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Kamy
Wicoff Susan
Shapiro Barash Susan
Maushart Rachel
Safier Marg
Stark Elizabeth Freeman An academic deconstructs the wedding Eva Unger Bowditch and Aviva Samet on how to survive your mother-in-lawStephanie Rosenbaum Lisa Miya-Jervis Nancy Cott Sheryl
Nissinen -----------
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Summer 2004 | In "The New Wife," author Susan Barash interviewed more than 500 woman to analyze how the role of wife has evolved over the last half a century. Barash, a professor of Critical Thinking and Gender Studies at Marymount Manhattan College and author of several books about gender and relationships, talked to women who got married in each of the five decades from the 1950's to the present. It is during this time that the push towards modernity and women's equality became a juggernaut that affected marriages as much as it altered workplaces and public lives. In the 1950's, wives were expected to organize and run their homes and not concentrate on working. With the explosion of the feminist movement in the 1960's and the fact that the pill made premarital sex easier, women started to pull away from traditional roles and venture into the workplace. By the 1980's women were fighting to "have it all" -- fulfilling professional and home lives -- and by the 1990s they were burning out, frustrated with having to struggle to be perfect both domestically and in their careers. What do women want from marriage? What is the role of the American wife? Do the old models offered by grandmothers, mothers, celebrities, and friends still resonate, or do they push women to rebel and reconfigure wifedom to suit their own new purposes? Not all of Barash's conclusions are reassuring. Women still struggle for equality in their relationships, and she doesn't discover new models for working families, in which the wife is the primary breadwinner. But "The New Wife" shows that, however much has changed for women, they still crave the security, validation, and even the civil and social approval that comes from being a wife. Some reviews of your book suggest that it aligns philosophically with some conservative ideas, such as those put forth by Dr. Laura Schlessinger in The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. Did you mean to imply anything reactionary in your book? Not at all. This is a study of the last five decades of wives in America. What is so interesting about the Generation Y women, the young woman, the 21st century wife, is that she is able to extract what she needs from historical models in terms of being a wife, to evaluate her status, and to get what she wants. This is very empowering and can't be anti-feminist. The New Wife is saying: "I will get my needs met." She has many opportunities, more than any of her predecessors, in terms of education and she's utilizing these opportunities to get what she wants within her marriage, which I think is very interesting. What your book doesn't do is say: Here is a problem with marriage, with relationships, and here's how to fix it. This is more of an exploration. It is not a guidebook. There are a lot of books on how to get the guy. There are a lot of books on the flaws in male-female relationships and the disappointment in marriage and to some extent re-marriage. What I found really compelling as I examined each decade is that the evolution of marriage can be observed in two ways. You can see it from the inside out: who people are in their own personal lives, who they are interpersonally within their marriages. And the other evolution, of course, is what happens outside, culturally, within each decade. Each decade has its own flavor and we're absorbing it at all times. At the beginning of your book, you have quotations from women who married in each decade, from the 1950's 2000's. So many of the women say: "I don't want to be like my mother." How much is each generation concerned with rejecting their mothers? Well, it's not only rejecting one's mother, but it's really rejecting who came directly before. Each generation always likes to think of itself as new and fresh and innovative, not burdened by the traditions and constraints of the past. Really, we live in a highly patriarchal society, in spite of the great strides of feminism. There are only so many ways to play out being a wife. Perhaps what seems like a rejection of the mother is actually a rejection of the models of marriage that these women had at home. The 90's wives were so disenchanted because they thought that they really could have egalitarian marriages, and they found they were still hitting the same obstacles as their predecessors. If they stopped working to have children, their husbands did not tend to be entirely supportive. The women I interviewed often felt disappointed and confused, unsure of how to get encouragement from their husbands for decisions they wanted to make about their lives. Now, what's really notable about the 21st century wife is that she is totally confident that she and her husband are equals. It doesn't matter who earns more money. This is revolutionary. People ask how I know these marriages work, and I can't predict the future but I can certainly note the voices in unison of these young women and I can't help but feel positive about them. If you had a baby in the 80's, you were petrified to take time off. If you missed a beat, missed a year in your career, it was torture, and it isn't as much like that now. I think this is really quite striking. How much of this shift happened when the economy tanked in 2000, and people decided they had to live for themselves rather than dedicate their lives to companies that didn't care about them? People did reassess. It is definitely going on and it is really in reaction to a very ungiving, unrelenting male-dominated workplace. In the 70's chapter I talk about the women who marched into the workplace and were astonished to find the kind of tokenism and sexism that existed. They thought they could have husbands and children and now a career. They had no idea that the workplace would be so rooted in the long-standing traditions that didn't include women. One problem that women are still struggling with is access to good, affordable childcare. The patriarchy doesn't make room; it doesn't accommodate women. What we're really talking about here is men who couldn't be bothered by the changes in women's lives, but who were affected by them, both in their workplaces and in their marriages. Until I got to the 21st century, I was hearing lots of complaints about the husbands from the wives. But you don't hear them as much now. When these new young wives say: "I don't want to work to the exclusion of nurturing my marriage, missing my child's ballet recital, being haggard, being pulled in 12 directions at once, stressed beyond belief," what they are saying is that they don't want to be like their baby boomer mothers. A lot of the husbands are saying: "I'm a baby boomer child too. I want you there for me. I will work harder. I will wait for you to go back to work, if that's what you want, and do it as you see fit because I endured the same strain and hardship that you did." They look at the failings of their parents and they don’t want to repeat them. The 70's and 80's produced a moral imperative about work. Women were supposed to be perfect machines, built to nurture a family and have a huge career, all at once. Failing to be that woman makes you small or lazy. Having it all is one of the greatest myths fed to the baby boomer generation, and it's a myth that died very hard. It died hard because it meant admitting failure. And where did the failure show? It shows in the divorce rate, which peaked in the 80's. It was because these women just didn't know how to balance. There had to be a reassessment of goals and priorities. We live in a very tough world and I think that marriage is still considered -- in spite of all the failed marriages -- a safe haven. In the aftermath of 9/11, people are holding on to what feels traditionally safe and comfortable. Does your research suggest there's a greater interest in getting married since the events of 9/11? Oh yes. Reports in the New York Times and media outlets really do bear that out. I’m also hearing it from young women who are getting married at a much younger age. The Family and Marriage census won't come out again until 2010, so we won't see if my mini-survey based on the 500 interviews I did for this book plays out, but I predict it will be reflected. In speaking to these women I find that there is this urge to avoid the infertility problems of the 90's wives, who tended to put their careers ahead of marriage and children, who struggled to find a decent guy and then ended up having problems when they were 39 or 40. My friends and I were shocked and angry when the Sylvia Ann Hewlett book came out telling us that our fertility was tanking. She had a point. These are the realities. What's interesting is that when I first started writing this book, I spoke with my mother and I don't usually speak to people I know, but she gave me a very interesting interview. She, as a 50's wife, talked about how really rigid the rules were: if you weren't married by 23 you were an old maid; if you didn't have a kid within 2 years, everyone whispered; if you had one within the first year, everyone counted months -- true scrutiny with very little wiggle room. But she's still married to my father and has had a very romantic, stress-free life. She could have ruled the world, but was in the wrong generation. When I told my youngest child, my daughter who was 16 then, about it she said: "Well, I'd much rather be Grandma than you. She's still in love with her husband. She didn't get divorced and remarried. She's not always working so hard. She's not worried about the workplace." This was very interesting, but not what I expected to hear. It turned out that a lot of these young women -- and I didn't scout 16 year-olds -- but women in their 20's were echoing that sentiment. They found their grandmothers' marriages more fulfilling models and more positive than their mothers'. However, what they got from their mothers was the message that they could go out there and do anything they wanted, so they absorb that too. Now, they can be more flexible about choices. If they decide to practice medicine, they don't have to choose the hardest, most taxing specialty to prove they can do it. In the 80's a woman would go to medical school and be an OB, and her family really was pushed to the borders of her schedule. A choice a woman could make more easily today would be to be a dermatologist who goes in at 10, leaves at 4 and takes vacation whenever. She isn't considered a failure for that. These are the ways in which women are accommodating their marriages and betting on the success of being a wife. And some women are opting out of the workplace entirely. People tend to be judgmental about women who opt not to work. That isn't a choice that always garners respect. There is a lot of mixed messaging. I wrote about this in the book. There are also these mommy wars, where mothers who go back to work look down on stay-at-home-moms, and the stay-at-home-moms feel that they are better parents and more connected to their children than working mothers who "abandon" their kids. There are people who do opt out, and then run the PTA as if they were the CEO of a company. For years, a stay at home mother felt really negated, and now stay at home mothers are saying: "Look at us." This is another topic entirely, though: the way women judge others. But there is also this question of whether husbands and children are really what complete us. One hundred years ago, a woman was a good daughter, a good wife, a good mother and a good grandmother for a short period of time -- because of the shorter life spans -- and then she died. Now she has options. With options come complications in a society that has to open up to accommodate different interests and different choices. My book is about modern, 20th- and 21st century women. The strides have been amazing. I interviewed a woman who married in the early 60's who said that her marriage was really a reflection of the 50's marriages, but her sister got married at the end of the decade and it was a totally different world. There was the pill; she had sexual encounters before marriage, everything was different. Most of the women who got married in the 50's told me that they got married to have sex. These were the rules. The rules changed. Options happened. But when the rules change rebelling becomes complicated because you don't know how to rebel anymore. You have to follow your instincts. And so much of the messaging is that wife-ing is very valued, that we're not complete without a partner. In promoting this book I'm asked all the time about gay marriage. Well, that's because what these couples are looking for is the validation -- socially and from civil institutions -- they can get with a heterosexual marriage. Women are conditioned by society, but what is really great is their new self-awareness in how they conceptualize being a wife. When I titled this book "The New Wife," I really saw it as being about what it means to be a wife today. If you were married in the 70's, what is it like to be a wife today? If you were married in the 50's, you're certainly not making rice pudding and meatloaf in an apron with starch in it and high heels. So our evolution is reflected by our personal changes and by the shifts in society. Given the social changes that have transpired over the past 50 years, and the fact that women can now do almost anything -- including have children -- on their own, why do you think they still want to be wives? There really is a desire on the part of women to be wives. Motherhood is something separate. Women have the ability right now to accept the good in marriage, in spite of all the negative modeling, and to me that comes from education and exposure to new ideas. Education is key to women and there are more women in college and graduate school now than ever before. People aren't going to college to get their "Mrs. Degree" any longer. If you want to be married younger, it is a deliberate, and popular decision, but it isn't because that's your only choice. It's all part of a movement. If you want to see examples of young wives, you can find them everywhere -- many Hollywood stars are becoming young wives. Look at Kate Hudson and Reese Witherspoon. Marriages in which the husband is the provider seem like throwbacks, but that is really just another legitimate choice women can make to pursue their goals. Do you feel hopeful about the future of the wife? There is tremendous hope for women as wives today because of the last five decades. We have come a great distance and have come up with some solutions. We have to get better than the 73 cents on the dollar [that men make], and we have a lot to do, but equality is within our reach. I think it really starts with marriages. Women entered the workplace in the 70's and dealt with all that tokenism and sexism and they went home and told their husbands, while their husbands were encountering other people's wives who entered their arenas at their offices and treated them just as badly, because there was no alternative modeling. They can't do that anymore. Women are emerging more and more, and I think the idea that you can have it all in a new way is really what it happening. We're not pretending as much. This is the confidence of the new wife. "Here I am. This is what I want. This is what I expect. Step up to the plate or I'm moving on." Someone told me she thought this book is bleak, but I said that it isn't bleak; it's truthful. It's a way to understand how we got where we are. ----------- Elise Mac Adam writes the Indieetiquette column. ----------- Buy "The New Wife" at the Indiebride book store. |
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