He’s really cool and laid back. You know, I don’t cook like I would like to, and he’d never, ever, complain about me not cooking or having a dirty house, or not getting the laundry done. It never ever would cross his mind to complain about that. And he gives me all the credit—I’m selling it so great—but he gives me all the credit in the world. A couple of months ago—my daughter can be a pain in the ass, and he spent a day with [the kids], and he’s like, “I just don’t know how you do this. You’ve got the hardest job in the world.” And he’s always said that, which makes all the difference.
Teresa’s analogy of “the CEO” gives her labor legitimacy through the reference to paid work involving managerial authority, as does her husband’s labeling her work a “job.” Her job is firmly anchored in the home, again suggesting that this recognition further cements the traditional division of labor, typically imagined as complementary. (Notably, her interjection “I’m selling it so great” indicates some self-consciousness about presenting the situation so positively to me.)
Like Frances, Teresa said she did not feel conflicted about not having an independent income, although other women she knew did. But, although she managed the money in the household, she claimed, “I manage it poorly.” She couldn’t tell me the amount of their rent or her husband’s precise income, claiming that “numbers are something my head does not enjoy.” Yet she went on to say, “I think not really having a grasp of the total picture of income helps with not feeling bad about spending my husband’s money.” This kind of comment signals that at least some women, even in couples with less conflict, are ambivalent about their entitlement to spend money they see as belonging to their husbands.
Some women said they appreciated the discipline their husbands encouraged. Talia, for example, indicated that she and her husband shared a spending style, saying, “We’re savers.” It turned out, however, that her husband was actually the more natural “saver.” She continued, “My husband, especially, drives the saving, which I’m so thankful for. … He, in life, he is very thoughtful about what he wants to do in the future. So he knows that in order to do those things we can’t, like, just spend [a lot], which is good for me, because sometimes I need someone to rein me in.” They had established specific measures to limit her spending, which suggests that it must have been interpreted as a significant problem (perhaps more than she admitted to me). She said, laughing:
One thing we did institute was an incentive program, where if I spent below a certain amount of money it would [go] to a profit share. So the cap was like, two or three thousand dollars. And whatever I spent below that, you know, if I [only] spent a thousand I would get five hundred dollars. It was great. … But I really only succeeded at that for, like, two months, just because being [in their summer home] I ironically have been spending more money, at like Toys R Us, Target, you know what I mean? I don’t even know what I’ve been spending money on.
Talia was quick to assert that she was never extravagant, saying, “Not like I would ever totally go overboard. I don’t have, like, really expensive tastes.” Yet she clearly has some conflict about what she should desire. Her husband helps anchor her in a morally more desirable place, as a saver, not a spender, thereby helping to constitute her as a morally worthy, prudent consumer.
Talia also felt that despite his financial discipline, he recognized her needs, such as child care, as legitimate. She said, “I’m very lucky, like, I have a babysitter. … I have a lot of freedom during the day, and that is one thing that we spend money on, because … my husband knows that for me to be happy I need to be able to walk away sometimes.” Talia and her husband both see the babysitter as “her” need because it is her job to take care of the kids, but he recognizes this need as legitimate. This comment also shows that his is the final word on spending, which determines the conditions of her labor. Although Talia and her husband have some conflict over her spending, they appear to be fundamentally aligned in terms of what they imagine legitimate needs and contributions to be.
Failures of Recognition
In some single-earner couples, however, the provider-consumer dynamic was conflictive rather than complementary. In these couples, the husbands felt that the wives were spending too much, but the wives did not agree with these assessments. These husbands tried to control their wives’ spending, casting them as untrustworthy with money and as profligate rather than prudent. They did not see family and lifestyle labor as real work, thus failing to acknowledge their wives’ contributions, triggering fears of dependency among the wives rather than reinforcing mutuality. These couples fought more about money, and they seemed more likely to be secretive about it with each other. The women with these difficulties reported both knowing less about the family finances and hiding expenditures from their husbands.
As we saw at the beginning of the chapter, Stephanie was a stay-at-home mother married to an architect who owned his own business. She appreciated that her husband was a “saver” and had put money away for college for their children, but her narrative made it clear that money was a great source of stress in their relationship. She was often confused about their financial situation. He would tell her, in her words, “‘Things are tight, you’ve got to watch what you’re doing.’” But then he would make big financial commitments to his parents or spend money on entertaining. She lamented, “It’s always mixed messages all the time.”
He also questioned Stephanie’s expenditures, which bothered her because she felt that she was buying necessities. She said he didn’t understand how much having kids cost, and because he hadn’t taken care of their summer home in a long time he “conveniently forgets” what it costs to do landscaping, maintain a pool, and so on. He got upset with her for spending money, she said,
Even though it’s, like, for the house. He goes, “I just don’t understand where all the money’s going.” And it’s like, I don’t go shopping. I don’t—you know, I painted my own nails this morning. Cut my own hair today. Like, thinking all these things I could do to, like, not spend. And I don’t spend money on myself, other than—you know, maybe I’ll splurge on a couple T-shirts at Target. But still, it’s like, this is what groceries cost. This is what booze costs. That’s a big expense in our house. You know, Costco, and—they just don’t want to know. Camp! Swimming classes. And, like, I know he thinks in the back of his mind, like, “Oh, we never should’ve [renovated] the house. Because then I’d still have, like, you know, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars just sitting in the account.”
Stephanie defends herself against real or imagined accusations of illegitimate spending (on herself) by talking about legitimate (family-related) expenses and suggesting that her “splurge” happens at Target. She also asserts that the problem is with prices, not with her choices. But her husband fails to recognize both her expertise as a consumer and the work she does to navigate markets (and to avoid them, in the case of her body labor).
She felt that her husband did not appreciate her family labor, either. As I showed earlier, Stephanie was proud of her work taking care of her child, baking cookies for his school, and making his Halloween costume. She was also proud that she did not have a nanny. But her husband did not appear to see this work as productive or valuable. She described a conflict with her husband in which he implied that she was privileged because she did not have to work for pay. She said, speaking of working moms,
And I’m like, “You know what? They’re lucky. They go to work. They go to work, that’s all they have to do all day.” I feel like sometimes I’m paddling upstream. I have so many things. And I’m not complaining. But we have three homes. And I’ve gotta deal with the leak in this one, and the electrician that’s come out to that one. It’s like, I’m all over the place, all the time. It’s stressful, having three homes. You know? There’s always something going wrong. And then when there’s something that goes wrong that costs money, I hate being the bearer of bad news. Because I’m the one that deals with all of it. … I manage. But i
t’s stressful, and—and then my husband, yet, thinks that I’m, you know, eating bonbons all day. It’s hard.
Stephanie’s husband doesn’t respect her consumption labor and doesn’t share knowledge with her about their financial situation. Yet because she is doing the consuming, she has to be “the bearer of bad news”—as when she had to tell him about a missed payment to their contractor of several thousand dollars—leaving her with an image that highlights her subordination to him and her distance from the family’s long-term money management.
Especially notable here is Stephanie’s disclaimer “I’m not complaining” about managing their three homes. In saying this, she recognizes that she is privileged, but her privilege is subsumed into the conflictive dynamic she has with her husband, who thinks she is “eating bonbons all day”—the quintessential image of the pampered, self-indulgent, nonworking housewife. When I asked her what she would do if they had more money, she mentioned maybe buying a new winter coat. She then said, “I don’t feel like I’m really missing anything. I’d just rather have less grief, you know, from him. About everything. You know, what the bills are each month, or whatever.” His failure to recognize her contributions to the family looms larger than any material desire.
Conflicts over consumption work sometimes included an explicit struggle on the part of the woman herself to see the labor of lifestyle as legitimate. Helen, for example, had loved her job in banking and left it only when it became clear that she could not reconcile its demanding hours with her family life. She told me, referring to her husband, “There are power dynamics where he’s the breadwinner now, and I’m really not. And yet, I do so many things for the family that you can’t put a number on it.” She continued, referring to herself, “And yet, you’re well-educated. I had a career. You know, where is all that now? And it’s hard, I think, to negotiate all those things. I was always scared that, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ll stop working, and then I’ll be working for him.’ And I feel like, you know, on some level, that’s how it feels sometimes. So I have to really work hard to claim my own stuff.” Helen went on, “It took me a long time to bridge that gap, sort of. And to feel like, ‘Well, listen. It’s my job here as, you know, managing the household. Like, I’m supposed to be spending the money.’ But I wasn’t comfortable for a long, long time.” Helen fears being her husband’s subordinate and losing her identity. Her labor, because it is unquantifiable, is hard to recognize, and even she has trouble seeing it as “my job.”
Like Stephanie, Helen resists the idea that she is spending money on herself, which would be illegitimate, emphasizing that she is being frugal or forgoing the little luxuries others might take for granted. Helen said her husband
just sort of feels like I’m, like, spending all this money on things. And yet I feel like I don’t spend money on things the way other women do. I do very little self-maintenance. … I know all these women who do all these beauty treatments. Like, I don’t get my eyebrows done. I don’t get waxed, I don’t do that. … When I buy, I try to buy 70 percent off, with sales. That’s just me. … But, so, he thinks I spend all this money. And yet I look at him, and he’s, like, very into rare books. So we have all these books that he buys. … He’s comfortable calling the shots, because [he’s working], and sometimes I feel like, “That’s not fair.”
Her husband gives himself more latitude to spend because he earns the money, while implying that her spending is frivolous because she doesn’t.
Although they do not use this language, Helen and Stephanie are describing the work of mediating between their husbands and consumer markets. They must convince their husbands that the amounts they spend are necessary—simply reflecting what products and services cost—rather than excessive. Although these husbands distrust their wives’ ability to do consumption work well, they do not want to do this work themselves. When I asked if Helen’s husband paid close attention to what she spent money on, she responded, “Not in any detailed way. He just says, ‘We’ve got to bring the credit card bills down.’ I’m like, ‘Okay. Tell me where.’ There’s never been an answer to that question.”
Some men wanted to control how their wives spent time rather than money. Alice’s husband, for example, trusted her to spend prudently; she said, “He knows my personality, so he knows that I’m not going to just be excessive and sort of throw away money. … I go to the ATM machine a lot and take out a fair amount of money. And he’s never, ever questioned me.” Alice and her husband also had similar spending styles. However, he chided her for doing too much volunteer work and spending too much time working on the renovation of their second home. Alice described herself as obsessive in terms of trying to find exactly the right fixture or piece of furniture, or to do tasks perfectly, and said her husband “feels like I can’t just let it go.” He believed that she should pay people to do more of this work. “He’s like, ‘Just hire someone, let them do it. I don’t care if you’re going to pay 25 percent more than if you did it on your own.’”
Alice felt that her volunteer and renovation work were “totally” analogous to a job. These projects felt like something she was doing “for the greater good” that allowed her to “use [her] mind in different ways.” But her husband saw these as illegitimate uses of her unpaid time, because her job as a mother was supposed to be primary (though her children were in school). When I asked her why it bothered him, she said, “Because, you know, the reason I’m home is to be with my kids, not sitting in front of the computer and going to meetings and doing all that stuff.” He told her, in her words, “‘I want you to enjoy yourself. Be with the kids, do whatever, not— you know, be doing that stuff.’” It seemed to me, however, that Alice did enjoy the projects she was doing and that it was her husband who saw her responsibilities differently.
It became clear that Alice’s husband wanted her to prioritize caring for and spending time with him as well as their children. She said, “He works hard. He values his time and his family. So when he isn’t working, he wants to be with his family. And, you know, doing something that he enjoys.” She explained,
He’s like, “I leave the apartment at seven in the morning. I get home at seven at night, or six at night, whatever. You’ve got twelve hours. Like, the fact that you can’t fit this stuff into these twelve hours, and you’re staying up late, or you’re on a computer, you know, after dinner, checking your e-mails,” that’s what bugs him. You know, weekends and stuff like that. So I think it’s more that he feels like I can’t just let it go. But I sort of say, you know, “We’re just sitting in front of the TV hanging out. So what’s the difference between [that and me] being in front of my computer?”
Unlike some husbands, who think wives should “do it themselves” when they’re not working for pay, Alice’s husband doesn’t mind paying for someone else to do it. But his schedule is supposed to be the primary one, and she is supposed to be available when he is. He is, in a sense, telling her how to do her job.14
Ironically, at one point Alice suggested that part of her attentiveness to money in the renovation might be related to her lack of independent income. She said she didn’t really care about earning her own money, both because her husband didn’t hassle her about spending and because, after having a job for many years, “I feel like I sort of proved—you know, I did that.”15 But, she continued, “One of the reasons why I try to save money … or spend that time maybe [on the renovation]—you know, even subconsciously—maybe that’s why. Because I feel like I’m spending someone else’s money.” Alice and her husband are, in a sense, at cross purposes: he wants her to spend money and contribute time, but she chooses to “spend” time, at least in part because she is not contributing money.
Some husbands were concerned about how their wives used both time and money. Alexis told me that she and her husband shared the same spending priorities: they were willing to pay a lot for quality and for experiences like vacations, but they were “moderate” in general. However, as I described earlier, they also fought ab
out her spending on what she called the “little things.” First, she said, “It’s not like I’m buying— it’s just, things add up. Diapers.com and the groceries. Stuff. Stuff just adds up. You know, he’s very, like, organized, and he has a budget of all my expenses, and he wants me to, like—he has a goal for the monthly credit card bill, and keeping it at that.” She casts her expenses in the language of legitimate family spending, contrasting them implicitly (“It’s not like I’m buying—”) to something more extravagant.
But ultimately, like Talia, Alexis described her husband as being reasonable in his desire to discipline her, saying, “He’s right. I don’t need anything. I don’t need another shirt, another piece of jewelry, another pair of shoes. … But it’s hard. Like, I go out, and I see something, and you know, I want it! But I’m getting better at that. And I try to be better. … I mean this very seriously. Like, I really want to try to be better all the time.” Alexis wants to be “better”—meaning more controlled, which also connotes morally “good”—in her consumption. She attached this desire to a history of having been a spendthrift, never thinking about money when she was single and working in finance. Now in a different life stage, she found it important to conform to the norms her husband wanted to enforce. But, at the same time, she admitted that she didn’t tell him about some expenses. When I asked if he noticed, she said, laughing, “Well, there’s one credit card bill that he doesn’t see the details of. So I use that one. You know. I’ve figured out ways. Like, ‘Amazon.com’ is so vague.” Keeping these purchases secret not only helps her avoid conflict with her husband but also allows her to keep thinking of herself as “good.”
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