Currently, most of the world sees the height of female success as marrying well. I have a big problem with that.
I have heard it said that women are the slaves of slaves or women are the slaves of the modern world and possibly a few variations on that.
This is rooted in defining female success as being a good wife and mom at the expense of having a paid career and even if she has talents that CAN pay well IF you are, say, a therapist or various other professions, people expect her to do it out of the goodness of her heart.
Some years ago, one article labeled this emotional labor, which I think is a lousy label. Music and plays often involve evoking strong cathartic feelings but song writers and play writers aren't viewed as engaging in emotional labor while other forms of women's work got lumped in under this header.
The reality is that historically marriage mostly wasn't about modern concepts of "love." It was often a political alliance or a deal to help both man and wife survive in a subsistence culture where there were no refrigerators or microwave ovens or fast food drive throughs, so not knowing how to cook from scratch while not having a wife was practically a sentence of death.
I don't really want to go into a long tangent defining the word love, but in a nutshell it's a pain in the butt to talk about it because it has two distinct but not unrelated meanings.
One is a noun that describes a wonderful feeling and the other is a verb that describes life-giving acts of caring. Frequently, one person does the action verb of loving someone and the person on the receiving end then experiences the wonderful feelings of being in love but may not at all reciprocate those caring actions.
We expect women to marry for love and be protectors of a broad range of important ethics and we do so in a way that is generally abusive of women.
It's hard to tease out because I agree that it's a bad thing for women to marry for money but the problem is that our current heteronormative culture insists that marrying well is the way women are supposed to pay their bills.
Decades after I read the book while in therapy in my twenties, I feel like I finally understand the ugly observation one woman made that "There is more prostitution in marriage than outside of it."
So the ugly truth is we turn far too many women into the personal servant of some man who expects her to care for him literally by doing enormous amounts of caretaking labor while he doesn't really care about her because his contribution to the relationship is his money.
There's a book called More Work for Mother that covers the history of household technology in the last three hundred years. The short version is that we developed vacuum cleaners to free men up from beating the rugs and shift that labor to the wife and most modern household technology follows that same pattern of shifting a job from the husband to the wife in the last three hundred years.
And the reason for this is because money became widely available on a consistent basis globally for the first time ever, so we collectively freed men up from household chores so they could improve household income while making household chores more manageable for the smaller and less muscular gender who needed to accommodate frequent pregnancy, breastfeeding and child rearing while working.
Prior to three hundred years ago, BOTH men and women were spending most of their time literally working to put food on the table. They had different tasks but the majority of everyone's labor went into putting food on the table.
In hunter-gatherer societies, men typically hunted or fished animals and women gathered edible plants often while wearing a baby strapped to their back or chest. In agricultural societies, men raised crops and engaged in animal husbandry, women had kitchen gardens with herbs and vegetables and did the cooking.
Whatever gendered tasks they each pursued, at the end of the day, BOTH men and women spent the lion's share of their time and energy on making sure the family got enough to eat.
And then money became consistently available and this division of labor became a gendered class divide between men and their female servants aka "wives."
I've written elsewhere about how I believe this global pattern helps create TERFS and "White Women" of a sort that a lot of people of color drag. It also fosters tongue in cheek quotes such as:
I want a man who's kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?-- Zsa Zsa Gabor
I like it because it subtly suggests that it usually is too much to ask of a millionaire husband. He owns your ass. He knows it. And in many marriages she can be easily replaced with someone younger, prettier and more compliant with his demands because she isn't really contributing anything that can't be purchased from other women for the same price or LESS.
I've never remarried in part because I got married at age nineteen to another nineteen year old, so when he came home from work and barked orders at me like I was one of his underlings at work, I reminded him I wasn't one of his underlings at work. I was the woman who had been sleeping with him since we were both seventeen.
He would go sit at his computer for an hour and keep his mouth shut until he could say something like "What are you cooking, honey?" instead of "Where's my dinner, woman?!"
I didn't get a real career while he did and the longer the marriage went on, the more he acted like me giving up a National Merit Scholarship and quitting college was NOT me giving up a real career to be his wife and "SOMEONE has to pay the bills" while all my arguments about how HE was allowed to travel for his career and I was not fell on deaf ears.
I've been extremely clear for a lot of years that women don't need money per se. We need stronger rights because money grows out of rights and power or becomes irrelevant if you have rights and power.
I could never get my husband to see HE had a career because we BOTH consistently made choices that affirmed his right to pursue a career while I struggled to figure that out for myself and he outright dismissed my arguments as irrelevant.
Men my age or anywhere reasonably near my age -- give ot take a couple of decades -- who are smart like me and have workaholic tendencies like I have and etc. -- in other words men likely to be interested in me that I might find attractive -- tend to have vastly more money than I have and I don't want to be some man's bitch because he owns my ass and knows it.
The title of this piece was jotted down with the idea of making the point that heteronormative culture turns women into servants incapable of thinking like a real human being responsible for their own destiny. They all too often think like a slave who needs to sell themselves into slavery to survive at all in this shitastic world.
Only YOU can make a real career for yourself, though I try to write up helpful information like THIS and THIS and THIS so other women have some hope of figuring out HOW in a timely fashion.
Some years ago, I believe I wrote and eventually redacted a post about something Donald Trump said for which he was dragged. I also discussed it with a friend, so this is hardly a new thought for me.
He said something like "If you are rich, women show up ready."
He's rich enough, he should know. And the reason he was dragged is not because he is full of shit but because he isn't and no one wants to admit that -- regardless of socioeconomic level -- most marriages are a polite form of prostitution such that the goals of far too many women boil down to being beautiful enough to ONLY do the sex part of this deal with the devil and HIRE other women to do the domestic servant parts of cooking and cleaning.
The concept of women's lib is currently a bizarre search for turning upper class women into well paid whores with nominal careers overshadowed by their much more successful husband whose homes are cleaned and children are raised by lower class women.
This is not remotely my idea of how to liberate women. It's not even my idea of how liberate upper class women, even if you are completely FINE with this class divide of trying to nominally give upper class women very privileged male coded careers while the women's work in their own homes continues to be done by WOMEN, just not THEM.
Which is why I have a variety of projects on things like small residential spaces designed to make it easy for a household of one to three people to feed themselves and live on very little money, post heteronormative food practices and clean home design.
Because when push comes to shove, the goal of a post heteronormative world should be to make women stop being domestic slaves upon which the welfare of other people depends.
It should do that not just because actively encouraging roughly half of the world's population to set a goal of becoming a courtesan under the polite euphemism of married well is a huge waste of human potential but also because it does bad things to the people incapable of taking adequate care of themselves without owning a wife.
I'm also for the decriminalization of prostitution because I think criminalizing prostitution actively makes it harder for trafficked women to escape but also because the practice of criminalizing prostitution is rooted in the same mental models where we pretend sex and marriage are sacred while creating a world where most women get most of their money via marriage while we pretend this isn't defacto a polite form of prostitution for far too many women who often feel incapable of leaving their marriage.
You can marry well ONCE and pretend it's for love. You do it repeatedly and they call you a gold digging whore and no one believes it's about anything other than the money.
When I got divorced I made the conscious decision that I would rather charge by the hour as a prostitute than to marry for money as a solution to my post divorce financial problems. With also having health issues, my financial problems have proven to be frustratingly intractable and persistent.
And I still know I will never marry for money. If I'm so desperate for money that I'm willing to trade sex for it, I will do that in an upfront fashion that doesn't make me his bitch in a vain attempt to save face and pretend I'm a good girl.
So far, I am a good girl according to something Heinlein once humorously said: I've only ever given it away for FREE.
Footnotes
Now that he's president and that trashy ho of his is "first lady," I desperately wish we would discontinue that practice.
I will add this seems less true in non Caucasian couples in the US. But that's a post for another day.