Secret Paths by Terri Apter

Author:Terri Apter [Terri Apter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393344042
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Expansive Woman and Divorce

“I’m 43. I thought, year by year, I was building my life. I was married. I had children. I worked at a variety of jobs while I raised my children. Eight months ago—if I’d talked with you then—I would have said that my life was pretty good, pretty secure, pretty much a success. Now I feel I have nothing—no security for my children, no home that’s mine, no health coverage, no pension—in fact, I simply don’t know what I own, and I have no control over my future. For the last twenty years I knew who I was, and I felt happy about my future. Now, suddenly, I have nothing I thought I had, and no way of knowing how to start again.”

Joann Mason can, she said, “stand for thousands of women who thought they had their lives sorted out, until their husbands decided to leave them.” The series of decisions, which seemed fair and reasonable in the context of a stable marriage, can come to an abrupt end in the context of divorce. She had worked, but in part-time jobs, with flexible hours—hence, with low pay, low prestige, and low security.10 “It all made sense at the time,” she explained. “He earned more than I could, he was going places, and so we lost less as a family if I stayed with the kids and he worked. At the time,” she repeated, “it was perfectly reasonable.”

Joann’s explanation of her personal circumstances have a strong backing in economic theory. The traditional roles in the family—the wife doing unpaid work at home to service the paid employment of the husband—are “economically rational.”11 Since her husband could earn more and succeed more easily in his career, it was more efficient for him to engage in paid work, while she does the unpaid work at home. Were he to spend more time in the home, on family oriented tasks and activities, then he would earn less and climb the promotional ladder less quickly. He, in effect, buys her domestic services with his earning power, and she buys his earning power with her domestic labor. This is more efficient, according to one economist’s model, than sharing work inside and outside the home, for two reasons. First, it is seen to be more efficient for each person to specialize and gain expertise in one area. Second, because two part-time jobs would fail to give a family either the income or the prestige or the security of one full-time job in the workplace: Part-time work is poorly paid, has few promotion opportunities, and has far less security than a full-time job.12

What this model of economic efficiency neglects, however, and what Joann discovered, is that this type of exchange is only effective when the marriage works perfectly. When it fails, the inequality of these exchanges become obvious: The partner who does not have direct access to the family wealth, who does not have the earning power, who does not own the pension and the health coverage, is the person who, as the marriage ends, loses the most.

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