/ 26 September 2006

Beware the career woman

The things I do for journalism. Do you realise that by being paid to write this I am jeopardising my boyfriend’s happiness, the health of our relationship and the future of Western civilisation? No? Then you cannot have read the plangent article by journalist Michael Noer, news editor of the online version of Forbes magazine, the United States’s ”business bible”, in which he warned men against the perils of female employment.

The piece opened with this exhortation to readers (the male ones at least): ”Guys: a word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.”

By careful cherrypicking of various sociological factoids from research institutes over the past five years, Noer has found that women who undertake paid employment are more likely to fall out of love with their husbands, to be unfaithful, to have fewer children and to be unhappy about staying at home with said children, and — as career women spend 1,9 fewer hours every week wielding a mop and duster than their non-career-driven counterparts — ”Even your house will be dirtier.”

It will be clear by now that when Noer says wife he does not mean ”equal partner in a marital coupling” but instead ”someone who pops out kids, scrubs the toilet with a smile on her lips and a song in her heart, and spends any spare time gazing at photographs of her beloved husband until it is time for him to come home and mess the place up so she has something to do tomorrow”.

With this definition in mind, it must therefore be conceded that career women do make bad wives. Or rather, they make bad Doris Days, which seems to be the ideal being venerated here. A woman who has taken a job is not going to be spending hours beating rugs or reblanching the grouting with a gauze-wrapped toothpick. She may be able to fit in some basic vacuuming or spray some cleaning product around the bath, but that’s about it. If she is extremely ambitious or naive, she may even expect a helping hand from her husband. (But I note that in Noer’s article there is not even a suggestion that the man might share the domestic load.) This may make her a bad wife, but it does undoubtedly raise a few more pertinent questions about how we define a good husband.

Speaking of which, what kind of husband would Noer be? What are we to make of a 37-year-old man writing in 2006 about the horrors of women who are economically independent enough to leave their husbands if they want to, who are free to leave the house and so be exposed to opportunities to be unfaithful, and who may choose to churn out fewer than one baby every year?

One response is to treat him as a fractious child in need of soothing. When, for example, he cites the Social Forces 2006 report that ”[women] will be unhappy if they make more money than you do” and the Journal of Marriage and Family finding of 2001 that ”you will be unhappy if they make more money than you do”, one could point out that the pay disparity that still exists between men and women doing the same jobs will militate against such a battering to the man’s self esteem. Or one could impress upon him the possibility that the mental processes women go through before leaving a marriage are rarely ”Oh, I have money and a job and a husband. I think I will leave my husband and find out what it is like just to have money and a job”, but generally involve a profound level of dissatisfaction with the relationship that has little to do with the presence or absence of a career.

Another is to heave a deep sigh of disbelief at how much and yet how little feminism has achieved during the past 40 years. Since Betty Friedan identified the nameless frustrations among the housebound women of her generation in The Feminine Mystique, feminism has succeeded in forcing society at large into some sort of recognition that housework is work, unpaid but valuable, and that for large numbers of women, a purely domestic life is not enough. This was — and is — a huge societal shift.

And then you have Noer’s article, which specifically says that, ”For our purposes, a ‘career girl’ has a university level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30 000 a year.” He is not, therefore, complaining about the severe depredations high-flying jobs make on domestic and personal lives but about the slightest inroads made by almost any kind of female employment. It makes his opening paragraph tantamount to saying, ”Don’t marry any working woman”, or ”Don’t marry any woman with a brain”, and betrays just how low a level of financial or mental independence among women is seen as a threat by some men.

There are signs that Noer may at least be in the minority now. Forbes.com took the unusual step of removing­ the article from its website 24 hours after putting it up, and then reposting a different version, with some of the most inflammatory parts removed, accompanied by a riposte from Forbes executive Elizabeth Corcoran (18 years married, career, two kids), explaining how marriages can be made to work without one party having to subsume every vestige of herself within his quest for big bucks and a shiny home.

There is no information available about Noer’s marital status, but if he is single you have to fear for his prospects. Especially as, I gather, even a woman ordered up from www.desperate-thaibrides.com can start getting a bit unruly once she realises that domestic enslavement and a role as favourite brood mare are no longer the only options for women in the land of the free. — Â