So there’s a convention…and then more conventions… and oh wait – more conventions. Let’s blindly keep following them because, well, they are conventional. Forget about intellectual freedom. Equality. You know, those basic rights. Not to mention the rational foundation on which we make choices. Nah.. it’s just how it always has been and so it should remain so. But wait, there was this thing recently called the Civil Rights Movement. What did that have to do with anything?
He doesn’t get into that. Instead, he wants to talk about “Career Women” with a capital “C.” Michael Noer is his name and he's the executive news editor for Forbes magazine.
In his much debated article originally published August 22nd 2006 (a revised version and with co-response is linked under "Career Women" above), he gives a word of marriage advice to today’s modern man: “Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career.”
What exactly does that mean? Well, he goes on to define his terms. “To be clear, we're not talking about a high school dropout minding a cash register. For our purposes, a ‘career girl’ has a university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 a year.”
According to Noer, marriage is a “stressful” situation and [based solely on that idea] “professional” career women are more likely to suffer a greater chance of divorce, be more likely to cheat on their husbands, and have less kids. Marriage is merely an “exercise in economic labor specialization.” Even more to the point, he says “Women's work hours consistently increase divorce, whereas increases in men's work hours often have no statistical effect.”
Tell me Noer, why should women be stripped of making their own choices for what role they choose in a marriage? Better yet, why should they alone carry the burden for what makes a happy marriage? I suppose these notions struck the core of me when reading this, as when I was a child, frankly, I didn’t dream of sitting at home having a bunch of kids and playing house like that was my destiny in life. Instead, I saw having a happy family and a career. I guess it meant kind of like having an identity, or something to define me outside the home. To me that fundamental idea was, and still is important to me. Just how to carry that out from a female perspective [and that’s a complex subject for another day] is not at all what he gets into. In fact, the way I see it he’s got the whole situation backwards.
Conceptually the fundamental assumption he holds is that the status quo should be maintained since there simply is no way around the “traditional” fact that women typically have stayed home to raise a family and men have gone out to work. In other words, there is no alternative, since “statistically” working outside the home does not affect men in the same way as it does women. But much of his purported argument doesn’t even get off the ground because of the high flying assumptions he attempts to make rational.
In my opinion, any one of these ideas could be replaced with “either spouse” and the logic would work the same. Simply because a marriage [ahem… it’s intuitive here] involves two people and not one. So in sorting out the few specifics he actually gives for not marrying career women (i.e., don’t marry..b/c of increased cheating, divorce, less kids) he doesn’t even acknowledge or anticipate the potential weaknesses to his reasons or even recognize the exclusivity of his claims. I agree with his idea that marriage is indeed something you have to “work” at, and it’s hard work. But he must know this… every marriage is not the same in regard to "cookie-cutter" roles, but any marriage can be a happy one. And the rewards for that work are not only satisfying, but ten fold. Or, you know, even more than that. There simply is no limit. I'd like to know how many times he's been divorced. But let’s be realistic about his claims. Marriage is for a long time. So inevitably there are going to be an abundance of temptations to “cheat” on a spouse. But what he doesn’t even come close to saying is that in any role, traditional or not, either spouse is prone to these risks. But we all know that’s where the importance of love and commitment come into play; maintaining and meeting each other’s needs and desires. So in a stable marriage the issue of whatever either spouse is doing career-wise or not doesn’t make a bit of difference, as long as each spouse consistently makes a concerted effort to maintain the relationship. Likewise, then there will also be no need for divorce if these things are upheld, so his second reason is also thrown to the wind. Finally, the issue of being faced with having fewer kids brings up several points I’d like to contend with. In my experience with young newly married working women, I don’t know any of these working “career” women that don’t wish to have children of their own one day. While I agree it may be more difficult while the children are young to raise them while working, it doesn’t seem impossible, or even illogical to not be able to have both kids and a career. There are many ways to work around this, and companies are making it [albeit slowly] easier to happen. And to use this situation to the best advantage - if both spouses are working, why can’t that extra income be used to pay for private school for the kids, save for their kids college education, or chuck a hefty bit of money away for both spouses to have a comfortable retirement. I mean, if you have the extra income why not spoil your kids to the N-th degree? In my mind, this should be just as much an option as either spouse choosing to stay home with the kids. And realistically, all of these financial things would be more difficult to achieve with only one spouse working. And of course there are the reasons for the traditional role, mainly more time spent between parent and child, greater ease with breastfeeding, less daycare costs, housekeeping costs, etc. etc. In short, (and this has turned to be everything but that, hehe.) I think every couple should be afforded the option to have choices, and weighing the pros and cons are important in any marriage. The structure of each marriage is a function of the individuals themselves, including all the unique characteristics and factors that go along with that. And these are the reasons marriage is so exciting [Remember Noer?] Thus the answer to the equation simply cannot be churned out by a simple formula for all, and my comments have been aimed to show that this is precisely what Noer has intended to suggest.
2 comments:
Maybe he doesn't pick on men because it's a fore-gone conclusion that those things already happen to men at work. He's pointing out that men should be ready to expect the same from their wives -- precisely because they are in similar situations (at work, away from home). Either way he seems to have a pretty narrow view of the situation, but if we just take what he says at face value, he's not wrong -- just not explicitly telling the whole story.
I definitely think he wrote the article assuming that men have always been at work, while women haven’t, and so he’s implicating the consequences of that historical change. But he doesn’t attribute the problem to men also, especially when he states clearly that “Women's work hours consistently increase divorce, whereas increases in men's work hours often have no statistical effect.” As I look over the article again, I see that he seems to think he’s doing a favor in giving advice to men (and possibly women) that “women just won’t be happy” unless they are allowed to stay at home and have kids. So, I don’t think he’s trying to “attack” anyone per se, but he’s got it wrong because his perception is skewed towards one conclusion only – don’t marry a woman with a career. He doesn’t even consider assessing the idea of a dual career household and the positive affects of that on children and the marriage financially – and that idea of an economically measurable contribution to the marriage may make a woman even happier than staying at home.
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