Book review: ‘The Richer Sex,’ on contemporary women, by Liza Mundy
By Stephanie Coontz,
Stephanie Coontz
Mar 23, 2012 07:41 PM EDT
The Washington Post
Are women about to replace men as the high-achieving sex? Women now earn the majority of academic degrees conferred in the United States. Their real wages have risen steadily over the past three decades, while men’s have stagnated. Today, wives in dual-earner families contribute, on average, 47 percent of family earnings. In 2009, nearly 38 percent of employed wives outearned their husbands.
Washington Post reporter Liza Mundy argues that “the Big Flip” in gender roles “is just around the corner.” Soon, she says, “women, not men, will become the top earners in households,” transforming the dynamics of male-female relationships.
(Simon & Schuster) - ’The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family’ by Liza Mundy
Mundy deftly summarizes the remarkably rapid expansion of women’s economic and educational achievements over the past 40 years, demonstrating that women’s empowerment is an international phenomenon. I agree that women’s workplace gains, combined with the overthrow of laws and customs that once enshrined male privilege, add up to a true revolution. But I think she overstates its reach.
Mundy may be right that more households will soon be supported by women rather than by men, but in part that is because more women are raising children without male support; few of these women qualify as “the richer sex.” In addition, much of the growth in the share of income that wives contribute to households results from the long-term stagnation of men’s wages. Thanks to the ban onpay and hiring discrimination over the past 40 years, women’s average wages have risen from their much lower starting point, but they do not yet equal men’s.
The increase in the percentage of women in dual-earner households who earn more than their husbands is impressive, but such role reversals seldom last over the course of the marriage. Because working women still tend to make more adjustments to accommodate the demands of parenthood than do their working spouses, even women who outearn their male partners for several years in a row usually end up with lower earnings over a lifetime.
Indeed, in a paper released this month by the Council on Contemporary Families, sociologists David Cotter, Joan Hermsen and Reeve Vanneman argue that in some areas, the gender revolution has stalled since its surge in the late 1970s. The pace of occupational desegregation by gender has slowed or even reversed since 1990, especially outside middle-class professions. Working-class jobs, in fact, are nearly as segregated as they were in the 1950s. And since 1994, there has been a slight slippage in Americans’ support for nontraditional marital roles.
Nevertheless, Mundy is correct that the changes in behavior and attitudes since the 1970s constitute a social and economic transformation so far-reaching that it “will reshape the landscape of the heart.” Unlike many observers, she believes that this restructuring of intimate life will benefit both genders. Her interviews with women and men lead her to herald the emergence of a world where both sexes are “freer to make purely romantic choices” based on individual preference rather than constrained by stereotypes about who will or should be the primary breadwinner.
This commenter is a Washington Post contributor. Post contributors aren’t staff, but may write articles or columns. In some cases, contributors are sources or experts quoted in a story.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
To pause and restart automatic updates, click "Live" or "Paused". If paused, you'll be notified of the number of additional comments that have come in.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
Loading...
Comments