The Wife Drought

by Annabel Crabb

  I talked to Elisabeth, a partner in a large professional services firm, who is the family breadwinner for her husband and three children. She explained that her home-based spouse is different from her male colleagues’ wives.

  ‘Just by way of example, my female friends and I who are primary breadwinners agree that asking your male primary carer partner to drop off or pick up your drycleaning is just a line that cannot be crossed,’ she says. ‘When the gender roles are reversed, tasks to do with the children are acceptable but anything otherwise straying into the “wife” spectrum of tasks is either too demeaning to ask of a man or they just don’t see it as being in the job spec.

  ‘In isolation, it doesn’t sound too onerous that the female primary breadwinner should deal with her own drycleaning. But when added to the multitude of other household/family tasks that still fall to the female primary breadwinner (such as organising gifts, dealing with family finances/admin, a fair whack of childcare) it means that the double shift is truly oppressive, and in a way that is not for male primary breadwinners who have wives who happily do all of this.’

  If male ‘wives’ don’t work the same way as female ones, female breadwinners don’t function like male breadwinners either, as Reeves discovered.

  First, they tended to downplay the importance of being a provider. They were all financially supporting their husbands, and yet none of them would put it like that. ‘Often the male partner interviewed experienced a keen sense of being dependent on their partner, and yet for the women, they did not demonstrate an awareness, or interest in, “providing” for their partner,’ Reeves noted.10

  Some simply did not define themselves as breadwinners at all. ‘The way I typically describe my situation … is I refer to my husband as primary carer,’ said another woman, a corporate social responsibility executive. ‘I don’t like to use terms like he is the home carer or anything, because I think that there are some terms which can be disempowering … I prefer to use a term that empowers him and talks about him and his role and then people can infer what that means in terms of what I do, rather than calling myself the breadwinner.’11

  A barrister, who works full-time and earns just under $200,000 a year while her tradesman husband looks after their three children, was especially cautious. ‘I don’t go around saying to people outside the workplace, “Oh, I am the breadwinner”, I don’t do that because I think that would be … I don’t think my husband would like me to do that and I feel embarrassed as well – it’s just when I’m sending stiff letters of reminder to pay bills that I do it. I mean he still wants to feel like he is the man and he doesn’t want people to know, I mean they know he is at home, but I wouldn’t go around saying it.’12

  Some of the women Reeves talked to redefined the whole concept of ‘supporting’ the household to accommodate the unpaid work their husbands did; renovating the home, perhaps, or supervising the household finances. ‘Broadly, in our family I earn cash and my partner builds capital,’ says a chief executive officer, of her arrangements. ‘I have been the main money earner through our relationship, but during that time my partner has studied law and economics including a PhD, he has built our two houses, he undertakes occasional consultancies and he is the primary caregiver for our two children including homeschooling.’13

  Several of the female breadwinners interviewed had taken conscious steps to shield their husbands’ sensibilities. The corporate social responsibility executive, for instance, had actively sought advice from a female mentor about how to ensure her husband did not feel emasculated. ‘Her advice to me was, empower your husband, let him be the one who manages the money even though you are the one earning it because you don’t have time, and if you are in a secure relationship or marriage … then you should trust them to do that.’14

  When men and women move outside the structures that society establishes for them, they build funny little cubby-houses of their own. It happens in every family to some extent – it’s what makes everyone different. A dad who loves ironing or does an exceptional chocolate cake, for instance. Or a mum whose job it has always been to kill spiders. But when a complete ‘role reversal’ takes place, vaster and grander edifices may need to be improvised.

  Some of these structures will be built entirely of silence.

  In Reeves’ study, one family simply did not ever mention the fact that the wife was the main breadwinner. Everyone accorded that role to the father, even though he worked fewer hours and earned less than his wife.

  How does such a salient detail simply never get mentioned? Easy. Every relationship has its no-go zones, its blind spots. It’s very difficult to be entirely objective about a relationship of which you are a constituent part. And when you spend an enormous amount of time with someone, it’s quite usual for even obvious stuff to go unnoticed or unmentioned. My favourite ‘marriage blind spot’ story was told to me by the Sydney arts executive Rachel Healy, who once was driving the family car with her partner, the composer Alan John, in the passenger seat. ‘Do you think I should shave off my beard?’ asked Alan, conversationally. Rachel kept driving, her eyes on the road. ‘Do you have a beard?’ she asked, with genuine interest.

  In long-standing relationships, the paths of least resistance are resignedly well-trodden. ‘I’ve given up on arguments about housework now,’ says one respondent, a chief executive officer in her forties.15 ‘I said this to my women’s group the other day who are all very strong feminists and one of them – a single woman – just said: “I can’t believe you actually said that, that you are going to give up on the arguments and just do all the cleaning.” I just don’t want to have the argument any more. You just live your life being resentful. I figure that it’s better than being a single parent. Everything he does is a bonus on top of being a single parent; I take it like that. If I have to spend five hours cleaning on Saturday, fine. Do it without complaining.’

  It’s easy, on hearing potted case histories or even (let’s face it) going round to people’s places for lunch, to arrive at a stern view one way or another as to how another family has organised their lives. Other families’ arrangements always have the stamp of immutability: ‘Aha! So that’s what they’ve decided to do, the idiots!’ But the truth is that families often don’t make concerted decisions about how they’re going to deal with certain circumstances; the circumstances arise, they make some ham-fisted, piecemeal attempt to deal with it, and that’s what sticks. This goofball lack of strategy is what makes human beings interesting. It’s also what makes us human.

  Reeves’ study identifies some of the things that Australian women and men trade between themselves as they adjust to running their households in a manner still thought unusual by the society in which they live. Some of the bargains, stalemates and concessions at which they eventually arrive may seem strange.

  But the global shift of women into paid employment has caused renegotiation in households all over the world, with bargains being struck to allay the fears attached to change. It’s an anthropologist’s dream, this stuff. In her splendid global romp through the knock-on effects of women’s employment across the world’s households, Naila Kabeer noted that the advent of working wives has created anxieties for husbands all over the world.16 In Bangladesh, husbands worried that a working wife increased their chances of being cuckolded. In India, some middle-income groups viewed a working wife as a blow to her husband’s prestige. In Chile, men worried that their wives would become ‘machista’, or blokey, and that their friends would think them lesser men as a result. In Kenya, husbands worried that their household authority would be under threat if their wives worked.17

  How did the women cope with these fears? They bargained, in many cases. The Bangladeshi women handed over their wages to their husbands in order to preserve his status as the family’s breadwinner. Wives in Chile convinced their husbands that their domestic work would not suffer. In many of the anthropological studies canvassed by Kabeer, housework is used as a bargaining chip.

&nb
sp; The weird little trade-offs and no-speaky deals improvised by Australian female breadwinners and their partners, in other words, are par for the course, globally, whatever our quaint regional specialities.

  What about the central fear underlying all of this horse-trading, though – the fear that the whole marriage might just blow up if a satisfactory deal cannot be struck? Are marriages where the woman becomes the primary earner more likely to end in divorce?

  For some worrying news on this front, we turn to Hollywood, a town that provides – it turns out – not only nonstop gossip and intrigue, but also a real live laboratory for examining what happens to the marriages of women who suddenly earn more than their husbands. Every year a crop of five actresses experience the exorbitant career bump that comes with an Oscar best actress nomination. Nomination brings all sorts of goodies – more fame, more attention, more magazine items reporting that you are definitely doing it with George Clooney, and so on.

  Keen observers, however, have noticed over the years that lady Oscar winners often got divorced soon after taking delivery of the bauble. The ‘Oscar Curse’ seemed to persist through the generations; way back in the 1940s, Vivien Leigh’s Oscar left her suddenly single when she divorced Herbert Leigh Holman the same year. Jane Wyman, who won in 1948, immediately split up with Ronald Reagan. Some of cinema’s most famous women – Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, Joan Crawford, Jane Fonda – discovered that intense stardom and super-inflated earning power did not necessarily a happy marriage make. Even in recent and – one would assume – more emancipated times, the Oscar Curse continues to blight the lives of the successful: Halle Berry, Hilary Swank, Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson, Reese Witherspoon and Sandra Bullock have all divorced in Oscar’s afterglow. Their marriages – for whatever reason – did not long survive the wife’s sudden blast-off into global celebrity super-orbit.

  A team of American and Canadian researchers decided in 2010 to quantify just how significant the Oscar Curse was.18 Was it only winners who were cursed? Or were nominees a little bit cursed too? They counted up every Best Actress nominee between 1936 and 2010, and investigated how many of them were married or in a de facto relationship at the time. Of the 265 women who were in a relationship when nominated, 60 per cent later divorced; a hefty marital casualty rate.

  But women who actually won the Best Actress Oscar were even more likely to get divorced. The median marriage length for winners was 4.3 years, the researchers established, while non-winners were looking at about twice as long – 9.5 years. Meanwhile, nothing like this pattern was observed for the men who won or were nominated for Oscars; non-winners and winners alike had marriages that lasted a median twelve years.19

  On one level, it might seem fatuous to turn to Hollywood for a lesson about the dynamics among typical relationships. But the Oscars have a quota – there are five female and five male candidates every year, all of whom feel the invigorating and sudden career benefits of nomination. What other professional endeavour offers such a high-profile level playing field for high achievers? In other areas, the crop of astronomically successful women is often too small to permit a decent comparison.

  In any event, affairs with George Clooney are neither here nor there when it comes to the marital destiny of successful women. Earning more money than your husband introduces complications for many women, whomever you are.

  In the economist Gary Becker’s famous formulation, stability in marriage comes from specialisation – one partner earns the money, freeing the other partner to take care of things at home. Or, if you choose to put it the other way, one partner’s unpaid work in the home liberates the other to go out and prosper in the workplace. Now, if Becker’s theory really was just about time and labour management, it would make no difference whether the earner was male or female. But, of course, it does make a difference – for about a zillion other sociological reasons.

  In a 2009 German study, researchers analysed a spread of families and established that marriages were more likely to end in divorce where the wife earned more money.20 They were more likely to end in divorce in the ‘role reversal’ scenario – when women went out and earned the money and their husbands stayed home with the children – than in the traditional male breadwinner situation. They were more likely to end in divorce when women earned the main income for the family and then came home and did all the housework too. The link between female breadwinning and escalated rates of divorce has been established by a series of such studies.21 So – it’s not just Oscar winners.

  But human behaviour is riotously insubordinate to sensible analysis. Do people get divorced because they are unhappy? Or because those around them convince them that they should be unhappy? We are horribly susceptible to the opinions of others, and the thought that others pity us for getting a raw deal often burns more deeply than the supposed wound itself.

  The truth is that doing things differently from the norm does tend to feel weird, and to look weird to others, and that’s why most of us avoid doing so. I keep thinking about that Canadian study I wrote about in Chapter 2 – the one finding that men who left work early to pick up their kids copped more flak than women who did the same thing. That study also found that women who didn’t have children were more likely to be harassed than women who did. The deep suggestion within that research is that the lead indicator for trouble at work is less to do with whether you are a man or a woman, and more to do with whether you behave the way people expect you to behave.

  If workplaces were equally accepting of men who take time out for family, there would be no reason for men to feel awkward about asking. And if men were as common as women on the playgroup circuit, then the assumption that raising children is women’s work would be less dominant.

  We are shaped by assumptions, after all. But they needn’t be set in stone.

  CONCLUSION

  One of the things that has surprised me most over the course of writing and researching this book is how powerful the male breadwinner model still is, even in our modern society. It seems like a dominant, ancient instinct that wordlessly underscores the patterns of a nation.

  But the weird thing is, the male breadwinner model isn’t even all that old. The idea that families could afford for only one parent to be in paid work is not an ancient model; it’s a convenient one, popularised largely in post Industrial Revolution societies experiencing periods of relative affluence.

  Ah – the Industrial Revolution: one of humanity’s more effective revolutions. Less bloody than the Russian. Less pointless than the Whiskey Rebellion. More memorable than the Pastry War (a four-month conflict in the late 1830s between Mexico and France, arising from the claims of a disgruntled French pâtissier in Tacubaya that a bunch of Mexican officers had trashed his shop).

  The Industrial Revolution got a lot of stuff done. It changed the way things are made, obviously – goods are now mass-produced in factories, rather than handmade by local artisans with shocking occupational health and safety conditions.

  It started our global love affair with coal. It made life easier for horses, who were decreasingly relied upon for the agrarian work that had occupied the majority of the poor and working classes. It triggered, in time, an extra ordinary burst of economic growth that established a sizeable middle class, enjoying not only reliable wages, but the fruits of the labour-saving devices they were employed to make. The car. The refrigerator. The washing machine. The tumble dryer. (Such is the irony of the human condition, of course, that in 2014 some of the richest beneficiaries of these labour-saving devices use their spare time to make cheese, spin wool, or grow their own vegetables. A magazine devoted to artisanal hobby coal-mining cannot be far away.)

  Middle-class prosperity by the mid-twentieth century made it possible for many families to support themselves on the earnings of only one breadwinner. The new class of jobs – manufacturing, labouring, mining, bookkeeping – also changed the way a working day looked. Rather than working in and around the home, or on farms, m
en arrived at a new pattern of labour – leaving the home for a long work day under supervision at a large workplace, with hundreds of other men.

  This standardisation of working hours had many consequences. The rise in packed lunches, for one example: the Cornish pasty thrived. Organised labour, for another; so much easier to bargain collectively when you were all working in the same factory, rather than straggled across fields, probably in the rain. But it also had significant and lasting consequences for our expectations of men.

  In the hardscrabble centuries before the Industrial Revolution, life for a vast proportion of the population was about trying to survive long enough to reproduce, without dying in childbirth or getting cholera while you were at it. In vast sections of the Third World, things are still like that. But the organisation of the developed world into orderly, regulated workforces of men heading off every day to factories or offices for a standard working day also established a dominant, and easily adjudicated idea of what an ideal man is.

  An ideal man is a good employee. He goes to work five days a week, from nine to five, except if he is especially diligent and ambitious, in which case he will do copious overtime. Possibly he will do shift work, but these hours will be regulated and he will do his required allotment without absence, complaint, or shirking. Nothing that happens at home will interfere with his productivity. In some cases, he will wear a tie. Why will he wear a tie? Why, when he is in a hurry each morning, would he stop to select a long, thin strip of fabric, providing neither warmth nor protection, and knot it around his throat in one of a small range of internationally recognised knots? No reason at all, beyond the fact that that’s just what men do. The tie is one of those special human things, like TV makeup or the Winter Olympic sport of curling, that would make no sense at all to a visiting alien, but are nonetheless permanent fixtures for homo sapiens.