What I want
Over at 11d, Laura wrote an interesting post about "What Do Men Want?", specifically about whether men overall prefer stay-at-home wives, as Jane Galt suggested. Laura thinks that most men underestimate the ways in which stay-at-home wives contribute to the family’s well-being, and so would prefer that their wives work.
My guess, with absolutely no data to back it up, is that most men would prefer that their wives worked part-time — enough to bring in some money to allow for extras (nicer cars, better vacations) — but not so much as to result in an expectation that they’ll be responsible for making serious addditional contributions to the domestic front. This isn’t because they’re evil. I know I sound like a broken record, but Rhona Mahony’s point is that once you’ve stepped off the career track, it’s hard to get back on at a level that (economically) justifies your spouse making significant sacrifices (covering an equal share of sick days, relocating) to further your career.
Certainly, all else equal, when the boys are both in school, I’d like it if T figured out a way to bring in more money. It would give me the freedom to consider lower-paying but more interesting and/or meaningful jobs without feeling like I was sacrificing my family, and it would give us more options generally (see yesterday’s post about schools for an example). And I’d like to be more involved in the boys’ schools, which is hard to justify while I’m working full-time and T’s staying home. But it’s probably not worth making him miserable doing database work (even if he could still get hired to do so, which is unclear). So we shall see.
The discussion on Laura’s post got a little sidetracked into a back and forth on whether it’s upper-class indulgence to discuss any of this. I liked Tim Burke’s answer:
"We live our lives, not someone else’s lives; in each of our lives, there are issues, problems, dissatisfactions. Effacing your own life, your own issues, your own reactions, ignoring the ethnographic texture of your immediate social worlds, in favor of endless pious genuflection at the holy shrine of some constituency of "deserving poor" is an upper-middle-class indulgence in its own right, and usually phonier by far than talking about how to do right by your children or your spouse."
April 11th, 2006 at 1:58 am
I would like to be able to trust that:
1. my wife will remain as dedicated to her career as I am to mine
2. that she will continue to hold me to the same standard of caretaking ability that would be expected of any mother (even when I am learning or backslide)
April 11th, 2006 at 2:23 am
ps. also, in no way is this discussion merely an upper-class indulgence, since it is directly related to the question of women’s leadership
April 11th, 2006 at 5:27 am
My husband has just got a fabulous professional part-time job (you know the ones that we always say on this site don’t actually exist unles they start as fulltime – I still think they’re rare, but here is one!) But when we discussed a fulltime job opportunity that came up last year, I was quite anti the idea – the extra money (considerable) wasn’t worth the additional stress on our household. E was anti as well, but I think I was more anti.
So as your classic professional breadwinner, I’m with you, I’m happy for my stay-at-home spouse to have a part-time job providing it makes him more fulfilled, but I was quite stressed by the thought of moving to a two-income family. I’m lucky, though, in either case, the income mainly means we can have nicer holidays (I’m hoping not to have to go the private school route), and support our ageing parents better, but doesn’t change our life that much in other ways.
April 11th, 2006 at 12:25 pm
It’s safe to say that the typical man just wants women to make up their darn minds and quit complaining that things aren’t perfect. I don’t think most men have any sort of agenda for their spouse, other than what makes them happy. Of course they probably have a pretty good idea of whether they’ve married someone who will be happy at home, or a career blazer. If anything men are simply more realistic that you can’t do it all, and life presents some difficult choices.
Which just goes to show that it is women who are more inclined to search for these “social norms” that can help them feel like there is some sort of consensus about what families should be like. When there isn’t. To each their own, and every husband and wife has to work it out between themselves, without being hit over the head with the hammer of social expectations.
It may seem like there should be some sort of social reality. But it is an illusion. There are, for example, many mothers with school age kids who dedicate their days to shopping, lunching and looking good. And if their husbands are happy and their kids are fed, who’s to say they shouldn’t?
April 11th, 2006 at 2:30 pm
What a post on my 7-year wedding anniversary! My husband and i have talked about this alot – for him, it is critical that i work, and work full-time (we are both faculty – me tenured, him tenure-track – at a tier 1 public research university). It has alot to do with wanting a full-on intellectual partner as a spouse, not a housewife; and i think the money figures into it somewhat. I also love my work and have no interest or inclination to step back on it. The upshot is we both make time and effort with parenting our two young kids (nearly 4, and 8 months).
However, my husband’s research area is one that is hot and well-funded now. Although our base salaries are similar, between summer salary from research grants and a consulting company he runs with a colleague, his income has far outstripped mine, and sometimes he pulls in double the money I do. Interestingly, we have both noticed a kind of easy slippage into more traditional divisions of labor than we like, and more kid-care falling on my shoulders – correspondingly, more interest in domesticity and focus on it from me, more focus on external job stuff from him….and so on. We view this slippage as directly linked to the financial imbalance in our incomes that has emerged in the last two years…. we’re trying to stop it, but the upshot in relation to ‘what we want’ is that what we want on a conscious level may easily run into trouble when financial or work-related forces make sliding into a familiar pattern easy; i would say the pattern that seems a ‘strange attractor’ is one of a wife with a part-time professional job….and a full-on, high power research career husband…
April 11th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Well, your quote from Tim Burke makes a very nice rejoinder to the review of Leslie Morgan Steiner’s “Mommy Wars” that was in my in-box courtesy of Powell’s Books this morning: http://www.powells.com/review/2006_04_11
This is also the first time I’ve seen the cover of that book, and ugh. Just ugh. What is it with these cutsy “spilled milk” and “crumbled cookie” graphics and metaphors? That was the one thing I didn’t like about Miriam Peskowitz’s book either.
April 11th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
And I know this has already been discussed a lot here, but spare me the idea that a “housewife” cannot be a “full-on intellectual”. Your inclinations, the amount of sleep you get, the number of people you can carry interesting conversations on with – all of these may play a role in your ability to engage in intellectual pursuits. It not directly tied to how many hours you work outside the house.
April 11th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
For the record, I wasn’t trying to argue that most men want stay-at-home wives; I don’t know what the split is. I was just saying that a lot of highly educated men do, which is anecdotally true among my friends and classmates; a lot of them are also horrified by the idea.
April 12th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
I was a stay at home dad while my wife worked full time, then we switched, I worked full time and she stayed home.
I really did not like having to work full time and be the “breadwinner”. I felt cut off from my kids, though I spent as much time as possible with them. I felt stressed and felt it was extremely unfair that the entire financial fate of our family was on my shoulders.
My (and our) optimal solution would have been to both work fulltime, but that is not really an option.
So as soon as our son was in school I really pressured my wife to go back to work. So now we both work full time (though I have flexible hours).
I got more time with the kids that way, and less stress. As for housework, when I was home full time I did pretty much all of it; when my wife was, she did, and now we share it depending on stress levels; for the past year or two I’ve been doing pretty much all laundry cooking cleaning since she’s stressed at work.
Bottom line I think it’s about negotiation between two people who respect each others needs.
But I have to say, I personally think it is not necessarily a good thing to have mom at home with kids and dad working. Dad at home and mom working is much better.
April 12th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
whoops, should read optimal solution would be to both work part-time…
January 14th, 2007 at 7:38 am
Across the water, the shift is against at-home wives – and commentators are lugubriating about the effects on family inequality. They are dead right, too: new home buyers in my neighborhood, which has gone up in price dramatically in the last few years, seem almost universally to be two-income families.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2546760,00.html