Uneasy Street

by Sherman, Rachel

  These interviewees are not claiming that they have money because they work hard, since they know they would have it anyway. But work is how they make themselves worthy of their privilege.15 Working hard means they are not illegitimately entitled. Many, though not all, work at jobs in the arts, nonprofits, or academia, which do not pay for their lifestyles. These inheritors enjoy their work and choose it freely. But it also seems as if they work as a way to legitimate spending their inherited money to support more comfortable lifestyles than their salaries would permit. Like spending reasonably, as we will see in chapter 3, requiring themselves to work is a way of setting limits on their own entitlements.

  The earners I described earlier saw their earned money as precious, to be saved, while imagining that they would spend inherited money more freely. Inheritors reversed this “mental accounting”: they felt they had to be restrained with the money they didn’t earn, whereas they could spend that which they had earned.16 Nicholas, an inheritor who also had a salaried job, said of the money he earned, “I feel a little bit more entitled to blow that money.” Donovan, who was in a similar situation, told me, “I’m more willing to spend money I’ve made myself, on whatever I want to.”

  Inheritors described a sense of moral obligation to spend inherited money to help others rather than on themselves, which felt self-indulgent. Danielle had worked for years in finance but had become a stay-at-home mother. Both she and her husband had inherited wealth. She said:

  Yeah, there’s a lot of complicated feelings about spending money you didn’t earn. Like the money we spent [to buy and renovate their primary home] we earned. That was money we had earned at our jobs. This money [for their second home] was entirely windfall [from their parents]. … And there’s a lot of, you know, “Why didn’t we build a school?” or “Why didn’t we invest that money in some project that would help a lot of people?” Like, this is vanity money and we spent it in a way that makes us happy. Certainly there’s lots of liberal guilt about how you do that, what you do with that. You know?

  As we have seen, Olivia felt conflicted about having access to Scott’s wealth because “I didn’t do anything to deserve it. Like, I didn’t earn it.” Given this, she spent a lot of the money that was designated as hers (which I will say more about in chapter 5) on helping people in her extended family and social network who were much less well off. She loved playing tennis and wanted a tennis court at their house in Connecticut. But, she said, “As appealing as that is, because it is just completely about me, I don’t know if I could ever really do it.” She continued, “It is one of those things where it’s just like, I want it. We have the land to do it. Like, why won’t I just do it? Why won’t I just invest the time and resources to do this thing that I love for its own sake? You know? [If] it’s helping somebody, it’s easy for me to spend money in that way. But it’s much harder when it comes to just doing something that’s sheerly for my pleasure.” To spend “vanity money” on themselves and their own pleasure rather than on helping others feels morally wrong and induces guilt.

  Over time, these inheritors often worked on themselves and their emotions, trying to feel less guilty or uneasy. Gary said, “I’m a lot more comfortable with it now than I was fifteen years ago, for sure. Fifteen years ago, I think I was totally uncomfortable with it. And hiding it.” Like several others, Gary had spent years talking through these issues in therapy. Ironically, inheritors sometimes framed these feelings as unproductive. Janice said, “You know, I did some work on not feeling bad about it. It’s not really productive to feel bad about it.” Nadine said, “I still feel guilty about having money. I feel a lot less guilty than I did. Because I think guilt is unproductive.” Caroline spoke with irritation about people who have money and feel ashamed about it, whom she saw as wallowing uselessly. “I just think it’s unnecessary shame. Why be ashamed? Who does that help? … And you could be getting on with utilizing what you have to greater effect.” Caroline suggests that feeling uncomfortable about having money prevents these inheritors from taking the worthy action of helping others and thus is a form of morally intolerable emotional self-indulgence—perhaps just as bad as the material self-indulgence the inheritors are conflicted about.

  STAY-AT-HOME MOTHERS AND

  THE LABOR OF LIFESTYLE

  Like inheritors, “stay-at-home mothers”—known as “SAHMs”—do not earn the money they live on. As recently as thirty or forty years ago, wealthy housewives’ distance from paid labor was taken for granted; their primary role was to support their husbands, raise their children, and participate in the social and charitable organizations of their communities, as Susan Ostrander’s aforementioned 1984 book Women of the Upper Class describes.17 Although some of the women Ostrander interviewed wished they had had more choices, particularly the option to work for pay, the majority seemed relatively content with these narrow expectations and possibilities. But most of these women had been born before 1940 and had come of age before the second wave of the women’s movement. Many had not attended or completed college, and very few had advanced degrees.

  In contrast, the women I talked with had been born mostly in the late 1960s and the 1970s and are part of a generation of women expected to work for pay and educated to do so. A few of the eighteen nonworking or minimally working women I spoke with said they had always wanted to leave their jobs to take care of their children.18 But most of them had felt some reluctance to give up their paid, professional, often quite lucrative jobs (and, as we have seen, many of them had earned advanced degrees that prepared them for these jobs). Several had not left paid work until their children were several years old, and most of them had left because their high-powered corporate jobs could not accommodate part-time or flexible schedules.19 A few had stopped working when the 2008 economic crisis hit, as they were laid off or their jobs were otherwise affected. Others said that, next to the large sums their husbands were earning, their own salaries did not justify their staying in the workforce.

  In the absence of paid work, these women turned to what I call the “labor of lifestyle.” This work includes everything from basic household tasks such as cleaning and food preparation to child care and a wide variety of “consumption work,”20 such as home renovation, vacation planning, and management of second (or third) homes. It also includes hiring and supervising paid workers in the home, such as nannies, housecleaners, tutors, and those involved in other projects, such as renovation. The labor of lifestyle also includes work on behalf of children, which goes far beyond simply feeding and clothing them to include choosing their schools, monitoring their progress, planning and implementing their leisure activities, and dealing with any health or disability issues. Many of the stay-at-home mothers also devoted significant amounts of time and energy to volunteer work, as I discuss further in chapter 4.

  But this work is not typically recognized as economically or symbolically valuable in the same ways that paid work is. Although taking care of children is generally seen as morally worthy, household labor traditionally done by women has long been viewed as economically unproductive.21 And consumption in general, historically and symbolically the province of women, is often associated with self-indulgence and the frittering away of money and time rather than being seen as necessary in order to reproduce families.22 For both of these reasons, affluent women’s labor may be especially undervalued because of the association of these tasks with wealth. It is hard to imagine taking care of a second home or planning a European vacation as “work.” Thus, like inheritors, these women confront a stereotype of being dilettantes.23 In fact, the risk is higher that others will judge them negatively because their “not working” status is more obvious than the inherited wealth of inheritors who have jobs.

  I saw some of these judgments from working mothers about those who did not work for pay. Willa told me, of stay-at-home mothers: “It’s amazing how you can fill the day with lots of things. … Renovations, decorators, going shopping, having lunch with your friends, going to
the gym, going to Pilates, going to a masseuse, having acupuncture. I mean, there are a lot of ways you can fill your day. I find most of them to be quite vapid. Oh, you’ve got to get your hair blown out. That’s another one.” Lisa, an executive with a household income of $600,000, told me, “If we go to a party and the husbands are there, inevitably I’m talking to the husbands … [about] some kind of business thing. And the women—I can’t really talk to them about that stuff. You’re talking about your workout. They work out, like, five hours a day. Oh my God. I don’t work out five hours a day! You know?”

  Furthermore, staying at home goes against the culturally powerful idea that women can and should work for pay, as well as their own professional preparation and experience. Susan, a parenting therapist I interviewed, told me, “You have some people who are so wealthy in New York that they can stay home and they just take care of their kids, and that’s great. But then they also feel so guilty that they’re wasting their degrees. … They feel so ‘less than.’” Later, she said, “They feel that they’re not doing anything. That there’s nothing productive that they’re doing.”

  In the absence of paid jobs, the stay-at-home mothers I talked with tended to try to convince themselves (and me) that their activities legitimately counted as work and that their consumption was productive. To do this they needed to draw on multiple discourses of legitimate work—as mothers, especially—but also on allusions to their own busyness and productivity, as well as to their own paid work in the past and that of their husbands in the present. I found this among women of color as well as white women, despite historical variation in the relationship of women in these categories to paid work.24

  Stephanie, as we have seen, was adamant that hard work was important and that poor people did not work hard enough. She and her husband had an annual income of about half a million dollars (plus her husband’s significant equity in his business). They owned an apartment in New York City and two other properties, for a total value of about $8 million. Like Paul, quoted at the beginning of the chapter, Stephanie equated hard work with deservingness. When I asked, “Do you feel like you deserve the lifestyle that you have?” she immediately responded, “Hell, yeah. I work my ass off.” She then continued:

  Other than having a wonderful place to escape on the weekends [her second home], I don’t, like, spend my days going to get my hair done, and go shopping, and have lunch with my friends. Some days I feel like, what did I get done today? I feel like I never get anywhere. ’Cause I take my son to school in the morning. By the time I get home from that, it’s 9:30. And then already, I’m leaving five hours later to go pick him up. And in between all that time, I’m cleaning the house, doing the laundry, going food shopping, dealing with stuff on the phone. … I don’t indulge myself at all.

  Stephanie elucidates her own hard work in the household while drawing strong boundaries against images of women who simply consume rather than producing anything. Again we see the rejection of self-indulgence, which she counterposes to morally legitimate productivity.

  In particular, Stephanie emphasized her labor as a mother. She told me proudly that she had not hired a babysitter until her son was a year old, saying, “I had a kid because I wanted a kid, not so I could hand him over to somebody else.” She spoke disparagingly of mothers she knew who “can’t believe that they have to get through a weekend, because their nanny can’t come.” She highlighted her domestic (i.e., productive) labor, telling me, “I’m a big hit at school with the cookies. They’re just all beautifully, intricately decorated.” She also refused to purchase a Halloween costume for her child. She asked rhetorically, “What kind of mom am I if I buy you a costume?” Stephanie devalues the commodification of both maternal labor (by denigrating paid child care) and goods like cookies and Halloween costumes; she thereby symbolically revalues her own unpaid labor, which cannot be done by anyone else and still have the same meaning.

  Alexis was a stay-at-home mother with a second home in the Hamptons. When I asked if she felt she “deserved” her lifestyle, she responded, “Deserve? I don’t feel guilty about it. I don’t know if deserve is the right word, but I feel like, even though I’m not making money now, I was, like—I mean, I’m a smart person. I mean, I’m taking care of our children. Yeah, I don’t feel, you know, guilty about that at all.” Here Alexis reaches for several different legitimations. First, her previous paid work in finance, for which she had earned an MBA; second, her intelligence; and third, her care for the children. Like Stephanie, and unlike Paul, she needs to bring in multiple legitimations beyond paid work, though it is to paid work that she turns first.

  Stephanie and Alexis were unusual among my interviewees in linking these discourses quite forcefully to their own entitlement. Other women I interviewed struggled more to cast their maternal and family labor as legitimate. I asked Ursula, for example, what she did on an “average” day, and then immediately clarified by asking what she had done the day before. She responded, “This is a very bad example, wouldn’t you say? Both kids are in camp, and it’s the middle of the summer. I feel like if I told you what I did yesterday it would be very— it would not be telling of a regular day.” I answered, somewhat confused, “I don’t know, would it? It depends on what it was.” Ursula recounted, “I had nothing to do! So I went for a facial. I met a friend for lunch. I went shopping. And then I planned a dinner. My son came home [from camp], and I took him to the park. We played ball. … So he was back at 5 and we played from 5 to 6. And then we watched the Olympics! For three hours. But I do think it was—that’s not my normal day.”

  Ursula was unwilling to describe this day, which had all the hallmarks of the “ladies-who-lunch” stereotype, as “average.” When I asked her how she would describe a day when the kids were around, she emphasized a much more “laborious” day: “If [they are] in school I have a very different schedule. I take them to school. We leave the house at like 7:30 in the morning. I have to be dressed, I have to give them breakfast, I have no help at that time. … When I’m at school, I often volunteer for various [tasks]. … I spend a lot of time in the school. I come back, I have reams of paperwork that needs to get done. You know, the two homes, all the stuff that’s going on in school. I manage other things like I just told you about the [kids’ activities].” This day, as Ursula describes it, involves a lot of work, including volunteering, child-related tasks, and the labor of maintaining the family’s two homes. Like Stephanie, Ursula represents the work of caring for children as especially legitimate—so her conception of herself as working hard is challenged when the children are not in school.

  Like Ursula and Stephanie, other nonearning women drew boundaries against the ladies-who-lunch stereotype. Allison told me that after she worked out in the mornings, she spent her days paying bills, going grocery shopping, doing cleaning or household projects with her housekeeper, organizing the kids’ schedules, and volunteering at three different organizations. She differentiated herself from the friends she worked out with by saying: “They don’t even pay bills. They don’t do anything to support their house. All they do is take care of their kids, and work out. [I do] all this stuff—like, I book all our family vacations. I do all this stuff. I manage, like, everything that comes to this house. These guys don’t have to do all that. … Their husbands do all of it. [The mothers] just manage their kids’ schedules, and their workout schedules.” Allison further critiqued these friends for working out two or three times a day, having coffee, and then going shopping. (Although she accompanied them doing these activities, it was only “once or twice a month. But not, like, every day.”) Like others I interviewed, Allison is working to draw distinctions that cast her own time as being spent in consumption that contributes to the household rather than consumption that is self-indulgent and unproductive.

  Some women explicitly framed their labor, from child care to renovation, as a “job” or used other business analogies and economic equivalents. Several women told me they were “the CEO of the h
ousehold.” Maya’s husband traveled a lot for work and did very little child care, even on the weekends. She said, “The way I’ve come to grips with it is, I have the nanny during the week, and so I can do my own things during the week. But that is balancing that with everything else. I feel like, when you put all of my stuff together, I kind of feel like I have a full-time job. Now of course, you know, I get to go to the gym and I get to do other fun things. But it just feels like [a job].” Maya acknowledges that her work is not like a job in that she can go to the gym and have fun. But she seems to dismiss this freedom, which contradicts the rest of her claim, even as she acknowledges it.

  David, an interior designer I interviewed, worked with many affluent female clients in their forties. He said, “I see a lot in New York how … we’re all raised with, like, ‘Okay, women can do the same things that men can do.’ But yet they might have been successful career people, but for whatever reason, they’re not any more. Probably it’s financial, they don’t really need to work. But there’s this desire to, like, make the house building and designing like their full-time job. … They really view it as their job. You know? So, say for instance, if you have a highly functioning woman who’s had a career, gotten married, had the kids, and then now has four houses that they’re redesigning or building one after the other, it really becomes like a job for them, because it takes so much time.”