Rebels in White Gloves (41 page)

Betty could not, she discovered, make her husband happy. When her new family returned to New Jersey and bought the house she’d grown up in, her husband quickly came to despise it. “Every day he found something new that was wrong. He was the same with our children, constantly disappointed—harsh and judgmental, as his father had been. At the dinner table it was always, ‘Put your napkin in your lap; get your elbows off the table.’ I played referee, but it was an unpleasant place to be. He complained that it undermined him. He was right. It did.”

An animated woman, plump and pink-cheeked, Betty soon began to feel trapped and isolated. She tried to cheer herself up in a 1979 letter to her classmates—“My life revolves around kindergarten and nursery school, car pools and piano lessons, but I feel less frustrated than I did five years ago. Though some days are filled with trivia, I don’t feel sacrificed on the altar of motherhood.” Three months later she went to work part-time. “I realized it sounded awful to say you were bored raising your kids, but a lot of it was day-to-day drudgery. I needed an outlet outside the house. Mostly, I needed contact with adults besides my unhappy husband. I got a job at the newspaper, where for the first time in a long time I was not somebody’s mother or somebody’s wife. I felt part of the town, which I loved.”

As for so many of these women, it was Betty’s emergence into the world that gave her the perspective and financial means to alter, or survive alterations, in her private life. “Once I started to regain my self-confidence, I began to realize how unhealthy my marriage was. Every day, our house was growing more filled with tension. It didn’t matter what my husband got—it didn’t assuage his need. He just got more and more angry, which increasingly spilled out on me.”

Betty did not consider divorce. “I wasn’t going anywhere. I’d made a commitment, and I believe in fulfilling my obligations. I wanted to give my kids the best possible upbringing and thought it best to have two parents and the financial security of a marriage. Oh, in the long run, I
knew I couldn’t stay with my husband. But if we had to split, I wanted the kids to be older so I could get a full-time job. Then my husband met somebody else, and I didn’t have a choice anymore. Truly, it was a relief when he left.

“Divorce is awful, even if you’re getting out of a miserable circumstance. To divorce a lawyer is worst of all—he fought every step of the way.” So did Betty, who happened at the time to be helping a friend write a book about divorce and was alarmed by what she was learning about the way women get burned. Two years into the battle, her own lawyer erupted in anger: “He snapped at me, ‘What you need is a man to put you on your back where you belong.’ ” (He later denied saying any such thing.) By the time it was all over, Betty had won a judgment against him as well. In the end, she believes, she and her kids came out better than most. She had to leave the newspaper for a full-time job in public relations at a local hospital, which she didn’t love. “But it kept me in my community and available to my kids.”

Since the divorce, Betty’s ex-husband has had almost no relationship with his children. He did not attend his son’s high school graduation. Though he met his financial obligations, for long periods of time, he had no direct contact with his kids, though his office is a mile from the family’s home. “I was finished enough with him that he could no longer hurt me, but what he’s done to my kids has been abominable. It was hardest on Doug, who was eight and idealized his father; he had a tough adolescence. My daughter was eleven, and told me, ‘I’m glad he’s gone. I never liked him.’ The pain hit her later. But I think both, fundamentally, are okay. Doug and I went out to dinner one night before he left for college. He told me that he felt he had to grow up faster than his friends, that he had more responsibility at an earlier age and a more realistic view of life and expectations and that he was glad for that.”

Between 1960 and 1980, the divorce rate in America rose 250 percent. For that breakdown of the family, many have blamed feminism: Its rhetoric of fulfillment, they claim, subverted women’s natural inclination to place others’ needs above their own and substituted self-gratification, no matter the cost to their children. Feminism has actually promoted and celebrated the dissolution of marriage, in the view of some conservatives: Barbara Dafoe Whitehead finds evidence of a pro-divorce feminist
culture in such books as Ivana Trump’s memoirs, which, she argues, commends divorce as a technique for self-improvement, like a poetry course or a trip to the spa.

The argument is odd, and not only for the obvious reason that Ivana—like many of Hillary Clinton’s classmates—did not elect to be dumped by her husband. It is odd also because divorce is almost never the act of casual self-indulgence the defenders of family values pretend, a fact many must surely recognize from their own broken marriages. In the many sorrowful tales of divorce in the class of ’69, few resemble the cavalier, untroubled gesture that has become the cliché. Most of these women were lonely and wretched for years before leaving, or being left by, their husbands. They were racked with impossible questions: Could she mend his happiness? What would harm the children least? Was giving herself up to duty a way to avoid responsibility for her own life?

To see the divorce boom as a consequence of feminism betrays as well a shallow sense of history. From the nation’s beginnings, as rugged individualists lit out for the territories in search of wealth and freedom, America has been “the place where husband and wife often split,” as John Locke wrote at the end of the seventeenth century. The divorce rate has risen for three centuries at a fairly steady pace, doubling at the turn of the twenteith century, as it would again in the sixties.

It is true that first-wave feminists fought against laws that made a woman her husband’s property and gave him alone the prerogative to sever the contract and claim custody of the children, and that temperance activists fought for a woman’s right to divorce a drunk. It is also true that second-wave feminism helped women secure the financial capacity to leave and raised their consciousness about the limits to forbearance. But the rise in divorce has also been impelled by a commercial culture that continuously stimulates an appetite for the new, and by changes in the economy that have blurred the very purpose of marriage: With ever more domestic services available for purchase, and with most women earning their own wages, men have ceased to need wives to cook their meals or mend their clothes and women have ceased needing husbands to support them. At the same time, as extended families and communities have loosened their ties, marriage has increasingly been expected to fulfill all needs for intimacy and companionship—an impossible, often fatal, burden.

Feminists have in fact often opposed social changes that made divorce easier, like the no-fault laws that many argued would help impoverish women and children. Most such laws eliminated or radically abbreviated alimony, as if women like Betty Demy could quickly match their husbands’ earning power—even though they had set aside their own career advancement for years to raise kids and even though they had lost their most valuable common property: the joint investment in their husband’s career assets. After divorce, the private inequalities in such marriages become social inequalities, with the husband’s household much richer and the wife’s much poorer.

Betty’s divorce is not atypical: Fathers (and their money) often disappear. A third of the children of divorce see their fathers just once a week and a third not at all. In 1995, half of the 5.3 million fathers who were supposed to did not pay the child support they owe, reneging on $34 billion to 23 million kids. The success of the women’s movement was undoubtedly as much a consequence of the collapse of this paternal responsibility as its cause. As women came to see the fragility of the institution that had traditionally sheltered them, they came to see as well the necessity of securing their own independent income.

In the Wellesley class of ’69, those who failed to secure such financial independence invariably suffered the toughest divorces, while those who were the principal breadwinners had much greater leverage and latitude in their choices. Susan Alexander and Nancy Young both had violence in their marriages, but because they were also their family’s wage earners, they had the wherewithal to leave. Others in the class, also financially self-sufficient in their marriages, have managed what can only be called successful divorces. Newspaper publisher Catherine Shen’s divorce cost her a lot: She had far more assets, which in California were treated as community property and equally shared. But, for her son’s sake, “I was willing to spend whatever it took to preserve the peace. His father now lives a mile away and we get along better than we ever did before the divorce.” Fashion model Michelle Lamson was also the money-maker in her family at the time of her divorce, which came not long after she adopted a baby boy; on the day she brought him home, her husband disappeared for the night, explaining the next day that “it was all too much for him.” A few months later, he left her for another woman. As her ex-husband, he has been a devoted father, seeing Nicholas every
weekend, calling him every day, spending Christmas with the family. “I don’t think he’d have been such a good father if we’d stayed married,” says Michelle. “Nicholas has thrived.”

That the children of divorce suffer less if they do not end up poor is obviously true. Beyond that, it is hard to assess how the kids of the broken marriages in the class of ’69 have fared; their mothers’ optimistic testimony reflects some unmeasurable mixture of truth and wishful thinking. In their usual fashion, these women have foraged among the countless studies for insight, cringing at those that find kids of divorce more prone to substance abuse, depression, and trouble in school, relieved by those that find them faring as well as those in intact families if their family income is adequate and their mothers are well educated and their fathers remain involved. All worry deeply for their children.

Mary Day Kent, ’69, was her family’s breadwinner. In 1971, she was living in Philadelphia and working for the American Friends Service when her boyfriend moved in. Eight years later, “because I was pregnant and my mother was weeping,” they got married. After her son’s birth at her midwife’s farm, Mary went back part-time to the Friends Peace Committee, working on human rights in Latin America. She earned little, but it had to serve: Mary’s husband spent his time putting out a newsletter promoting bicycle riding. Until they had children, Mary did not object to subsidizing her husband’s work. “Then money becomes one of those things that is suddenly much more important. When our kids were young and we were broke, it was a source of great stress to be living with someone who could have helped out and just never got around to it. It was always going to happen any moment. He would have had to work just twenty-five hours a week to ease the enormous financial pressure on me.”

A number of Mary’s classmates have landed in similar circumstances: supporting husbands whose higher consciousness or free spirit required a life outside the system. Johanna Branson never minded that her husband, Jock, didn’t get a bachelor’s degree, but she was bothered by “his lack of interest in preparing himself to support his family, and that he managed to shed that traditional imperative without shouldering domestic responsibility. I spent a lot of time when my kids were little chafing, wanting to work more. I’d have to get home by midafternoon, then try to work when they were in bed. I was exhausted and sick all the time.”

Mary Day Kent was fortunate to have good subsidized day care at her workplace; she could nurse her kids at work and watch them play in the courtyard, and because she set her own schedule, she could take them to the doctor or attend a school play. “My husband wasn’t willing to take on those responsibilities any more than he was willing to get a job, and my experience was that when he was taking care of the kids, he would try to combine that with lots of other things. He wasn’t giving them full attention. I felt I was carrying 95 percent of the load. I had to make all the decisions about their schools and get them to do their homework. I had to arrange and pay for summer camp. I had to fight to get him to do any household chores.”

“Marrying down,” in Mary’s case, did not turn out to be a liberating choice. “When I was young, I had vowed I would not get into a conventional marriage, feeling that if I married a high-powered man with lots of goals, he’d make all the decisions and I’d never make my own. I way overdid it. We both were terribly unhappy for a very, very long time. I got counseling and suggested marriage counseling, because it seemed the right thing to do. My husband didn’t want to do it. Frankly, by that time I didn’t either. I couldn’t have stayed with him. I would not have been able to stand it. After ten years of marriage, when our kids were ten and five, we got divorced. My mother was heartbroken. But at one point she said to me, ‘Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to push you into marriage. It didn’t provide you security after all.’

“I have no doubt that we made the right decision, but I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the devastating impact that divorce has on children, even under good circumstances. My kids did not have to move. They see their father frequently. Their economic circumstances, if anything, improved: My husband does not give me child support, but I don’t have to support him anymore. But my ten-year-old son’s academic work suffered. He was extremely depressed and had lots of counseling. He’s a progressive and sensitive kid, and right now he’s doing well in a special arts high school. But I cross my fingers to say that he is through it. I just hope maybe he’ll make it to college and get a self-supporting career.”

When I first met Kris and Jeff Rogers in the spring of 1994, their family seemed proof that a marriage could be truly equal, granting both partners
a chance for a deep, sustained relation with their children and for a dedicated working life. Like Bill and Hillary Clinton’s, theirs was a political marriage, though not in the cynical sense that is usually meant; their alliance was not simply a way to aggrandize their individual power but a foundation from which to pursue joint aspirations that were public as well as private. It was, as Jeff said at Kris’s swearing in as U.S. attorney, a genuine “life partnership,” a fair sharing of responsibilities and sacrifices and rewards.