Not long ago, The New York Times reported a list of “money disorders” linked to our economy. Overspending. Underspending (hoarding); serial borrowing (we all know what that is); financial enabling (too much money forked over to adult kids); and so forth. Stars like Wynona Judd (overspending), admitted to once buying too many cars and Harleys, but doesn’t anymore.  

But “financial infidelity” caught my eye: “Cheating on a spouse by spending and lying about it.”

Oh dear: Is that a disorder?  If I told my spouse what, say, a new ski helmet costs (which I won’t buy, but still, mine is a little shaky on my head), he’d wonder about my sanity, not to mention the new goggles required to fit over that ski helmet. I repeat: I’m not doing it, so don’t call Richard and tell him I’m cheating on him).

Who reports back to a spouse what she spends? Unless you’re married to a guy who knows–really knows– retail, what woman in her right mind tells her spouse, over a pizza, “Darling, guess what? The bag our daughter wants has been reduced to a $125 from $450.”? Most men I know don’t see $125 as a bargain for anything but a new bicycle, but most girls have peer pressure going on that, whether we like it or not, means something to them. (My stepdaughter and I joke that while we happily wear faux Uggs bought from Costco, what we we get her daughter Emily are the real ones. Why? Because she wouldn’t be caught dead in ours.) Does a man who hasn’t bought a shirt for himself since the Vietnam war know what a nice dress shirt costs?  (I tear off tags when I buy my husband clothes, even on final sale, financially unfaithul wretch that I am. Otherwise he wouldn’t wear them. And we wouldn’t be able to return them. And he’d wear nothing other than the Michigan sweatshirt our grandson Adam gave him when he went off to college, the one that’s now permanently stained with coffee, red wine, and chicken grease.

 I mean look, I’m all for codifying emotional problems—like Grief, for instance—the newest prospective disorder on the DSM’s to-do list. Yes, let’s give more support and counseling to those who feel they’re supposed to be up-and-at- ‘em after that one-year mark we traditionally allow for mourning! But private spending is not a disorder, unless of course you’re Bernie Madoff..  If it’s not hurting anybody, back off and pay for it and stop naming names. And just for fun, ask any cosmetics, jewelry, clothing or bedding store salesperson the number of ways women divide their purchases among credit cards, cash, debit cards and gift certificates. I’ve done that before, and it’s a field of its own, this Byzantine divvying process: As one saleswoman at Bed Bath and Beyond told me, “Hey, it’s the only way to get decent towels and sheets.” Who wants to report back on one’s genius cost-cutting savvy every time she purchases soaps and books? Being discreet, in retail as in love, isn’t deceit. It’s called privacy.  If we decide to call it infidelity, then most every woman I know is a harlot. 

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I know men aren’t thriving right now, for a host of reasons beginning with the economy and including a dramatic sea change in social structure. But when coverlines (and here I mean like the Atlantic’s) undermines one gender’s success by linking it to the other’s failure, they’re playing an old power game that women have no interest in: The If–you’re- not- one- up, you’re-one-down idea of power.  For one thing, women are not at the top of their game just yet: It’s worth remembering how very few women are really at the top (for more about this, see Facebook C.O.O. Sheryl Sandberg’s wonderful TED talk on YouTube). And while women may be outnumbering men in the workforce, they aren’t being paid the same salaries as men.  As it stands,  women will reach the age of sixty and have accumulated a million dollars less than men of sixty who have had exactly the same job.

So we may be getting jobs, but without pay parity, we’re hardly knocking men out of the water financially.  

But the main reason I hate equating women’s success with men’s downfall is that we can take little joy in claiming what we’ve won—the ability to make a living and send kids to school; the capacity to get by without a man’s putting a roof over our heads; the thrill of autonomy and independence–if it’s at the expense of men. The equation pits us against one another, as though we’re taking men’s jobs, gleefully triumphing over our lovers and husbands. We’re not. Yes, we’re competing in the workplace, but competition isn’t sex war. Framing it this way means we have to hide our pleasure or, worse, not get any, from our achievement. So we have to ignore those old, frightened inner voices telling us, “Don’t change the old ways. Don’t beat him at tennis or anything else. Don’t do well.  If you do, you’ll be punishing men.” That’s the formula for a backlash, as well as a way of thinking that, because it punishes both genders at once, we’re just going to have to exorcise.

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I’d expected some resistance to the pleasure option, since, if marriage isn’t sobering, sanctified, and serious, what is? Ever since the Puritans turned the pursuit of happiness into a frenzy of righteous self-improvement, Americans have opted for betterment over pleasure. We are suspicious of enjoyment for its own sake (pleasure has to improve our blood sugar levels). It’s as though what’s good for you long ago won out over what feels good. But what was special about these readers who chose what we called “The Pleasure Marriage” is that, when I interviewed them individually some time later, they were still having fun. Their marriages, of the ones I was able to find out about, were the happiest.

Often the busiest couples made fun the highest priority. An Oregon woman wrote, “Yes, we work. Yes, we have a little girl. Yes, we care about her. But yes, we go away together, without her, as long as a week.” The price this wife pays for fun with her husband is the criticism of friends and family. “It’s as if,” wrote another Oregon woman who did the same, “having kids is incompatible with having a terrific time without them. Our friends who have spent the last fifteen years putting their children first every second feel very righteous about it–and outraged at us–but we see they’re not so happy now. We are.”

At the risk of sanctifying fun the way we’ve sanctified marriage itself,  let’s face it: people are fleeing marriage. And women are leading this flight. So, if more women married for fun (and risked the family’s and the culture’s censure) is it possible that more women would want to stay married? If more women had a great time with their husbands, would divorce stats—way over half of all divorces are initiated by wives—change?  If pleasing wives were put first on a list of Things to Do, would “wife” become a sexier word?

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“That’s terrific,” I said.

“What’s so terrific? I never see her.”

So I got to thinking about the difference between a man’s desire for more “space” and a woman’s. We ‘ll readily call his “commitmentphobia,” “intimacy problems” and “terror of dependence.” We (make that I) champion hers as “autonomy,”  “independence” and “growth.” I think it’s because for so long, a man’s “I need more space,” was a creepy code phrase for “I’m outtahere.”  A woman, though, tends to mean that she needs more independence, more room for growth and self-expansion within the relationship. 

Yet Elliott was nailing something that he thinks women don’t cop to, and that’s ambivalence.  The big pullback that comes just as you begin to become sexually and emotionally exclusive. The raging contradictory, simultaneous push and pull we experience with  growing intimacy. We, the relationship mavens, the ones with no intimacy problems, don’t admit readily to pulling back in a relationship, to feeling overwhelmed by the demands of love and running from them. “He just wants his dinner cooked, is all,” we say, when a man complains that we’re never home, and blame even our own raging terror of engulfment on his man-centricity, on his supposed  expectation that well nurture and maintain the relationship without giving back same.

Ambivalence plays out for women in weird ways. Some women , like Joan, get very very busy. Some take up marathon running. Some even get sick. (“For three nights in a row after I got engaged to Elliott, Joan says, “I threw up. It wasn’t the flu. It was terror. ”) I have a friend who gets a migraine whenever the topic of lifelong monogamy comes up with her lover.

Some women suddenly lose all feeling for the men they love; a numbness comes over them that disguises the emotional wall they’re building to protect them from love.

Some pull back by pushing too hard. “If you don’t want to get married now, then let’s just forget it,” a friend told her lover after a great weekend, even though it was she who wanted to keep to a weekends-only schedule with him. She’d just suddenly felt too close, too involved, too needy.

You’ve got to know how you react to the simultaneous push and pull of love: how that contradiction makes you, specifically, feel. Then you’ve got to know how you act in response to that contradiction. The acknowledgment alone will alleviate the migraines, the flu symptoms, the numbness.  If your response to ambivalence is to sign up for French lessons, and Spanish lessons, and yoga-instructor courses, you should know it. We’re as entitled to the fight-or-flight response as men are. But we can’t pretend it isn’t operating, just because we supposedly want relationships above all else.

Joan admitted she was afraid of engulfment, and gave up French. “Pas plus,” she assured Elliott. And he took up tennis. And, he stopped calling her a commitmentphobe.

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First, notice how The Atlantic entitled its two major articles this year regarding women’s ascent in the workplace and the shifts in the marriage landscape. The first was “The End of Men?”, and this one, “All The Single Ladies.” Both are Scare Titles, reminiscent of newspaper headlines in the 80s that sent those women hoping to find husbands OUT of the workplace and back into the home, while  recapitulating the preposterous idea that if women do well, men plummet. I wouldn’t have thought The Atlantic would have succumbed to this tiresome approach, but there you are. Let’s be clear: Women’s rise in the workplace is hardly The End of Men, any more than men’s historic dominance in the workplace ever signified The End of Women. Moreover, the fact that so many women are in the workplace doesn’t, alas, mean more women are running things there. As Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, laments, “Women are not making it to the top.” In corporations, women in C level jobs top out at 16 percent….”and the numbers are going in the wrong direction.”  In fact, sometimes I think that more women in the workforce is a bit of a practical joke, giving the top brass , overwhelmingly men, more women to serve the companies’ needs… but not run the companies.

 And while you’re absorbing the fact that yes, traditional marriage is pretty much over; and yes, we are now a country dominated by singles of both genders; and yes, we women can’t count on husbands necessarily to be the financial providers they once could be counted on to be; remember that choosing a man for reasons other than financial ones is what women have been demanding for over two decades. Women are the ones, after all, who have been leaving traditional marriage in droves—three quarters of all divorces have been initiated by wives for at least fifteen years. Breaking from that tradition is not bad for many women, but good.

 Next time: Why this social upheaval is good for both women and men, and how we will be told otherwise.  

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 The front page review in Today’s New York Times Book Review section is of Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard who has written brilliantly on linguistics, says that violence in our era has decreased more than it ever has, and for a host of reasons– one of which is the effect of women. Noting this, the reviewer, Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton, writes, “The empowerment of women does, Pinker argues, exercise a pacifying influence, and the world would be more peaceful if women were in charge.”

Yes, we’d be more peaceful, certainly in terms of physical violence. But we do have our ways.  I get nervous when I hear the Women Are Peaceful argument, not because we aren’t, but because I worry about  being held hostage to our peaceable natures the way we were held hostage for so long to the “Would You Let A Woman Be in Charge of Pushing The Button?” question that impugned our decisionmaking powers because we menstruate.  Our natures could be held against us in just the same way using the peace-loving theory: “A woman leader? How will she handle Afghanistan? Iran! Iraq! Places where violence rules and only men can understand….?”  you get the drift.

We (“The American People”) always gravitate toward the tough. Even when it’s just a front, as with George W. Bush, who was decidedly  ineffective against Al Quaeda, whereas our reasonable and peaceable President Obama has been mightily effective.  The “soft on terrorism” accusation against Democrats, though, is just the kind of unreasonable brush that will paint us for our peaceable natures, if we’re not careful to make it very clear that, like child care and housework, World Peace isn’t just a woman’s job. 

I’m not for All Women All The Time in any case, any more than I am for all men all the time. Which brings me to the story that my friend and former agent, Joni Evans told me. Not long ago, she heard an interview with Ted Turner by Pat Mitchell, who had worked for him for decades at CNN. Turner,  known to generously acknowledge the strong women in his life, observed that the world would be a much better place if, for the next 100 years, women were the heads of state everywhere.

“Everyone clapped,” Joni says. But a day later, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stood up and said, in her wonderful way, Not so fast. ‘If you think that the world will be better off with women as their only leaders,” she said, “you have forgotten high school.’”

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It’s weirdly fun, on the cusp of Banned Books Week, to look at the titles of books that have been banned: Gone with the Wind; To Kill a Mockingbird; Beloved; The Great Gatsby; The Catcher in the Rye; and, of course, Ulysses.  And the bylines: The authors of the aforementioned, along with Voltaire and Defoe, Chaucer and Aristophanes, Rousseau and Paine, Pascal and Steinbeck and Hemingway and Faulkner and Twain.

Okay, “fun” may not be quite the right word (although Brave New World was banned as recently as 1980 for making “promiscuous” sex “look like fun”). But can’t you just see censorship committee members, one more sanctimonious than the next, poring over page after page to find a “filthy” word or an “indecent” scene? Oh, the outrage these men must suffer in their noble venture! The vicious arguments they must have over the subtle differences between “lewd” and “obscene”;  between “filthy” and “indecent”!  What a responsibility! And all to protect us from…..from what?  Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was banned for its “troubling ideas about race relations, man’s relationship to God, African history and sexual relations,” all of which troubling ideas are the reasons she wrote it.

The first book I wrote was banned. Walmart took one look at The Erotic Silence of the American Wife (pictured above) and refused to carry it, calling it “a dirty book,” even though its spokesperson admitted that they hadn’t actually read it. The cover of the hardcover edition, a lovely black-and-white stock photograph of a woman’s bare back, is the reason it was deemed “dirty.” KMart followed suit.  I was stunned—and angry.

Rebecca West called banning books “a practice as indefensible as infanticide.” As a new breed of the Super Righteous begins an insidious, rabid new form of censorship—actually attempting to alter famous authors’ own words and to insert the amended ones into books retroactively–the idea of murder does cross one’s mind. Not of babies, though. Of censors.

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So, who is narrating the story of this photo in Victoria’s Secret window in Fairfield, Ct.?  (We added the type to illustrate where it might have been more appropriately shown) Odd  that the moment when women are powering ahead, storefronts and magazine covers  feature skinny young girls not only made  up to look like fashionable adults, but posing in a  way that clearly suggests  subjugation—as  does the girl above. Whose viewpoint is this, do  you think? Who’s telling girls about to inherit a legacy of unprecedented power that their  REAL power lies not in their education and their upcoming careers, but rather, in looking  like baby hookers,  pouting and bruised and with their arms up in their air as if in chains?  Are storeowners telling this story so they  can sell underwear? Perhaps. Photographers,  who want to make their mark? Maybe.

But come on, folks, it’s endemic. Who’s so scared of women’s power that all they can do is send messages to young girls that say, Forget about it, girls: What you’re good for is sex. JC Penney and Forever 21 are right now offering them tshirts that say, “I’m Allergic to Algebra” and “I’m Too Pretty to do Homework.” Cute?  Innocent? Not when you remember who is coming home with more bachelors and masters degrees. Not when you know who is the majority of the workforce. Ask yourself, Who doesn’t like those facts?

If we’re not interested in who is urging this role on girls, who is urging them to be anorexic and provocative and passive, we shouldn’t be surprised that even the youngest teenagers are gaining popularity by giving fellatio at parties to as many boys as possible. (Have you heard the new one? It’s called “Pterodactyling,” and, like its sad little cousin, Rainbowing, young girls do it to get “street cred.”)

When girls are afraid to be round, as women really are, they’re also afraid to be women; they’re afraid to be imperfect; they’re afraid grow up.  So who’s teaching them to back off from being round, powerful, assertive women?  Who’s telling them to shut up and back off? Who’s urging them to become underweight and ill and to think of themselves as nothing other than–oh how tired and tiring this is–sex objects?  And—really, please, ask yourself not only who, but WHY?

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Nevertheless, I said..  Why? And what’s this “obey” business?  

We exchanged ideas. He was patient. “So: you want a Lucy Stoner marriage, is that it?” he said. Thankfully, since I didn’t know what a “Lucy Stoner marriage” was, he went on to tell me about his early brief marriage to a writer named Hagar Wilde that ended on friendly terms. “We had a Lucy Stoner Marriage,” he confided. They had lived in Greenwich Village, he told me, but she had insisted on a separate studio, one outside their home, for her work. (Hagar, by the way, wrote the famous screwball comedy with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, “Bringing Up Baby,” which I later decided was successful because she had a place of her own.) I hadn’t heard about his first marriage, of Hagar, or of a “Lucy Stoner marriage,” whatever that was, until then. He also told me that he and my mother did not have a Lucy Stoner marriage.

 So I asked. What’s this Lucy Stoner Marriage you and mom don’t have?  Is it improper? Illegal?  A girl could hope.

It turned out that he was referring to the marriage of the 19^th century  abolitionist and suffragist, Lucy Stone, to fellow activist Henry Blackwell on May 1, 1855. They wrote their vows at a time when women’s rights were not yet remotely on the horizon—sixty-four years before women got the vote. It was also ninety years after something called “The Rights of Persons” appeared in the commentaries of Sir William Blackstone, reiterating the law, which said that “…the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage….” and meant that wives were the property of their husbands: they couldn’t own or control their own property, serve on juries, hold elective office, sign a contract, have custody of their children or control their money, even if it was money they earned.

Lucy Stone’s and Henry Blackwell’s magnificent marriage statement, a staggering insistence on equality despite the law (and she kept her own name) was read aloud at their wedding ceremony by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higgins, who, to his credit, was so impressed that he made copies and distributed it to the local clergy should other couples decide to use it.  The ceremony must surely have given the guests the vapors.

My father got hold of these vows soon after our discussion, and gave them to me, whom he thereafter referred to from time to time as his “Lucy Stoner daughter.” Read them, and be reminded of what Lucy and Henry did for all of us.

Lucy Stone’s Marriage Statement

 While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage, as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess. We protect especially against the laws which give to the husband:

1. The custody of the wife’s person.

               2.   The exclusive control and guardianship of their children.

               3.    The sole ownership of her personal, and use of her real estate, unless previously settled upon her, or placed in the hands of trustees, as in the case of minors, lunatics, and idiots.

             4.    The absolute right to the product of her industry.

            5.    Also against laws which give to the widower so much larger and more permanent interest in the property of his deceased wife, than they give to the widow in that of the deceased husband.

           6.    Finally, against the whole system by which “the legal existence of the wife is suspended during marriage,” so that in most states, she neither has a legal part in the choice of her residence, nor can she make a will, nor sue or be sued in her own name, nor inherit property.

We believe that personal independence and equal human rights can never be forfeited, except for crime; that marriage should be an equal and permanent partnership, and so recognized by law; that until it is so recognized, married partners should provide against the radical injustice of present laws, by every means in their power.

Of all the vows I’ve heard– and God knows I’ve heard many, delivered on mountaintops and in ski lodges, vows that became singalongs and hugathons, words written by the church, Leonard Cohen, or by couples themselves; words uttered by straight couples and gay couples; young couples and old couples; couples who were high, and couples who were low–these are the most meaningful to me. They speak not just to one man’s and one woman’s defiant, passionate intention to treat each other as equals at a time when the law forbade such a thing, but to their uncanny understanding that enduring love depends on it.  I’m proud to have been a Lucy Stoner daughter. And I’m proud to be a Lucy Stoner wife.

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 One of women’s greatest quests is an internal one: a search for self-knowledge, self-authority, self-expansion, self-esteem. While this focus on “self” may sound idle—or, as the culture has long claimed, “selfish”–to those who see political activism as solely external, it’s clear to me that this quest is what will determine our monetary future. Only if each of us understands our own psyche, as well as the collective psyche of women over time, will we have mojo for change. The selfless woman, heralded still as being “good”, will never feel good enough inside herself to make a big difference outside.  In the words of the poet Adrienne Rich:

 “Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge in women, is more than a search for identity. It is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.” 

Our common experience of the self, is that it can be submerged, diminished, even lost. When we speak to our male lovers and companions about the experience  of “losing” ourselves—in family, in love, in relationships—they give us that uncomprehending look: “How do you lose a self?”

Ask women with eating disorders about diminished selves. Ask women whose marriages have hurled them into depression. Ask any woman: I don’t know a single one who doesn’t feel that her self is a mutable, precarious thing; one who doesn’t worriy from time to time about her self-esteem, her self-regard, her sense that she has the right to nurture her self and expand it without being called “selfish.” One of our national treasures, Gloria Steinem, whose special on Channel 13 this week focused on the extraordinary external work she has done throughout her many years of fighting for women’s rights, wrote in her book, Moving Beyond Words, about turning away from her self to the point where she felt burned out and totally drained. “….I began thinking about the need to link self-esteem to revolution…..I’d come to know the stories of brave and talented women of all classes, ages, races, sexualities, and abilities, too many of whom assumed they were somehow “not good enough,” even though they were performing miraculous feats under hard circumstances.”

We will only feel good enough when we recognize the importance of attending to our selves as carefully and lovingly as we tend to our mates, our children, our parents, our inlaws, our friends, the needy; and as passionately as we for social change. This doesn’t mean giving short shrift to our usual concerns, it  just means giving ourselves equal time. Equal time for ourselves. So we can feel good enough to insist once and for all on equal pay.

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