Culture Digested: Divorce Season
Fair Play, Lyz Lenz, and Maggie Smith go to family court
Back when I was doing press for my book Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto, a young married woman asked me to tell her one thing women could do right now to change the world for the better, and I answered, “Divorce your husbands.”
I said it because she was annoying me. She had been an hour late for the interview she had scheduled, and then it turned out she didn’t want an interview, she wanted to argue with me, petulantly. The running theme of her questions was, surely as a feminist all that I need to do to make the world a better place is to succeed and have a good time, right? Nothing else is required. So when she asked me a stupid question, I gave her a stupid answer. Divorce your husbands. And leave me alone.
I don’t think she understood my point, which was that if women were serious about dramatic social change, a collective action like leaving their husbands -- including every Republican senator intent on destroying social welfare programs and banning reproductive rights and trans health care, every professional misogynist Evangelical influencer, and every banker, diplomat, and businessman -- thereby removing the material domestic support that makes their careers possible would be one option. But they won’t. Most women just want to make their lives better and more comfortable. It’s a mistake to assume that the women married to these men are smarter, more self-aware, or less evil than their husbands.
Reading Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife, I felt like I was stuck in a funhouse reflection of that earlier conversation. A “I divorced my husband – and it’s a political victory for all women!” kind of thing. Lenz’s book is only the latest in a trend in memoirs, personal essays, and autobiographical novels where a woman’s struggle to free herself from a marriage becomes a metaphor for all women’s struggle for liberation from patriarchy.
Most of these books are written by women who were or are married to successful, professional men, and their primary complaint is their husbands’ inability to do housework. Or as Lenz puts it, “I didn’t want to waste my one wild and precious life telling a grown man where to find the ketchup in the fridge.” Now there is also the multimedia extravaganza Fair Play, which uses the experiences of successful women – doctors, executives, filmmakers – to illustrate this need for domestic labor parity. In an interview with The Financial Diet, Fair Play author Eve Rodsky says this is a matter of equality, because women deserve to have as much wealth as men do. Even with hired help, the book says, women are still doing more domestic labor than men and that is a sign that something is really wrong.
I was about to say that the domestic labor complaint resurfaces regularly, but actually it is always there, face up, bobbing away, refusing to sink to the depths no matter what you throw at it. It’s been attacked through socialist thinking, rebranding, arguments for domestic reorganization, angry ranting, and general begging/pleading. And yet here it is, yelling about dental appointments and crumbs on the counter. But is domestic labor at this point a political issue with a political solution? The more the writers of these books insist it is, the less convincing they become.
After the election of Donald Trump, a lot of people took to radical politics like children with a shiny new toy: “This is the only thing I will ever need.” Women, raised on lifestyle affirmations and “you are a secret goddess” nonsense, now looked to “radical” feminism not to help them navigate the political world but to help them fix their whole life. I was shocked by how many women I met on my book tour who asked me if they could still get manicures if they were feminists. There had recently been an investigation in the New York Times into the terrible working conditions at nail salons. This was where feminism began and ended for them, like feminism was an ethical shopping guide with me their presumed guru, there to walk them into enlightened consumerism. They actually seemed to think this was a thing I would be interested in doing.
The women who were paid to represent women in the public sphere at this time were mostly wealthy professional women who were unable to use feminism as a way articulating a shared goal but instead recentered the conversation on their own personal problems. And for a while, feminists were eager to show their marriages as enlightened ones, beacons of hope. They wrote personal essays about wearing nontraditional wedding gowns, about their husband’s willingness to do the dishes, about how romantic and political fulfillment was possible. Now, however, the feminists are all writing about divorce.
The complaints about marriage in these books are the same ones that have been repeated since Betty Friedan’s depiction of bored housewives, languishing with their quickly diminishing potential in big suburban houses. The Feminine Mystique, though, was published in 1963, before many of the changes in law, policy, and social norms that would allow women to build stable existences for themselves outside of marriage.
The feminist gains around marriage and family that followed were all negative freedoms, as in, the freedom to be unimpeded by discriminatory obstacles or obligations. The no-fault divorce, which saved people the burdensome obligations to prove in a court of law their spouse’s infidelity or abuse, is a negative freedom.
The feminist aims related to equality, however, were not successful. Free childcare centers would have allowed women to access services regardless of ability to pay, were not successful. Widely available public housing that allowed for communal approaches to domestic labor (as in, shared kitchens and gardens, public spaces, and amenities like libraries and safe spaces for children), were also not successful.
And this is what led to “choice feminism,” or whatever you want to call it. Lifestyle feminism, capitalist feminist, girlboss feminism. One’s ability to access freedoms was tied to capital, meaning the more money one made the freer they could be. This is essentially trickle-down feminism, the idea that if we get marriage good for the most wealthy, the common woman will start to benefit as well. The problem for the common woman, however, is not an unhappy marriage, it’s the inability to get or stayed married. In our time of wild income inequality, even marriage has become a luxury item that most cannot afford.
And many of these personal stories of “liberated” feminism started to take on a kind of desperate feel to them, because people who wanted to keep feminism away from class politics needed to make these negative freedoms seem like the pinnacle of female achievement. Women on day five of an antibiotics scrip, through gritted teeth and smudged eyeliner, insisting, “This is me thriving, actually? This is me throwing off the bonds of patriarchal oppression, actually? I just feel sorry for you for being so rattled with internalized misogyny that you can’t be as free as me, actually?”
The problems of Lenz and her ilk are less about oppression and more about unhappiness. And creating a political project around successful women’s unhappiness really doesn’t seem like a good use of resources. There are consequences for the decisions a person makes. The only time those consequences become political are when they are disproportionately distributed due to race, gender, or another demographic. The poet Maggie Smith wrote about her divorce in her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, and she makes similar leaps from her individual experience to the universal as Lenz. It’s not enough that she’s unhappy in her marriage to a successful attorney, or that she finds it distressing that between childcare responsibilities and domestic labor she can’t find enough time to write. She links her struggle to the struggle of women throughout time, doing housework and raising children without pay or “a room of one’s own.”
But her specific circumstances are not the same as a 19th century working class woman. A woman in the 19th century can’t own her own property, can’t file for a no-fault divorce and be granted alimony and child support, doesn’t have an expensive education to assist her in the job market. So Smith’s forced association with oppressed women – and she is eager to establish her “privilege” as a white woman as is necessary in all personal writing these days, but that announcement isn’t followed up by any integration of a less privileged perspective into her political project – is disingenuous. Her plight is not the plight of “women.” Her plight is her plight. Her plight is an unsatisfying marriage (sad face). It’s the consequences for her decisions. Neither feminism nor god can protect you from those.
Politics is one of the few boxes in which women still feel free to complain. “My marriage is unsatisfying” will get you “oh poor baby” responses – just look at the backlash Emily Gould received for her essay about divorce ideation at New York -- but “my unsatisfying marriage is a form of political oppression” gives the writer a kind of cover, a framework that can justify their complaint. There’s not much to distinguish this round of divorce literature from the post war fantasies of the midlife crisis from our men. Updike, Bellow, Roth, you know the ones. The women have gone mad, etc. We listened to a lot of men complaining about modern marriage for many years, and now it’s simply the time for women to complain instead.
Because both Lenz and Smith use political framings in their texts, the marriages only have to make political sense (the “patriarchal culture” that coerces women to sacrifice their independence and shape their family lives following patriarchal structures), not psychological. Which is why there are no convincing stories of falling in love, just the building dread of the helpless victim being lured into a trap. The husbands are not characters, they are patriarchal archetypes. They do not have characteristics, they have failings. Both Lenz and Smith describe their husbands in similar ways. They are oblivious to what it takes to run the household. They are not supportive of their wives’ creative work. They see childcare as beneath them or something that just happens, magically, without their participation. They withhold the support their wives desire, acting more like disapproving fathers than partners.
A political problem with marriage is the inability of people in lower classes to marry, people who are denied the rights and privileges distributed through marriage because of their inability to maintain romantic stability, or the way marital troubles in the lower classes, like separation or problems with children, introduces government surveillance into their private lives. It’s not the inability to negotiate with your husband over roles and obligations, it’s not the disappointment of marrying the wrong person, and it’s not the indifference of the world to your writing projects.
Lenz’s call for women to divorce their husbands in order to achieve court-ordered equality assumes that her readers are much like her, as ambitious as she is to write bestselling memoirs, as desirous of fame, and as capable of building a successful career. Her absolute faith in the family court system to grant fair and equal divorce settlements and custody arrangements suggests she has never been unable to perform heteronormativity within the justice system, nor is she likely to have experienced domestic violence or she would know that taking a man to court is likely to increase the danger she is in. Again, she is quick to claim solidarity with women living less comfortable lives than she does, but she refuses to adapt her ideas or claims to the information they could provide about they want and need.
In the same way that romance, melodrama, and other “women’s stories” entertainment were compensatory – as in, your imaginary attachments to heartthrob actors and celebrities helped you relieve the pressure of your disappointments with your husband and children – I think contemporary feminism is also compensatory. But now it’s not an affair with Gary Cooper, it’s beautiful revolution that will sweep you away into a better world. One where you are the famous writer and not your husband; one where your husband immediately intuits your every need and picks his socks off the floor. This is not the feminist future I was promised. Nor the one I have any interest in pursuing.
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These narratives never include how certain African American women have happily refused marriage on the grounds that the guy isn’t a long term love, and rely on a tree of true relatives, god parents, chosen relatives etc. to bring up their children and support their own inner selves. These hipster Brooklyn women have never bothered to read and understand the work of Kathryn Edin, a brilliant sociologist at Princeton who has conducted ethnographic studies that have illuminated the inner lives of African American low income women. My favorite book of hers is Promises I Can Keep: How Low Income Women put Motherhood before Marriage (with Maria Kefalas), 2005.
These narratives always forget that some people cannot get married, as it would cut them off from disability and other benefits necessary for their survival.