Ehrenreich - The Hearts of Men

A LSO BY B ARBARA E HRENREICH

with Deirdre English:

For Her Own Good:
150 Years of the Experts Advice to Women

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses:
A History of Women Healers

Complaints and Disorders:
The Sexual Politics of Sickness

with John Ehrenreich:

Long March, Short Spring:
The Student Uprising at Home and Abroad

The American Health Empire:
Power, Profits and Politics

ANCHOR BOOKS EDITIONS, 1983, 1984

Copyright 1983 by Barbara Ehrenreich

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Anchor Books/Doubleday in 1983.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ehrenreich, Barbara.
The hearts of men.
1. MenPsychology. 2. Sex role. 3. Marriage.
1. Title.
HQ1090.E36 1983 305.31 8245104
eISBN: 978-0-307-77904-5

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

This book was made possible by a Ford Foundation Award for Humanistic Perspectives on Contemporary Society and by a fellowship from the New York Institute for the Humanities. I thank the latter institution not only for financial support, but for the collegial environment it has provided me for the past two years.

At the beginning of this project I often feared that I was straying too far from the conventionaland, indeed, even feministwisdom about what has happened between men and women in the past couple of decades. Fortunately, a number of thoughtful people urged me to persistRichard Sennett, Marilyn Young, Frances Fox Piven, Ann Fergusen and Deirdre Englishand I thank them for their questions as well as their confidence in me. Along the way, Howard Gadlin, Joel Kovel, Joe Interrante and Jane OReilly took the time to help clear up some particularly baffling points and to suggest additional sources. Several friends were enlisted to read and comment on particular chapters: Peter Biskind, John Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess and Bob Fitch. I am especially thankful to Bill Leach, who read the entire manuscript in, more or less, one sitting, and to Patrick Merla, who did most of the typing. Both of them offered useful suggestions of both an editorial and substantive nature. Finally, I have had the good fortune to work once again with Loretta Barrett at Doubleday, who is not only an insightful and energetic editor, but a good friend. Needless to say, I sometimes ignored all these peoples advice, and that should account for any errors or lapses of judgment in what follows.

I would also like to thank Nancy Boensch for her contribution to the typing and her unfailing good humor. The librarians of the Nassau County Library System are to be commended for their courteous helpfulness in the face of many peculiar requests. Credit is also due to Rosa Ehrenreich and Benjamin Ehrenreich for providing refreshing distractions as well as loving support.

This book is dedicated to those people who came through when I needed themDiane Alexander, Deirdre English, Elizabeth Hess, Gloria Jacobs, Barbara Riddle and Ruth Russelland to the vision of community which they have helped keep alive for me.

Necessity, as well as instinct, sends the ladies pell-mell to the altar; it is only the secondary things, social pressure or conscience, that send the men.

Emily Hahn, 1956

The fact that men marry in precisely the same numbers as women do conceals a basic inequality of motivation: namely, that in the sort of marriage we have rather suddenly come to see as traditional, women need men much more than men need women. When I was growing up in the fifties, everyone acknowledged the battle of the sexes in which women held out for as long as possible, until, by dint of persuasion, sexual frustration or sudden pregnancy, they landed a man. From their side of the battle lines, men viewed the proceedings with a certain sarcastic detachment. For example, a 1958 article in Esquire described courtship with humorous references to the military theories of Field Marshal Rommel and offered the following account of a typical girls attempt to win an MRS degree:

College is four years, okay? A freshman dates everybody. She doesnt care. A sophomore dates in flurries. Now a junior is looking for real love. Shell go out three times with a boy who is a Possible. She may worry: there arent enough Possibles in her immediate circle of friends. So she gets interested in extra-curricular activities,

To a young woman of spirit, the battle of the sexes seemed to be a degrading exercise that was hardly worth the prize. From what I could tell of my mothers life, victory meant a life sentence to manual labor, relieved only by the intellectual challenge of family quarrels. Yet the grown men around me were, if anything, even more prone to bitterness, and fond of declaiming on the theme of marriage as a trap for men and a lifelong sinecure for women. Throughout my childhood I was mystified as to what forces propelled peopleespecially womeninto the battle of courtship and, beyond that, the prolonged hostilities of wedded life.

The answer, when it was finally revealed to me later in life, had as much to do with economics as biology. Women were, and to a large extent still are, economically dependent on men. After all, a man could live on his own. He might be lonely, unkempt and nostalgic for home-cooked food, but he would, more than likely, get by. A woman, on the other hand, would be hard pressed to make a living on her own at all. If she had spent her college years changing majors in pursuit of Probables, or her married life changing diapers, so much the worse; she could expect to enter the labor market as a saleswoman or a waitress earning something near the minimum wage. So what was at stake for women in the battle of the sexes was, crudely put, a claim on some mans wage. Both sexes, of course, were under intense social pressure to enter the fray and resolve it by settling down, but the penalities for failure were very different. The man who failed to marry or stay married might be judged a little odd; the woman might well be poor. In the eyes of the middle-class, mid-century world, he had dodged a responsibility, while she had missed the boat.

The fact that, in a purely economic sense, women need men more than the other way round, gives marriage an inherent instability that predates the sexual revolution, the revival of feminism, the me generation or other well-worn explanations for what has come to be known as the breakdown of the family. It is, in retrospect, frightening to think how much of our sense of social order and continuity has depended on the willingness of men to succumb in the battle of the sexes: to marry, to become wage earners and to reliably share their wages with their dependents. In fact, most of us require more comforting alternative descriptions of the bond between men and women. We romanticize it, as in the popular song lyrics of the fifties where love was an adventure culminating either in matrimony or premature death. Or we convince ourselves that there is really a fair and equal exchange at work so that the wages men offer to women are more than compensated for by the services women offer to men. Any other conclusion would be a grave embarrassment to both sexes. Women do not like to admit to a disproportionate dependence, just as men do not like to admit that they may have been conned into undertaking what one cynical male called the lifelong support of the female unemployed.