Read Online The End of Men and the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin - Free Book Online Page A

marriages “happy” or “very happy” and less than half as likely to get divorced; out of wedlock births are virtually unheard of among them. Marriage has become yet another class privilege in America, the gated community of human relationships, the “private playground of those already blessed with abundance,” in the words of sociologist Brad Wilcox, the head of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project.
    What was the trick? Smashing the old model, which was largely built on the assumption of male economic dominance. In Lucy’s time, a woman had no choice but to marry up; how else could she get ahead? Sylvia Plath described these privileged husband-huntersmemorably in
The Bell Jar
as “hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or another” and looking “awfully bored.” In fact, she writes, “girls like that make me sick.” Now that women can have their own careers, they can banish the waiting and boredom and that air of dependence that makes a freethinking woman sick. They don’t
need
a man to get ahead, so they can find one they really want to be with instead. And isn’t that a purer form of love, anyway?
    When I got engaged in the late 1990s, I had a vague concept in mind of an egalitarian marriage. I’d seen my husband work out some family finances for his parents one afternoon in a highly competent way, and remember feeling relieved that I’d be able to offload that particular task. I’d seen him playing with friends’ kids; he seemed to enjoy it. We were both journalists with about equally successful careers, and I assumed it would stay that way.
    This in itself was a radical enough vision. My mother had worked sporadically when I was a kid and started her career only after I had left for college. My father, like most fathers I knew, worked steadily every day. But I assumed my husband and I would both work, both raise children, and on into a happy retirement. I am not an especially precise planner, but if you’d have pressed me for an exact ratio, I would have given the same one most women of my generation had in mind: fifty-fifty, with its soothing intimations of yin-yang harmony and feminist equity.
    The new model of elite marriage renders even that simple equation obsolete. The prevailing arrangement now is a constantly shifting equation—sixty-forty or eighty-twenty or ninety-ten. I call it the seesaw marriage, where any side of that ratio can be filled by either partner at any given time. A husband can work to support his wife through school and then she can take over and be the hotshotlawyer. A wife can start out ahead and then decide to cut back and take care of the children. These new bourgeois marriages work, argues marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, because they have “much less rigid gender roles.” Anyone can play the role of breadwinner for any period.
    In the fifteen years I’ve been married, I’ve started to encounter more families where the wife is at least for some period the main breadwinner. Some couples seem to ease into it naturally—the wife is a born workaholic and the husband delights in, say, coaching the sports teams or picking the kids up after school. One woman at our preschool can’t stop bragging about her stay-at-home husband—although, I can’t help it, I am still startled by the sight of him hanging around the school making handprint T-shirts for the teachers. Some dynamics are not so pleasant—one woman I know, whose husband works part-time as an airline mechanic, never seems to run out of ways to call him a loser. Another, with an out-of-work lawyer husband, complains about petty things—why does he spend all her money on dress socks if he hasn’t had a job interview in over a year, and why does he have to subscribe to every damned sports channel? In a couple of cases I know, the disparity never felt natural, and the couple got divorced.
    The emotional landscapes of such families were a mystery to me, which