Uneasy Street

by Sherman, Rachel

  Driving home to Brooklyn along the tree-lined Southern State Parkway, I thought about the emotions around spending that these women had described, including anxiety, frustration, denial, and desire. I considered the power struggles over the control of money that they were clearly engaged in with their husbands, Alexis in a more muted way, Stephanie more overtly. I felt compassion for them, because their husbands criticized them for being too consumerist while seeming to diminish their household, renovation, and child-related labor. As a feminist scholar of domestic work, I knew that this tendency to devalue the unpaid household labor that women typically do is common, regardless of social class. Later, when I listened to the interviews, I heard myself taking their sides as they described these disputes, as I would with a friend. I agreed that Alexis needed more babysitting and sympathized with Stephanie’s difficulties in talking about money with her husband.

  The greenery of the parkway gave way to the Long Island Expressway and eventually to the run-down streets of eastern Brooklyn, lined with dilapidated brick low-rise buildings. Still musing about these women, I stopped at a red light and noticed a long line of eighty or a hundred people, primarily men but also some women and children, stretched along a building and around the corner. As far as I could tell, all were people of color. I realized the building was a church. A large sign outside proclaimed “Hot Food Wednesday Nights.” It was Wednesday night.

  What struck me at that moment was how much I had forgotten about the broader context of inequality that had brought me to this project. In feeling sympathy for Stephanie and Alexis, I had started to see their situations through their eyes, which distracted me from something I would usually have been obsessed with: their social advantages over others, the expensive renovation, the three properties, and the many other comforts that they and their families enjoyed. That is, the relations of distribution in the household—these wives’ conflicts with and sense of subordination to their husbands—had deflected my attention from relations of distribution more broadly—their privileged lives relative to those of the vast majority of the population.1 To put it another way: my feeling of gender solidarity with them had obscured their class position.

  Ultimately I came to believe that these tensions with their partners also made it harder for Stephanie and Alexis themselves to see and feel their own privilege. Conflicts over money created a sense of scarcity within these intimate relationships and loomed much larger in their daily experience than did their advantages over abstract others with less. I realized, too, that these challenges from their husbands were also refusals to recognize the legitimate entitlement of their wives. Stephanie and Alexis were trying to establish their labor as productive and their consumption as reasonable—that is, they were trying to interpret themselves as good people, morally worthy of their privilege. But their husbands’ failure to support these interpretations made it hard for them to constitute themselves as deserving.

  In this chapter I explore how money, time, labor, and recognition become objects of negotiation and discord within wealthy couples. I focus especially on how couples constructed the relationship between earning or otherwise providing money and being entitled to spend it, how they valued unpaid household and lifestyle labor, and how they understood what it meant to contribute to family life. An extensive scholarly literature on the control of money in couples analyzes the relationship of each partner’s income to marital power and control over various aspects of the couple’s life (including decision making, money, fertility, and sexuality).2 An equally vast body of research explores the division of household labor and its relation to gender identity.3 My primary interest and contribution here is to link class to gender by looking at how entitlement within these relationships, which are influenced by gendered beliefs about the value of paid and unpaid labor and the control of money, relates to my interviewees’ larger sense of entitlement outside them.

  CONFLICTS AND CONTRIBUTIONS

  As I started hearing stories about arguments or tensions over finances, I initially imagined that perhaps one reason interviewees might clash over money would have to do with whether they shared a spending style—that is, ideas about what kinds of needs were reasonable and how much it was appropriate to spend to meet these needs. And indeed some people believed that their lack of conflict came from agreeing on these priorities. As Penny told me, “We don’t have a conflict over [spending]. We’re both similar about it.” Some indicated that class background and upbringing played a role in spending styles. Danielle described herself and her husband as “skinflints,” saying they shared the same outlook; she explained, “I think part of it is, we basically had incredibly similar upbringings about money.”

  I surmised that a lack of financial constraint would also foster a harmonious relationship around money, and some people did mention this freedom in their descriptions. For example, Janice said, of her partner, “There aren’t big things where we disagree. And it may be partially a function of not really having the stress or worry about it. I mean, I think it is. Like, we don’t have to stress about it. So, if [her partner] wants to spend more money on a coat than I would ever spend, it’s not taking away from something else. And I’m aware of that.”

  But I soon realized that both spending priorities and having “enough” to meet their needs were matters of interpretation between the members of the couple. Penny said, “I think having money and not having to worry about it totally alleviates the conflict, in a way.” Yet she went on to say, “Although there are plenty of people with money who spend a lot and who have conflict.” As Penny’s comment highlights, it is not an absolute amount of money but rather a particular understanding of needs relative to assets that fosters ease or anxiety. I came to see that many of the members of the couples I interviewed had different spending styles but still described minimal conflict over spending; others had enough money to buy whatever they wanted but still disagreed with their partners about it. I also realized that how people spent time, as well as money, was often an issue and usually had to do with the valuation of unpaid labor.

  In the end, I found that clashes over money and time in these relationships primarily stemmed from interpretations of how each member of the couple was contributing to the family’s lifestyle relative to their entitlements. Because money itself is a recognized form of contribution, those who brought money into the relationship—through either earning or inheritance—were likely to feel entitled to spend it. Those who had not brought the money to the relationship were more conflicted. But these entitlements were not set in stone simply by the balance in monetary contributions. What mattered most were the ways both parties to the relationship recognized and valued each other’s contributions and their needs.4

  In turn, these valuations were influenced by deeply gendered ideas about the value of certain kinds of labor and time. As feminist theorists have long pointed out, household “consumption” is also “production” (and reproduction) of both humans and lifestyles.5 Yet the men in my study did not always recognize the labor of lifestyle as productive work, despite the women’s desire that it should count as such, as we saw in chapter 2. The men were more likely to be bringing home the proverbial bacon, so they were more automatically able to draw on ideas about legitimate, productive (paid) labor. In contrast, stay-at-home mothers sometimes struggled to legitimate their own unpaid labor—including consumption work—as productive, prudent, and family-related. Stay-at-home mothers also sometimes felt uncomfortable spending money they had not earned.6 They depended on their husbands to help them cast their labor as worthy, but, as the stories of Stephanie and Alexis showed, this recognition was not always forthcoming.

  When the women I talked with had access to their own money, through either inheritance or their own paid work, they required less of this kind of recognition. But when they brought in more money than their husbands, they went out of their way to recognize their husbands’ contributions—often more than the men did those of their wives. Female inheritors tal
ked about (and tried to assuage) the conflicts their husbands felt about not being the primary providers more than male inheritors did. Likewise, women who significantly out-earned their husbands described having to compensate for their husbands’ feelings of inadequacy. Yet such women retained primary responsibility for their homes overall, as did all women in dual-earner couples. Notably, I did not see much variation by race in these accounts.

  DIVISIONS OF LABOR AND RECOGNITION

  IN SINGLE-EARNER FAMILIES

  Heterosexual couples composed of male earners and stay-at-home mothers (or very low-earning wives relative to the husbands7) usually observed a strict division of household, family, and lifestyle labor in which the women did much more of it than the men. The men were providers, bringing all or nearly all of the money into the household by working outside it. The women were consumers, responsible for nearly every aspect of the home and the children’s lives. Husbands who worked in finance or the corporate world rarely spent time with their children during the week thanks to long hours and, in some cases, punishing travel schedules.

  The male earners and female “consumers” I interviewed seemed to take this division of labor for granted. Only one woman complained to me that her husband spent too little time with their children. In fact, several went out of their way to recognize their husbands for spending any time at all with the kids. These women took the demands of their husbands’ jobs in finance, business, and law for granted, comparing the men to others in their fields who did less, not to what they might otherwise have wanted. Alexis, for example, told me that her husband was a great father; he had gotten up with her for night feedings and never had a problem changing a diaper, unlike some of his colleagues. Teresa called her husband a “very hands-on dad,” relative to other men he worked with, because he tried to get home on weekday evenings in time to put the kids to bed.

  The men were usually in charge of family money management, planning, and control.8 Even when women I interviewed were tasked with paying the bills, they often did not have a broader sense of what their families’ assets were or how they were organized. Julia, for example, told me, speaking of her husband, “We have a couple of different accounts. And he’s always juggling, ‘Okay, pay this out of this account. Pay this out of this [other] account.’ He does all that.” Several women told me, sometimes sheepishly, that they did not understand how much money there was or how it was invested.9

  In home renovation specifically, the men were almost always identified as having cared primarily about the money, while the women were much more likely to have concerned themselves with logistics.10 As Susannah, a mother of two married to an executive, said of her husband, “Budget, budget, budget. That’s all he cares about.” Grace said of the renovation she and her husband had done, “He watched the numbers much more than I did.” Husbands and wives usually made big decisions together, such as who the architect and contractor would be and what changes would be made to the space. But once the projects were off the ground, the women ordinarily managed the renovations on a daily basis, while the men attended occasional meetings with architects and/or contractors. David, the interior designer, said of the female clients he worked with on renovations, “It’s like these women are on salary for their husbands.”

  The women were also typically, though not exclusively, in charge of the aesthetics of renovation. Many described confronting the vast array of possibilities about everything from faucets to light fixtures, tiles to paint colors, as they spent hours surfing the Internet or roaming around Manhattan’s Decoration and Design Building and other retail outlets. After the women had narrowed down the options, their husbands would help choose from among the available alternatives. Some men cared a lot about one or two issues, lobbying for a particular kind of shower or asserting control over the design of a home office.11 But, for the most part, the woman’s preferences drove the changes. In talking about a meeting his wife had asked him to attend with an interior designer, Paul said, “I don’t care about any of this. I care about the budget. Honestly. I sat for three hours; I couldn’t even bear to go any longer.”

  When the division of labor was not clear enough, it could lead to conflict. Talia’s description of the process with her husband was fairly typical: “I was in charge of getting bids and managing that whole process at the beginning. And he would ask a lot of questions. And I kind of felt like I was back at [my old job], with the boss I hated second-guessing every single thing. And my biggest irritation was that—I was like, ‘If you’re going to let me manage this process, you can’t be gone and then come in and ask all these questions.’ You know what I mean? So there were a few bumps in the road at the beginning. But eventually we decided, ‘Okay, you [the husband] are in charge of the money part, you keep track of the invoices and, you know.’ He’s just very good at looking through an invoice and finding any discrepancies. And I’m in charge of, basically, making sure the trains are moving and keeping things going.”

  In these households, the husbands would often review monthly expenditures (even if the wives actually paid the bills), thus essentially monitoring and potentially disciplining their wives. The women were highly attuned to this possibility. Ursula said, “I mean, every now and then [when reviewing the bills] he’ll be like, ‘Oh gosh, what happened this month?’ You know, like, ‘What are you doing?’ I’ll be like, ‘You know, that’s the camp for the two kids for the summer.’ And then it’s like, ‘Oh, okay.’ If I’d said it was, you know, the cocktail dress that I couldn’t resist, it would probably be like, ‘Gosh, are you serious?’ But it was the camp for the two kids for the summer. It’s okay.”

  Ursula further characterized her husband as “good” because he did not restrict her spending too much. Indicating a pair of expensive shoes she had just bought, she told me she was excited to show them to him. She said that he would not have a problem with her having bought them. “He’s very good that way. If I did five of these in a month, he’d be like, ‘Get a grip.’” (She also underscored that she had gotten the shoes for 50 percent off.) Several other women also described their husbands as “very good” about not interfering with their spending. These characterizations as “good” indicate that their husbands could be “bad,” which would mean controlling the wives’ spending. Thus, however they use it, the husbands hold the power to define acceptable and unacceptable choices. Indeed, Ursula told me later in our interview that she would like to have her own income “so I don’t have to justify my pair of shoes from yesterday.” This statement contradicts her earlier assertion that her husband is “very good,” suggesting that perhaps he is more demanding of “justification” than she wanted initially to admit.12

  When husbands trusted their wives to spend money and time intelligently and recognized their “consumption work” as legitimate labor that contributed to the family, conflicts were minimal.13 And when they did not try to control their wives’ spending, they avoided implying that their own contributions were more important by virtue of the fact that they provided the money. But when they did try to control women’s money and time, denying their status as contributors and hard workers, conflicts over how their wives spent both money and time were more frequent.

  Relationships of Recognition

  In relationships marked by minimal conflict over money, the partners seemed to have found complementarity in their provider/consumer status. One key was that the husbands trusted their wives to spend wisely and did not interfere in their choices. Frances told me, “I’m in charge of literally everything” having to do with the household and family. But, she said, “I’m so super lucky that I married someone who never makes me feel like I’m contributing less. And never questions what I’m spending money on, and we have a really good division of labor. … I have wonderful friends who are on a budget. Which, I mean, if [my husband] ever came to me with a question [about spending], like, game over. That wouldn’t work. But like I said, I’m just lucky that I married somebody who doesn’t ever—if anything,
he’ll complain that I don’t spend enough on something.” Frances and her husband do sometimes disagree over spending, as she says, because she wants to spend less. But this difference in spending style doesn’t create major conflict because Frances doesn’t feel as if her husband is trying to control her. Yet Frances is clearly aware of the possibility that her husband could try to control her spending, as it is an issue for other women she knows.

  The second critical dimension of this complementarity is the husbands’ recognition of the wives’ unpaid labor as a legitimate contribution. Frances told me that her husband “will often say he couldn’t do what he does and be as successful as he is if I weren’t managing this part of our life. If he couldn’t be totally secure that I had this down, in terms of raising our kids and managing our home, he wouldn’t be able to do what he does. So I feel like I’m contributing economically in that way.” Frances’s husband explicitly recognizes and legitimates her labor, which allows her to see it as an “economic” contribution and highlight its “managerial” dimension. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, Frances said she did not miss having her own income.

  Teresa’s husband, as previously noted, worked long hours on Wall Street and traveled frequently. He saw his two children only briefly during the week, although the whole family spent weekends together. Teresa had not been reluctant to stop working for pay, but she had struggled to “come to terms with” the fact that she was fully responsible for the home, which included employing both a nanny and a housecleaner. But now, she said, “I am the CEO of this house, and I run the ship, and that’s how I like it.” She highlighted her husband’s recognition of her work and her contribution: