Unreal.
Published by Lisa Kansas August 5th, 2008 in "Science", Media hackery, She's (or he's) crafty, What Patriarchy?, What would we do without such great advice?
Note: In its original format, this article made no sense whatsoever. The items in bold are my annotations, which hopefully will give you an easier time figuring out what’s really going on here than I had the first time I read it. Apologizing in advance for not blockquoting all the article excerpts!
By Sarah Jio, author of articles such as “Do You Mommy Your Husband?” and “She’s Just Not That Into You–Or Is She,” an article that has such story highlights as Study: Woman better at reading facial expressions, body language and Expert: Men more likely to heed woman’s words, than her actions.
(LifeWire) — “What do you do all day?” is a question Anne Marie Davis, 34, says she gets a lot. This is an intrepid attempt to instill indignant sympathy in the reader at first go, as Sarah is aware that the next few lines are going to inspire most readers to say Well…yeah, given all that, I’m kinda not surprised she gets that question a lot.
Davis, who lives in Lewisville, Texas, isn’t a mother, nor does she telecommute. She is a stay-at-home wife, which makes her something of a pioneer in the post-feminist world. This is very much like someone living in the Bronze Age declaring a flint knapper a pioneer in the Iron Age world, but if the reader doesn’t accept this as fact, they will be unable to swallow the rest of the article at all.
Ten years ago, she was an “overwhelmed” high school English teacher. “I didn’t have time for my husband, ” she says, “and I didn’t have a life.” Given that most of us work jobs that don’t even have extended winter, spring and summer vacations built in like that one and still manage to find time for our significant others and our lives, this is clearly a personal problem. However, we are obviously being invited to empathize.
She presented the idea of staying home to her husband, a Web engineer. “I told him it was something I wanted to do, and he supported it. It was a great relief.” Now, don’t you wish you had someone in your life who when you said, “I’m tired and stressed all the time and I just don’t want to work anymore, please say you’ll take care of me if I just quit my job and sit at home all day, please please please!” just WENT for it..? Aren’t you secretly just DYING of jealousy here..? Isn’t she SO lucky? …are you following the script here yet?
Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” says stay-at-home wives constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years, many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home,” he says. While his research is ongoing, he estimates that more than 10 percent of the 650 women he’s interviewed who choose to stay home are childless. Here is some background on Dr. Scott:
Sex is something that will keep men happy, Haltzman wrote in the fifth chapter of his new book, “The Secrets of Happily Married Women: How to Get More Out of Your Relationship by Doing Less,” which was released last month. The crux of Haltzman’s book can be gathered from the chapter titles alone: Chapter 1: Know Your Husband, Chapter 2: Nurture His Needs - and Yours, Chapter 4: Talk Less and, of course, Chapter 5: Have Lots of Sex.
And Sarah has based the title of her article, “No Kids, No Jobs for a Growing Number of Wives,” not even on this person’s research, but on his estimate of barely into the double digits.
Daniel Buccino, a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine clinical social worker and psychotherapist, says stay-at-home wives are the latest “status symbols.” “It says, ‘We make enough money that we both don’t need to work outside the home,’” he says. “And especially with the recent economic pressures, a stay-at-home spouse is often an extreme and visible luxury.” Davis says her life isn’t luxurious. But Daniel Buccino didn’t say your life was luxurious, he said you were a luxury. Like a BMW or a plasma-screen TV or an espresso maker. It is strange that neither you nor Sarah have any objections to that.
“Tuesdays are my laundry day,” she says. “I go grocery shopping on Wednesdays and clean house on Thursdays.” Mondays and Fridays are reserved for appointments and other errands. But her schedule also allows for charity work and leisure: reading, creative writing and exploring new hobbies, like sewing. It’s a lifestyle, Davis says, that has made her happier and brought her closer to her husband. “We’re no longer stressed out,” she says; because she takes care of the home, there are virtually no “honey-do” lists to hand over.
“If you told me years ago that I was going to be a stay-at-home wife, I would have laughed at you,” says Catherine Zoerb, 27. Yet after the Wichita, Kansas, resident finished graduate school in 2005, she found herself unemployed, childless — and strangely happy. With her husband’s support, Zoerb decided to just stay home.
“I was able to clip coupons, do all the chores and make nice dinners,” she says. “I was much less stressed and tense.”
But she was concerned, too — about not using her master’s degree in English and how future employers would view her work history. “I worried about gaps in my resume,” she says. And there was something else: “I thought about the feminist movement — all those women who worked so hard so that I could go out and have a good career, and I was kind of saying ‘no thanks.’”
Recently, Zoerb took a temporary job at an engineering firm. It will boost her resume, and although the Zoerbs don’t need the money, it will help pay down their mortgage. Still, she hopes to return to stay-at-home wifedom soon.
“I’d never say that a woman shouldn’t work,” she says. “But I don’t see what good it would do to work in a job that I couldn’t stand, and if I have the choice not to, why wouldn’t I take that opportunity?” No one should, least of all me, argue that if someone is doing what she wants to do and it’s hurting no one, she shouldn’t do it. However, no one should also have to sugar-coat the truth to her if she decides to make her private choices public. In short, both of these women are weak-minded, overgrown children who have found men who are willing to coddle their Peter Pan-like playacting…in exchange for what we don’t know, as we’re not privy to their personal interactions, but I hope for the women’s sakes it isn’t the Debi Pearl route.
“Everyone seems to be OK with women staying home when they have kids,” says Davis, who currently doesn’t plan to have children. “I’ve actually heard people say that women who don’t work are a drain on society.” Don’t be too quick to judge, says Haltzman. Women might give up a job to focus on an advanced degree, pursue artistic or creative goals, or deal with health issues. Since these are, however, specifically not the situations Sarah is focusing on, it’s hard to understand why either he or she included it here–they are likely attempting to throw a sop to normalcy.
Surprisingly, though, Haltzman says the biggest draw is homemaking itself. “Many women I talk to take care of the household seriously, and they want to focus on caring for the home, whether or not it involves children.” In order to properly weigh the likely worth of Dr. Scott’s deduction the true feelings and desires of women and how they are different from men, here is some more of his demonstrated knowledge:
I’ve spent the last decade researching the differences between men and women, and I’ve come to appreciate that the behavior in wives around the globe are part of women’s natural talent to care about other people. Women’s inborn ability to “take the temperature” of a relationship allows them to have a clearer sense of what ingredients will lead to happiness for the couple.
Consider the following men, not well known in the world of relationship literature: Eric A. Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, Carl E. Wieman. Not familiar to you? Then perhaps you’ll recognize the names Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, or author Sir V.S. Naipaul. These are all names of Nobel Prize winners of 2001–three in Physics, and one each in Peace and Literature. In fact, last year all the Nobel Prizes, including those in medicine, economics and chemistry, went to men. A lucky year for fellows? Hardly. In the past decade, the Nobel Foundation granted prizes to only four women.
Men can master skills in the sciences, literature and leadership. It doesn’t end there. Men have demonstrated excellence in endeavors from architecture to culinary arts. Is it such a leap of logic, then, to believe they can master relationship skills as well? My experience as a marriage therapist, and research on SecretsofMarriedMen.com, tell me that men have a wonderful aptitude at making a union last. Having a man’s brain–a man’s problem solving talents–is an asset, not a liability, for committed relationships.
Sometimes a wife’s desires don’t align with her husband’s. “I hear frustration from men whose wives choose not to work,” Haltzman says, “but only if there are financial stresses. One of the realities is that few men appreciate the scope and difficulties of managing a household.” Unless most men move straight from their parents’ house directly in with their wife, most men know full well the scope and difficulties of managing a childless household, and of course both Dr. Scott and Sarah know this. However, if they admitted it, then they would have no leg to stand on whatsoever for the entire rest of this article.
Kirk Zoerb is an exception: The 27-year-old engineer says he’s happiest when his wife is jobless. “When Catherine stays at home, I feel the house is more together because she has the time to do things like in-depth cleaning and can be more attentive to the garden,” he says. “She also has more time to find good deals at secondhand stores, garage sales and at grocery stores.” As a couple, he says, “we have more energy and are generally emotionally healthier.” Still, “I don’t believe that the woman has to be the exclusive cook, cleaner or shopper, and I don’t believe the man must be the breadwinner. I wouldn’t mind staying at home while Catherine works!” And now that Kirk has expressed this desire, shouldn’t Catherine enthusiastically support him to give him what he wants? Rather than exploring that dynamic, though, the article simply ends here. What a surprise.
I’d like to say that I’d do more painting and finish my novel if I were a trophy housewife, but given my behaviour this summer, I’d probably just be home all day flaming people on the internet.
Unless most men move straight from their parents’ house directly in with their wife, most men know full well the scope and difficulties of managing a childless household, and of course both Dr. Scott and Sarah know this. However, if they admitted it, then they would have no leg to stand on whatsoever for the entire rest of this article.
I wonder how many men still do that? It was pretty common in the rural area I lived in when I was a kid, but there’s a whole class issue buried here - like most ‘human interest’ reporting, it’s describing to the top 5% income bracket only - where surely the men have at least been to college? What.
“Given that most of us work jobs that don’t even have extended winter, spring and summer vacations built in like that one and still manage to find time for our significant others and our lives, this is clearly a personal problem. ”
Whoah, hey. I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, but that’s not cool. Teachers really do have that little time, even with vacations. You work in a high-stress environment all day and go home to hours late, exhausted. A lot of us then cook and clean for their family, often followed by more school work. Oh, and you have a three-hour workshop Tuesday night and one from 8-4 on Saturday. District mandated training, not optional.
When you finally get to a break, you spend the first quarter getting sane again, the next doing all the errands you didn’t do during the year because CHRIST, are you SERIOUS? Take a day off for the doctor and the dentist and the vet and the DMV when my boss is breathing down my neck for a 20% increase on the next district test and HER boss could show up at any time? And the rest alternates between sleeping, mandatory training, and planning for the next semester. I at least fit in hobbies. Many don’t. So no, that’s not a personal problem. It’s pretty damn systemic.
I could kind of follow along (disagreeably) until he got to that Nobel prize stuff. What the christ was that?
I have a pair of friends who are married. She is a stay at home wife, he’s some kind of I.T. guy. They’re very well-off financially (his parents became multimillionaires in the 90s tech boom). I sometimes wonder if he’d really be okay with her working, because I do indeed get the impression that he considers having a wife to take care of his domestic needs a ’status’ thing, to which all men should aspire acquiring (his sentiments, not mine). I don’t think he’d try to stop or forbid her, but he might be kind of passive-aggressive about it - not really being very supportive, not showing interest in her job, etc. I suppose that little resistance can mean the difference when it comes from your spouse.
I also get the impression that she isn’t 100% on board with the state of affairs, but that she’s kind of…rationalizing it? Making excuses to herself why it’s actually a good thing, etc. Last we spoke, she said she might take up flying lessons, which I think is a good use of her (ample) free time.
I worry about her, sometimes.
Now, now: god gave you this gift for a reason, don’t be ashamed of using your talents to the fullest!
Xocolotl, my best friend is a high school teacher. She does indeed work VERY hard, puts in lots of extra time evenings tutoring kids, has to take classes to keep her certification up, etc. However, she would not deny that she has a lot more vacation time forcedly built into her schedule than any corporate eight-to-fiver does, and I notice you’re not denying it either, which is the only claim I made about the specific workload or lack thereof of a teacher. And since she does find time for her significant other and for her life, yes, I stand by my claim that the fact that this other woman who could NOT do so, SOLELY based upon her job as a high school teacher, is clearly her personal problem. I, for instance, have spent the past year traveling for business at least one week a month–there is no situation that makes it as hard to have time for your S.O. and your life as being actually physically absent from their presence more than 25% of the time, believe me. Yet again, I manage somehow. So again, I am quite convinced that the fact that she “could not” was and is a personal problem.
Of course everyone is different. Some work at slower paces, require more sleep, or become ill more easily than others. Maybe writing lesson plans, stressing about parents and going on trainings takes less of some people’s energy than it does of others, but I don’t think the people who become weakened by the stress are bad people.
shannon, I don’t think Lisa was saying that finding teaching stressful made Anne Marie Davis a bad person. I really don’t. She pointed out that many many people carry very full jobs and have rather stressful lives, but manage, nonetheless to find time for their personal lives; however, the reader of the article is being invited to empathize with Ms. Davis’s reasons for opting out of her career and choosing to become a stay-at-home wife.
We’re being asked, in this article, to accept that women should consider serving as trophies if their husbands make enough money, because being an equal contributor to the family’s income is just so stressful.
Weirdly enough, the article doesn’t profile even one single overwhelmed stay-at-home husband who as found self-actualization and reduced his personal stress level by opting out of the workforce and running a smooth, nice house for his hardworking, high-income wife. I wonder why that is?
I also find myself wondering why, if these families have so much extra income, and were finding it so very burdensome to fit two careers and household and relationship maintenance into their lives, they didn’t use some of that discretionary to maybe hire someone to take care of the day-to-day household tasks. They might have contributed to the local economy by hiring a local independent housekeeper to come do the cleaning once a week, and a local chef or culinary student to prepare nice dinners. A gardener or even a high-school student with an interest in gardening to keep the garden looking nice. If you have discretionary income, there are a lot of ways to buy your way out of tasks you don’t like that don’t require one partner to become financially dependent on the other.
I think the idea that any problems managing are solely a personal problem as locating the fault solely within the person. Many people thrive at 80 hours a week, but that doesn’t make the rest of us lazy. I think men should also be free to have values in their lives that are more important than working, and if a woman wants to not work, have at it. Most women will continue to work, either from necessity or because they enjoy working and find it fulfilling. The two jobs model is just that- a model. It works for some people, and not for others.
The Nobel Prize stuff really got to me. Actually, it made this feeble minded woman who needs a man to think big sciency thoughts and problem solve for her proud that I earned a fellowship for graduate school in the name of Gerti Cori, one of the women who has won the Nobel Prize for chemistry.
The two jobs model is just that- a model. It works for some people, and not for others.
Yes, and given the way our society is structured, unless the non-income-earning partner has some other independent means (a handy trust fund, a really good investment portfolio, etc.), it’s also the only currently extant model that give both parties in a partnership some financial independence from each other.
Again, I don’t think anyone suggested the lady was lazy. I do see your point that we’re not all equally able to handle the many somewhat unreasonable demands implicit in holding down a full-time job and maintaining a nice home and a healthy personal life—hence my suggestion that one could, conceivably, use one’s extra income to pay someone else to do the more irksome parts of housekeeping. Of course, it’s entirely possible that Ms. Davis really likes scrubbing grout with a toothbrush, polishing silver with an old mascara brush, dusting the tops of frames, and scrubbing the windows with vinegar and old newspaper to keep them sparkling, and that she really does find having a day each week to devote to these activities much more satisfying than having an independent income.
I still find it interesting that so few men find this “choice” a desirable or fulfilling one.
I must reiterate–it is a very noticeable personal problem when an adult, regardless of gender, decides that working at ALL is just too stressful for them altogether. That is what adults do, you know–they work. It is not a personal problem to find an 80 hour week too stressful; it is not a personal problem to find any particular job or career too stressful. However, it is an adult’s responsibility to w-o-r-k. Period. Children on summer vacation get to live a life of chores and play, all day, every day. Adults–no. And women, in spite of what this article would like to be the case, are just as much adults as men–can you ever imagine a man saying, with a straight face, “Yes, any job at ALL is just much too stressful for me, now I stay at home every day–I do laundry Monday, I shop Wednesday and I work in the garden for a few hours every day,” and anybody finding this remotely normal?
Any job at ALL is too stressful..? And we’re supposed to buy this because that’s just the way women ARE?
I live in Lewisville, Texas! How sad that we’ve gotten publicity for such a lame story.
It is my opinion that maintaining the domestic sphere actually IS WORK. It’s WORK, people! WORK! It is absolutely craptastic that the modern American woman works for pay all day and then does the domestic sphere work all night, with no time for leisure. Having both partners split it up evenly is a tidy solution; but everyone on this thread (practically) is denying that it is work at all!
It is as though you have thoroughly bought the chauvinist line that housewives are home all day eating bon bons watching TV. Well, no; you can actually work a full forty-hour week mantaining the Domestic Front, espically if you grow some of your own food, and certainly if you include child or eldercare.
Sheesh, it is like you are AGREEING with the pundits who say that unpaid labor is without worth, therefore woman who perform it are without worth.
I honestly don’t think you could BE less Feminist!
It is true that, you are protecting yourself financially if you never drop out of the workforce, to a degree. But if you make yourslef ill spending your life doing shit that you hate, it probably isn’t worth it.
Do you think artists are worthless too? Or are they only worthwhile if they make tons of money?
Do you really want to make money into your primary or only measure of worth?
KMTBERRY - because SSA and immigration are having such great fun playing pingpong with my life atm, I am a stay-at-home wife, and no, it sure as fuck isn’t a 40 hour week. I’m not sure it’s even a 10-hour week. And I hate it. I hate not having control over my own finances, and I can’t wait to get back into a job, even if it’s another pointless crappy job like all the others I’ve ever had. I can’t imagine what sort of person would choose to be in this situation permanently.
Just because women have historically done unpaid domestic work doesn’t make unpaid domestic work some laudable spiritual burden. It just means that men have been using patriarchy to get women to do unpaid domestic work. It is not the same as being a writer or artist because it affects, at most, two human beings and has no possibilities beyond that. Money doesn’t have to be your only measure of worth for you to think that this work is worthless, believe me. And if you have proof that staying home improves your health, I’d love to see it - because I’ve always read the opposite; it’s staying home that makes you ill.