Uneasy Street

by Sherman, Rachel

  Assigning financial worth to this time and effort made it more like “real work.” Danielle, the inheritor and former banker mentioned earlier who felt guilty about spending “vanity money,” told me, “Earning your own money is validating. Somebody’s paying you for what you’re doing.” Following this logic of validation, she and her husband had calculated “what it would cost to replace” her domestic labor. She said, “It’s a sizable amount.” She laughed. “You know, between babysitting, tutoring, housecleaning, cooking—what does that add up to in people hours? And it’s not what I [earned before], but it’s a bunch of money.” In fact, Danielle had rearranged the family’s investments to produce dividends, from which she paid herself a salary of $48,000 for this work, which she used for family and personal expenses.25 She also spoke of her children jokingly as her “two very small clients” and made an analogy between the research she used to do as part of her work in finance and the research she had done for her renovation. Susan, the parenting therapist, told me that the women she worked with who were “in the best shape” emotionally were those “who really value what they’re doing” (taking care of children). She said they felt best when “they’re really feeling like ‘What I do is worth huge amounts of money.’”

  Some of these women associated themselves with paid labor in other ways. Some attached themselves symbolically to the hard work and upward mobility of others, especially husbands and immigrant parents. Lucy told me, “I grew up in an upper-middle-class family, absolutely. But my mother was an immigrant. She came with nothing. … My father paid for everything himself. He put himself through college. You know, like, my family was all about hard work and merit and hustle.” Or, like Alexis, quoted previously, several women mentioned the paid work they had done in the past. Danielle said, “I think maybe because I had worked and I feel pretty confident about that, I don’t really care when people ask me, ‘What do you do?’ I say ‘I’m at home, I’m not working. I’m a retired banker.’” Helen, quoted previously as having the prudent “mindset” of her immigrant parents, also said, “And I feel like, you know, I worked for my money, so I know what that’s like.” Helen also suggests that knowing what it is like to work for money matters in terms of having the right “mindset” even when one no longer actually receives a salary. That is, one can have the deserving selfhood of hard work without actually doing such work.

  PAID LABOR AND SELF-SUFFICIENCY

  Framing the labor of lifestyle as a legitimate, time-consuming job raised questions for these women about what it meant to pay others to do household and child-related work. All the families in which one partner did not work for pay employed housecleaners, and interviewees seemed to take for granted that they would not do this kind of work themselves. But some women struggled over the choice to hire nannies, and most were conflicted about paying for other kinds of labor such as that of personal assistants, personal chefs, or night nurses. In some cases, as I have suggested, part of this ambivalence came from discomfort over class inequality with these workers. But many also felt that they should do this work themselves, especially when it came to mothering.

  For example, Teresa commented, “You feel like you’re not as perfect if you have help.” She had had health problems when her daughter was an infant and had been convinced to hire a baby nurse. She told me, “I fought that one tooth and nail. You feel like you have to pay your dues. … I felt like, you know, who am I to have a night nurse? It felt like [I was] almost a failure as a woman.” Like all the other women she knew who had hired baby nurses, she thought, “That’s ridiculous; I should be able to do it myself.” When her mother-in-law offered to help with the kids, Teresa resisted, thinking, as she put it, “I should be able to do it all. My house shouldn’t be a mess, I shouldn’t have clutter on the table, you know.” This desire to “do it all” without help is another iteration of the value placed on self-sufficiency.

  These mothers also described paid labor as facilitating their own unpaid work rather than as enabling them to avoid it.26 For instance, Zoe said, “I have a nanny that helps me out. And she’ll come, maybe take them out in the morning so I could go to the supermarket, or go do an errand, or [go to a] doctor’s appointment, or whatever.” Zoe indicates that the nanny is only allowing Zoe to complete essential household and personal tasks, not enabling her to indulge herself in other ways. These women also emphasized that the nanny would take care of one child while they took the other(s). Lucy said she spent nearly all her time with her kids. She qualified, “I do have a babysitter. But I’ve got three kids. … It doesn’t happen that often that I’m not with at least one of them.” Lucy and Zoe frame their use of time as productive even though it is unpaid, distancing themselves from the stereotype of unproductive dilettantes.

  Alexis said, “It’s not like we’re sitting on the sidelines. You know. There’s always dishes to be done, and laundry, and—you know. So, believe me, I know plenty of women do it all by themselves. And I know that I could, obviously, if I had to.” But later in the interview she asked me if I thought she was a “total snob” for hiring a lot of child care. When I asked her to define snob she said, “Like, I don’t know. Spoiled. That I’m not working now, and I have all this help.” Her use of the words “snob” and “spoiled” implies that she is illegitimately using labor to which she should not be entitled. As we will see in chapter 5, this question also loomed in conflicts with her husband about how much paid labor was too much.

  These stay-at-home mothers compared themselves to working mothers who could, they imagined, “do it all.” Maya had hired a personal chef to come once a week to cook meals that the family would eat over the course of a few days. She told me, “The chef definitely feels like something I don’t talk about a lot, because it’s almost embarrassing. With the moms at school, I find it embarrassing. With our social circle [comprising primarily high-earning men married to stay-at-home women], I think it’s fine. But with the moms at school [who worked for pay] it does feel a little silly, extravagant.” She described friends with kids who also had jobs and/or who had no child care. Of one friend she said, “She does it all. She doesn’t get time to exercise, her house might not be as immaculate as mine is, things like that. So I feel silly talking about being tired or being stressed given all the help I have. So I’m careful about that. Right? I mean I feel like with those folks, they’re making it all happen, and to them [I’ll] say, ‘Oh, and I have this chef’? It’s like, what the fuck?” Again, as I discussed in chapter 1, not talking about these issues with people in different situations is one strategy for avoiding discomfort with it.

  Maya also felt that these women, as well as her old friends “from when I was working,” would think that having “help” in the house when she was not working was “crazy.” But, she immediately countered, as if to an imaginary critic, “None of my friends are 40 with [such young children]. They all had kids younger, and the husbands all came home [in the evening, to help with the kids]. Or if their husbands didn’t come home they didn’t expect a home-cooked meal. And my husband is quite picky about what he eats.” Asserting the ways in which she is different from these other mothers legitimates Maya’s “need” for the personal chef, as well as the full-time nanny, thereby assuaging her discomfort with it.

  I did not speak to any heterosexual men who were “stay-at home dads” and spoke to only one father who did not work for pay. Richard was a gay man without a paying job, married to a financier. He did sometimes feel bad about not having paid work, telling me, “New York City’s so much about work. And people define themselves through their work. You know, ‘What do you do?’ And sort of, ‘I do this.’ And having children doesn’t seem to count. You know. It’s like, ‘Oh, fine. You have kids. But what do you do?’” However, in contrast to the women I spoke with, Richard expressed no conflict about hiring a full-time nanny and a baby nurse around the clock for their infant. He said, “I think we were just each honest with ourselves. We didn’t want to give up a certain free
dom, or certain involvements. … And also, having a woman’s presence also [is good], right? So it just makes sense for us. And if we can afford it, it feels like a worthwhile thing to spend money on.” Though Richard mentions the desire for a “woman’s presence” in the baby’s life, he does not describe having the nanny as allowing him to do more lifestyle work. Instead he feels comfortable using that time for his own “freedom” and “other involvements.” Although the gendered expectation of paid work weighs on him, the gendered stigma associated with using paid labor does not.

  RETURNING TO PAID WORK?

  These conflicts about the value of unpaid labor also emerged when I asked them about returning to paid work. Again, these women were highly educated, and almost all had had lucrative jobs prior to or even after having children. Several liked earning their own money. Others spoke about the intellectual challenges of their jobs or said they missed the camaraderie of the workplace. Some wanted an identity beyond mothering.

  But, most important in terms of the morally legitimate status of paid work, they wanted to be “productive” and to “contribute” to the household, which seemed to mean earning money. Julia, a mother of two married to an entrepreneur, said, “I keep wondering about [going back to work], just ’cause my kids are getting older. I’m like, well, I’m not going to be a housewife forever. It’s not my personality to just have the kids go to school and still not do anything. I’m not the person that goes and gets my hair done and my nails. I just don’t do that. … I’d want to be productive and bringing something in. And so I’ve really been trying to figure out what that next thing is going to be.” Julia distances herself from the stereotype of the stay-at-home mother as the unproductive, self-indulgent consumer. While it feels legitimate to her to be taking care of her kids while they are small, she doesn’t want to “not do anything” or to focus only on her appearance.

  Although these women also try to value their unpaid labor symbolically, the idea of contributing financially is still powerful. As we will see in chapter 5, sometimes the value of the unpaid “contribution” becomes a bone of contention between husbands and stay-at-home wives. Yet despite these women’s desire to contribute, the lack of economic necessity meant that their standards for paid work were high. They did not want work that was too time-consuming or inflexible. Most did not want to go back to reporting to a boss or serving demanding clients; some were not interested in returning to the corporate world. Some women said they would probably just continue to volunteer, which gave them the same social and intellectual rewards as work, without the money. Others imagined starting a business; a few talked about tutoring or otherwise working with kids. But it seemed unlikely that most would return to full-time paid work.

  Here, again, the possibility of cultivating a hard-working self in the absence of actual paid work arose. Lucy was happy being at home with her small children, but she was thinking about the “next step.” Partly, she wanted to work for pay because “I need another way to fulfill myself.” And, she added, “there’s also kind of just showing a work ethic, I think, to my kids.” On the other hand, she thought she herself had a good work ethic even though her mother had not worked outside the home. She said, “I’m very committed. I’m a great worker. I’m loyal. You know, I get what it means to get up every day and do that. I totally get that. But my mother never worked. So I got that somehow in a house without my mother working.” This notion leaves the door open for her not to work but still to be able to instill a solid work ethic in her children, which is a crucial part of being a good mother. Again, in a sense the mindset matters more than the work itself, because one’s identity as a worker who “get[s] what it means to get up every day and do that” can be split off from one’s actual work.

  The idea of productive work looms large for these affluent New Yorkers. Some interviewees—those with a lot of earned wealth—use it as an empirical explanation of privilege (“I have what I have because I worked hard”). Many also recognize the role of luck, though rarely that of structural advantages. But, more important, hard work is a key element of inhabiting the worthy self for everyone I spoke with (“I deserve what I have because I work hard”). The most legitimate work is paid work, especially highly paid work, which is tied not only to effort but to individual self-sufficiency. Even the notion of being financially “at risk,” while anxiety-producing, reinforces this idea of individual (usually male) responsibility.27 The people I talked to who are more distant from paid work struggle with feelings of guilt, unworthiness, and dependency rather than anxiety. They create symbolic proximity to paid labor by alluding to work they have done in the past, that other people close to them do, or that they know how to do. To understand that work matters, to be able to work, and to be prudent can form part of a “mindset” of the deserving self even in the absence of paid work.

  At the same time, to be hard-working is not the only feature of the deserving self. We have already seen here that the concept of hard work is twinned with that of prudence. Both are forms of disciplined—rather than self-indulgent—action. Together, these behaviors legitimate accumulation, not by indicating that one is chosen by God, as in the Protestant ethic, but by indicating that one is morally worthy. Chapter 3 develops the idea of prudence as it fits into a narrative of reasonable spending for earners, inheritors, and stay-at-home parents alike.

  3

  “A VERY EXPENSIVE

  ORDINARY LIFE”

  CONFLICTED CONSUMPTION

  Gary is a downward-oriented inheritor of wealth with assets of well over $10 million. He is an academic, and his wife runs her own small business; their young children attend a highly ranked public school. He and his wife own and have renovated both a brownstone in Brooklyn and a second home in upstate New York. Gary told me about an incident with the contractor on his renovation, who had ordered “one of those really fancy, big stoves.” He continued:

  And so we said to him, “No, we’re going to put in a regular stove.” You know. Painted porcelain, whatever they are. I don’t know. Part of that was, we’re not going to [do] this big price thing. But part of it was very much about not ending up with the kitchen that looked like the luxury kitchen. You know, by the baseline comparative points of where our friends and colleagues live, the fact that our kitchen [is big], and it looks out on the yard, and it’s lovely, it is already a really, really nice kitchen. But it’s not a really nice kitchen that has really, really, like, top of the line [appliances]. I grew up with a stove. A regular stove. It gets hot. It still heats up the pots.

  Gary went on, “It’s almost like I can hear my grandmother, on my father’s side, saying this kind of thing. She was a big influence, by the way. You know, the message of ‘That big shot, Mr. Rockefeller, still has to get up in the morning and put his pants on.’” Gary invokes his grandmother as someone whose down-to-earth attitude influenced him to stay focused on function, to remember the basics rather than getting distracted by unnecessary bells and whistles.

  Gary also told me that he and his wife and kids “have, by far, the most expensive ordinary life of everybody that we know.” He continued, “You know, it’s almost like we’re making an effort to live, or appear to live, a pretty ordinary life. But, I mean, I’m sure our life costs ten times more than kids—not the kids in the projects. The other professional upper-middle-class families whose kids [are in school with ours].” In talking about the expenses of this life, he mentioned his mother-in-law’s nursing home costs, amounting to over $200,000 per year, and summer camp for his kids, which had cost over $20,000. Asked to elaborate on what he meant by an “ordinary life,” Gary said, “Ordinary in the sense of, we don’t own a car. … That we expect the kids to clean their dishes. We don’t go to Vail at every chance to ski. Probably even more important than that is a deep commitment to be part of the community. [My wife] has often served as a class parent at school. I do nonprofit board work. Which you could say is the provenance of privilege. Or you could say it’s an avenue of commitment
to community. Or both.”

  Gary was especially thoughtful and straightforward about both his privilege and his family’s consumption. But, although they might have left off the word “expensive,” most of those I interviewed were, to use his words, “making an effort to live, or appear to live, a pretty ordinary life”: a life focused locally on kids, homes, and family time.1 Regardless of whether they faced up or down in terms of the self-positioning that I described in chapter 1, these affluent consumers shared the desire to see their consumption as “normal” and reasonable rather than as excessive or materialistic. They also described themselves as obeying the imperative of prudence paired with hard work that we saw in the previous chapter by setting limits on consumption. They talked about making most decisions on the basis of family and children’s needs—basic needs they framed as common to all, regardless of class. And they expressed discomfort with visibility and display. All my respondents criticized ostentation, drawing strong boundaries against showing wealth, just as they drew boundaries against talking about it.

  Thus my interviewees construct themselves as worthy people not only because of their hard work but also because of their consumption choices. Their discourses tie the “worth” of the spending to the moral “worth” of the person.2 In framing their consumption in these ways, my interviewees symbolically situate themselves as part of the morally upstanding American middle class. Here they “aspire to the middle” not in the distributional sense I discussed in chapter 1—how they locate themselves in relation to others—but rather in the affective sense of having the habits and desires of the middle class. Many struggle with what exactly it means to live reasonably, and nearly all describe becoming comfortable spending more money over time. But regardless of what their lifestyles actually look like, they try to preserve their self-definition as “ordinary” consumers.