Women, Marriage, and Labor

Early in my career, I worked for an attorney who was married to a woman whose job required frequent international travel. There were times she would slip me some cash and ask me to order a birthday cake, or order flowers, or take him out to dinner, because she was going to be out of town on the day of the event. (This was the late 1980s—you couldn’t just go online and order things for instant delivery, and international phone calls were *expensive*, even for people in the upper middle class.)

One day, we were doing our morning check-in (both “how are you?” and “what delightful tasks are on the docket today?”), and he recounted his frustration with trying to have some basic domestic task completed, as neither he nor his wife had the time to deal with it. “We need a wife!” he exclaimed.

“Wait, you have a wife.” I had not yet had enough coffee to follow the sudden detour from discussing the case we were working on that day.

He replied, “Yes, but we need a wife—someone to do all the traditional wife things, clean, cook, manage the house—while we do our jobs.”

I nodded, said something about how having domestic help would be useful, and perhaps they could hire someone. Then the discussion went back to the day’s work, and I didn’t think more about it.

Shortly thereafter, I came across Judy (Syfer) Brady’s piece, “I Want a Wife“, from the first issue of Ms. Magazine in 1971, and it made me think about my parents’ marriage, and how incredibly unbalanced it was, and painfully unfair to my mom. It confirmed to my 25-year-old self that I was not interested in marriage, especially on those terms.

In college, three of my male professors (that I know of) earned their graduate degrees while being supported by their wives, so they didn’t have to work while studying. They then “rewarded” their wives by becoming professors and “allowing” their wives to retire from the workforce—so they could stay home and be full-time wives and mothers. Which is not retiring from work at all. One of these professors proudly proclaimed that he had never done laundry—his mother did it when he lived at home, and then his wife did it (while working full-time to put him through graduate school). It angered me, but I didn’t say anything too pointed (only a comment along the lines of “must be nice”), because I didn’t know whether it would affect my grades.

In 2002, I read Marilyn Yalom’s “A History of the Wife” (which deserves its own blog entry), which addresses important questions: “How did marriage, considered a religious duty in medieval Europe, become a venue for personal fulfillment in contemporary America? How did the notion of romantic love, a novelty in the Middle Ages, become a prerequisite for marriage today? And, if the original purpose of marriage was procreation, what exactly is the purpose of marriage for women now?” That led to some changes in my own marriage—for the better.

But even with all the scholarship and discussion in academic and social institutions, the idea that society can only function with the unpaid and unappreciated labor of women is an ongoing problem.

Ms. Magazine published an update to Brady’s piece, written by Maggie Trinkle, “I (Don’t) Want a Wife”. Trinkle acknowledges that, while having domestic help would make life easier, the real issue is that our society is broken and unbalanced. Our lives are unmanageable because of dysfunctional social structures and societal expectations.

Trinkle begins:

So, I don’t want a wife anymore. I just want a goddamn functioning society. Why do I want a functioning society?

Because if society just operated like us ladies do, I wouldn’t need a wife, nobody would, and we’d all be better off, and here’s why:

For most of my life, I bought into the trope that women are supposed to do it all and make it seem effortless—so it’s only fair that society finally fulfills its side of the bargain.

I am 100% here for this.

I don’t want a wife. I want a functioning society.