To honestly take the position that wives “earned” their keep, Gilman argued, would require compensating wives for their work as cooks, housemaids, nursemaids, seamstresses, and housekeepers. “This would of course reduce the spending money of the wives of the rich,” she wrote, but it would “put it out of the power of the poor man to ‘support’ a wife at all, unless, indeed, the poor man faced the situation fully, paid his wife her wages as house servant, and then she and he combined their funds in the support of their children. He would be keeping a servant: she would be helping keep the family.” In this scenario, she argued, such a thing as a “rich wife” could not even exist, because domestic wages would never make anyone rich. “Even the highest class of private housekeeper, useful as her services are, does not accumulate a fortune,” Gilman wrote. “She does not buy diamonds and sables and keep a carriage. Things like these are not earned by house service.” Whatever women’s unpaid domestic labor was worth on the open market, wives did not get it. Actually, Gilman argued, the wives who did the most domestic work got the least money, and the wives who had the most money did the least work. The same went for motherhood. It made no sense to think of motherhood as a job, because a job is payment for an exchangeable commodity (labor), and it would be impossible to establish a relation between “the quantity or quality of the motherhood and the quantity and quality of the pay.” What she meant was that, if the argument for women’s economic dependence on men was that motherhood is a job, then this would be reflected in the status of married women. Wives with no children would have no economic status at all, and the number of children a wife had would determine her status. “This is obviously absurd,” wrote Gilman. “The childless wife has as much money as the mother of many, more; for the children of the latter consume what would otherwise be hers; and the inefficient mother is no less provided for than the efficient one.”
But, of course, the number of children a woman has has no bearing on her economic status. And failure to produce a child is not grounds for “firing” a wife, at least not in Gilman’s day, when a divorce was hard to get. “The claim of motherhood as a factor in economic exchange is false today,” she wrote. “But suppose it were true. Are we willing to hold this ground, even in theory? Are we willing to consider motherhood as a business, a form of commercial exchange? Are the cares and duties of the mother, her travail and her love, commodities to be exchanged for bread? It is revolting so to consider them; and, if we dare face our own thoughts, and force them to their logical conclusion, we shall see that nothing could be more repugnant to human feeling, or more socially and individually injurious, than to make motherhood a trade.”
Yet if motherhood could be defended as work in the usual sense, then it would be a strangely disempowered job. “We are the only animal species,” she wrote, “in which the female depends on the male for food. The only animal species in which the sex relation is also an economic relation.”17
I heard echoes of Gilman in Wednesday Martin, author of Primates of Park Avenue, in a New York Times op-ed. “Among primates,” she wrote, “Homo sapiens practice the most intensive food and resource sharing, and females may depend entirely on males for shelter and sustenance . . . Access to your husband’s money might feel good. But it can’t buy you the power you get by being the one who earns, hunts or gathers it. The wives of the masters of the universe, I learned, are a lot like mistresses—dependent and comparatively disempowered.”18
When Charlotte York, Sex and the City’s Victorian-lady character and aspiring “angel in the house,” decided to quit her job at the art gallery to become a stay-at-home mom even before becoming a mom-to-be, she was disappointed when her friends met the news with something less than enthusiasm and support. How to justify and defend this choice? For Charlotte, the answer was to stand on the sidewalk, yelling, “I choose my choice!,” which was not very convincing. We couldn’t help but wonder: Was it really a choice? If so, why did it look so much like previous nonchoices? By the time my generation reached adulthood, nobody talked about adventure anymore. Nobody talked about anything but “the choice.” The choice hovered over everything, flattening everything into an undifferentiated standard. You chose your choice, like Charlotte York or Charlotte Gilman. You could choose to be a person, or you could choose to be loved. This was framed as a choice between working and not working, but really it was a choice between the known and the unknown, between saving the institution and saving yourself.
Bewitched
After two years in New Jersey, we moved to Chicago, transferred by the pharmaceutical company that my father now worked for. A few months after we moved, my mom went to the hospital for minor surgery. As kids do, I believed all adult jobs to be equivalent, freely selected from a tantalizing portfolio of equally fulfilling choices. I also believed them to be inextricably bound up with the identity of the people who performed them. (One was a fireman just as one was a blond.) This idea, like all neat, categorical, deterministic ideas, appealed to me enormously—kids are natural-born fascists, big into essentialist, categorical ideas. I knew very few working women and almost no professional women as a child, so I concluded that being a lady was a woman’s profession, which would then make women’s magazines trade publications. I didn’t want my mom to miss out on any important news, so I decided to make her a magazine out of old magazines and construction paper using a selection of clippings from old issues of the Ladies’ Home Journal. My issue was a curated selection of recipes for Cool Whip and Jell-O–based things in fancy parfait glasses, a glittery makeup tutorial, a glam fashion spread, a parenting article biased in my favor, a funny Virginia Slims ad, a pudding ad featuring a droll Bill Cosby, and, of course, a column called Can This Marriage Be Saved?
Can This Marriage Be Saved? was a marriage-advice column that ran in the magazine from 1953 until it folded, in 2014. It was a triptych of subjectivity: first, the wife explained the problem, then the husband gave his side of the story, and finally the marriage counselor pronounced his or her verdict. If the spark had left the marriage, then the wife was advised to prepare a candlelit dinner and greet her husband at the door wrapped in Saran Wrap, for instance. Marriage saved! Decades later, I read in an Aeon essay by journalist and professor Rebecca Onion about the column that the counselor almost always favored the husband unless the problem was that the husband was trying to live some alternative lifestyle—say, he was a swinger resistant to “settling down” in the suburbs. The counselor would strongly recommend that he give up his “free love” lifestyle and live “a straight life.”19 The story might conclude with a happy report about how the couple got through it and wound up in “a distant suburb of San Francisco among a new circle of congenial friends who are more concerned with gardening, the Little League and PTA meetings than with the dubious virtues of drugs.”20 Your standard happy ending. Can This Marriage Be Saved? resonated because it presented marriage in a singular format, as a dialectic. You had your thesis, your antithesis, and your synthesis. Or, he says, she says, the expert decides. Another reason I liked Can This Marriage Be Saved? was that it had an aura of heroism about it. It was always a tale of rescue. The marriage counselor was the hero, and the marriage was the damsel. It had to be saved, even if that meant throwing the wife, the husband, the kids, or the whole family under the bus. In a fight for the greater good, you were going to be collateral damage. Marriage was a world with a population of two. It had to be saved because the world needs to be saved.
I thoroughly appreciated the Rashomon-like structure of Can This Marriage Be Saved? as a second-grader. The boys-versus-girls format really spoke to me. My brother and I were fewer than two years apart, close friends and mortal adversaries. Every single thing between us was a competition in which we took rigid, unyielding sides. I don’t know if this was because our dad encouraged it (which he did: I was the brain, my brother was the jock) or if it was just the way we were. We split the world into spheres, took sides, and debated the relative merits of every “opposite” thing we
could think of. The arguments were never gendered, that I recall. They were never about “girl things” versus “boy things.” They were more abstract, more philosophical, more “Spy vs. Spy.” We argued the relative merits of pancakes versus waffles, hot dogs versus hamburgers, ketchup versus mustard, vanilla versus chocolate (all the natural food enemies), Ernie versus Bert, Superman versus Wonder Woman. (OK, that one.) We committed. We hunkered down. We fought to the death. No position was too inflexible. No blow was too low. There could be no compromise or middle ground. It was win or lose. That’s how life was played. I saw the counselor in the Can This Marriage Be Saved? column as a kind of referee, whose fairness, scientific objectivity, and impartiality I did not question. I assumed fair play and a level playing field. I was confident that I lived in a free country, because “It’s a free country” was a slogan that got bandied around the playground a lot. It was also my belief that we lived in a fair country, founded on the principles of turn taking and equal amounts of everything, at all times.
For years I thought my love of Can This Marriage Be Saved? was an obscure and offbeat personal quirk. I had no idea it was one of the most popular columns of all time, or that it was created by a eugenicist named Paul Popenoe, founder of an organization called the American Institute of Family Relations (AIFR). By 1960, AIFR was the best-known marriage-counseling institute in the world. Can This Marriage Be Saved? debuted in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1953 and gave Popenoe an extremely popular and influential platform from which to spout his right-wing views on the family and on how women should sacrifice themselves to uphold it. Popenoe, who acted as the advice-dispensing counselor for the column, had very definite opinions about the differences between men and women, which he made it his mission to point out at every possible opportunity. Popenoe believed that the average man “was more active, venturesome, aggressive, consistent, nomadic, businesslike, secular, rational, high-minded, and courageous,” whereas the average woman was (surprise!) more “modest, submissive, romantic, sincere, religious, vindictive, ‘catty,’ drawn to trivia, and affectionately demonstrative,”21 and he advised couples accordingly. Even in cases of domestic violence, husbands’ infidelity, and infertility, he tended to blame the wife for all the couples’ problems. He tended to believe marriages failed because of a regrettable lack of wifely effort. In the 1950s, he sometimes advised battered wives to watch what they said in order to avoid further beatings. Wives’ keeping their mouths shut was prescribed for husbands’ alcoholism, gambling problems, and silent treatments. Silence was a cure-all.
To what degree Can This Marriage Be Saved? shaped my view of marriage, I can’t say for sure. But the idea that marriage was so brutally sectarian that caring about it was the exclusive domain of the girl was confusing to me. How was this not exactly like the sound of one hand clapping? By dividing the world so inexorably into public and private spheres, into girl stuff and guy stuff, were we not just creating two alternate imaginary universes that served nobody, really, so much as our corporate masters? What was the point? In her essay, Onion noted that men’s magazines don’t write about marital trouble—they write about sex.22 Promoting the idea that the responsibility for forming and maintaining committed relationships falls exclusively to women, even the power to decide whether relationships form in the first place, is a privilege that resides exclusively with men. The emotional labor is hers, the executive decisions are his.
By the time I started reading it, Popenoe’s institute still supplied many of the cases for the column, but Popenoe was no longer dispensing the advice himself, and Can This Marriage Be Saved? was no longer doing things like advising battered women not to say things that made their husbands mad. Still, there was something spooky about it—very female gothic. I loved nothing better than to kick back with some Jell-O pudding and luxuriate in the titillating grotesquery of Can This Marriage Be Saved? If by reading the column I was learning how to be a submissive wife someday, I was not aware of it. I was eight. I thought pudding was delicious and Bill Cosby was hilarious and the magazines needed more articles on hair and makeup and fewer chicken recipes. I loved it when someone produced a Stephen King book or Flowers in the Attic at a slumber party. The seventies were awash in thrilling gothic tales of madness, female abjection, abuse, and domestic confinement, so maybe it just seemed normal. In the world of Can This Marriage Be Saved?, there were no problems that could not be covered up with a pretty tablecloth, a negligee, or bricked-in windows and doors. Still, as Onion wrote just a few years before it was discontinued, “There’s a hermetic feeling to the present-day ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ columns which persists in understanding marital issues as internal to a dyad,” but “surely some of the ‘work’ that needs to be done is social and political, not personal.” Not that those things don’t get famously intertwined.
Still, it was always a surprise to stumble across these stories of radical action, more sincere, organized, and inspired than anything I’d ever seen, heard of, or participated in. When I read Susan Brownmiller’s memoir, for instance, I was stunned to learn that in March 1970, before I was out of diapers, a coalition of feminist groups including Media Women, NOW, the Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists (not to be confused with an earlier group, New York Radical Women) decided to occupy a women’s magazine to protest its male bias, sexism, and racism. With their infinite tips and advice on how to be a girl, women’s magazines conditioned girls and women to be subservient and insecure. Meanwhile, with the exception of Cosmopolitan, these magazines were almost entirely run and staffed by men. Ladies’ Home Journal had been founded by a woman, but she ran it for less than a year, and it had been run by men ever since. The editor in chief was John Mack Carter, a member of the Sigma Delta Chi fraternity for distinguished journalists, which did not include women until 1969, but in that way it wasn’t very different from the others. Popenoe’s column was the main reason the coalition chose the Ladies’ Home Journal for its sit-in. About a hundred protesters occupied the magazine’s offices. They hung a banner that read WOMEN’S LIBERATED JOURNAL from the window. They called for Carter’s resignation and demanded that a female editor in chief and an all-female editorial staff be hired. They also demanded that the magazine hire women to write the columns and articles, hire nonwhite women in proportion with the population, raise women’s salaries, and provide free day care on the premises. They demanded that the magazine open its editorial meetings to all employees and eliminate the traditional power hierarchy; that it stop running ads degrading to women and ads from companies that exploited women; that it stop running articles tied to advertising; and that it kill Can This Marriage Be Saved? They also gave Carter a list of suggestions for articles that would benefit women over advertisers, things like “How to Get a Divorce,” “How to Have an Orgasm,” “What to Tell Your Draft-Age Son,” and “How Detergents Harm Our Rivers and Streams.” Though at first Carter refused to negotiate, by 6:00 p.m. a settlement had been reached. He promised to look into the feasibility of an on-site day-care center. Carter did not resign, but within a few years the magazine had installed its first-ever female editor in chief since its founding, in 1889. He agreed to let the group guest-edit a portion of an upcoming issue. The issue included a column called Should This Marriage Be Saved?
Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie were my favorite shows in 1975. Twin sitcoms about a witch named Samantha who married an adman named Darrin and a genie named Jeannie who enslaved herself to an astronaut named Major Nelson, they both dealt nervously with power and gender. Whereas Samantha and Jeannie could do literally anything, the former by twitching her nose, the latter by crossing her arms and nodding, they tried hard to “behave” themselves and suppress their powers out of love for their respective husband and “master.” Darrin and Major Nelson were perhaps two of the most anxious, highly strung, insecure, and haplessly neurotic male characters ever to appear on TV. The humor was derived from the contortions required of the women to make themselves comparatively passive and weak.
But it wasn’t really Darrin or Major Nelson who required the display of “normal” domesticity or (in Jeannie’s case) of total invisibility: it was their bosses. Samantha and Jeannie posed direct threats not to Darrin and Major Nelson but to the institutions they stood in for and depended on for food. Darrin’s career was constantly threatened by Samantha and by her family: her disdainful mother, Endora, who thought her daughter had married beneath her; her silly goose of an Aunt Clara; and their daughter, Tabitha, who had inherited her powers. In episode after episode, Endora, Aunt Clara, Samantha, and Tabitha torpedoed Darrin’s client dinners, enraged his boss, Larry, and got Darrin fired. It was almost always as a result of the fact that Darrin’s career depended on his ability to uphold an image that his industry had created and was selling but that nobody could possibly live up to. Why anyone would want to—how anyone could even consider this slavish conformity to be in any way aspirational—is the question represented by Endora, who would have liked nothing more than to see Samantha liberated from the oppressive effects of Darrin’s fragile ego. Darrin loved Samantha, and he was mostly sympathetic to her; he was just caught between a rock and a hard place. It was his boss, and ultimately his clients, who demanded compliance to an image that required Samantha to act a certain way.
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