Only to girls and women does our society truly say: “You have a choice of working, if you want to. But if you don’t want to, and you are lucky enough to have a man fall in love with you, you can let him support you and any children you may have. I don’t mean that he will give you money as recompense for what you give him–I mean, he will pay all the bills for your life BECAUSE he loves you and you love him. You will have no money of your own, nothing you can truly say is yours and that you need account to no one for. But you wil have a promise of support in return for love. Which is, unfortunately, subject to withdrawal at any time if the man should die, become incapacitated or just plain fall out of love with you. And of course, if you fall out of love with him, you’re on your own, dear.”

Honestly, it’s a wonder more women don’t look at this whole concept with a more critical eye than they do. Why do we let ourselves get blinded by romance?

It’s no different from the argument put forth by some slaveowners that slaves were actually better off than free black men because they were given free living quarters, food, clothing and medical care by their masters, whereas a free black man had to go out and find a job and pay for all those things for himself or he ran the risk of being starving, naked and homeless. The fact that one man was getting his livelihood supplied to him free, while the other had to pay for it, was NOT THE POINT. The point was whether or not one man should have absolute ownership and control over another. If you believe it is morally wrong for men to own other men, you cannot condone slavery. You just can’t.

Women who choose to become homemakers may not be slaves–no one forced them into their servitude–but the way I see it, they are a kind of indentured servant. Only the contract they sign is for life, or whenever the other party sees fit to broach it, whichever comes first.

We need to strip the romance off the labels we choose to affix to the relationships men and women choose to form if we want them to get any better. And if that makes me sound like a radical feminist, too bad. I don’t have a problem with anyone, male or female, choosing to be a homemaker; what I have a problem with is how that seems to make them magically no longer worthy of being paid for their choice, but dependent entirely on an arrangement in which they get free room, board, etc., but all is doled out by the generosity of the laboring person with whom they have chosen to pair themselves.

One interesting aspect of gay palimony suits (such as there have been) is how they strip away the male-female role-playing expectations we have of couples and are decided on the basis of what evidence there was that one of the parties in the relationship truly agreed to support the other in return for such chores as housekeeping and child rearing, and whether or not the supporting party owes something to the supported party if and when the relationship ends. Sometimes it’s a matter of one party’s word against the other, with one claiming “I quit my job because he promised to support me” and the other saying “Not so–we both agreed that if we parted we’d each take out what we came in with.” If the supported party wants to prove he’s lost his earning power through voluntarily leaving the workforce with expectation of support, or that he deserves a chunk of the financial wealth his ex partner has, he has to supply hard evidence of it.

It’s easy to recognize that a gay man or a lesbian who trusts his or her partner to suppport himr or her and quits a job to care for their home, etc., without having such an arrangement written in a contract, is taking a huge risk. Why is it not so for husbands and wives?

Some wives think they are protected by the marriage laws of their state, and that they would never find themselves in the trouble that gay people who cannot marry may find themselves in if a partner dumps them. Then they come in for a rude awakening when their husband wants a divorce and their lawyer tells them what those laws really are.

Nothing about that is very romantic at all.

As I said my parent’s divorce did not benefit my mother, the homemaker, the amazing woman with a degree in journalism. As we moved around the world following my father’s various Navel Officer’s assignments, my mother played her role spectacularly. She never was able to get a job in journalism, in those days military wives were not seen as good potential employees – having to move around and all that. Just before their divorce my father, retired from the military, was laid off from his government contractor job and decided to just pack it in. He now lives in a mobile home; he lives a life of leisure. No alimony there. Since the divorce my mother became an ESL teacher, which is a part time job in our state. She expects to have to work until she dies.

So in today’s work climate of mergers, closures, outsourcing, smartshoring, and now in my fortune 500 company “homeshoring”, it seems that virtually no job outside the service industry is ‘secure’. I think couples need to have major contingency plans in place to account for the instability of America’s current situation if only one person is working and you have children.

Outsourcing is one thing. But outsourcing without compensation is quite another. Do you ask the farmer growing your food to grow the food for free out of love and because farming, being close to the earth, is so much more fulfilling than anything you do and not to worry, you’lll provide them with whatever they need (as a gift, of course, not because they earned it through their work, but out of your own benevolence)? Do you try to convince young people from lower class backgrounds that they should become (unpaid) farmers because they are biologically meant for it? Do you go around saying that we shouldn’t assume that having a high powered career is more fulfilling than living off the land and that the only problem with the system is that the consumers are sometimes “irresponsible” and don’t support farmers as they should?

Male irresponsibility is one problem, but not the only one or even, IMHO, the key one. The most responsible man in the world can die, leaving his work-inexperienced partner and children without needed support, financial and otherwise. (Yes, a responsible man would have life insurance, but insurance at a level that will truly replace his income for life or even until the children are adult is often prohibitively expensive.) And it also sets up a potentially nasty double bind for both partners. Suppose one or the other is miserable in the marriage. Not because the other partner is abusive, disloyal, or even unpleasant, just because they are no longer in love and don’t like living intimately with someone that they don’t love. But the wife is stuck because she has no work history and therefore no reasonable expectation of being able to support herself and her children if she leaves. The husband is stuck because, being a responsible guy, he doesn’t want to leave his wife destitute and possibly emotionally devistated and feeling like a failure. So they continue on their miserable way, making their children miserable as well because they feel they have no alternative. Responsibility is wonderful and I agree with you entirely that teaching men (and women) to be more responsible is a good thing. But being independent beats being dependent, no matter how responsible and reliable the person you are dependent on. Bluntly put, your dependent is never really your equal and having an intimate relationship with a non-equal is not the ideal, no matter how responsible you are.

Hugo, still waiting for you to address the ON-topic discussion. ;)

You and the lads can do your thing at Stand Your Ground, but take a break from here.

The only way I might be seen as “derailing the thread” as you call it us that I’m not singing in the feminist choir, yelling “amen sister” to all and sundry comments supportive of feminist and PC suggestions, and otherwise towing the Party Line.

Too bad - my allies and I are here to stay, whether you like it or not. Get used to it.

leapfrog, the reality is that without social support for “the next generation” there still will be plenty of people to carry on and have kids, and IMHO those will be the truly responsible ones who able to do so in a, well, resposible manner and not foist their choices onto the rest of us. In fact, I’m with the First and Second Wave feminists who think that there are far too many humans on planet earth and thus birth control (including abortion) is a reasonable and IMHO necessary thing. Even without the “welfare queens” as Reagan called them, there still will be pleny of babies to take care of you, me, et al. No, I don’t buy for one second that I need to contribute to the maintenance of another single mother family on welfare (whether that be public assistance or private welfare, i.e., court-imposed so-called ‘child support’): In fact, since single mother families produce the majority of criminals, I’d be happy to see them eliminated. Let responsible people who can afford to raise kids have those kids and stop enabling deadbeats to do so via the dole. I know: Blasphemy!! Heretic!! Burn Mr. Bad at the stake!!

I assume you clicked on my name like anyone else, but as there doesn’t seem to be a comment by a “Mr. Bad” there (plus the confusion about ‘third divorce’) I still think you’re confusing your bloggers. And I’m really not sure why you’re trying to derail the thread with rants about taxes and outsourcing.

That’s just it — some of what we’re talking about here is rooted in a sense of vulnerability, which in turn is rooted in an expectation of male irresponsibility.

Or rooted in a sense of reality. Even the most responsible man can unexpectedly die, or develop a mental disorder, or become unable to provide for his family. Yes, insurance and planning help with these things, but the fact is that in a one-earner family, when one paycheck goes away, you don’t lose half the family’s income; you lose ALL of it.

I have no idea whether you were indeed at mythago’s blog, but are wildly misremembering the contents, or whether you are accurately remembering the contents of a completely different blog, but I’m pretty darn sure that what you’re describing isn’t mythago’s life. It sounds more like somebody’s satirical take on Caitlin Flanagan, with a couple more divorces. FWIW.