by Hanna Rosin
The men, in turn, accept this diminishment as their fate, referring to themselves as “fallen idols” and explaining dispassionately that their kids no longer say “Hi, Dad” when they come in the door. “They used to come and hug me and now I seldom hear a pleasant word from them,” one says. The particular stories are heartbreaking, but the equation is soothingly simple, with its promise of easy reversibility. Everything would be all right, the couple agreed, if her husband “could find something to do.” She could pay the grocer, give the children their allowance, and turn on the heat. Peace, along with the timeless contract between man and woman, and the blind faith in the goodness of patriarchal authority, would be restored. Was there an alternative? Could Mrs. Johnson perhaps find a job instead? suggested the interviewer. No, they both agreed. That would be “terrible.”
Barely a decade after the publication of Komarovsky’s book, the simple contract began to break down. What had been blindly accepted as man’s singular destiny since the caveman days—to provide for his family—suddenly seemed like a choice, and a choice many men were rebelling against. In retrospect we can pin the blame not so much on the gender revolution of the 1960s but on the 1950s, where the notion of breadwinner was so brutally enforced as the only middle-class norm that it began to feel like a noose. Authorities relied on the weight of science and psychology to hammer the point home: Men who failed to accept the breadwinner role were “deviant,” “unnatural,” and “immature,” as Barbara Ehrenreich outlines in her 1987 book The Hearts of Men. Psychologists laid out clear developmental stages much the way Jean Piaget had done for babies: A man had to select a mate, find a vocation, establish a suitable home. Men who failed to meet these stages on time (meaning before age twenty-three) suffered from diseases such as “psychic immaturity,” or “aspiring to ‘perpetual adolescence’”—the kinds of conditions Ben Stone would recognize well. This irresponsible man, Ehrenreich writes, even “blurred into the shadowy figure of the homosexual,” so much so that psychiatrist Lionel Ovesey created a new category of “pseudohomosexual,” meaning a man who was not gay but nevertheless failed to conform to the standards of masculinity.
Peter Tarnopol, Philip Roth’s alter ego in My Life as a Man, summarizes the prevailing ethos of the fifties perfectly:
No wonder then that a young college-educated bourgeois male of my generation who scoffed at the idea of marriage for himself, who would just as soon eat out of cans or in cafeterias, sweep his own floor, make his own bed, and come and go with no binding legal attachments, finding female friendship and sexual adventure where and when he could and for no longer than he liked, laid himself open to the charge of “immaturity,” if not “latent” or blatant “homosexuality.” Or he was just plain “selfish.” Or he was “frightened of responsibility.” Or he could not “commit himself” (nice institutional phrase, that) to “a permanent relationship.”
As you can surmise from the bitterness in Tarnopol’s voice, the establishment had turned the screws too tightly. Almost simultaneously the first rumblings of the male revolt began. The best sellers of the mid-1950s—William Whyte’s The Organization Man and David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd—warned men that they had become puppets of large corporations, mechanized versions of real men. Riesman especially lamented the creation of the emasculated, other-directed new man of the American workplace, who was forced to suppress concrete skills in favor of qualities such as perpetual alertness to signals from others and sensitivity to his colleagues. (And how prescient he was! These are now known as “people skills,” and they are highly valued in the twenty-first-century workplace.)
How precisely to escape this trap was not at all clear. Midway through Richard Yates’s 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, April Wheeler comes up with the perfect way to get out of the desperate suburban prison. Her husband will quit his post at Knox Business Machines, “the dullest job you can imagine.” They will move to Paris, and she will work as a government secretary while he roams the city and reignites his old creative bohemian self.
“Don’t you see what I’m saying? It’s . . . it’s your very essence that’s being stifled here. It’s what you are that’s being denied and denied and denied in this kind of life . . . .
“Don’t you know? You’re the most valuable and wonderful thing in the world. You’re a man.”
But the world was not yet ready for this new definition of man, set free from his family duties. April finds herself pregnant, and the plan is drowned by the chorus of men alarmed by such a gender upheaval. His neighbor: “What kind of half-assed idea is this about her supporting him? I mean what kind of man is going to be able to take a thing like that?” His colleague (to Frank): “I don’t see you languishing indefinitely at sidewalk cafés while your good frau commutes to the embassy or whatever.” His neighbor again, imagining the lovely April Wheeler “grown thick and stumpy from her decade of breadwinning.”
The peaceful solution to upper-class breadwinner angst did not present itself in the sixties and seventies, either. Instead marriage became the casualty of the all-out, sexually charged gender wars of the era. The new magazine Playboy urged men to reclaim the domestic space for themselves—put on some mood music, mix up a highball, and invite a woman over as a one-night guest, not a permanent resident. For women, meanwhile, marriage and all its accoutrements became the enemy, the barrier to fulfillment and progress. The worst thing one could be was a housewife, enslaved to a master husband. “Prostitutes don’t sell their bodies, they rent their bodies,” feminist activist Flo Kennedy wrote in Color Me Flo, a quote that got reprinted in Ms. magazine. “Housewives sell their bodies when they get married.” In a 1971 forum captured in the documentary Town Bloody Hall, Germaine Greer and her feminist acolytes mocked a culture that believed a woman should “get an orgasm from a shiny floor.” The forum ended with three women falling all over one another and making out onstage. This might have been an act designed to annoy and titillate Norman Mailer, who was also onstage, or it might have been a genuine gay rights moment. Either way, the message was that conventional bourgeois marriage was for the dogs.
America’s divorce rate began going up in the late 1960s and then took a steep climb during the seventies and early eighties, as virtually every state adopted no-fault divorce laws. The rate peaked at 5.3 divorces per thousand people in 1981. This was the era in which I grew up, and the uncouplings and recouplings were part of the music of my childhood. My best friend lived a couple of blocks away in the tallest building in my middle-class neighborhood in Queens. The building had a pool where the neighborhood divorcées came to meet. One summer Brandi’s mother was a dowdy mom with frizzy hair, and the next summer she was a bombshell with black hair and a bikini, who had changed her name to Raven. Robert’s father showed up one summer with shiny nails, no wife, and a new sports car. The following summer he showed up with Raven. I had no feel for the deeper traumas. My own parents were the same age as my classmates’ divorcing parents, but they were Israeli immigrants, so operated in more of a fifties mode. For me, all the marital turmoil was rolled into the glamour of being American; I may have even been jealous.
Then, when the fervor died down, what got left in its wake was what sociologists call the “divorce divide.” Divorce, like so many other phenomena in American life these days, got refracted through the prism of widening income inequality. Divorce rates began to plummet for the college educated while they stayed high for everyone else. Yates’s April Wheeler had it exactly right. For the ambitious class, the key was opening up the possibility for the woman to support the family. In fact, the most thorough overview of studies found that when a wife works, a marriage is more stable. Couples where the woman works are vastly less likely to divorce, probably because of less financial stress. If she had lived now, April Wheeler would have ended up like a Washington friend of mine: She would be the US ambassador to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) in Paris while her husband worked remotely and took some time to write, and the
n when they returned to the United States she could take her time finding her next gig while he went back to his big firm.
This is how the new seesaw marriage operates. Couples are not chasing justice and fairness as measured by some external yardstick of gender equality. What they are after is individual self-fulfillment, and each partner can have a shot at achieving it at different points in the marriage. The arrangement got established in an era where the creative class moves more fluidly through jobs and no one expects to stay in the same job forever. It thrives in a culture that privileges self-expression over duty. It’s progressive in its instinctive gender blindness and rejection of obligatory work, and utterly conservative in its comfort with traditional marriage. This continued devotion to finding your thrills within the confines of the old two-ring Biblical union is what puts it miles away from Germaine Greer and the hot lesbians onstage at town hall; in fact, so smug are the bohemian bourgeoisie in their current form of marriage that any deviation from the script—divorce, single motherhood, some other “uncommon arrangement”—earns you playground pity and a scarlet letter, as critic Katie Roiphe has often written.
And what of the college-class men in this new era of marital bliss? Have they finally escaped the breadwinner noose? A smart man knows that a wife is no longer a financial drain. Quite the opposite—a wife is a man’s ticket to comfort. On the verge of retirement, the average married couple has accumulated assets worth about $410,000, compared with $167,000 for the never-married and $154,000 for the divorced. One study showed that the assets of couples who stayed together increased twice as fast as those who had divorced over a five-year period.
Copious studies prove that marriage benefits the man much more than the woman, and not just in the old generic winking sense that it “domesticates” him. Excellent studies, from dozens of countries, show that married men are happier, healthier, and live longer than their single counterparts. (Also, contrary to the bachelor myth, they report more sexual satisfaction.) Different studies show married men are less likely to develop heart or lung disease, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, or serious depression. A recent study conducted by the Canadian Medical Association showed that married male heart attack victims arrive at the hospital, on average, half an hour before single men. (For women there is no difference.) Statisticians Bernard Cohen and I-Sing Lee, who compiled a catalog of relative mortality risks, concluded that “being unmarried is one of the greatest risks that people voluntarily subject themselves to.”
Of course it will come as news to no one that women are the diligent caretakers who prod their husbands to go to the doctor and get to the hospital quickly. And perhaps this has always been true. But what’s notable is the total reversal in the scientific establishment’s focus. Studies about the “normal” male holding the reins are no longer in vogue. These days the establishment is being marshaled to confirm our new cultural notion that men have become the frail dependents in need of a protector. That men need marriage more than women do. In fact, they need it to survive.
There are many prophets of new manhood who would welcome this new dependence as progress. Only by being more flexible in domestic roles can men break free of the armor society binds them in. The most stalwart and well-known such prophet of the men’s movement is Warren Farrell, author of The Liberated Man, and more recently the best-selling The Myth of Male Power. For decades Farrell has been advocating what he calls a “gender transition movement,” where sons would have the same options as daughters—they should be free to choose a job they like or work part-time or not at all, and that should be all right with society.
Recently I saw Farrell at a forum in Washington. He is heading a working group to start the White House Council on Boys and Men to bring attention to the suffering of the forcibly machoed. Farrell is still bearded and gentle, with a practiced, nonthreatening voice and a low-key Venice Beach demeanor. At the forum he was lamenting that we teach our men to be “disposable” when we send them out to battle and cheer them at football games even though we know they might get injured.
Farrell often tells the story of how he was in such a hurry to get through his studies and assume his breadwinning role that he failed some of his PhD exams. This experience taught him that men need to be liberated from their constricted sense of manhood. Some aspects of his visions have already come to pass: The younger generation of men does in fact aim for some job satisfaction and decent balance in their lives. Our expectation of fatherhood has changed dramatically since the seventies. There may not be all that many stay-at-home dads, but a father who is never home for family dinner or bedtime is out of tune with the times.
Still, men have not yet fully embraced the message. There are many engaged fathers these days, but no men marching in the streets to demand paternity leave or flexible schedules. Instead, what we have are individual men, isolated in their own new domestic experiments, showing David Godsall and the rest of the world what marriage will look like in the not too distant future, when more women than men are paying most of the bills.
STEVEN AND SARAH ANDREWS moved into this Northside Pittsburgh neighborhood even before the cops had chased away the dealers who colonized the stoops. The beautiful old row houses are a steal, and the neighborhood, known as the Mexican War Streets, holds hidden treasures. Sarah gave me a tour one summer morning on her way to work. Although she was seven and a half months pregnant, she walked and talked so fast, I could barely keep up. She pointed out, across the street, one neighbor’s visionary garden crowded with lush plants and flamingoes and a cityscape on his wall made of tiny figurines; down one alley is an asylum house festooned with the Chinese poetry of a grateful refugee; then the famous Mattress Factory one block away. The Andrewses are surrounded by eccentricity and renegade behavior, but that is not, in the long run, what attracts them. In this urban drama the Andrewses play the gentrifiers, and what they want is a settled and safe life for themselves, their twenty-month-old son, Xavier, and the baby to come.
Sarah leaves most mornings just before eight, about an hour before Steven and Xavier make their way downstairs to have breakfast (which many mornings Sarah leaves for them on the kitchen counter). A sociologist taking a brief history of their relationship might mistake them for “marriage naturalists,” meaning the old style of couple that just stumble into marriage and life without all that much thinking and planning. They met in high school outside Columbus, on the set of a production of Ordinary People; they spent the downtime backstage playing cards. In fact, however, Steven and Sarah, who are thirty-seven and thirty-two, are consummate “marriage planners,” the current reigning model among the professional class.
Since their fortuitous early meeting, they’ve planned everything: the exact timing of each pregnancy, how long Sarah will work at what job, how much money she will make. They haggle over the minute details and individual demands like two executives in a negotiation. They actually possess a piece of paper called the “Master Plan,” in which each partner lays out his and her duties and responsibilities, year to year. At the moment Sarah’s role is to “feed the family” and “make big money,” which means that after graduating from law school she took a job at a law firm working eighty hours a week. In return she got to have a kid a year before Steven wanted to. Now he goes to law school at night, and during the days he takes care of Xavier and acts as “mediocre house dude.” Steven likes this phrase. He repeats it often, like a job title—almost as often as he repeats that Sarah is a “superstar.”
“I told her no way I can be like my mom, or like she would be,” he told me. “I’m just the mediocre house dude.” This is what the contract requires of him: He keeps the kid “reasonably happy and mostly fed and the house mildly clean.” He might be able to pick up things around the house occasionally, but no laundry, and no cooking meals. Steven could pass for a Brooklyn hipster with his band T-shirts, lack of a clean shave, and black Keds. (Yes, Xavier, whom they call X, has a matching pair, although most of the time he seems to prefer
to be naked.) But Steven is also good with his hands, not because he adopted some retro working-class “shop class as soul craft” ethos, but because his dad was an actual shop teacher and taught him how to fix and build. Steven’s most notable quality is that he knows his own limits, which makes him a lot less defensive than some other guys might be in this situation. “Women seem to be able to multitask better than men,” he says. “If X is busy for ten minutes, Sarah will go do the dishes and start the laundry. I don’t transition like that. A toddler kills my productivity. I don’t multitask.”
I spent a couple of summer afternoons hanging out with Steven and Xavier and a friend visiting from Italy. As often happens in the presence of toddlers, time passed in a haphazard way. Xavier moved some branches from one side of the garden to the other. Steven tried to pull some weeds, but it was too hot so he gave up. Unlike most moms I know, Steven did not try to organize the time into tidy quadrants. There was no snacktime, no music hour, no walks to the park, no time-outs or “use your words.” Xavier had a rash and Steven acknowledged that “it must burn,” so he filled up a bucket of cold water, told him he was a “tough guy,” and suggested he hop into the bucket. (I never would have thought of that.) When Xavier’s cloth diaper got dirty, Steven sprayed it and left it in the sink. (In the contract his duties here stop at “smearage containment,” but Sarah, who insisted on cloth diapers, has to launder them.) A few hours in, it was time for lunch, or maybe a nap. Once Sarah tried to show Steven a website where he could meet other house dudes in the neighborhood. “Why would I do that?” he told her. “I’m not gonna make friends just because some guy has a kid his age. I’m not into that.” The great majority of days, Steven and Xavier don’t leave the house.