Dwight Cass
07/01/2004
The campus culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, when politically correct university students tried to become the arbiters of intellectual debate, often swept away the good with the bad. In hindsight, it seems that the student protesters (many of whom were women) who shouted down scientists and authors like Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson during their lectures on sociobiology and evolutionary science did not do themselves any favors. Their anger was understandable: tomes of reductionist doggerel meant to provide genetic exculpation for bad behavior by men were at that point littering the best-seller lists. But the campus uproar over these books eventually raised such a clamor that it largely obscured more credible work.
Today, this furor has receded,
and the more dogmatically reductionist ideas about genetics and behavior have
become little more than fodder for The New Yorker’s cartoonists. This is
fortunate, since talented biologists, sociobiologists and evolutionary
psychologists are doing important work on the origins of our expectations about
power and gender roles in relationships. Biology is clearly not the only factor
(and few believe it to be the dominant one) in setting these expectations, but
the evidence suggests it does play a part. If so, it may help explain the tenaciousness of the problems that doom so many relationships between affluent women and less affluent men. Our beliefs about the roles we should play in a marriage seem at times to be almost primal. Indeed, when we cannot reconcile belief with relationship, it is often the latter that we discard, rather than the former.
This is visible in the esteem issues suffered by professional men from nonaffluent backgrounds in their relationships with affluent women. These men, raised to be breadwinners, have been inculcated with the idea that career accomplishments are the best measure of their worth to themselves, their families and society. When they marry into a family that does not perceive success the same way, it can cause them enormous stress. Psychologist Lee Hausner tells of a surgeon at the top of his profession whose wife’s family did not respect him for his career accomplishments. This couple was unable to make the emotional investment that might have allowed them to reconcile their different values; the marriage eventually ended. Meanwhile, many women, even those of high professional and financial standing, will tacitly admit that they want their husbands to support them—a desire that may cause them to be dissatisfied with their spouses when they marry fiscal unequals.
This is not
an isolated problem. James E. Hughes Jr., an attorney and wealth issues advisor,
explains that, as wealth continues to become distributed more evenly between the
sexes (unlike, for example, in the early days of the 20th century, when it was
overwhelmingly held by men), these problems will, in fact, become more
prevalent.
Affluent women bear a heavy burden in these relationships. They
must find a way to respect their spouses despite the financial inequity and all
the social baggage that it entails. To succeed, they must be able to set the
money issues aside, and focus on the other types of capital each partner brings
to the relationship.
Since the problem is rooted in expectations concerning
each partner’s financial role in the marriage, we need to pay more attention to
how those expectations are formed—through personal experience, social and class
mores and perhaps even a bit of biology.
Jaqueline Merrill, a facilitator of
seminars for women and couples who herself is in relationship of this nature,
agrees, but believes the solution lies less in our stars than in ourselves. “I
tend to place more hope on the capacity of the individual to become conscious
than I do on sociological change,” she says. “I think it is very important for
people to see where the fossilized vestiges of earlier ideas about class and
class values exist, so they can move on.”
Dwight Cass
Editor-in-Chief