Of all the major magazines, I must concede that The Atlantic covers the gender debates best, but its writers tend to have blind spots that detract from the value of their articles. The problem is that they all come from the same overschooled, credentialed pool of urban scribblers, having paid their dues at the same schools, followed the same curriculum and even married the same people. Their life experiences are therefore inherently limited. Unfortunately, these days getting a job writing for a major publication requires a limited set of credentials and life experiences. This is the price we pay for the academic orthodoxy and accompanying credentialism that took hold back in the 90s.
So, every now and then a writer sees a glimpse of the wider world and has a moment of clarity, but then tragically gets it wrong anyway. Stephen Marche, an author and editor for Esquire, wrote a piece for The Atlantic this month concluding that the debate about work-life balance is not really just a women’s issue, but actually it’s all about why we need socialism.
A passage:
A year after The Atlantic published Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” the plutocratic wave of feminism continues to roll in. Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In looks to dominate the best-seller lists for months to come. Both accounts are full of stories like the iPad in the delivery room, stories of women furiously multitasking, worrying about family over champagne at a United Nations event, or diagnosing children with head lice while aboard a corporate jet. Men are mostly offstage. Slaughter, to her great credit, talks repeatedly about her husband, noting that he has done everything possible to support both her career and their two sons, including taking on the lion’s share of parenting duties while she commuted for two years from Princeton to Washington, D.C. Sandberg, too, talks about her husband’s role at home (in her book’s dedication, she credits him with “making everything possible”). But in the ensuing discussion of gender politics, which has been conducted almost entirely by women, for women, men are far more anonymous—implacable opponents of progress in the upper echelons, helpless losers elsewhere. Meanwhile, the good husbands—the selection of whom is “the most important career choice” young women can make, according to Sandberg—are as silent as the good wives once were.
Men’s absence from the conversation about work and life is strange, because decisions about who works and who takes care of the children, and who makes the money and how the money is spent, are not decided by women alone or by some vague and impersonal force called society. Decisions in heterosexual relationships are made by women and men together. When men aren’t part of the discussion about balancing work and life, outdated assumptions about fatherhood are allowed to go unchallenged and, far more important, key realities about the relationship between work and family are elided. The central conflict of domestic life right now is not men versus women, mothers versus fathers. It is family versus money. Domestic life today is like one of those behind-the-scenes TV series about show business. The main narrative tension is: “How the hell are we going to make this happen?” There are tears and laughs and little intrigues, but in the end, it’s just a miracle that the show goes on, that everyone is fed and clothed and out the door each day.
It gives me a smile to see Stephen taking it to the Sheryl Sandbergs and Anne Marie Slaughters of the world, calling their elitist brand of matriarchal cheerleading “plutocratic feminism.” Any ordinary man facing the realities of getting by and trying to raise a family at the same time would have a hard time listening to these two overpaid women kvetch about the “hurdles” they leapt while wearing pantsuits and carrying briefcases like some kind of corporate relay runners.
But then I have to ask Mr. Marche whether it really is so strange that men are absent from the discussion about who works and takes care of the children. He thinks, and not without justification, that men should be involved in these matters. He, after all, is involved, and he, after all, does make these decisions, or at least he makes some of them. Later in the article, however, he cites a statistic that shows that family decisions are far more likely to be made by women:
A 2008 Pew study asked cohabiting male-female couples, “Who makes the decisions at home?” In 26 percent of households, the man did; while in 43 percent of households, the woman did. The family has changed and is further changing, while at work, patriarchy survives as a kind of anachronistic holdover, like daylight savings or summer vacation.
I assume that this means that in 26% of households we have a traditional, patriarchal setup, while in 43% it is matriarchal. The remaining 31% must be egalitarian. If we’re generous and split the egalitarian decisions down the middle, then we come up with a figure of about 60% of household decisions made by women. In the American home, men are essentially the minority partner, and we must keep in mind that in most cases they don’t even have veto power!
It seems that this may be the case in Marche’s household, because he describes his wife, over his gentle objections, barking demands while delivering their baby (yes, really) to the effect of “hand me that ipad so I can email the office!” He also admits to essentially throwing his dreams aside so his wife could obtain her “dream job.”
In 2007, my life was right where I wanted it to be. After the lean misery of graduate school at the University of Toronto, I had, at 31, landed a job on the tenure track at City College in Harlem, as a professor of Shakespeare. My second novel was in the windows of appealing independent bookstores in Brooklyn, it had a good review in The New York Times, and the lead singer of the Decemberists was recommending it in interviews. This was basically all I had ever hoped for. Then I gave it up. My wife was offered her dream job as the editor in chief of Toronto Life magazine (roughly speaking, the New York of Canada), and we returned home.
You could see our departure as the triumph of egalitarianism, and in a way it was. I don’t think my father would have given up a tenure-track job for my mother. But in my marriage, the decision came down to brute economics: My wife was going to make double what I made. Good schools and good hospitals are free in Toronto. These are the reasons we moved. And if I were offered a job where I would make double what she does, we would move again. Gender politics has nothing to do with it.
I feel for Mr. Marche. Giving up on your dreams must really be a letdown, but men have been doing this for family from the beginning. However, at least in the old days men were afforded a certain position and respect as “head of household.” But not anymore:
We were moving back to downtown Toronto, where people self-identify as socialists, so I expected open-mindedness. Yet the reaction to my reduced professional status and stepped-up involvement in child-rearing was sharply divided along generational lines. Among Baby Boomers, classic gender stereotypes prevailed. To them, I had become “the woman” and my wife had become “the man.” Boomer men could not wrap their heads around what I had done, while the women would smile an amazed smile, their eyes glinting with a touch of self-satisfaction. A younger generation was completing what they had begun.
Among people my own age, the reaction was more complicated. Our story possessed a sort of circumscribed romance: to academic friends, the idea that I had given up a tenure-track appointment was like the Charge of the Light Brigade—glorious professional suicide. At any rate, most friends and acquaintances in roughly my age group at least understood the nature of the decision. They appreciated that chasing jobs was part of 21st-century life, and that marriage sometimes requires sacrifice. Well over half my male friends have wives who make more money than they do. Nonetheless, in social life, I found myself more and more of an addendum: “This is Stephen. He’s Sarah’s wife.”
Poor guy — this is all too familiar to me. What he didn’t realize was that his compliance and submission to his wife would not win him any favors. Without being taught otherwise, we men tend to think that being reasonable and giving in will evoke the same response in wives that it would in husbands, but this isn’t the case. Too often, we must learn the hard way, and for Marche that meant being treated like “the wife” at his wife’s journalist social events. Sounds like hell on earth to me, but hey, she’s making good money, so it must be worth it…
However, Marche does find a saving grace: socialized childcare. He says that because he and his wife can afford to warehouse the kids from 9 to 5, he’s been able to get back to work and regain some self-respect:
let us get down to the details—specifically the financial details. The key fact of our story, the overwhelmingly most important factor in our personal gender politics, is that in Canada, we have access to high-quality, modestly state-supported (though far from free) day care. Of all the privileges my wife and I gained, our boy being in a safe place we could afford between nine and five was by far the greatest. It’s why this story has a happy ending; it is the thing that enabled me to build a new career for myself. Day care is not theoretical liberation. It is the real deal, for women and men alike.
He has a point. Without that perk, I doubt his marriage would have lasted; just this issue put the final nail in the coffin of mine. However – and this is crucial – this kind of socialization of home duties also obviates the family. Does a woman with access to state-subsidized childcare need a husband? Aside from saving money on housing, is there any reason for a two-parent household at all?
Of course, it’s in the interests of the children to have two parents, and sober-minded Swedes and Canadians may recognize that, but most Americans? I don’t think so. Not anymore, at least. This socialized model of family that allows each parent to have the freedom to pursue his or her preferred lifestyle while co-parenting kids is great for the kind of people who have advanced degrees – people like Stephen Marche and his wife – but for a growing proportion of American families it will lead directly to even more single mother households, and these households won’t be cheap for the rest of us. Unlike in Sweden or Canada, every two-parent household in the US will end up subsidizing a single mother.
Marche writes that mediocre-quality daycare for two kids is on average more expensive than rent in the US. Does he really think that removing it from the private sector will make it cheaper? I don’t think Marche understands the economics involved here. When most of the children born to young mothers are now illegitimate, and most of their fathers all but broke, the level of taxation required to give these women an additional $10,000 or so per year (that’s a conservative estimate) on top of what we already spend will be unbearable. Sure, it works fine when you’ve got a Nordic welfare state full of responsible, productive citizens, but that is not the contemporary USA.
So, while Marche sees the light and correctly points out that work-life balance is not solely a “women’s issue,” he fails to address the fact that families in the US are de facto matriarchies – even more so if you take into account the single mother households (he does not) – and he displays his own kind of narrow-minded elitism in assuming that what works for him and his magazine editor wife is broadly applicable to the 300+ million people in the US. In the end, he only comes off as slightly more reasonable than Slaughter and Sandberg, and that’s because he is not in the 1%, but rather the 10%. Sadly, I’m afraid that’s the best The Atlantic can do.
