As Alexis discussed these issues, it became clear that her husband wanted to control her time and her labor as well as her spending. Soon after their first child was born, she realized that she did not want to return to her job because she did not want someone else taking care of her child. But she “felt guilty” about the prospect of not making money. So when her husband admitted that he also wanted her to stay home, she said, “a weight was lifted.” When I interviewed her a few years after this decision, however, Alexis’s use of paid child care had become a bone of contention between them. He made fun of her for hiring babysitters because he thought she should be taking care of the kids herself. Although she initially described this as “only” good-natured teasing, she eventually remarked, when I asked about it, “Maybe he does make me feel a little guilty about it.”
As a consequence, as I noted previously, Alexis sometimes lied to her husband about how much babysitting she used when she was at their summer house and he was working in the city. She said, speaking haltingly about the lie:
Sometimes I lie about how much—because he doesn’t really—like, I pay—like, he doesn’t really know all the time how much help I’m having. It just makes me happier. Because I can get things done. I don’t like [it] when my life backs up. You know? And if I have the two kids on my own, I have to be with them. Busy. So, I’m not doing, like, administrative things on the computer that I need to be doing, or emails, or planning [a child’s] birthday party … or doing the dishes, or the laundry. You know, I like to keep moving. Getting all my stuff done, and multitasking. So it helps me do that. Makes my brain happier.
Like other women I discussed in chapter 2, Alexis frames her use of paid child care as facilitating other morally worthy work, which mitigates a sense of illegitimate entitlement. But her husband doesn’t echo this interpretation, because he doesn’t think she should need this “help.” Lying to him about it allows her to avoid conflict with him, just as seeing him as “teasing” rather than “shaming” allows her to avoid confronting the real gap in their valuations of her labor. It also permits her to see herself as morally worthy, because she does not have to confront his critique of her consumption as unreasonable and therefore can avoid thinking of herself as a “snob,” a fear we saw in chapter 2.
Marie, a stay-at-home mother married to an executive, also recounted ongoing conflict with her husband over money. They struggled both over money and over the legitimate use of Marie’s unpaid time. She described herself as “a spender,” while her husband “spends nothing, ever.” Marie and her husband had been in counseling at least partly to address these issues. She felt that her husband was “watching” her spending. Marie also thought her husband took her (unpaid) time for granted, assuming she would always be available because she did not have a job. For him, time spent on paid work was symbolically (as well as economically) valuable and legitimated spending; unpaid work was not and did not count as a real contribution. Yet, at the same time, she thought he was conflicted, because at some level he was glad that she did not work. She said, “I think that he believes that at a certain point, it’s good for you [the wife] to quit work because you [the couple] are at a certain level. None of his friends’ wives work. None of them. And in general, I don’t really have that many friends that work, either. But I do have some. But I always think that [husbands] think, ‘But what are you doing? What are you doing all day?’ … I think that he thinks I never have to do anything if I don’t want to, because ‘What are you doing, you’re not working.’” Marie’s husband seems to desire the status of having a nonworking wife (much as Veblen would have predicted) but not to believe that her unpaid labor is valuable.
Marie described the same struggle that Helen did, to feel that she had a right to the money her husband earned. She said, “It isn’t a comfortable place to go—when I first quit, to now have to figure out how money would be spent. Because I’m still the same person that’s been socialized to believe I would support myself. And now I’m looking to someone else to support me. And the truth is, in the marriage, it’s both of our money. Legally. But it’s a mindset that you have to get over.” She went on, “But it’s also hard for [her husband], as the person that’s working, to have no control. I can see him feeling that way. And I remember having many arguments with him and saying, ‘Whether you like it or not, whether you’re comfortable with it or not, whether I am comfortable with it or not, if something should happen to this marriage, half of this money’s mine. So, you can work a hundred hours a week. And for whatever you make, half of it’s mine. So you’ve got to get used to that.’”
Though Marie knows that legally she is “entitled” to the money her husband earns, she has trouble feeling that entitlement, “getting over” the “mindset” that it is not her money. She continued, “And I’ve got to get used to that. So I started kind of unapologetically spending money. And so, then you’re not a team. You’re just spending to assert that you can. You almost have to be in your [husband’s] face, to overcompensate for the fact that you feel uncomfortable about it. And you do. And so I am.” Marie is responding to her own discomfort with her lack of earning, as well as her husband’s; she uses aggressive spending as a way to assert her right to her husband’s money and her power in the marriage.
Maya took a different tack. As we saw in chapter 3, her husband set strong limits on her spending overall (she said, “He doesn’t give a shit if I have a nice handbag”). She claimed not to know how much his salary or assets were, and I believed her (again, this was not always the case among the women I interviewed). She told me she would propose certain expenditures, “and then he’ll be, like, ‘This is crazy’ or not.” But he appeared to give her autonomy within the amounts he allocated to her. I asked if she missed working and having her own income. She responded, “No, I don’t, because he doesn’t get into my business. Like [her friend], she works, and her husband looks at every credit card [bill]. If [her husband] was doing that, we’d have real problems. We’d have real problems. But he never questions—I don’t tell him everything, but if I told him everything and he questioned, which he would if I told him, then we’d have a problem. There are no questions asked, it just kind of goes. Now I’m also not crazy. I’m not crazy at all. If I was, I think questions would get asked, but I’m not.” Maya doesn’t feel that she needs her own earnings because she can spend her husband’s earnings freely—and she represents her own desires as “not crazy.” But this is possible only because of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of not discussing what she is spending money on. Avoiding overt conflict about money, Maya has accepted her husband’s limits, and he has accepted her right to control what he gives her.
A shadow issue in these stories was the question of the women’s dependency on their husbands and what would happen if they split up. Marie was sure her husband had money in accounts she didn’t know about. She maintained a secret account herself, with “under a hundred thousand” dollars she had “saved” (from money he earned, it seemed). She explained, minimizing the amount, that this money was to “buy toothpaste” if she and her husband ever separated. Maya was also anxious about her own ignorance of the family’s finances as it related to her dependency on her husband, although she spoke about this very vaguely. She told me, “I think I probably should understand more of the whole picture, and I don’t.” When I asked why, she said, “I just let it go. … He was kind of like, ‘Let’s not worry about it. You know, I’ll take care of it, and blah, blah, blah.’” She haltingly explained that she felt that she should know the size of the “whole pie” as part of a “safety net.” Instead, she said, she had made the “naïve” decision to trust her husband and, as a last resort, the legal system. She had saved some money from working, about $1 million, but she did not seem to feel that this would be sufficient. As in Marie’s case, the law outlines what Maya should be entitled to in one sense, but it does not suffice to make her feel comfortable with the situation.
These conflictive dynam
ics clearly interfered with these women’s self-conceptions as hard workers and prudent consumers. Men’s refusal to recognize women’s volunteer and philanthropic activities also delegitimated their attempts to “give back” more explicitly. Marie said, for example, “My husband would like to see all that volunteer work going to a paycheck.” She also told me that her husband would prefer to reduce their giving to $50,000 per year from $75,000 (on an income of over $2.5 million).
Furthermore, such conflicts engender a sense of scarcity among these wives. The conflict locates the question of entitlement to and use of resources between the members of the couple rather than between the couple and the rest of the world. All of the women who mentioned these problems were “upward-oriented” in the sense that they did not tend to describe themselves as privileged. Alexis and Stephanie were among the very few in my sample who did not make charitable donations. Alexis said, “I don’t feel like we have money to be giving away right now.” Stephanie said, “I don’t have any money to [give away],” although she described making some political contributions. They may feel that they do not have enough to give away for multiple reasons, but it seems likely that these constraints and conflicts with their husbands play a role in stifling a sense of self as privileged.
Stay-at-home mothers married to earners seemed less susceptible to these dynamics if they had significant resources of their own, accumulated through earning and/or through family wealth. These women did not talk about conflict with their spouses. Zoe, for example, had worked in corporate law and also had inherited wealth. She told me that she and her husband didn’t disagree about spending: “One, because he’s not petty at all about it. And two, because I bring just as much.” She explained, “He’s the only one working now, earning money. But I’ve got my own money. So, when I want to buy my own pair of shoes, or buy myself a bag, or whatever, I certainly don’t feel like I have to ask permission. And I can do it myself, and never have to tell him how much they were, because he’ll never see it. Like, it’s my own account, and my money. We have everything together, as well. But he’s certainly not looking through my credit card bill, thinking, ‘What is this?’ … And anything related to family, whether it’s groceries or home, he’s like, ‘Spend as much as you need.’” When her husband says, “Spend as much as you need,” he sounds like other husbands, who ultimately have power over the couple’s money. But her financial independence means he can’t control her spending (though she does echo the idea that spending on herself should come from “her” money).
Danielle had been a banker before leaving paid work. Like her husband, she had inherited wealth, from which she paid herself a “salary,” as we have seen. She told me, specifically alluding to her primary role in household consumption, “I don’t understand how you could be the one who spends the money and not know. That would make me real nervous. … I need to know the cash flow. I need to know what the [balance] sheet looks like and, you know, like how all that stuff affects the long term.” Unlike most of the other stay-at-home mothers I talked with, she links her desire to understand money to the fact that she is spending it. That is, spending, not earning, justifies control. I believe it was easier for her to take this position because she brought her own money to the relationship, so she did not feel as if she was spending “someone else’s” money.
INHERITANCE AND ENTITLEMENT
In heterosexual couples living primarily on inherited wealth from one inheritor, the household division of labor and the fact that one person was the source of the money played out somewhat differently. Like stay-at-home mothers, women in these families (including female inheritors) still did the majority of the daily household management, including food preparation, planning for the kids, and supervising domestic workers, even though they almost always worked at least part-time for pay. But men in these families tended to take a more active role in some aspects of this work (especially child care and renovation) than did high-earning men, in part because they worked shorter hours and in some cases because they had more progressive politics. Because they almost always worked for pay, the women had strong identities as paid workers. And because the bulk of the household assets did not come from paid work, the money did not confer quite the same legitimacy on the inheritor as earnings could, as we saw in chapter 2.
For all these reasons, I saw less discord in these couples over whether consumption and family work counted as real labor. They also felt less economic anxiety than earners because their significant assets shielded them from the risks of job loss. But questions of control over money did arise. Most prominent was whether it was “our money” or the money of the inheritor alone. Couples who could experience the money as “ours” (a status less enshrined in law than it is for couples who have earned wealth since marrying) seemed to experience less conflict. Both male and female inheritors talked about trying to equalize these relations, although the women seemed to be trying harder to create balance.16 Here issues of legal transfer —of inheritors to their spouses and of inheritances to children—became central.
In these couples, money was usually managed by the inheritor, male or female. Scott, for example, was in charge of what Olivia called the “care and maintenance of money,” dealing with their accounts and all the “emails and signings.”17 She preferred this arrangement, characterizing her attitude as “your family, your money,” though she also recognized and lamented that this stance was conventionally gendered—that she as the woman didn’t know much about what was going on with the money. Inheritors also often held significant assets apart from those of their spouses, sometimes because they were tied up in family arrangements for wealth management.
It seemed to me that the inheritors’ control over the wealth was taken for granted in these families, for the most part. And I did not get the sense that inheritors were policing their partners’ daily spending to the same extent as earners. But power struggles over consumption decisions still emerged. Grace, who worked part-time in nonprofit consulting, very explicitly illuminated the relationship between the source of the money and the power to decide where to spend it. She said that sometimes her husband, who had both inherited and earned wealth, “gives me a hard time about buying [something]. And I’m just like, well, how am I ever going to be able to have—I can’t make enough money to impact our life. And how am I ever going to make enough money to deserve something, like, if I don’t just say, ‘I worked for this, and I made this money?’ Even if it’s not impacting our life. It’s frustrating. It’s hard.” She ties “earning” to “deserving” specifically in the context of having the right to control how household money is spent, even though she provides very little of it. She continued, “Or, I can’t be like, ‘Well, I know you don’t like it, but I’m buying it.’ Do you know what I mean? Whereas [her husband] can. He can be like, ‘I know you don’t like it, but I’m going to buy that car.’ Because he could. Whereas I don’t have the background money to do that.” Because her husband brings the money to the family, he has the ultimate power to define legitimate needs in the household.
Grace also missed the psychological boost of financial accomplishment and contribution. When she worked in a regular job, she said, “Like, if I got a raise, I’d buy myself something. I’d buy myself something small or go out to dinner or something to celebrate, and I don’t have that now. It’s just not the same. I can’t be like, ‘I put money into this renovation.’ I think there is a pride there that is lost, and it’s hard.” She thus turned to her own work as an important source of autonomy. It was crucial to her to have her own money, which she earned, and to keep it separate from the household money. This was partly because, as she said, “It is all mine, and I can say it’s mine.” Also, she said, “There is a part of me that needs to have my own access [to money]. … If anything were to happen, like, I have access to my own—I don’t have to worry. It’s a little bit of a security blanket.” She also told me she did not give away much money to charity, both because she didn’t feel as if her
husband’s money was hers to give and because she felt as if she had to hold onto her earned income. As in the case of the stay-at-home mothers described earlier, these tensions over control create a sense of immediate scarcity that can overshadow the sense of privilege.
Struggles over control also played out between Kevin and his husband, Dan, who had inherited wealth. But unlike Grace, Kevin was less likely to want to spend. Kevin said, of the differences in their financial situations, “I mostly would say I don’t think it matters at all.” He told me, “In many ways, [Dan’s] values are super close to mine. He’s not at all identified with having this money. I mean, I think what’s beautiful about it is, he sort of sees his money as allowing him to do things sort of with his own life, and sometimes in support of his friends, that he wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.” They also had an egalitarian division of labor, Kevin said. But Dan’s definitions of need, which involved spending money more freely, were likely to prevail. Kevin described the tension between spending to change something and accepting it the way it is as “always in our lives.” Dan would argue, Kevin said, “‘If we can afford to do it and we kind of want this thing, whatever it is—this new sofa, or, you know, new shelves, or whatever—then let’s just do it.’ And I much more have this feeling of like, do we really need that new sofa? I mean, yeah, our sofa looks like crap, but it’s still functioning, and is it so terrible to have a crappy-looking sofa? So that kind of justification question is often in my head.” Dan also wanted to pay others more often to do things Kevin felt they should be doing for themselves, such as taking care of their children.
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