Thursday, August 24, 2006
Don't marry a career girl
Rod Dreher links to a Forbes.com article that advises men not to marry career women. The article cites studies that show two-career marriages are more stressful and are more likely to head for divorce than traditional marriages. The author of the article, Michael Noer, sees this as a problem for men because they are attracted to women with similar goals - that is career men, especially successful career men, are attracted to career women. This leads to problems - if the woman gives up her career she's unhappy. If she stays at work, there's the problem of competition.
Rod isn't buying it that men have to marry a woman with nothing upstairs to be happy.
I'm really lucky that I ended up with a woman who is interested in many of the same things I am, and who loves to read and talk about books and ideas. So I don't have the trade-off that Noer sees, namely between an intellectually engaging career woman, and a boring homemaker. In fact, we know lots of traditionalist young couples in which the wife stays home to look after the kids, and in every case the woman is the intellectual equal of her husband. That Noer even thinks in terms of this (false) dichotomy betrays a commonly-held bias about modernity: that the more educated and intellectually advanced you are, the less interested you are bound to be in traditional social arrangements, traditional religion, and so forth. It may well be true as a statistical matter, at least in the US, but it isn't a Law of Existence. Quite a few educated men and women have used their smarts to discern that our ancestors really were on to something, and that what we take to be progress is actually regressive in important ways.
I'm on Rod's side. I also know lots of young couples where the wife stays home to take care of the children and I wouldn't consider any of those wives boring homemakers. One of these days, I hope I get to be just that kind of housewife and stay-at-home mother myself.
Rod isn't buying it that men have to marry a woman with nothing upstairs to be happy.
I'm really lucky that I ended up with a woman who is interested in many of the same things I am, and who loves to read and talk about books and ideas. So I don't have the trade-off that Noer sees, namely between an intellectually engaging career woman, and a boring homemaker. In fact, we know lots of traditionalist young couples in which the wife stays home to look after the kids, and in every case the woman is the intellectual equal of her husband. That Noer even thinks in terms of this (false) dichotomy betrays a commonly-held bias about modernity: that the more educated and intellectually advanced you are, the less interested you are bound to be in traditional social arrangements, traditional religion, and so forth. It may well be true as a statistical matter, at least in the US, but it isn't a Law of Existence. Quite a few educated men and women have used their smarts to discern that our ancestors really were on to something, and that what we take to be progress is actually regressive in important ways.
I'm on Rod's side. I also know lots of young couples where the wife stays home to take care of the children and I wouldn't consider any of those wives boring homemakers. One of these days, I hope I get to be just that kind of housewife and stay-at-home mother myself.
