Marriage: When women outearn men

We’ve come a long way, baby, said Tara Parker-Pope in The New York Times. Nearly half a century since feminist pioneer Betty Friedan “urged women to leave the house and pursue careers,” full equality, it would seem, is finally within reach. A new analysis of census data by the Pew Research Center shows that women are now the main breadwinners in 22 percent of U.S. households, up from 7 percent in 1970, and that in nearly a third of marriages, the wife is better educated than the husband. Traditionalists have long predicted that the crumbling of old-fashioned gender roles would lead to the breakdown of the American family, but the opposite appears to be true. “The more economic independence and education a woman gains,” the Pew study found, “the more likely she is to stay married.”

Feminists can crow all they want, said Maggie Gallagher in the New York Post, but the real story here is “not that women are doing well, but that boys are doing badly.” The driving force behind the so-called “rise of the wives” is that this nation’s feminist-dominated education system is biased against boys and their different learning styles, leaving young men more prone to drop out of high school and forgo college, and thus less prepared for the job market. In the current recession, fully three-quarters of the jobs lost were lost by men, and today, only 40 percent of college graduates are male. These are truly alarming statistics, but in our politically correct culture, “every sign that boys or men are hurting gets turned around into a ‘happy news’ story of female success.”

Are you kidding? said Petula Dvorak in The Washington Post. “Things are sweeter than ever” for the average U.S. husband. Married American men are working less, living longer, and discovering that there are worse things in the world than having an ambitious spouse with a high-paying job. And they still do less around the house than women. For women like me, though, said Sandra Tsing Loh in The New York Times, our new, post-feminist reality is a mixed blessing. Yes, I make more than the man I share my life with, and yes, we share the housework after our long, exhausting workdays. But no one meets us at the door with our slippers and a tray of martinis, ready to offer us “uncritical emotional support” while we bitch about our day. What both I and my partner need is a wife—a role that’s “fast disappearing.” We’re all breadwinners now.

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