One day, while I was in the middle of reading it, I sat down on the subway and pulled out my Kindle to read some more, BUT the Kindle opened to a Star Trek novel, and it’s not me who reads Star Trek novels. Which means that I had taken Harold’s Kindle and left mine at his place, and that if he turns it it on, it will opening to a book about settling for an underwhelming romantic partner.
Sorry, Harold!
I’m really glad I read the entire book because Gottlieb gets quoted pretty frequently, and sentences from this book are taken wildly out of context to make points pretty far from the text. (Her main thesis, as far as I can tell, is that two good people who share interests, enjoy the same lifestyle, and would like to be married should marry each other.) I wouldn’t say I agreed with everything she wrote (Marry a kind, balding bore before they’re all taken and you’re settling for a balding bore with a potbelly and bad breath!) but there was a lot to think about regarding how we choose partners and how relationships work or fail.
I was pretty excited about reading Suzanne Venker’s How to Choose a Husband: And Make Peace With Marriage
Choosing a husband is a slightly disingenuous title since the book is more about choosing a sperm donor than about choosing a life partner. How To Choose a Husband was a lot more about how not to have any goals or identity outside of childrearing than about making peace with marriage. Feel dissatisfaction at work? It’s totally NOT because you’d be happier in another field, your boss is a jerk, or women make 74 cents to a man’s dollar. It’s because women are only fulfilled by submitting to their husbands and having babies. Any happiness women take from professional success or work satisfaction is a result of feminist trickery, convincing women that they want to be men.
Most of the book states and restates that any desire felt for babies and home life is woman’s inner nature asserting its proper place, and any desire for any other kind of life, or any conflict about motherhood and other goals, it’s all due to feminist trickery.
Then Venker describes how to act on this wisdom. Don’t spend time with your single friends. Ignore all presentation of relationships in the media — except for the book, of course! Don’t focus so much on a career, and definitely don’t inconvenience your husband for your career, since you’ll be giving that up soon to have babies. Make sure your husband feels like a Man, by agreeing with what he says, deferring to him, and by having sex when he tells you to. (Because all men want sex all the time, and women aren’t particularly interested, apparently.) Parts of the book infuriated me, but overall it was just such a terribly dull and depressing view of womanhood. Subservience to a decision-making husband instead of having a friendship between equals, and devaluing any career or artistic success as a time-filler until motherhood is just too depressing to contemplate.
I wanted to read this book so I would have context when it was quoted, but I think I can sum up the book with this line:
At the moment, the single greatest problem your generation faces is the relentless anti-male/pro-female rhetoric you’re exposed to. It’s inescapable.
Yeah. What can I say to that?
Ya know, my dad always says, “That’s why they call it ‘work.'” He’s also semi-famous for saying, “I didn’t grow up dreaming about selling toilet paper for a living.” If I were out there giving young people advice, or women advice, I would caution against looking for fulfillment in work. Even if you manage to be fortunate enough to find it, the pay is going to be terrible, the hours irregular, or the work will be inconsistent – things you can probably only put up with if you have a trust fund or a breadwinner husband.
That’s not a problem with women having their place in the home; it’s a problem with expectations. Don’t expect calculus to provide you with essential amino acids (to borrow a Thomas Sowell-ism), and don’t think there’s a thing wrong with treating work as a means to an end.
There are a ten thousand reasons why work is not satisfying, starting with “That’s why it’s called work, and not super awesome novels and candy time”. You start a job, and you get the tasks for the most junior person. You take an underwhelming or awful job because it pays money. People get laid off! Commutes are stupid! Even interesting fields have crappy assignments! I can think of about 10,000 reasons that work is, well, work, before I’d say that women are unhappy at work because they’re only able to be REALLY happy as mothers, particularly stay-at-home mothers.
Women in the home isn’t the problem. Saying ALL women are ONLY really happy when they’re home raising children is the problem. Yes, we all know someone who was a high-powered fill-in-the-blank but once she had her baby, she just knew she never wanted to go back to work and stayed home happily forever. But that’s not the case for everyone and it’s a terribly depressing view of the world.
Right. It irks me when we say that women should ALL be in the workforce, or ALL be at home. Or that it’s impossible for women to move in and out of the workforce as it suits them.
If your job is cleaning hotel rooms, then staying at home with the kids might be the best thing that could ever happen. Many women also find that their incomes are similar to child care costs, and they simply do not see a point in working for zero net income while their kids are in daycare. On the other end of the scale, many high-powered women opt to stay home when they figure out that up to sixty cents of every dollar on a second income is taken in taxes. (This is, IMHO, the primary reason that college-educated married women skew Republican. They didn’t change, but their marginal tax rates did.)
Yeah, but I also know women like that BEFORE they had their babies, and many of them were never happy in work. The kids are the excuse to leave, not the motivation for doing so.