Read Online The End of Men and the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin - Free Book Online
Authors: Hanna Rosin
Tags: Non-Fiction
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money. “Do you realize how tough it is for a guy to make a buck these days?” asks Ricky. “Do you think that the money grows on trees?” And thus the game is on. Ricky and Fred will play the housewives for the day while Lucy and Ethel go out and look for a job. The resulting pandemonium illustrates the absurdity of such a reversal of roles. Ricky and Fred dress essentially in drag, with flowered aprons and do-rags on their heads. For dinner they produce two exploding chickens, a volcanic eruption of rice, and a seven-layer cake as flat as a pancake, leaving the kitchen a disaster. The ladies fare no better. They get jobs at a chocolate factory, which produces the famous scene: the chocolate bonbons racing down the conveyor belt as Lucy and Ethel, overwhelmed by the pace and terrified of the boss, stuff them intheir mouths, chef hats, and shirts. The girls return home hoarse and exhausted and eager to restore the natural order of things. “We’re not so good at bringing home the bacon,” Lucy confesses, and Ricky suggests, “Let’s go back to the way we were.”
Barely two generations later, the housewife is a rare breed on American television, unless you count the
Real Housewives
of anywhere, who would not be caught dead in a flowered apron that wasn’t part of a kinky maid’s costume. During the intervening years, the real-life Lucys and Rickys sat down at the American kitchen table and Lucy laid down the new rules. At this point Lucy was working, perhaps as a headhunter or a publicist or a Hollywood agent. Ricky meanwhile was still nurturing his “creative pursuits.” Lucy was bringing home at least as much money as Ricky, and some years more. Lucy was a woman reborn, hiring and firing, getting promotions, then coming home to put little Ricky to bed. Big Ricky was helping out, too, picking up from day care every once in a while or making a playground run on a Saturday morning so Lucy could go to a spin class. And by now he’d learned to roast a chicken. Wasn’t that something? But Lucy, newly attuned to the cadences of her own satisfaction, wanted still more.
By now, going “back to the way we were” was no longer an option. In 1970 women in the United States contributed 2 to 6 percent of the family income. Now the average American wife contributes 42.2 percent. More than a third of mothers, in the United States and the UK, are the family’s main breadwinner, either because they are single or because they make more money than their husbands. This latter category of breadwinner wives, also known as “alpha wives,” are a particular shock to the usual marriage regime, given that they were once considered as bizarre and exotic as a portly man in a frilly apron. Within one generation, demographers expect them to be themajority of American families, with families in Europe and some Latin American and Asian countries not far behind. In fact, argues Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress, the whole question raised in the
I Love Lucy
episode and rehashed in some form today, about whether mothers should work, is moot, “because they just do. This idealized family—he works, she stays home—hardly exists anymore.”
In the confines of intimate relationships, women’s growing economic power has done extraordinary things. For the 70 percent of Americans without a college degree, the rise of the breadwinner wife is associated with the destruction of marriage. Women are choosing to stay single rather than marry men who can’t step up and provide. The divorce rate has stayed as high as it was in the seventies, and every year fewer people get married before having children. In Washington, DC, for example, an astonishing 63.8 percent of mothers act as their family’s main breadwinner, largely because the city has so many poor single mothers.
But for the elites, the result is exactly the opposite. Since the seventies, the college educated have become far more likely than anyone else to rate their
Barely two generations later, the housewife is a rare breed on American television, unless you count the
Real Housewives
of anywhere, who would not be caught dead in a flowered apron that wasn’t part of a kinky maid’s costume. During the intervening years, the real-life Lucys and Rickys sat down at the American kitchen table and Lucy laid down the new rules. At this point Lucy was working, perhaps as a headhunter or a publicist or a Hollywood agent. Ricky meanwhile was still nurturing his “creative pursuits.” Lucy was bringing home at least as much money as Ricky, and some years more. Lucy was a woman reborn, hiring and firing, getting promotions, then coming home to put little Ricky to bed. Big Ricky was helping out, too, picking up from day care every once in a while or making a playground run on a Saturday morning so Lucy could go to a spin class. And by now he’d learned to roast a chicken. Wasn’t that something? But Lucy, newly attuned to the cadences of her own satisfaction, wanted still more.
By now, going “back to the way we were” was no longer an option. In 1970 women in the United States contributed 2 to 6 percent of the family income. Now the average American wife contributes 42.2 percent. More than a third of mothers, in the United States and the UK, are the family’s main breadwinner, either because they are single or because they make more money than their husbands. This latter category of breadwinner wives, also known as “alpha wives,” are a particular shock to the usual marriage regime, given that they were once considered as bizarre and exotic as a portly man in a frilly apron. Within one generation, demographers expect them to be themajority of American families, with families in Europe and some Latin American and Asian countries not far behind. In fact, argues Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress, the whole question raised in the
I Love Lucy
episode and rehashed in some form today, about whether mothers should work, is moot, “because they just do. This idealized family—he works, she stays home—hardly exists anymore.”
In the confines of intimate relationships, women’s growing economic power has done extraordinary things. For the 70 percent of Americans without a college degree, the rise of the breadwinner wife is associated with the destruction of marriage. Women are choosing to stay single rather than marry men who can’t step up and provide. The divorce rate has stayed as high as it was in the seventies, and every year fewer people get married before having children. In Washington, DC, for example, an astonishing 63.8 percent of mothers act as their family’s main breadwinner, largely because the city has so many poor single mothers.
But for the elites, the result is exactly the opposite. Since the seventies, the college educated have become far more likely than anyone else to rate their
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