A Mommy Story

I generally don’t pay attention to the news headlines Google gives me at the top of my Gmail page. Usually there’s something about someone winning a hot dog eating contest, or that oil companies are the next big investment (gee, you think?), or some other useless topic. But it’s hard to miss a news headline when it has the title “Reasons NOT to Marry Career Woman“. Oh yeah, gotta go check that one out.

I expected something that was going to be far less sensational than the headline clearly designed to lure readers in. Instead, I was even more shocked at the content. The link, if you haven’t clicked it already in curiosity, is a slide show, put together by Forbes.com, counting the reasons why you, as a man, should run screaming from any woman who says her career is very important to her.

I’ll wait while you now rush to click the link. I understand, I did the same thing. I couldn’t believe this to be a real story, complete with research to back up the author’s position. While some of the points have validity, such as research showing that women who are focused on their careers and have higher earnings are less likely to get married (makes sense, right?), other points are simply sexist and insulting.

Case in point? How about this reason not to marry a career woman: your house will be messier. Apparently women who earn more than $15 an hour devote 1.9 hours less a week to housework as compared to their close-to-minimum wage sisters.

So clearly if you want a spotless house, (and of course you don’t want to do any housework yourself, for heaven’s sake) you need to marry a girl who won’t work, or who will only work some poorly-paying job (you know, to give her a sense of accomplishment). Otherwise your house will be dirty and you’ll just have to beat your wife for not doing her job of keeping house.

But wait, this isn’t a lone sexist reason in a group of perfectly sane ones. How about the reason: she’ll be more unhappy if she makes more than you do. Hear that, ladies? If we make more than our husbands, we’ll certainly be miserable, because even if we hold feminist views, deep down we know that our husbands should be the breadwinner. And if he’s the breadwinner, we can be free of that burden to instead pursue our part-time, “meaningful but not particularly remunerative job”. So they’re just doing us a favor, for our own happiness, and here we are not being nearly thankful enough. Geez, aren’t we just bitches?

My favorite reason (to hate) has to be this one: men are more likely to fall ill if they have a wife who works more than 40 hours a week. A woman who works more than 40 hours a week has “substantial, statistically significant, negative effects on changes in her husband’s health over that time span”. Translation: we’re killing our husbands because we work. The author goes on to explain that “wives working longer hours not do not have adequate time to monitor their husband’s health and healthy behavior, to manage their husband’s emotional well-being or buffer his workplace stress.”

Now, maybe I’m just being a little too modern here, but I had no idea that my husband was an extra child. Last I checked, he can take care of himself, make his own doctor’s appointments, and has the sense of mind to know when he’s sick or needs help. While I can express concern over his health, just as he can do for me, my role as wife does not include the duties of nurse and mental health practitioner. I’m pretty sure that requires some extra training.

Are men really still searching for women who will be their nurse, their housekeeper, their sex toy, their baby producer, and their mother rolled up into one? And I’m not just talking about people stuck in the 50’s – I’m talking about educated, intelligent men who read Forbes Magazine. (Well, I thought they were well-educated and intelligent. I’m doubting that now.) I guess I’m just baffled that in 2006 a woman can be thought of in such diminutive, sexist ways as soon as her status is converted to “wife”. It creates an entirely new warning for parents to tell their sons. In the 50’s, it was “Party girls make great dates, but you should never marry them.” Now will they tell them, “Career girls make great dates, but you should never marry them”?

Is it OK in today’s world to think of women as equals in the workplace and in society, until one of them becomes your wife, at which point she should take her proper role in the marriage of taking care of the husband, his castle, and the kids? Are some trying to create a new dichotomy for feminism, of being equal but only where marriage isn’t concerned?

Now, I’ll admit I’m not a career woman. I had aspirations of that at one time, but I gave up graduate school and my ideas of being a college professor because I decided it wasn’t for me, not because I was married and planning to have a child. And in not being a career woman, I can’t say for sure one way or another that this author pulled random statistics out of the air and the reality of American marriages looks nothing like this.

However, I just can’t see that a woman who chooses to pursue her own career goals is destined to wreck her marriage simply because of those career aspirations. I think it is possible for two people to be happily married, to each have a successful career, and to possibly have kids or no kids. Of course, the author infers that nearly all women want to have kids, so it’s a problem if they’re not having kids. The key, I think, is in how you approach your marriage. If you approach it as a power struggle, where one person must have control of the other, then you’ve got much bigger problems than a woman who chooses to work. And I think it is those problems in perception that will lead to divorce, not because the wife has a career.

Maybe instead of crafting a list of reasons not to marry a career woman, Forbes should write an article warning career woman how to spot and avoid sexist, spineless, controlling men who are actually looking for a servant and not a partner in marriage.

Edited to add: After a lot of digging through Forbes.com’s (poorly organized) website, I did finally find the intro to the slideshow. While it confirms that the slideshow is dead serious, it also acknowledges that the author is simply pulling together a lot of recent research. However, just because the intro isn’t (as) offensive doesn’t excuse the overall tone of the article, in my opinion.