The War on Women: Orange Alert

There was an article in Forbes a week or so ago about how marrying a "career girl" increases one's chances of divorce. "Whatever you do," Michael Noer hyperbolizes, "don't marry a woman with a career." You can almost smell the fear.

It gets worse. Noer writes:

To be clear, we're not talking about a high school dropout minding a cash register. For our purposes, a "career girl" has a university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 a year.

Ok, first of all: career girl??? Um, Forbes, welcome to 2006.

But to give credit where credit is due: at least Forbes lays its economic cards on the table: it wants to be clear that it's ok for women to be underemployed at low paying jobs. Hell, that's what made America great!

No, Noer saves his panic-mongering for a cautionary tale about women who might one day threaten his job or want into his club or who might - God forbid - not be at his home making his dinner.

Forbes takes pains to point out that it's only women's work that threatens marriages:

Women's work hours consistently increase divorce, whereas increases in men's work hours often have no statistical effect.

"Often have no statistical effect"????? What does that mean? Something either has a statistical effect or it doesn't.

Besides, I would think that most obvious interpretation of this data is that financially independent women are more able to leave miserable or abusive marriages. If the rate of divorce is higher for women who have the means of supporting themselves and their children, maybe it's because these were marriages that were bad for the women in them. We should be glad that women aren't trapped in rotten unions. We should be working as a society to ensure that this is also the case for women who don't work outside the home or who don't make enough money to leave.

Noer, himself, hints at the fact that it's women's independence that is so damaging to marriages:

[Y]our typical career girl is well educated, ambitious, informed and engaged. All seemingly good things, right? Sure … at least until you get married. Then, to put it bluntly, the more successful she is, the more likely she is to grow dissatisfied with you.

Is it just me, or does Mr. Noer sound just a little insecure? And what a snob! There are lots of women who don't have a university degree who are "ambitious, informed and engaged." Lots of them are probably stay-at-home moms. It's a nice little double-bind Noer makes for women: you're either a shitty wife or you're dumb and boring.

This is where I think the heart of Noer's position is: career women are scary and the rest of them aren't worth anything beyond their household labor.

I won't even get into their housework argument, except to say: Maybe those husbands could pick up a damn broom now and then. Or pick up the kids from school. Jackasses.

But what really scares me is the timing. As we gear up for campaign season and start the two-year slimefest that is the presidential election season, I can't help but to see this as a gear up in the press against working women.

This not only helps rally the base, but it gets the rhetoric against women up to a fever pitch in case Clinton gets the nomination. Now, I am no fan of Clinton. She's the Splenda to McCain's Sweet'n'Low - just more illusion of choice. I hope like all get out that she doesn't get the nomination.

But not like this.

Addendum: War on the Poor also at Orange Alert:

I wonder how my own mother would feel to know that she didn't really have a career because she didn't have a "university-level (or higher) education." I wonder if this goes for men, too. Do men need a BA in order to have a "career"? In order to be "informed and engaged"? I find the classism of this piece as disturbing as its anti-feminism. Maybe if Noer et al weren't so isolated, they would discover that working class people are just as intelligent and interesting as -*gasp* - people who write for (or are written about in) Forbes magazine.