she is. Nina also isn’t competitive, maybe just a little, and I am, just a little.” Peter did not feel the problem was competition. It was that Nina’s higher earnings shamed him as a man. He felt that friends and relatives—especially older males—would think less of him if they knew his wife earned more. Given that Peter wanted their good opinion, he could not gracefully accept Nina’s gift. Indeed, he and Nina treated her salary as a miserable secret. They did not tell his parents; if Peter’s father found out, Peter said, “he would die.” They didn’t tell Nina’s father, because “Nina even outearns him.” And they didn’t tell Peter’s high school buddies back home because, Peter said, “I’d never hear the end of it.” Over lunch one day, Nina told me in a near whisper: “I was interviewed for an article in Business Week, and I had to call the fellow back and ask him please not to publish my salary. When he interviewed me I was proud to tell him my salary, but then I thought, I don’t want that there—because of Peter.”
Nina was giving Peter the kind of gift that, under the old rules, a man should give a woman: relief from the pressure to provide. Peter wanted to give Nina “the choice of whether to work or not.” He wanted her to want to work—sure, why not?—but not to need to work. But Nina did not need that particular gift: given her combination of skill and opportunity, she would always choose to work.
With his notion of manhood under new pressure, Peter made one of those unarticulated “moves” that serve the goal of preserving a mans relation to a “mans sphere,” and his notion of the “right” amount of marital power. He summoned the feeling that it was not Nina who gave him the gift of her high salary. It was he, Peter, who was giving the important gift because he was suffering in his sense of manhood on her behalf. People “out there” in the world Peter came from and cared about ridiculed men whose wives outearned them. They shook their heads. They rolled their eyes. In order to live with Ninas salary, he had to absorb a cultural assault on his manhood. As Peter said, looking me in the eye, “Only one in a hundred men could take this.” Nina was lucky to be married to such an unusual man. And Nina gave him credit: she thought Peter was “unusual” too. Her salary was hard to take. She was lucky.
Curiously, because Peter and Nina allowed them to, it was their parents, the guys in Peter s office, his buddies at home, society “out there”—not the two of them privately—who defined the value of the gifts they exchanged. What was it that had ultimately lowered Ninas credit with Peter and reduced her side in their balance of gratitude? One thing was their joint appreciation of the injury he had suffered to his male pride—an appreciation based on their feeling that a man should be able to base his pride on traditional grounds. And this pride hinged on the attitude of others “out there.” Through both their ideas about gender, the outside came inside and lowered Ninas “private account”: given what people out there thought, she owed him one.
On the surface, Peter adapted to her salary; it was “fine”; he wished her well. But, as he had to make this hard concession to his older view of himself “as a man,” he wanted her gratitude. After all, it was she who had passed on the pressure from her irresistible opportunities at Telfac to him, forcing him to adjust his role as husband.
Through this invisible ‘move”—to expect Nina to be grateful to him—Peter unwittingly passed the strain of a larger social change (of which the call for female executives at Telfac in the early 1970s was one sign) back to Nina—through their marital economy of gratitude. Now she owed him something—gratitude for “being willing to take it.” Like a great storage closet crowded with objects that would otherwise clutter the house, her indebtedness made the rest of their relationship more “tidy.” Peter Tanagawa seemed to adapt to his wife’s higher salary—he supported and took pride in her work—but only by storing in this hidden emotional closet the tension between his unchanged idea of himself and Ninas new salary. It was like a bite taken but not swallowed. Had he actually altered his views about men and money in response to Ninas new salary and changing self-image, he would have been saying the thanks; or at the least, they would have been even. Instead, their economy of gratitude absorbed and encapsulated the fact that Peter had not adapted to these recent changes in his wife.
Ninas sense that Peter was doing her a favor in being that “one in a hundred” kind of guy also had a bearing on his participation in the second shift. She told me:
Ive wondered if my salary bothers him. Because if were having a disagreement over something, he sometimes says he thinks I’m acting high and mighty—like “Who do you think you are?” I said to him once, “You never used to say that.” And he told me, “I do think you’ve gotten much more assertive than you used to be.” Peter might equate my assertiveness with my income. I don’t know if the money has anything to do with it, or if I’m just tired of doing all the housework.
Normally open and articulate, Peter made it clear in conversations with me that Nina’s salary was painful. He felt he couldn’t be the man Nina would still love thirty years from now if he both earned less than she did and also shared the second shift. That would amount to two assaults on his manhood and present him with a line he felt he couldn’t cross. If he did, he would feel like a failure compared to other men, and subliminally a failure in her eyes, too. In his heart of hearts, Peter didn’t really care about his career success. What he did care about was his marriage to Nina, and for things to feel right between them, she could not be that far ahead at work, that disengaged from home. Peter wanted to be involved in family life, but only if Nina were also more involved. He was doing more at home now than when they first married. He wanted credit for all the changing he had already done on her behalf. He felt perilously close to the “line” that marked the limits of his ability to change, and which he guarded by his “move” to win credit for sacrificing his honor, credit for being the one to adapt when, as Nancy Holt had said, usually women do that.
One sign of this “line” emerged spontaneously in an interview. I had asked Peter to look at a long list of household chores—laundry, sewing, car repairs, and so on—and tell me who did each one. Expecting a series of perfunctory replies, I was taken aback—as I think he was himself—when we came to the item on lawn mowing. “Lawn mowing!” he burst out suddenly, “/do the mowing!” He jabbed the page with his finger and exclaimed:
We share the weeding, but / do the mowing! I do not like the idea of a woman doing the mowing. I think a father, if he’s got the time to mow the lawn and edge it, should not let his daughter do that, or his wife. I think it’s lazy! I don’t like it. I don’t like parents that ask their children to do things when they either could or should do it themselves. I wouldn’t want to see my wife mowing the lawn. The logical extension of that is that I don’t want people seeing my daughter do that either! And another thing—I don’t think girls should drive cars in high school. I wouldn’t let Alexandra or Diane drive a car in high school. No way!
In the woman he deeply loved, in the home that mattered most, and in the world of work, a whole gender revolution was under way. But the old-fashioned ways still held for Peter Tana — gawa’s lawn and car.