My Final Tribute to An Old Argument

I grew up in a small town community of very loving, generous people. As a whole, they were also fairly conservative people who held, among other things, that woman's highest calling was to be a good wife and mother.

I remember talking with an older woman one Sunday after church, discussing the colleges to which I was applying. One of them was a conservative Christian college our church supported. I decided against going there when the well meaning woman told me, "Going there is a great idea. You'll make an excellent pastor's wife."

Not surprisingly, I've always had a chip on my shoulder about the idea that women should stay home with their children. It didn't make sense to me that this was the only moral and ethical choice for a wife and mother to make.

(Let me be clear, I have no problem with women - or men - who do decide to be a stay at home parent. I actually think that's great, if that's a financial option for your family and if it's what you want. I just don't want my community telling me what the right choice is.)

So I developed an arsenal of arguments as to why it was okay for me to want to keep working after becoming a mom. And one of them was an argument drawn from history: that in reality, both parents used to work at home. Men working outside the home, and women as stay at home moms, is really a modern convention.

I've continued this argument in my head long after society stopped asking me to defend my position: some habits die hard. Last year I read sociologist Stefanie Coontz's amazing book, Marriage: A History - How Love Conquered Marriage, and was delighted to see her lengthy development of this argument from history. I tried to summarize it in this blog post, but failed miserably.

Then last week I read The Atlantic's cover article, What, Me Marry? by Kate Bolick and discovered a terrific summary of Coontz's lengthy historical overview:

IN THE 1990S, Stephanie Coontz, a social historian at Evergreen State College in Washington, noticed an uptick in questions from reporters and audiences asking if the institution of marriage was falling apart. She didn’t think it was, and was struck by how everyone believed in some mythical Golden Age of Marriage and saw mounting divorce rates as evidence of the dissolution of this halcyon past. She decided to write a book discrediting the notion and proving that the ways in which we think about and construct the legal union between a man and a woman have always been in flux.

What Coontz found was even more interesting than she’d originally expected. In her fascinating Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, she surveys 5,000 years of human habits, from our days as hunters and gatherers up until the present, showing our social arrangements to be more complex and varied than could ever seem possible. She’d long known that the Leave It to Beaver–style family model popular in the 1950s and ’60s had been a flash in the pan, and like a lot of historians, she couldn’t understand how people had become so attached to an idea that had developed so late and been so short-lived.

For thousands of years, marriage had been a primarily economic and political contract between two people, negotiated and policed by their families, church, and community. It took more than one person to make a farm or business thrive, and so a potential mate’s skills, resources, thrift, and industriousness were valued as highly as personality and attractiveness. This held true for all classes. In the American colonies, wealthy merchants entrusted business matters to their landlocked wives while off at sea, just as sailors, vulnerable to the unpredictability of seasonal employment, relied on their wives’ steady income as domestics in elite households. Two-income families were the norm.

Not until the 18th century did labor begin to be divided along a sharp line: wage-earning for the men and unpaid maintenance of household and children for the women. Coontz notes that as recently as the late 17th century, women’s contributions to the family economy were openly recognized, and advice books urged husbands and wives to share domestic tasks. But as labor became separated, so did our spheres of experience—the marketplace versus the home—one founded on reason and action, the other on compassion and comfort. Not until the post-war gains of the 1950s, however, were a majority of American families able to actually afford living off a single breadwinner.

Do I still have to defend my choices as a working mom? No - not really. Society has left that discussion behind, and I think most women feel an autonomy to make the choice that best fits their family and personal desires (assuming they can afford to not work, that is). But we still feel that emotional pressure, and perhaps remembering our place in history will ease the tension some. 

Speaking of tensions, Bolick's article (which is long and interesting, if a bit disjointed) is full of them. As a never-married woman in her late 30s, Bolick expresses an ambivalence toward her marital future. It's an ambivalence she feels is common among women of her generation:

... as women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up—and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with.

As a result of the circumstances, Bolick is moving beyond "our cultural fixation on the couple" and into a mental landscape where friendships and freedom replace the objective to marry for happiness. Fair enough.

I think I felt a bit defensive reading the article - as if, now that I've finally come to terms with my freedom to choose to work, I have to defend my choice to marry in order to still feel I'm a modern woman. But when I'm honest I don't really think Bolick intended that outcome: I think she's arguing, as Coontz does in her book, that our concepts of marriage, and singleness, and couplehood, are in constant states of societal change. She wants the freedom to make her own choices. So do I.