My mother has always been great at keeping her home spotless. No one cleans the way she can. She’s the sort of person who would dust and vacuum before the maid would come, then work alongside the housekeeper to get the job done, but of course the job is never really done, so she’d clean again after the maid left. Only my mom never hired a maid. She was the maid—you know, the type who works for free. You know, a wife.
My mom has little in common with the women that anthropologist Wednesday Martin writes about in her new book, Primates of Park Avenue, an insider account of Manhattan’s Upper East Side “Glam SAHMs,” or glamorous stay-at-home moms. That’s not because she had a full-time job outside her house for most of her life. Rather, it’s because some of the ladies in Martin’s book get paid to stay home. Their wealthy husbands give them what Martin calls a “wife bonus,” which “might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance—how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a ‘good’ school—the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks.” Or, as Martin continues to explain, based on “sexual performance.”
“I’m not sure if this is what we meant by when we said we need to value the work women do as wives and mothers,” writes Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon.com. Indeed, Martin reveals that when she questioned women who received such payments, they “usually retreated, demurring when pressed to discuss it further,” as if they deep down felt ashamed.
But why? If we constantly talk about how being a stay-at-home mother is a real job, just like the kinds on CareerBuilder.com, only much more demanding with no work/life balance because your life is your work, your work is your life, why feel embarrassed? If a SAHM, glam or otherwise, is a real job, then the person working it deserves a real paycheck, right? Bonus reviews? How about the right to complain to her boss?
“I get a wife bonus and I deserve it, so STFU,” writes Polly Phillips in the New York Post. The 32-year-old SAHM and wife of a petroleum engineer and receives a five-figure bonus “that I’m proud to receive for putting his career before my own, and keeping our lives together,” she points out.
“The wife bonus gives me not only financial freedom, but freedom from guilt too,” Phillips adds. “We have a joint account, and before we started the system, I was reluctant to spend our money on myself, even though my husband insisted he was happy for me to. Now that I have a quantifiable amount to treat myself with, I don’t feel guilty doing so.”
Furthermore, “to put those (dirty) minds at rest—the size of my bonus has nothing to do with my performance in the kitchen or the bedroom. It’s entirely dependent on how my husband does at work, and how well his company performs.”
So let’s be real. A wife bonus is hardly some fair gesture in the name of feminism and equal rights. Any woman who is totally financially dependent on her husband is not his equal in a certain respect. I’m not denigrating what SAHMs do or don’t do. But please, let’s not pretend that a husband throwing some money at his wife for mopping the floor or changing a diaper is some grand egalitarian gesture. If anything, it only highlights the financial inequality within such a marriage.
And that’s OK—because hey, if that arrangement works well for some couples, who am I or you or anyone to say otherwise? What’s more, who said that equality of any sort—be it financial or sexual or intellectual or otherwise—is important to every union? Only one thing is most important in a marriage, and it isn’t money or sex.
