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Thanks, Denise
March 28, 2010
New York Times
By LISA BELKIN
My mother has a sly way of backing into major announcements. “I’m renovating my kitchen” was her way of introducing the fact that she and her beau were moving in together several years after my father died. A year or so later she said, “I’m spending the morning finishing paperwork, so this afternoon we can go ring shopping,” which was her way of warning that a sapphire solitaire would soon grace her ring finger.
But about one thing she is most direct. “We are not getting married,” declares the woman who chose a teaching career over law school back in the 1950s because her mother warned that a new bride would be too busy to become a lawyer — and who was none too pleased when I briefly lived with a boyfriend when I was in college.
Her decision not to remarry makes her part of the fastest-growing subset of cohabiting couples in the U.S. nowadays — those over the age of 50. The generation that most wanted marriage has become the generation that scoffs. Most of their reasons are practical — remarriage can mean, for example, adjusting or possibly losing some Social Security benefits and risking a life’s savings to pay a new spouse’s medical bills. It means entangling finances that adult children will, sooner or later, have to untangle. Some of their reasons are more personal — memories of a bad first marriage, perhaps, loyalty to a good one or a reluctance to give up newfound independence.
But at its core, this trend is the latest twist in the redefinition of marriage — and what it means to be a wife. It used to be that a woman went to college for her Mrs. degree, then donned a starched apron and baked apple pies, all while delighting in her sparkling floors. Now a grocery chain in Britain surveyed its customers and found that only 16 percent of married women can make the dough from scratch, while more than half of their mothers could. (Only 25 percent can poach an egg without relying on a gadget, compared with 75 percent of their mothers; two-thirds of us can’t make gravy from scratch — two-thirds of our mothers could.) Today working wives in the U.S. bring in 45 percent of total family earnings, and 22 percent ages 30 to 44 earn more than their husbands.
My mother was there at the start of that rejection of the old ways (and not only because she never had any interest in cooking). In the ’70s, she left the education field for law school, heading into the work force with the other women in big shoulder pads and faux neckties, trying to look like men. That was when women began to joke that a wife was something they themselves wanted to have — to run the errands, handle the chores and do the scut work — meaning it was not something they themselves wanted to be.
It did not take long, of course, before the guilt set in. Mom never really felt guilty — her three children were grown by then. But she watched as young mothers all around her were torn. Those who stayed in the work force felt that they were shortchanging their children; those who left felt they were shortchanging themselves. They expected to be both their mothers (or their rosy memory of what their mothers had been) and their fathers (who won the bread but never dreamed of baking it), and because that is an impossible task, they felt they had failed. The old guideposts were gone, and new ones had not been established. What was a good wife?
Also, I now realize, she watched me. Obsession abhors a vacuum, and since my generation had moved past pie crusts and hand-waxed floors, we turned our energies to our children. “Housewife” disappeared from the language completely, and “wife and mother” became “working mom” or “stay-at-home mom” or “soccer mom.” There became “right” ways to “parent” — attachment parenting, slow parenting, free-range parenting. We signed our kids up for T-ball teams and swim classes, math tutors and SAT prep courses, because everybody else was, and because the world had changed.
There is a third way, Mom would periodically tell me, between the extremes of perfect wife and over-enmeshed mother. It is possible not to give a hoot what others think of your housekeeping but to simply enjoy making a home for someone you love. It is not necessarily a contradiction to dream of a poufy wedding gown and a corner office, or to rely on someone else as fully as you are relied upon, to put their needs before yours and know that they would do the same for you.
She’s right, of course, and there are hints that the next generation is heading down this third path, this place where “wife” doesn’t come with a job description to either embrace or reject. The key to this new paradigm for women is men. Part of the reason women are baking fewer pies and shining fewer floors, and may even be backing away from the feeling that their children’s activity schedule is a measure of their own worth, is because more men are adding these and other tasks to their own to-do lists. The young men and women coming into adulthood right now consistently tell researchers that they are determined to make their marriages into partnerships and to not default to traditional gender roles at the expense of equality. (And hopefully invest less of their own identities in their children.) Of course every generation vows to do things different from its parents; what happens when real life gets in the way is the question.
These young people are getting a push in the right direction, though, in a way their grandmothers probably would not have expected. For the past decade or so, “partner” was a consolation prize, a second choice for same-sex couples who were not legally allowed to marry. But with states replacing “bride” and “groom” on their marriage-license applications with “spouse,” and with wedding officiants declaring those spouses “legally married,” the word “wife” may never be the same.
And they are getting a push, too, from those grandmothers themselves. My mother, even as an early feminist, was very much my father’s wife. Now she is quite deliberately no one’s. That ring on her finger? They are engaged — permanently. She’s in a deeply committed relationship of equals now, and they needed a word to describe that relationship. “Fiancé” fit them better than husband or wife. Oh, and did I mention? He does all the cooking.
Lisa Belkin is a contributing writer and the author of the Motherlode blog.
