In almost every case, the women took greater responsibility for their homes in general, as women in all social classes typically do.19 In this sense these women resembled those in the other types of families I have described, with the significant difference that they also worked full-time.20 Margaret, for example, was responsible for the mental labor of taking care of the household. She said that her husband’s work travel “puts me in that gender role again, where I’m the one responsible for the children, the schedule. I mean, he doesn’t know what they have for homework, and all that. So yeah, absolutely, I’m definitely performing that gender role where I take care of the home and I take care of the kids, and I have my job as well, and so on.”
Monica, the real estate broker, and her self-employed husband both worked full-time, but her account illuminates her much greater household responsibility, even as it shows the effort she makes to interpret her husband’s behavior as a contribution. She sometimes hired after-school babysitters for her children, but, she said, framing these tasks as her responsibility alone, “I do all my shopping, I do all my cooking.” When I asked about her husband’s household involvement, she said: “Actually, he does a lot. I shouldn’t complain. He does laundry. He’ll do grocery shopping if I give him a list. I mean, he doesn’t think of things that we need, but—you know, he’ll go do whatever. Since [his time is] flexible, he gets [our son] from the bus and takes him to soccer or picks him up from wherever. It’s easier, because he’s uptown, and I’m all the way down here. So he does so much in that way.” Though she said, “I shouldn’t complain,” she had not been complaining to me, so it seemed as if what she was saying was one side of a dialogue ongoing in her head. But although she might have felt like complaining, like some of the stay-at-home mothers described earlier, she also gave a lot of credit to her husband for doing even minimal tasks.
Even in couples in which the women earned significantly more than the men, the women were more responsible for their households.21 When I asked Lisa, who brought in about two-thirds of her $600,000 household income, if it was an issue that she earned more than her husband, she said, “I think so. Not that he would admit. I don’t think he would.” She continued, “But earlier on, it came out in indirect ways, I think. Because maybe I was giving off a sense of my work was more important. Because it was!” She laughed and pointed out that without her income they could not afford their lifestyle. “So it can’t be equal. If there’s a choice, and the child is sick, and I have a meeting, guess who’s not staying home? I’m not staying home. So it kind of came out in those ways. In, like, the division of labor. It was surprising how much I had to push to get what I needed. To support me in my work.” Ultimately they hired a housekeeper, Lisa said, “of course.” And they paid to have full-time child care even when the kids were in school, “because,” Lisa said, “I wasn’t going to have the stress of having to think about, ‘Now I have to put something in place.’ Like, it just needed to be there.” Even this formulation (“I have to”) shows that it was Lisa’s job to make sure the kids were taken care of.
Miriam’s case was especially striking. She worked long hours in banking and her $1.2 million annual income was about ten times that of her husband. Yet she told me that her husband had “the priority job in the family.” This meant that she was the one who dealt with emergencies, such as staying home with the kids when the nanny was sick. She initially attributed this arrangement to her greater job security and to being more able to deal with chaos; she also felt that her husband’s ego was more wrapped up in his job than hers was. She went on to say, “I think there’s a gendered thing that happens, where women who work also are the CEO of the house and the men just work. And even in the most progressive-minded man, that’s just what happens. It’s very rare in my experience to find couples who have a better balance.”
Echoing Margaret, Miriam also said that in “most couples,” “the woman carries the whole mental burden.” Examples of things her husband did not think about included school tests and applications, classes for kids, life insurance, and homeowners’ insurance. She said, “He doesn’t take that on. Having said that, he does way more cooking than I ever do. He does the laundry. He tidies. He does all these things. … But I carry a much bigger burden.” Initially she seemed to me to be justifying her husband’s lack of participation, both by legitimating his job insecurity and by asserting that few other couples did it better. But by the end of our conversation it was clear that her household responsibilities (which she called “running the details”) made her exhausted and angry and that they had numerous conflicts in which her husband failed to see the sacrifices she made. He asserted, for example, that his job “always came second” or quickly vetoed renovation possibilities she had spent hours coming up with. And she had almost no time for herself.
Although Miriam was the primary earner, she did not seem to try to control her husband’s spending, as a high-earning man might try to control his wife’s. In fact, she went out of her way to recognize his contribution.22 For example, her husband invested her income as well as his own. She recounted, “He feels like that’s a way that he can contribute. That he can make my money into more money, you know? And it’s not really—I don’t think of it as my money, either; I think of it as our money. But he can grow it for us, and that’s a way he can add value.” This is exactly the process Ellen described previously, in which men want to invest the money so they can “have their footprint” on it.
Unlike some of the high-earner husbands, Miriam also made an effort to maintain her husband’s feeling of financial autonomy. She said, explaining why their accounts were not entirely joint, “He likes having a nest egg of money so that he doesn’t have to be in the position of asking me for money.” He had not wanted to use “his” money to solve a temporary cash flow problem with the renovation, even though she had explained that she would repay him with her end-of-year bonus. He seems to feel—like the stay-at-home or low-earning women discussed earlier—that he needs his own money to be protected. And she is willing to legitimate this need and preserve the “family myth” that he is financially independent.23
GENDER, CLASS, AND CONTRIBUTION
As Viviana Zelizer has written, “In organizing their economic activities, household members are actually negotiating the significance of relations among themselves.”24 As they negotiated household consumption and labor with their partners, the people I interviewed were also working out the value of their own contributions to family life. These negotiations are common across classes, of course. As previous research has shown, couples in all economic strata have to navigate these same questions of money, power, and paid and unpaid labor. This research has established that both the person who earns more money and that person’s gender matter for power and labor relations in the family. Female breadwinners, for example, may actually do more household work once they become the primary earners, while their husbands do less, and such women do not gain greater power over financial and other kinds of decision making.25 The idea of the female breadwinner goes counter to ideas about appropriate gender identity held by individuals and enshrined in institutions.26 The same is true among my interviewees. The dual-earner households I studied also appear to be similar to those studied by others in that unpaid labor becomes a contentious issue.
The kinds of conflicts my interviewees describe are specifically inflected by class, however, in multiple ways. One class issue is the context of abundance in which these families operate. In the case of single-earner families, the stay-at-home mothers are doing the “labor of lifestyle” rather than (or in addition to) more basic reproductive labor such as cleaning, child care, and cooking, much of which is performed by household workers. As we saw in chapter 2, such labor is harder to construe as a contribution, especially because it largely consists of consumption, which is associated with the imagined excesses of women in general and wealthy women in particular. Some earner husbands—probably the majority in my sample—see this labor of lifest
yle as a legitimate contribution to family life. But others seem to see it simply as a drain on their hard-earned assets. Furthermore, some of these highly educated women are themselves ambivalent about the contribution they are making and their own entitlement to spend money they did not earn—even when they are legally entitled to do so.
Second, the structure of and compensation associated with careers in finance and related sectors also contribute to these dynamics in a single-earner household. The extremely high incomes in these fields mean that the earner—nearly always the man—brings in enough money that it doesn’t “make sense” for his wife to continue to work, which means they both spend more money on behalf of the family and accumulate less wealth for themselves.27 The time demands of these careers further create incentives for women not to work for pay, or not to work very much, because their husbands work such long hours and often travel frequently. But the risk associated with these often unstable jobs may also make men more fearful about the future and therefore more inclined to police their wives’ spending.
Third, these questions of power in relationships have mostly been addressed in terms of who earns the money. This chapter shows that similar gendered dynamics of control play out in relation to inherited wealth. Inheritors control their wealth, no matter what their gender, but female inheritors appear to be more attuned to the ways in which contributing less financially challenges their husbands’ gendered desire to be providers. Legal transfer of assets to the noninheritor is the preferred method of attempting to equalize these relationships.28
Fourth, entitlements to recognition in the family are tied to broader questions of class entitlements. Joan Acker wrote in 1988: “The twentieth-century American emphasis on love as the basis of marriage tends to obscure the character of marriage as an integral part of the society’s system of distribution.” Acker was pointing out that marriage appears to be only an emotional relationship between two people, but it is in fact an economic relationship that, in many ways, regulates the distribution of resources, especially from men who work for pay to women who do not. Because money appears as “a personal issue” within marriage, “the question of how the society should provide for distribution is obscured as it is transformed into a problem of interpersonal conflict.”29
Acker was talking about gendered access to resources, not broader class distributions. But the point applies in a new way in these families as well. Struggles over entitlements in intimate relationships take up an enormous amount of space in participants’ psychic lives and daily routines, displacing awareness of their social advantages. It is hard for someone who feels as if she is fighting for equality and recognition with a partner to feel privileged relative to others in the world. These struggles also engender a sense of material scarcity—when expenditures and entitlements are contested, it is difficult to recognize abundance. As I noted at the beginning of the chapter, it was hard even for me to hold onto an awareness of the privilege of Stephanie and Alexis as I saw them grappling with these issues.
Finally, struggles over spending, which are also struggles over labor and power, are tied to questions of worth—the worth of the person as well as the object. These affluent New Yorkers look to their partners to confirm their self-conceptions as legitimately privileged hard workers and reasonable consumers. Feeling legitimately entitled is most difficult for the stay-at-home mothers without independent wealth, not only because they have no income but also because—due to their class position—their labor consists largely of consumption rather than traditional mothering work, such as cleaning, child care, and cooking. When their husbands reflect images of their labor and consumption as reasonable, they confirm their wives’ entitlement. When they don’t, conflict ensues. Similar dynamics obtain in other types of couples as well, though when both partners work for pay they can draw more easily on earning as a source of merit.
Overall, regardless of the type of couple, because men’s labor is paid more often and more highly and women are more likely to do the less-valued household labor, it is harder for women to be legitimately entitled. Chapter 6 explores questions of legitimate entitlement in another family realm: the raising of children.
6
PARENTING
PRIVILEGE
CONSTRAINT, EXPOSURE,
AND ENTITLEMENT
Lucy was the stay-at-home wife of a global business entrepreneur, with assets in the tens of millions. She and I talked sitting at the dining table in the large, open kitchen/dining room/living room area of her apartment, the renovation of which had combined three smaller apartments. For the first hour of the interview, until her nanny came to entertain them, her three small children played nearby. Every once in a while the youngest, a 2-year-old boy, toddled in for a snack or to climb onto Lucy’s lap for a cuddle. The children also showed up frequently in our conversation, especially as Lucy described her fears about how to raise them. She said, “I just don’t want them growing up with a sense of entitlement. You know, everybody’s got entitlement concerns. And I still really struggle with that. Creating a sense of, kind of, hunger and drive. … When you get everything you want, you don’t have to work for it, you don’t appreciate it.” There was a “level of affluence” at her children’s private school that, she said, “really troubles me.” She had considered moving them into public school. And she regretted having set up a trust fund for them because, she explained, “I don’t think that anything good ever comes out of a trust. It can only be incendiary in somebody’s life.” She was relieved that the trust would mature only when her children were much older, so they would have to earn money before they inherited it.
Actually meeting interviewees’ children was unusual for me during this project. I usually just saw traces of them, such as drawings on the fridge or toys in a corner. But, like Lucy’s, many parents’ narratives were brightly threaded with anxieties about the kind of people their children would turn out to be. Also like Lucy’s, their anxieties turned particularly on the threat of “entitlement,” a concept they brought up frequently, usually unprompted. In general, as we have seen, to be “entitled” is to believe (or behave as if one believes) that one should receive certain benefits simply by virtue of who one is.1 Implicitly, these parents grouped a number of different fears under the umbrella of entitlement. They worried that their children would lack a work ethic and would expect others to do everything for them, that they would think they could have everything they wanted, that they would be covetous and materialistic, that they would not be aware of their advantages relative to others, and that they would treat other people disrespectfully. Instead, these parents wanted their kids to grow up to be “good people”: hard workers, with prudent consumption desires and practices who respected others, were aware and appreciative of their advantages, and gave back. Although such ideals are common to parents across social classes, these privileged parents are specifically concerned with how their children can be best prepared to occupy their social position, as we will see.
In order to cultivate these characteristics, these parents used two strategies: constraint and exposure. First, they talked about limiting children’s behavior and their consumption of material goods, experiences, and labor. Placing boundaries on kids’ entitlement to consume would, parents hoped, also constrain their sense of entitlement more broadly. And requiring labor of them would instill a strong work ethic and a sense of self-sufficiency. Second, these parents tried to expose their children to class difference, in both imaginary and concrete ways, in order to help them understand their advantaged social location and get a sense of what a “normal” life is. These ideals had instrumental aspects—that is, parents imagined that having a solid work ethic and being comfortable with people different from themselves would help their children succeed in a risky world.2 But they also cared about the moral integrity of their children, both for its own sake and because it reflected on the parents themselves as moral actors.3 As Eliana put it, “Another moral warrant” for her was that “I’m rai
sing people with good values.”
However, creating limits stood in tension with a more conventional form of cultivation: giving children more. As previous research would predict, elite parents wanted their kids to have access to a vast array of experiences and opportunities, receive all the attention they might need, and be able to develop any interests and skills they might desire. So they struggled with the idea of limiting these and thus the children’s “boundless potential.”4 Furthermore, as we have seen, the parents themselves were conflicted about how much is enough—for their children as well as for themselves. It was also a challenge to define exactly what was “normal,” and for whom. They wanted their kids to be “normal,” meaning similar to others with less; but they also wanted them to be aware that they were not normal and appreciate their advantages.
I came to see that the kind of entitlement parents wanted to avoid was behavioral and emotional, not material. As long as they don’t act or feel entitled, children remain legitimately entitled to resources. Their advantages remain essentially the same. Ultimately, the parents are not challenging their children’s advantage but, instead, teaching them how to occupy their advantaged position appropriately. They inculcate an identity, or a habitus, as Pierre Bourdieu called it, of legitimate privilege. This legitimately entitled self faces the contradiction we have seen before: between erasing class difference through treating everyone the same and recognizing this difference through “awareness” of privilege.
DISCIPLINING THE SELF:
BEHAVIOR AND CONSUMPTION
One central parental concern had to do with how their children acted vis-à-vis others. They wanted to teach their kids to take other people into account and to be generous in the world more broadly.5 Paul told me, “I think one thing [his wife] and I are, very, very, very—it’s very important for us, is that our kids are, at a minimum, respectful to people. They’re nice. That’s number one.” Nadine said, “I don’t want my kids to be entitled or snobby or spoiled in any way. I come down pretty hard on them about—I mean, the main thing is, like, ‘You’re going to be, like, a good fucking person, you know? Like, you’re going to say please and thank you, and you’re going to be, like, kind towards other people. And you’re going to be responsible for yourself and make good choices.’” Sara planned to be “intentional” about “making sure that my kids understand that there’s an obligation to give back.”
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