New York magazine recently ran an article entitled “The Retro Wife“:
This is not the retreat from high-pressure workplaces of a previous generation but rather a more active awakening to the virtues of the way things used to be. Patricia Ireland, who lives on the Upper West Side, left her job as a wealth adviser in 2010 after her third child was born. Now, even though her husband, also in finance, has seen his income drop since the recession, she has no plans to go back to work. She feels it’s a privilege to manage her children’s lives—“not just what they do, but what they believe, how they talk to other children, what kind of story we read together. That’s all dictated by me. Not by my nanny or my babysitter.” Her husband’s part of the arrangement is to go to work and deposit his paycheck in the joint account. “I’m really grateful that my husband and I have fallen into traditional gender roles without conflict,” says Ireland. “I’m not bitter that I’m the one home and he goes to work. And he’s very happy that he goes to work.”
A lot of the new neo-traditionalists watched their own mothers strain under the second shift, and they regard Sandberg’s lower-wattage mini-mes, rushing off to Big Jobs and back home with a wad of cash for the nanny, with something like pity. They don’t want a return to the confines of the fifties; they treasure their freedoms, but see a third way. When Slaughter tours the lecture circuit, she is often approached, she says, by women younger than 30 who say, “I don’t see a senior person in my world whose life I want.” In researching her 2010 book The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work and Family, New York University sociologist Kathleen Gerson found that, in spite of all the gains young women have made, about a quarter say they would choose a traditional domestic arrangement over the independence that comes with a career, believing not just “that only a parent can provide an acceptable level of care” but also that “they are the only parent available for the job.”
The harried, stressed, multiarmed Kali goddess, with a laptop in one hand and homemade organic baby food in the other, has been replaced with a domestic Madonna, content with her choices and placid in her sphere…
There are a number of interesting research findings referred to in the article. It’s worth a read.
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