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REVOLUTION IN MARRIAGE

How two-career couples are coping
By Jo Brans |

JUST THE OTHER DAY we revo-lutionized marriage. My husband and I missed the moment when it happened. He was listening to Verdi and unloading the dishwasher when I came in from a late class and stuck my head in the kitchen door. “Hi, Willem, I’m home. What’s for dinner?” And there it was-revolution.

Or did it happen the afternoon that family members congratulated him on his spiffy 1983 car? “When do you get yours, Jo?” they said, winking. (Assumption: Husbands provide all new and perfect cars.)

I missed the wink and answered in all seriousness, “I can’t afford one right now. Maybe in a couple of years.” Their puzzled looks told me-revolution.

It could even have been as long ago as 1974, when for a while my husband and I worked side by side, same job, same pay. “How will you feel,” I teased him, “if I start making more money than you do?”

“Richer,” he said. Presto-revolution.

We share the household tasks, more or less equally. We have separate checking and savings accounts, and divide responsibility for our mutual obligations more or less equally. What could be competition for control of this marriage has become for us, and for numbers like us, a spirit of healthy and enthusiastic cooperation. Forgive me if I sound boastful, but I’m proud of the direction marriage is going in this country, proud to be a part of it.

Maybe “revolution” is too strong a word, suggesting, as it does, burning documents, shouting in the streets and overthrowing tyrants. We are, after all, simply unloading dishwashers, working late, buying new cars, getting richer together. Maybe a better word is “evolution,” the word that psychotherapist John McCormick used last week concerning two-career couples. “Working couples now have a tremendously exciting way of being together,” John said. “For perhaps the first time in our society, many of them are equal partners, financially, personally, every way. It’s a real evolution of mankind.”

Whatever you call it, something has happened in the past 20 years, to me and to millions of other American women. In 1960, when my first child was born, two-thirds of American women did what I did: stayed home to take care of the house and the family. We at home pitied other women, especially the mothers of young children, who “had to work” because of financial pressures, and covertly disapproved of those who didn’t “need” to work, but chose to. My friend Evelyn, for example, from need or choice, sailed out the door every morning before nine o’clock, leaving her two young daughters. Never mind that the woman who cared for them took them to the park, came home to read Winnie the Pooh and washed the kitchen walls while they napped. Never mind that when Evelyn was home, she herself mostly drank a lot of coffee, smoked a lot and regaled us all with stories of life at work. She was a mother, we tsk-tsked, and she would be sorry.

Well over half of the women in America are employed now, earning almost $400 billion a year. In 1980, there were 5.5 million Evelyns -43 percent of the mothers of preschool children were working outside the home. Remember Leave It to Beaver and the ideal family of the early Sixties, with a working father and a mother whose only occupation was to take care of home and children? Today, a minuscule 7 percent of American homes correspond to that traditional model. Instead, we have a proliferation of one-parent households, of single men and women living alone or together in various combinations and, increasingly, of two-career marriages.

I had my own secret ideal back in the Sixties, but it didn’t come from Leave It to Beaver. Instead, it was the first frame of a French film, the title of which now eludes me-Mon Oncle? Mr. Hulot’s Holiday? Do I remember this correctly? A very nice town house in, one is sure, Paris. The front door opens. Une femme, tr?s chic, and her suave Gallic husband emerge (how I knew they were married I can’t recall). They talk animatedly for a minute, then kiss gaily. With cheerful waves, they turn away from each other, march out to identical Volkswagens on either side of the house and drive briskly off-in opposite directions. What they leave behind them through the door of that smart town house I no longer remember, if I ever knew. Crying babies, screaming for Maman? Unmade beds? Bowls of bread and chocolate stacked in the sink? Heaven forbid.

Nor do I remember their coming back to those babies, beds and bowls in the evening. It all seemed very French and free. But the image -cheerful harmony followed by brisk independence -has glimmered in a corner of my memory for 20 years. It’s what I want for myself, what my husband and I want together and apparently what millions of other people want. And we are well on the way to getting it.

Not that achieving happiness in dual careers is entirely a matter of “want to” rather than “need.” As much as I love my work, there are plenty of Saturday mornings when I sit down to write, or winter evenings when I head out to teach, when I look around in dismay for the man my mother assured me would always be there to support me. What is this drive that causes me to write out my life for strangers, to take on extra classes when I could be serenely doing needlepoint?

Willem is, I think, totally committed to our way of life, but he has his breaking point, too. Occasionally, I suspect, he wants a wife instead of a partner -for example, the night a couple of months ago when he made a salad and I thanked him for “cooking dinner.” “You mean, that’s dinner?” he asked ruefully, tossing the greens more vigorously than necessary.

Nevertheless, together we have built a life predicated on the belief that we will be happier if we’re both working, and now we have the bills to prove it. The second salary has gone toward private schools, a second car, a better home, trips out of town – not to mention the staples of food, clothing and flurries at Sound Warehouse, The Book Merchant and Neiman’s Last Call -a combination of “want” and “need” is no longer separable for us or for others like us; it’s simply the way we live.

As a New York friend wrote me when I told her I was doing a piece on two-career marriages:

I’m a bit surprised that your subject would be encouraged rather than indulged. Maybe living in Brooklyn convinces you that everyone is part of a two-career marriage -at least those of us who are married. I would find a one-career marriage much more exotic to read about, at this point.

And so it goes. I’ve always said my tombstone should simply be inscribed “Generic.”

But it hasn’t always been so. Because I’ve lived both ways-10 years at home while my two children were growing up and now 12 years in the world as a career woman -I think I have a good sense of what everyone calls “the trade-offs.” I’ve mapped out here what are for me some of the pluses and minuses in two-career marriages.

But my experiences may not be your experiences because I’ve also been incredibly lucky in my timing. I never had to go to work for basic necessities, as many women do, when my children were small. We didn’t have much money, but my first husband and I made it fine on his salary. I could give being a full-time wife and mother my best shot, and I did -sewing, cooking, cleaning, giving dinner parties, reading to the children. Though my mind and even my emotions deteriorated in this sweet routine-I once spent an entire Houston summer reading and rereading Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimos– my conscience was clear. I was doing what I believed a mother should do.

Then, when my first husband and I separated and divorced at the beginning of the Seventies and I would have “had to work,” both the times and I were ready. I had a graduate degree, and the children were in school; I had also discovered a real vocation for teaching, and I had a job doing it. And the Sixties had given women irrevocably, for better or worse, the revolutionary ideal of self-fulfillment. Mother Martyr was out. American women wanted “the responsibility to become all of who we are, to cultivate all the sides of ourselves, at work and at home.”

I am quoting Pat Pearson, a female psychotherapist who has both a personal and professional relationship with John McCormick, whom I mentioned earlier. As Pat says, “We are a couple working with working couples.” That they are busy and successful in their professional capacity indicates two things to me: being a partner in a two-career marriage is not easy, but people have enough invested to do whatever is necessary to make it work. We are making up the rules as we go, and we know it. We want all the help we can get.

The rules for the Cleaver family marriage were clear. When I married for the first time in the late Fifties, I considered myself a free agent. And I married an intelligent, enlightened and fair man. But I had not been married two weeks before I voluntarily began to darn his socks, to prepare “attractive, well-balanced meals” (alone, of course) and to emulate June Cleaver and my mother. When I got pregnant, I gave up my job and, to a measurable degree, my own identity. When I gradually became unhappy and disoriented as a result of this self-enforced isolation, it never occurred to me to consult a therapist or to admit my failures openly. Social pressure was strong.

I feel differently now. I want it all in this marriage -to be a good wife, mother and friend, as well as a productive writer and teacher -and I don’t see why I can’t have it. All. During the past eight years I have read books and articles, talked to people and thought a lot. Though I have never joined a women’s group, I have quietly become a feminist. I’d prefer to think of myself as a humanist, but men haven’t needed my support; no one ever said they couldn’t have it all. My husband laughs when my side of the bed is littered with Making It Together, The Girl I Left Behind, The Two-Paycheck Marriage and The Coming Matriarchy. I’m glad he can laugh, as long as he knows I’m dead serious, I think he does.

Would I stay at home again for 10 years? Hindsight tells me no, but that’s hindsight. In some ways it was easier for my generation than it is for my female college students now. We had babies because that’s what married people did. Though I now have to grapple with grim feelings that I’m hopelessly behind, at least I had none of the trauma of decision that hits many 30-year-old career women today. I have enough trouble in a cafeteria line, for heaven’s sake, without trying to make that sort of choice. But the point is that there are choices, and responsible maturity requires that we exercise them. So I’m working on it.

But marriage and career, or motherhood and career, don’t have to rule eachother out. Not long ago, I was dismayed tohear a highly placed young businesswoman describe her job interview. “Theinterviewer asked me to define my long-range goals. I knew what to say -’I wantto be president of the company, making$100,000 a year’-so I lied. What I reallywant is to get married and have a couple ofkids.” But why shouldn’t she aspire, atleast, as a man would, to have both?

The joy I get from the job I do is strong enough to withstand any number of difficulties. To say I love university teaching and essay writing understates that joy absurdly. What can I add? That I am more conscious of being alive in the give-and-take of the classroom than almost anywhere else? That I get a high from teaching a good class that must be better than that of any controlled substance and that sends me reeling into the hall afterward feeling more like the Henry James I’m teaching than the Jo Brans I am? That I have learned more about that Jo Brans by facing a blank sheet of paper than in any other way? All of those things are true, but there’s more.

In part, this exhilaration about my work derives from my certainty that literature matters, that literature not only broadens experience, but that it is experience. Would I have the same dedication to another sort of job? I suspect I would. My husband taught with enthusiasm too, and now he raises money for the symphony with, if anything, even more devotion than he felt teaching at the university. I believe there is something else at work here: We human beings need to give ourselves to something outside ourselves. We like problem-solving. We like troubleshooting. We like being aroused to our fullest capacities. And for many of us, men and women alike, the confines of a single-family home simply don’t provide all the challenges we need.

Contrast my life at home with my grandmother’s life in rural Mississippi. She never worked outside the home, but she had nine children of her own and two nephews to raise. She carried water from the well, worked her vegetable garden, cleaned a huge, open, dusty house with a broom and a mop, washed outside in a big black pot and ironed with a flat iron heated on the wood stove, on which she also cooked, three times a day, the family meals. For the women around her, she served, as they did for her, as midwife, marriage counselor, baby sitter, Salvation Army and Rape Crisis Center. These women and she also quilted together, read the Bible together, exchanged dress patterns and cups of sugar, and carried food to each other’s houses for weddings and funerals, of which there were plenty.

To try to impose our grandmothers’ values on urban, nuclear family life is worth doing perhaps, but it demands rethinking the priorities. Mistakenly, we often settle for simply doing our own housework, which leads to excessively clean ovens and not much else. Remember that Grandmother was a useful part of a community to which she contributed much more than 2.5 children and a well-fed husband.

I sometimes think that the real descendants of my grandmother are not the solitary housewives throughout the city quietly tending their own families, as I did for a decade, but the hundreds of unpaid volunteers who also support the charitable, spiritual and aesthetic life of Dallas. Money alone doesn’t determine the value of the services rendered. A volunteer who reads to the blind is as valuable as I am as a teacher, though I’m paid and she isn’t. And I’m convinced that the person who organizes the Crystal Charity Ball, let’s say, could (and perhaps should) be president of IBM. But being useful in the world makes them both happy.

It also makes them smarter. I mentioned that my intellect deteriorated during the years I was at home. Maybe I should have said that it improved when I went to work using it. When I entered graduate school in 1968 after eight years at home, I scored 710 on the required Graduate Record Exam. After five years of school and work, I took it again-800. Psychologists say that a 10- or 15-point variation in this kind of test is normal, but a 90-point increase is nothing less than a major transformation. Another plus then is that both partners in a two-career marriage are challenged to be informed, active, interesting people.

That information, activity, interest come back into the marriage. I remember when my children were little the pleasure I derived from opening the lid of the washer to see the dirty water swirl down the drain; I felt that I had conquered something. I still think it’s fun, but it’s not exactly great conversational material. Now, during the course of a single day last week, I talked with a female student who had been raped and had been afraid to tell anyone about it; convinced a male student that he could get both the business major his father wanted him to have and the English major he wanted, without losing his mind; discussed the philosophy of pragmatism in Huckleberry Finn with one class and Freud’s theory of the death instinct with another -and that was before lunch! My husband understandably likes to hear about my day, just as I like to hear the ongoing saga from him of a $40 million fund drive for the new symphony hall. Our work makes us interesting to each other.

Not all husbands feel this way, of course. According to Pat Pearson and John McCormick, one of the most common minuses in a two-career marriage is the miserable sense one or the other partner has of falling behind.

“Competition is the rule of our society,” John says. “Self-worth is established even in our school systems in terms of competition-the bell curve where for every A there’s an F. We have the mistaken opinion that not everyone can make an A. So if I am insecure about my own self-worth, I may have to push my partner back to see to it that she gets a C or a D so that I can have the A.”

If my husband, hearing me talk about my work, developed the uneasy sense that either my work or 1 were superior to him or his work, he might respond in the spirit of hostile competition. “Often a man will interrupt his wife in a social situation,” Pat says, “put her down, especially if she’s being particularly interesting or charming. He has to humiliate her to keep her in her place or to elevate himself.” She laughs. “If he could just relax and be glad that he has the good taste to be married to a terrific woman, that would be the solution!”

Such competitive manipulation too often works, according to Pat. “But the wife in such a situation has a choice. She may slow down, be quiet, not be as attractive or as interesting or she may essentially say, overtly or covertly, ’Grow up, buddy. I’m not trying to be better than you. I’m just trying to be as good as I am.’”

John has another analogy. “I’m a sailor, and I’ve done a lot of sailboat racing. The issue in racing is how well I sail my boat, not how poorly you sail your boat. The real issue between couples is, how well do I do what I do?, not, how poorly does my partner do what he or she does? I like to race someone who’s highly competent and skilled. Then it’s smooth sailing.”

Are men always more competitive? Not at all, John says. “Women have traditionally been competitive about how they look, how the house looks, how their children do in school or sports. Now they are becoming competitive in business and the job market, in formerly male provinces.”

“I’m working with a couple right now,” Pat says, “whose main problem is that she’s making more money than he is. They’re both miserable about it. He’s set in his career path and very happy about it, but he just doesn’t want to be president of American Airlines or something. She’s aggressively on the move, highly upwardly mobile. She sees him as lazy and uninteresting, and she’s very angry, driven to succeed in ways she herself doesn’t understand.

“He’s depressed, not standing up for himself, resenting her lack of affection but unable to say ’Knock it off to her because he’s afraid she’ll leave. They’re what I call a Gruesome Twosome. I wouldn’t give their marriage another six months.”

Such couples lack, according to Pat and John, an understanding of basic character differences they may have. It’s important to understand that the person you’re with is not your clone, and a lot of problems arise from seeing someone we love as just like ourselves.

Can competition in marriage ever be good? “Sure,” Pat says. “I think challenges are fine. All of us have to be goosed into greatness; we need to be challenged to resist the movement toward entropy. Actually, that kind of excitement keeps marriages growing. Without it you get a mutual boarding house, a kind of deadliness that none of us really wants.”

Another plus in two-career marriages is that they are also, as Caroline Bird has put it, two-paycheck marriages. Money alone does not determine the value of work, as any housewife or any volunteer will tell you. But in a capitalistic society, money without question determines the prestige of that work. According to a 1981 mail survey of 2,400 women that was cited in The Coining Matriarchy, the ambivalence that a women, especially a mother of young children, feels about working outside the home falls off sharply once she earns a higher income ($20,000 or above) and is certifiably more successful. Usually, the more money she makes, the fewer conflicts she feels; there is a direct correlation between income and ambivalence.

For that reason, many housewives who find time on their hands prefer a part- or full-time job to volunteer work. They want the prestige of a paycheck; they also want to get their hands on some money of their own. In a recent column, Erma Bombeck rehearsed all the male solaces once offered to women without paychecks.

“What you’re doing is just as important as what I’m doing. The fact that I get paid a lot of money for it is of no consequence. If you want something or need something, you know that all you have to do is ask.”

“Just because you are not paid for what you do doesn’t mean you’re dumb or stupid. I love you when you get mad.”

“Look, we didn’t make the rules, and besides, what’s such a big deal about seeing your name on a bank statement or a credit card? As long as you’re married to me, you’ll always have credit.”

“Thank goodness you have a job that doesn’t require enough stress to bring about a heart attack. Believe me, it’s a jungle out there.”

Sweet, perhaps, but those placebos won’t go down for a lot of women these days. Even the superficially convincing line about stress has been discredited. Research shows that work per se does not cause stress in women, nor does juggling a home and a career. On the contrary, in a recent survey by the Wellesley College Center for Research, women between the ages of 35 and 55 who were found to be happiest -to have the greatest feeling of well-being -were precisely those with both marriages and careers.

Well-being rises with recognized success, for women and men. Studies done by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company indicate that prominent, successful people of both sexes “live distinctly longer on the average” than the general population. In fact, happiness in work prevents stress, as do regular exercise and a supportive partner. The women most likely to suffer from stress are sales and clerical workers in dead-end jobs, with unsympathetic bosses; that group has double the rate of heart disease of all other women, and who can wonder?

If you are the parents of young children and are trying to maintain two careers as well as supply quality child care, either a certain amount of financial success, a tremendous amount of ingenuity, or both, is vital. I never worked when my children were small, so I asked my colleague Judy Mohraz, a history professor at SMU, how she has done it. How has she, in the last six years, had two babies, received tenure in her department, written and published, worked with campus organizations, taught a full load of courses and been named an outstanding professor? And what does she do in her spare time?

Judy, who is married to Bijan Mohraz, a professor of engineering, laughed. “Not, I’ve done it; the fact is, we’ve done it. Bijan and I have done it. We’re in this together. You should hear how these shared and more-involved parenting relationships have transformed men’s lives. I heard the most amazing conversation the other day at Kuby’s. There sat three male professors, two of them engineers, talking about different kinds of diapers!

“And the support that Bijan has offered, his really keen sense of fair play, has kept me going. At times when I would wonder and waver, he reassured me that it was worth the effort.”

Judy and Bijan perform, semester in and semester out, a tremendously complicated juggling act. An advantage is the flexible academic schedule they both have. “First of all, I teach Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; he teaches Tuesdays and Thursdays. So if there’s an emergency, one of us could be there without missing class.”

But university positions entail writing, research and student conferences, so fulltime child care is also a must. “When I look at what really good child care costs, I realize that there are a lot of families that would have a very tough time affording it,” Judy says. “On occasion in those early years, it almost costs more for a woman to work – but if she doesn’t, she loses seniority and that sort of ongoing advancement. We had a woman who came in for four years, nine hours a day, and I could leave home absolutely certain of her patience and competence. It cost a lot, but it should have.”

The two Mohraz boys are now 4 and 6. “Now we’ve got a battery of SMU students. There’s one who works Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, who takes our 4-year-old from his morning preschool to his afternoon Montessori school. Another picks up our 6-year-old at 2:10 and our 4-year-old at 4 o’clock and keeps them until 5:15. We have others for Tuesdays and Thursdays. We pay well, and we insist that each person have a backup person.

“To watch it work semester after semester, as one graduates and another comes into the slot – ” she shakes her head. “It’s like moving troops on the western front. I feel like General Patton. But it feels good.

“Oh, occasionally what Garp calls the Undertoad will get me, and I’ll wonder whether I’m really doing anything as well as I might. Or I’ll miss a special moment – I’ll hear from someone else that my child took his first step or something. But I wouldn’t change our life.

“Our boys get along well; they’re healthy and happy and are accustomed to a large community of friends. In my own family we’ve all gained more than we’ve lost because of my career. I just couldn’t imagine giving up any of it. And why should I have to?”

Not every couple has the advantages Judy and Bijan have -good health, education, a supportive environment, decent salaries, not to mention a new wave of rookie baby sitters each year! What about questions of child care and housework when some of those ingredients are missing? And in such a high-pressure life, what about time for friends? What about time together? And, not to put too fine a point on it, what about sex?

Pat Pearson has an answer. “Subsidiary issues can always be worked out if there’s a really deep, loving commitment. But we find so many times that when people are unhappy because other needs they have are not being met in a relationship or because they are insecure about themselves, they will focus on issues, like housework, which are scarecrows. They are avoiding the real issue, which is that they are miserable with one another.”

Take sex, John McCormick suggests. “The sexual relationship can’t really be separated from the rest of the relationship. One man came to see me about sexual disfunction -he was impotent. I talked to him and discovered enormous power struggles behind it. He saw his wife as an overpowering person, so he just withdrew. If you can’t get an erection, you can’t make love. He was pulling back unconsciously from all intimacy in a threatening situation.”

Women who are unhappy with their marriages tend to focus on the issue of housework; men focus on the issue of sex. “And it is a fact,” Pat says, “that in homicides within the home, women are most often killed within the male domain, the bedroom, and men are most often killed in the kitchen.”

Both Pat and John insist, however, that the problems just surface in those locations and that if they are simply environmental or circumstantial, they can be resolved. “If two people start the old, ’Yes but’ routine,” says John, “they don’t want to see their problems resolved. They don’t want intimacy and sharing. They probably really want out of the marriage, but neither wants to say it first.”

Such circumstantial problems may include geographical considerations, for example, in the insurance business where an executive is expected to move frequently until he or she is promoted and settles back in the home office. Knowing that the sort of moving around is temporary now frequently encourages the other spouse to live with a commuter marriage for a while in order to continue a separate career. John told me of one couple he helped who commuted every weekend for two years. These couples are usually among the educational and financial elite. According to Time, which did a profile on a dozen long-distance marriages last year, about 90 percent of the people involved have done graduate work; the family income averages about $30,000 to $40,000 a year.

Another circumstantial problem at the high level might be called the Second Person Syndrome. Lynda Holmstrom puts it this way in The Two-Career Family:

There is an expectation that certain jobs will be held by men and that their wives will perform ancillary activities. The wife, though unpaid, is to perform duties which are an extension of the husband’s job. .. entertaining, public appearances with her husband. The archetype of this feminine role is that of First Lady, but a similar phenomenon occurs when a woman’s husband becomes a high-ranking military officer, a career diplomat, dean of a law school, a university president, or a corporation executive.

But determined couples can get around this obstacle too. Enough determination can change the expectations of employers so that they will get a package deal.

Perhaps no employer would be harder to reason with than the American people. No doubt we Americans, with our frustrated longings for a royal house, do enjoy the sight of a decorative Nancy, a pretty flower on her husband’s arm. Imagine, if you can, how more justifiably proud we might be of a First Lady who also performs open-heart surgery or conducts the New York Philharmonic. We will certainly expect the First Gentleman, when he comes along, “to make something of himself,” as columnist Russell Baker’s mother puts it.

Isn’t that what we all want -to make something of ourselves? Along the way we have to give up some of our cherished shibboleths, for example, that a “lovely home” means a happy marriage. “It was not the kind of household,” John Cheever writes, “where, after prying open a stuck cigarette box, you would find an old shirt button and a tarnished nickel.” Willem and I don’t have any household help, and I must confess that sometimes ours is that kind of household.

Just before Christmas, for example, I had my adult class over. They came bringing wine and cheese. One student, a doctor, said, “Jo, where’s the corkscrew? I’ll be the wine steward.”

After a frantic search, during which I could measure the steady decline of my status in his eyes (or so I thought), I gave up. “Look, Allen, here’s the junk drawer. It’s bound to be in there. Would you mind looking?” He found it, but this was not one of my happier moments.

On the other hand, another moment that same evening was. Willem came in late from work after the party was well under way. From across the room, I heard him greeted by another student, a woman in a traditional marriage who is back in school for the first time after 23 years at home. “Oh, I know who you are,” she exclaimed, as he poured himself a drink. “You’re Jo’s husband! I’ve been wanting-“

Then she realized her gaffe. She blushed furiously and clapped her hand over her mouth. We both listened for his response.

“I am,” he said. “Thank you.”

Revolution.

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