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

is why last year I conducted an extensive survey of seventy-five hundred people in female-breadwinner couples in the online magazine
Slate,
and followed up with interviews.
Slate
readers are much more educated than the general population, and the majority of people who answered the survey were women. Still, the responses start to get to the bottom of some of the more sensitive questions: Does more money mean more power in the relationship? Do more hours worked mean fewer hours taking care of the children? Do themen feel liberated? Humiliated? Do the women feel proud? Taken advantage of? Does a husband ever separate darks from whites?
    In fact, nearly 80 percent of people in my
Slate
survey on breadwinner wives described themselves as happy in their marriages, and rated themselves as having a fairly low chance of divorcing. About a third said the men were self-conscious about making less money, and slightly fewer felt judged by the community. Nearly 90 percent said in the future, it will be more acceptable for women to be the main providers. This may be because as financial providers go, women are relatively benign. A surprisingly small number of respondents said the woman has more power because she makes more money; about two-thirds reported that they share power equally.
    One recurring storyline I uncovered in my follow-up interviews was
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, only with a Hollywood ending. Lori, an attorney who makes half a million dollars a year, was tired of dating men who considered her professional competition, and whose “entire mood depended on whether they’d inched one step closer that day to being CEO.” So she married a train conductor she met on the dating site Match.com. “I wanted a man who didn’t talk about his work all day, who would rather go for a bike ride on the beach,” she told me. “My husband knows who he is. He’s just comfortable in his own skin.”
    Still, it was clear from my dozens of interviews that there are tensions under the surface. A power arrangement that’s prevailed for most of history does not fade without a ripple. In many cases I heard the same old marriage anxieties, only they showed up in the reverse gender. Andy, a stay-at-home dad in San Jose, had had to cancel several appointments with me because he couldn’t get his twins to sleep. Before he stayed home with his kids, he was a carpenter. His wife is a physician, and because she makes so much more money it mademore sense for him to stay home. Andy likes watching the toddlers, but he is wistful about his old life, and somewhat defensive about his new one. The feelings flood over him when he passes construction crews while taking the twins on a walk: What would it be like to work with a group of guys up on a roof again? What adventures is his wife having while he’s wiping off bibs? When his wife and her doctor friends rib him about staying home, he over-aggressively pulls the manual labor card: “How about I come over and help you put that Ikea furniture together, Mr. Doctor?” It’s the old Betty Friedan identity crisis, only in masculine form. These days when his wife suggests that he should go back to work, he feels “terrified.” It’s been a long time, and he’s lost the stomach for the outside world.
    On the other side of that equation are women who are resentful about carrying the whole economic load, much the way husbands once were. They exhibit the same range of provider symptoms: pressure, fear of the gold digger, frustration at being trapped in the day-to-day with no outlet for creativity. Michelle, an attorney in Los Alamos, complained to me about being “hunted like a deer by men as a desirable wife because of my wage-earning capability and good job.” Beverly, an African-American executive in Washington, DC, fed up with her couch-potato husband, warned that “women should be very careful about marrying freeloading, bloodsucking parasites.” Julie, an attorney and reluctant family