Working
It Out:
The Domestic Double Standard (2nd Edition)
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Table
of Contents
Chapter 1: Great
Expectations
The crumbling of the 1960s model of suburban domestic bliss …
the creation of new, equally unworkable relationship models… the
50/50 marriage
Chapter 2: The
New Reality
How the new reality is much like the old reality … why "having
it all" usually means "having to do it all" … why the domestic
double standard persists … how women tend to perpetuate the double
standard
Chapter 3: Planned
Parenthood
The importance of early marriage experiences … setting a "we're-in-this-together"
precedent … why parenthood must be a conscious choice … planning
a blessed event
Chapter 4: Housework,
the Great Equalizer
Why everyone who lives in a house should share the housework…
how to schedule housework for maximum benefit …compromising on
standards … hiring work done
Chapter 5: Setting
the Kids Straight
Playing house in a low-risk setting … it's all in the communication…
gender doesn't count in housework … learning to live within a
budget … you value what you pay for … making choices as a family
Chapter 6: What
No One Ever Tells You in Lamaze Class
The reality of a new baby … how motherhood differs from fatherhood
… how to handle isolation and fatigue … spacing children … school/parent
relations … extracurricular activities
Chapter 7: Hiring
an Employer
The penalties for motherhood in the work place … creating your
own job … pros and cons of working at home …selecting a job that
meets more than your financial needs … taking advantage of available
options
Chapter 8: Dealing
with Life's Little Nuisances
Picking your battles … defeating the DDS outside the home… unconventional
approaches to conventional domestic problems … friends and other
well-meaning nuisances …learning to say "no" … escape hatches
Chapter 9: Tribal
Customs
How to make holidays bearable … simplifying birthdays… coping
with customs in the extended family
Chapter 10: A
Question of Time
Time management for the long and short terms … coping strategies
that work
Chapter 11: Redefining
Success
New ways of thinking about success … setting new goals as a couple
and as a family … creative alternatives to traditional patterns
Chapter 12: Having
It All (Revisited)
What "having it all" means today … creating a new definition for
the future
SAMPLE
CHAPTER
Chapter 1
Great Expectations
What
we had hoped would evolve into the New Marriage crumbled in the
face of the New Reality. Publicly, we prided ourselves on our
Superwoman images, while privately, we mourned the death of our
great expectations.
At the dawn of creation,
Eve may have set one of womankind's most unfortunate precedents
when she offered Adam that apple. With one ill-considered action,
she set the pace for every succeeding generation in which woman
cooks and man asks, "What's for dinner, Honey?"
One cannot help but wonder
how it all might have turned out had Adam chosen the menu that
day, but second guessing is an unproductive occupation, at best.
The fact is, the concept of "woman's work" has endured thousands
of years of societal and political upheaval, in this country and
the majority of others, largely intact. While women have gained
the right to vote, have been accepted reluctantly into traditionally
male occupations, and are slowly but steadily carving places for
themselves in the upper echelons of business and government, the
old double standard lives on in the domestic arena and will for
some years to come. The woman who wears a hard hat on the construction
site each day still dons an apron most nights.
It's a complex issue, but
its roots lie somewhere in the turbulent coming-of-age of the
post-World War II generation. Graduating from high school in the
mid-to-late 1960s, we confronted by our militant older sisters
who insisted that we abandon the mores and models instilled in
us by our well-meaning parents. No longer should we expect men
to open the car door-or any door, for that matter-or to leap to
their feet when we entered a room. Far from being forbidden, premarital
sex became a rite of passage. Gone, too, was the 1950s model of
domestic bliss: marriage to a college-educated husband, two children,
two cars, and a lifetime of volunteer work.
"Good riddance!" we exulted,
once we recovered from our initial shock, and promptly set about
creating a brand new, equally unsatisfactory model for ourselves:
the uncommitted, open-ended relationship.
Living together sans benefit
of clergy, open marriages in which partners were free to engage
in casual couplings with others, and other modern relationships
became the rule rather than the exception. They created the illusion
of unfettered love between two independent, consenting adults,
and they lasted just about as long as they deserved to. While
struggling to maintain an equal footing with our male counterparts
and to abolish the double standard in the work place as well as
in the bedroom, we accepted, however briefly, the new "no strings"
arrangements. We buried our nagging doubts about the value of
casual sexual liaisons to our lives, suppressed our rage when
our partners took us at our word about being free to come and
go, and refused to admit our longing for committed men with whom
to share our lives-with whom to build satisfying lives together.
That model died hard, but
die it did, as men and women acknowledged their need for roots-a
home base from which to venture forth each morning and take our
chances in the world and a loving partner who would welcome us
back each evening and help us assess the day's damages. For many
of us, this meant family, the old-fashioned "'til death do us
part" commitment we had so recently scorned. Bravely, women resolved
to stop wasting their time on casual relationships and made their
newly acknowledged wishes known to a surprising number of similarly
inclined men.
Still, we were reluctant
to abandon the positive aspects of our decade of freedom. To a
certain extent, we had enjoyed our independence and had reveled
in our newfound strengths and abilities. We had found satisfaction
in earning our own livings and had discovered a new world of challenging,
stimulating career opportunities open to us. We wanted commitment
from our men, but we also wanted it clear that some choices were
still ours to make: if and when we would bear children, where
and how long we would work outside the home, and with whom we
would continue to socialize. Naturally, we would consider the
wishes of our partners, but no longer would we bow to them.
Secure in our new identities,
we sallied forth to negotiate the terms of yet a third preposterous
model: the fifty-fifty marriage.
* * * *
For me, as for so many other
women, the second half of the 1960s were a time of trial. Scorning
a bachelor's degree as a frivolous credential, and desperate to
establish myself as an independent entity, I waved aside my parents'
offer of a college education and opted instead for a year of secretarial
training at Katharine Gibbs School in Boston.
Because it is New England's
pre-eminent college town, housing hundreds of thousands of undergraduates
from all over the world in the dormitories and apartments of Boston
University, Northeastern, Tufts, Harvard, Boston College, Radcliff,
MIT and dozens of other institutions from September to June each
year, Boston is a melting pot of youthful society. For all that,
it is still old New England, which may explain why the flower
children of that era preferred Berkeley to Back Bay and why, though
we embraced portions of the Hippie culture, we did so more cautiously.
Beer, not pot, was the mainstay of the Boston fraternity party
in the mid-sixties; and while we were sexually active, we abided
by an unwritten code of discretion.
Flo, Gina, Joanne, Pepper,
Nancy, Marta. Their very names-as well as those of their countless
beaux, for all of us were endlessly in love-evoke memories of
another self, the not-yet-me self who struggled to put aside the
values of the past and to find a new, more satisfactory model
for the future. To my recollection, and certainly to our credit,
not one of us aspired to find a man and acquire an engagement
ring. We toiled over our typewriters and steno pads in order to
equip ourselves to earn a living, and by and large, we did. We
would be whatever we chose to be, unshackled by husbands and babies;
and although we thoroughly enjoyed our lovers that year, we were
always a little relieved when they moved on.
In June, we too moved on,
scattering to New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Denver
to explore our options in the work place. October of 1966 found
me in San Jose, California, at what was then an innovative, university-based
educational television station. To my everlasting disgust, I became
the 19-year-old mascot of the department. My boss-an earthy, energetic
fifty-year-old woman named Gaither Lee "Terry" Martin from Lubbock,
Texas-hired me primarily, she later confided, "to give the boys
something to look at," but she defended my by then questionable
virtue like a bulldog. Whenever I dropped in after a falling-out
with my latest swain, she would help me regain my perspective
and my sense of humor with one of her Texas homilies. "Now, I
like men better'n I like chocolate candy, Honey," she would say,
"but I could always take or leave 'em both."
Simply by being herself,
that lady taught me more about standing up for myself in a man's
world than she ever knew. Striding confidently through her days,
she never let me see the difficulties and discrimination she must
have encountered at that time. Just being the department head
in an emerging field would have been rigorous enough, but as the
female boss of an all-male crew in the late sixties, she faced
an extraordinary challenge. With a shrug and a joke, she made
it all look easy, ameliorating the double standard in the workplace
by ignoring it.
The lives of most women of
Terry's generation, however, revolved around their husbands' careers.
During the early days of World War II, for example, my mother
married the business manager of a hospital where she worked as
a nurse. A year later, Dad chucked the administrative life to
open his own gas station, and for the next thirty-three years,
their lives were defined largely by his heavy work schedule. As
a self-employed owner/manager, he worked six and a half days a
week, often until the station closed at 9:00 p.m., because he
loved it. On Sunday afternoon, he might mow the lawn, and he'd
help with the dinner dishes on the nights he got home for dinner
before 9:00, but that was about it for him in terms of domestic
work. Mom did everything else, from weekly cleaning and yard work
to major painting and repairs, aided only by me and my sister.
This was true even after she returned to a full-time nursing job.
We sisters got exceptionally good training in home maintenance
as a result, but it was hardly fun for any of us. It would have
been nice, I think, to have had Dad around more. But it was also
nice, for Mom and for us, to have the man of the family so happy
in his chosen work. So it was, as such things usually are, a compromise.
With that as my upbringing,
I was always aware, however subliminally, that whatever else a
woman might do, she still bore the lion's share of the responsibility
for homemaking. And however many love affairs my contemporaries
and I had, it was we who cooked the cosy little suppers and washed
the dishes and sewed on the buttons-and resented it somewhere
deep in our souls.
On the career front, things
were not going so swimmingly either. We relished our ability to
support ourselves, but we began to notice that the men with whom
we had graduated only a few years before were nimbly climbing
the corporate ladders, while we remained behind our typewriters
and waited for someone to notice that we had a great deal more
to offer.
Finally, we got tired of waiting.
Over the next few years, the
women's movement combined with the Vietnam War in a blur of activism.
Feeling out of control as a society, we turned to each other as
individuals to reassert some control over our personal destinies,
abandoning the uncommitted relationships of the sixties as we
struggled to impose some order on our lives and our futures. Marriage
was no longer a dirty word, but negotiation often replaced the
romantic scenario in which he popped the question, and she responded
with a breathless, "Yes!" In the early seventies, she was as likely
to pop the question as he, and the response from either party
was likely to be, "Yes … if we can work it out."
Reluctant to take a step backwards
into the role of chief cook and bottle washer, or to be viewed
by our partners as sex objects and breeders, women set out to
create a modern version of matrimony: the fifty-fifty marriage.
I know. I was one of them, and for a while, it really seemed possible.
So long as things were clearly understood from the start, we reasoned,
we could keep the ground we had gained on the work front and start
making inroads on the household front, as well. Shared responsibility
in every area-financial, domestic, and parental-was the goal,
and eagerly, we set out to attain it with the cooperation of our
newly enlightened male partners.
In 1970 I met a man with whom
I wanted to share my life. Following a succession of spoiled,
selfish Lotharios, Wayne embodied everything I sought in a partner.
Bright, warm, funny, open-minded, and tolerant, he seemed able
to accept my wishes for a career as well as a home and family-even
to support them. After living together for several months, we
decided to marry, work for several years while sharing domestic
responsibilities, then think about starting a family.
Wayne was a pharmacist, a
profession that offered security plus mobility, and I was an executive
secretary. We earned exactly the same salary that first year.
While the world was in turmoil around us, we set up housekeeping
in an apartment on the outskirts of Hartford, Connecticut, banked
lots of money, took trips to Bermuda and Puerto Rico and the Bahamas,
and smugly congratulated ourselves on having it all figured out.
We were certain that our lives would be exceptional, no middle-class
mediocrity for us, no sir. On our first anniversary, we rented
a posh suite at the local Hilton and renewed our fifty-fifty marriage
contract over a bottle of champagne. It was working, and we'd
make damn sure it went right on working.
For another year or so, all
went relatively smoothly. We bought a modest house in the suburbs
and continued our modern lifestyle, meticulously sharing everything
from the vacuuming to the snow shoveling in the interests of fair
play. But in the spring of 1972, Wayne became disenchanted with
the role of pharmacist, which consisted mainly of counting pills
and typing labels, and decided to pursue a career in drug enforcement.
He had my wholehearted support in this. Blithely, I sent him off
to the Drug Enforcement Administration's training school in Washington,
D.C., and cheerfully, I accepted DEA's mandate that agents be
willing to relocate whenever such moves were in the Administration's
best interests. Further, if significant overtime was involved
with the job, well, I could handle it. I knew it would be worth
it to have a husband who was happy in his work.
With Wayne enthusiastically
pursuing his new profession, however, it was impossible to ignore
my own frustration on the job. I had been a secretary for too
long, and without that bachelor's degree I had so high-handedly
dismissed back in 1965, other opportunities remained closed to
me. Not that I didn't try to climb out of the clerical trenches,
mind you. I did, but without success. The futility of my effort
was never clearer to me than it was on the day I entered the personnel
department of a major Hartford corporation and noted two entrances
to the inner office. One was marked, "Four-year Degree Holders
Only," and the second, "Others." Shocked and humiliated, I slunk
from the building to consider a future in which I would be an
"Other," and found it unacceptable. "Screw them," I thought and
went home to figure out a way to beat the system.
There was a way, as it turned
out-a new approach to post-secondary education called the "external
degree." Instead of sitting through four solid years of classes,
I could earn college credits through independent study. If I could
pass the same examinations required of all graduates of the State
University of New York, I would be granted the same degree, a
B.S. in Business Administration. I promptly enrolled, but I was
not content to remain a secretary while I earned my degree. Instead,
I decided to open a bookstore and become a stunningly successful
entrepreneur.
As a result, I spent 1974-75
losing $22,000 of Wayne's and my hard-earned money on what turned
out to be a disastrous retail operation. Within months of the
store's opening, the first of the state's mammoth shopping malls
opened five miles down the street. Two major bookstore chains
occupied prominent positions there and made quick work of driving
every independent bookstore owner in the metropolitan area out
of business. Narrowly escaping bankruptcy, I retreated from the
business world once more, broke, depressed, and about two months
pregnant.
Though my pregnancy took us
by surprise, since two eminent urologists had assured us that
Wayne was all but sterile, we were delighted. Just about everything
else had gone wrong, but biological lightning had struck, granting
us the opportunity we thought had been denied us to become parents.
With that exciting prospect, I philosophically returned to secretarial
work, accepting temporary assignments to help pay off the residual
debts from the bookstore, and awaited the birth of our son in
November 1975. We attended Lamaze classes together, and Wayne
was ecstatically present to welcome Ricky when he arrived, right
on schedule.
While the prenatal instruction
had prepared me for the birth, I was shockingly ill informed about
the reality of having a new baby in the house. Rarely having babysat
as a teenager, I scarcely knew which end of an infant to diaper,
let alone how to deal with a severely colicky newborn who screamed
day and night for more than four months. It's a period in my life
I still cannot recall without flinching, a blur of chronic fatigue.
In those pre-paternity-leave days, Wayne was able to take only
a week's vacation time to share the burden of those endless nights.
After that, it was up to me, and I became the neighborhood zombie.
Though the worst of the colic
subsided by the time Ricky was five months of age, his erratic
sleep pattern seemed unalterable, and I continued to wake four,
five, who knows how many times a night to his unhappy wailing.
Desperate for some relief, and still guilt-ridden about our burden
of debt from my failed business, I accepted a full-time secretarial
job when Ricky was seven months old and hired a wonderful, grandmotherly
neighbor to care for him during the day.
My second week on the job,
I discovered I was pregnant again, and I spent the evening sobbing
through a double feature at the local movie house wishing I had
died instead of the rabbit.
By the time Jenna joined us
in May of 1977, however, I had arrived at some sort of acceptance
of my new situation. Wayne and I had longed for children, and
now, by heaven, we had them. But enough was enough, and having
been told two years earlier that there was no way he would ever
sire a child, Wayne had a vasectomy. Ricky continued his wakeful
habits, but Jenna was the perfect baby, snoring her way placidly
through the nights. Our debt had been reduced to the point where
we could manage the monthly payments on Wayne's paycheck, though
just barely. We still had the house, our health, and each other,
and surely Ricky would sleep through the night at some point before
he entered college. It was simply a matter of hanging in, so I
hunkered down for the duration.
While I mixed formula, folded
diapers, and doggedly continued to complete the requirements for
my bachelor's degree, I clung stubbornly to the belief that this
domestic interlude was merely that-a hiatus in the normal course
of things caused by an unfortunate business experience and a biological
fluke. Because Wayne was now earning twice what I could as a secretary,
his primary role had to be that of breadwinner; and because of
our remaining debt, for which I felt responsible, we couldn't
afford to hire help. So the domestic responsibility would have
to be mine for the moment. When I completed my degree requirements
and paid off the last of the bookstore debt, our fifty-fifty marriage
would bloom anew, I felt sure. So I finished my studies, wrote
the final check to the bank, and made a fresh start in the fall
of 1977, accepting my first "professional" position: Director
of Public Relations for the Metropolitan Hartford YWCA.
* * * * *
In retrospect, I see that
year as the turning point in our relationship. Having finally
dragged myself out of the secretarial trenches, I felt in command
of my professional destiny for the first time. No longer an "other"
in the eyes of corporate personnel directors, I would now catch
up with my male counterparts. The children were thriving during
the work week under the loving supervision of a young teacher
with two children of her own who preferred to stay at home until
her kids were in school. Weekends were a marathon of housecleaning,
grocery shopping, pediatric appointments, and visits to grandparents,
but we were surviving.
What I failed to see-or perhaps,
to admit-during that hectic year was how drastically Wayne's and
my roles had altered on the domestic front. The demands of his
career as a federal law enforcement officer, which I had so cheerfully
accepted Before Children, now became a heavy burden. Wayne was
required to work sixth hours a week, for openers, and additional
overtime was frequently required for special investigations. I
never knew from one day to the next when or if he would be home.
He was on call more weekends than he was free, and a social life
was next to impossible because of his constantly changing schedule.
Two or three times a year, he traveled to Canada, the Mexican
border, the Florida coast, or wherever the international drug
trade dictated, and two-week stints at special training schools
in Georgia became customary. So while Wayne pitched in at home
when he was around, I could never plan on his availability and
was therefore 100 percent responsible for the running of the household,
whether or not I actually ended up performing every task.
It was nobody's fault, but
I was never off the hook, a fact I realized only after juggling
my full-time job and the brunt of the domestic burden for more
than a year. I also realized that I would have to live with that
fact for a very long time. As the 1970s drew to a close, I publicly
prided myself on my Superwoman image and privately mourned the
death of our great expectations.
While the specifics of those
interesting years varied from marriage to marriage, I know now
that the bottom line for most young couples in the late 1970s
was essentially the same. Their efforts to arrive at an equitable
division of domestic and income-producing responsibilities were
sincere, but circumstances eventually undermined them, leaving
him caught in the sticky web of his employer's demands and her
holding the domestic bag, right along with her full-time job,
which more often than not had become an economic necessity.
The circumstances in which
the 1970s woman struggled for domestic and employment equality
very often approximated those of her 1950s sister, and she found
herself having to put personal needs and priorities second to
those of her husband. In the '50s, a woman married to an aspiring
lawyer, dentist, or physician-professionals requiring extended
and expensive schooling followed by years of financial struggle-frequently
took a job to meet expenses until her husband's practice was successfully
launched. But the '50s woman knew it would be a short-term sacrifice,
an investment of time and energy that ultimately would pay off
not only in financial security but personal freedom. In contrast,
the 1970s wife in the same situation soon found it impossible
to predict when, or even if, she would be able to pursue her own
goals, once having shelved them in favor of her husband's.
Take Melanie and Dennis,
who met in their junior year at the University of Connecticut,
where she majored in business administration and he in pre-med.
As it happened, both were from outside the state, but they opted
to settle in Connecticut when they married. "We had our bachelor's
degrees by then," Melanie recalls, "but Dennis still had four
years of dental school to go, even if he didn't specialize. Our
parents had extended themselves about as far as they could financially
to get us that far, so the rest of the trip was on us."
More specifically, it turned
out to be on Melanie, who went to work immediately following graduation
to support her and Dennis while he tackled the next demanding
four-year stint in his medical education. She says, "In Connecticut,
probably one out of every six workers is employed by an insurance
company, many of which are headquartered in the Hartford region,
and I soon became one of them. I started out in the personnel
department of a huge insurer, working my way up from receptionist
to secretary to test administrator. By the time Dennis finished
his education, I was an apprentice interviewer. I really enjoyed
working with people face-to-face on a daily basis and helping
them evaluate their job skills and career goals. At the same time,
though, I couldn't wait for Dennis to finish school. His tuition
expenses kept us pretty well strapped, so we lived in a seedy
third-floor walk-up in East Hartford and drove an old Buick that
probably should have been retired as junk even before we bought
it. I was tired of working hard, making good career progress,
and still living like paupers. I wanted Dennis to take his turn
at supporting us so I could have a baby."
To the couple's dismay, however,
their financial woes were only beginning once Dennis finally passed
his exams. The cost of setting up and equipping a dental practice
was extraordinary, and they were immediately confronted with $100,000
in debt, offset only by the unknown amount of income Dennis's
first patients would generate. "The early years of any practice
are an iffy proposition," Dennis points out. "The start-up costs
are overwhelming, and the amount of income is unpredictable. Some
practices take right off, but others have to be built slowly over
a period of years. You just can't tell. Melanie and I had really
scrimped so that we would end up even when I finished dental school-no
savings, but no big debts, either. It seemed so unfair that there
was no reward, just another huge loan to pay off. I really wanted
her to have a chance to stay at home and have a baby, but there
was just no way."
Melanie continues. "We had
both always wanted a large family with at least four children.
That was one reason why Dennis chose dentistry. It seemed to be
a lucrative enough profession to support even a large family.
Boy, were we dumb. Anyway, by this time, I was twenty-six years
old, really ready to have a baby, and extremely frustrated to
discover that I would have to postpone that dream for years longer."
It was partly that frustration
that led to a further complication in the couple's financial picture.
Her major desire thwarted, Melanie convinced Dennis to snatch
at a chance to fulfill their next major goal, buying a home of
their own, when they learned of a gracious suburban house about
to come on the market at an exceptionally good price. "The seller
had recently been widowed, and he couldn't bear to stay in the
house where he and his wife had spent so many happy years. He
didn't seem to care much what he got for it as long as he could
sell it quickly, but he did care who bought the house. He wanted
it to go to some nice young couple, he said, who wanted a real
home and lots of kids-and there we were!" Melanie recalls. "The
problem was that unless he wanted to give us the house outright,
we couldn't afford it."
Knowing of their daughter's
long-standing wish for a house, however, Melanie's parents made
an unexpected, but characteristically generous, offer. "Mom and
Dad had just sold their big colonial in Massachusetts, preferring
to retire to a condominium that required less upkeep. They had
made quite a handsome profit on the house sale, so they told us,
'Why should you wait to inherit the money when you can really
use it now?' and gave us the down payment for the house we wanted.
It seemed like a miracle … until we moved in and realized the
true expense involved in maintaining a house."
Still burdened with debt
from setting up Dennis' practice, the couple quickly became acquainted
with outrageous heating bills, insurance premiums, and the cost
of replacing ancient appliances when they failed, plus monthly
mortgage and tax payments. At age twenty-seven, Melanie began
to despair of ever being able to quit her job, even temporarily.
Worse, the effort involved in building a new practice was absorbing
most of Dennis' time and energy, adding the primary responsibility
for house and yard maintenance to Melanie's already heavy schedule.
"If we'd had any brains,
we would have stayed in an apartment for a couple of years until
Dennis' practice got firmly established, then started our family.
When I returned to work, we would have had two good incomes with
which to finance a house. But the way we did it, we created an
incredible economic and work load, and because Dennis had to concentrate
on his practice to recoup some of our expenses, I had to carry
most of the load by myself. By the time I turned thirty, I felt
like the total drudge-work, work, work inside the house, outside
the house, at the office. I think the house created more of a
domestic double standard than a baby would have!"
Melanie was thirty-two before
she felt she could afford to take time off from her job to have
a baby, and even then, she gave the decision serious thought.
"Instead of the four children
we had originally planned, I was wondering if I could possibly
manage to care for one. All of a sudden, the road ahead looked
endless, no light at the end of the tunnel. Dennis' profession
had become, and would no doubt remain, a way of life for him,
so everything else had become my job. He was earning relatively
good money by that time, but the expenses of the practice continued
to be heavy, and we still had years to go to pay off the loan.
The house needed major repairs, and even the second car we had
bought was getting old. I kept thinking, 'How did this happen?
We've both worked so hard for so long-but when do I get my turn?'"
It was a question that many
women were asking themselves as the financial realities of that
decade eroded thousands of couples' good intentions to share fiscal
and domestic responsibilities. Though many wives, like Melanie,
were willing to work early in their marriages to contribute to
the family's financial foundation, most found them compelled to
do so for the foreseeable future, not just for a year or two.
Worse, again like Melanie, they found that the inexorable ticking
of their biological clocks forced them to accommodate maternal
duties right along with their full-time employment-a major snag
in their original life plans. While they enjoyed the increased
number and variety of work opportunities open to them, they resented
the fact that employment was no longer a choice. It had become
a necessity.
Even when financial circumstances
were far more comfortable, a couple's great expectations could
take a beating. Rosemary and Al are a good example. "We were both
raised in the suburbs of Chicago," Rosemary begins. "We met in
undergraduate school at Northern Illinois University, and we were
married right after we graduated in 1970. At that time, I wouldn't
say I had any liberated leanings at all. I wanted to get married,
and I wanted to work as a special education teacher, and neither
of us was sure about having children. The women I knew were teachers,
nurses, or mothers, and I really didn't challenge too much of
what was going on."
Helping other people had
always been very important to Rosemary, and teaching seemed to
be the way for her to do that in those days. "The extremely bright
and talented women were becoming lawyers or doctors, but they
were exceptional. I was a bright student, but I wasn't number
one in my class or anything. I would say I was pretty much the
average college girl."
While Rosemary denies that
her career aspirations were prompted by the fledgling women's
movement, she admits that she was probably more career-oriented
than others of that era. "I always wanted to work. I never had
the idea of getting married and having someone support me. My
mother had always worked as a nurse, and I didn't want to be taken
care of in any sense. So in a way, I guess I was more liberated
than I'm making myself out to be here. I wanted to be independent,
and it was really important to me, when I graduated, to have a
job and always to have a job, not to arrange my life around my
husband's job."
What appealed to Rosemary
most about Al, as opposed to other men she had dated before they
met, she says, was his level of respect for women. "He didn't
see me or any other woman as a sex object or someone who was lower
in status to him. He really thought that I had a lot going for
me, that I had a lot of potential. In fact, he's always been an
optimist so far as my future is concerned, and he's been very
supportive of everything I've ever really wanted to do."
Both Rosemary and Al attended
graduate school after their marriage, though he went full-time
and she part-time while working as a teacher to support them while
Al finished his education. "Our relationship was very different
then from what it is now. I can still remember calling him up
and saying I was going to go someplace when I was finished teaching,
and he'd say, 'Oh, come home. I'm lonely-I miss you.' He worked
hard, but he had time to play golf or to spend with me once I
got home from school, if I didn't have a class that night. So
we had these two years while he was in graduate school that really
weren't realistic, because Al had so much free time. It was very
idealistic and romantic and wonderful. We had a lot of good times."
The division of household
duties was a simple matter in those early days. Al did all the
grocery shopping and maintained their two cars while Rosemary
cleaned their one-bedroom apartment. Everything could be accomplished
on a Saturday morning, and the work was equally divided. When
Al accepted his first full-time position with an insurance company
in Connecticut, though, things became quite different.
"When Al began an actuarial
training program, it was a real adjustment. Even though we still
had just an apartment to take care of, we didn't have much time
together, and that was difficult. That was when I started to feel
the pressures of growing up. As independent as I thought I was,
I really wasn't. I needed a lot of his nurturing and time, but
the program he was in was constant. He would work 45 to 50 hours
a week on the job, and then he'd come home and work some more.
When he wasn't working or studying, he'd be watching sports. So
I went from having all that time together to having hardly any
time together. I thought he didn't love me, but it was simply
the reality of being married to somebody who was ambitious and
who loved me just as much but had decided that this job was what
he wanted to do."
Although it was difficult
to adjust to her husband's new involvement with his career, the
domestic double standard didn't really hit Rosemary until the
couple bought a house. "When we had an apartment, there really
weren't that many things to do, and they were fairly evenly divided.
But when we bought a house, I found that most of the work involved
in maintaining it fell to me, because all his time was taken up
with working and studying for his actuarial exams." Still, Rosemary
was able to temper her growing resentment by looking at things
in perspective.
"I would say to myself, well,
if he's studying for exams and working all day, then it's not
such a big deal for me to do the cleaning. I looked at it time-wise.
How much time was he devoting to a career that I would benefit
from, too? If he gets to where he wants to go financially, and
I do, too, through my work, it will all even out. We were both
working equal amounts of time, though we were doing different
kinds of things, so the domestic double standard bothered me,
but not to the extent that it bothers me now."
After fourteen years of marriage,
during which Rosemary successfully changed careers from children's
special education to corporate management training and Al rose
meteorically through the ranks to become one of the youngest executives
in his company's history, the couple welcomed the arrival of a
son. As wonderful as the experience was, however, his birth served
to underscore the existence of a double standard in the household.
It was Rosemary's career, not Al's, that had to be interrupted
for the baby to receive the kind of parental attention both felt
was important. It was she who got up nights because Al had to
work at his demanding job the next morning. And it was she who
bore the brunt of the planning and preparation, shopping, feeding,
cleaning, laundry, day-care arrangements, and so on. Though she
realized that Al's career was as important to her financially
as it was to him, Rosemary was eager for the day when both their
lives would be more balanced.
For hundreds of thousands
of other 1970s couples, the fifty-fifty marriage model turned
out to be as unrealistic and unworkable as the models which had
preceded it in the 1950s and 1960s. Because of women's still limited
earning power and career interruptions for childbearing, the employers'
job market in which men had to work harder and longer to improve
or even to retain their status, and an inflationary economy that
prohibited the hiring of any but the most essential day-care help,
the domestic burden briefly shared equally between partners once
again became women's work..
What we had hoped would evolve
into the New Marriage crumbled in the face of the New Reality.
Working outside the home had become a necessity, not an option,
for both partners; but largely because of the lingering disparity
in the size of men's and women's paychecks, as well as the failure
of employers to acknowledge their employees' need for top quality,
convenient day-care, the domestic double standard lived on.
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