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>> 7 Part I Alimony Reflections Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (New York: Knopf, 2001), 3 Stacy and Tracy were lovers. They graduated from college, found fulltime teaching jobs at a local high school, and in a small ceremony attended by happy friends and family, committed to each other as life partners. The world looked bright. A year passed, the couple gave birth to a daughter, and like many young couples, Tracy and Stacy assumed they would equally share their daughter’s care. This they did during the first summer of her life. But in the fall, when Stacy and Tracy returned to full-time teaching, life proved more complicated than they supposed it would be. Household tasks multiplied with their daughter’s birth, and while the couple initially shared these chores, it was Tracy who took time off from work when the child’s sneezes and coughs, rashes, and ear infections precluded day care. A year passed and more. The couple bore a son, Stacy acquired a master’s degree and a nice salary increase, and Tracy quit her teaching job, planning to return when their son entered kindergarten. Four years later, Tracy did return to teaching, but took a part-time position. Life went on. Tracy continued to assume the majority of child care and household responsibilities, though no one much noticed. Stacy took an administrative position with the school district, 8 > 9 1 Who Cares about Alimony? In most households, someone is cleaning the toilet. Hardly anyone likes this job. And then there is the vacuuming, the laundering, the grocery shopping, the cooking, the bill paying, the dusting, the bed making. If the family includes children, these tasks multiply and new ones are added: the feeding,thebathing,themanagingofchildcareonsickdaysandsnowdays and regular school days that don’t match job hours, the homework supervising , the transporting to soccer and dance and medical appointments, the bedtime storytelling. Not all unpleasant tasks to be sure, but responsibilitiesthatdemandtimeandenergy ,oftendrivingprimarycaregiversinto part-time employment, employment gaps, and paid work that is flexible enough to accommodate family work. Meanwhile, the caregiver’s labor frees her spouse to participate in the paid economy as an “ideal worker” unshackled by primary home responsibilities.1 Teamwork thus allows the coupletoenjoytogetherahomewithchildrenandafamilywage. It’s a common story and a convenient one—at least so long as the partners’ commitment endures. But if affection fades, divorce may unmask the reality that teamwork has disparately impacted the spouses’ earning capacity. Over time, investments in family labor tend to reduce 10 > 11 destinies of man and woman. . . . [T]he domestic sphere . . . properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood.”7 Such candid expressions of separate-spheres ideology sound peculiar to most modern ears. Yet the ideology persists in more subtle forms, casting women as natural nurturers—warm, selfless, sensitive, relationship -focused, better purveyors of family care—and men as tough, competitive , and ambitious, natural breadwinners for whom nurturing is awkward and even unmanly.8 Most significantly, separate-spheres ideology underscores a gender script that continues to describe the division of labor in most contemporary marriages. Married women, even if they are full-time wage-earners, continue to assume primary caregiving responsibilities in the home. This gender script becomes more vivid when we return to a time when it was more openly expressed. In the 1950s, for example, the view that women belonged in the home was trumpeted in startlingly frank fashion. A woman’s “central function,” observed one sociologist of the day, “remains that of creating a life style for herself and for the home in which she is life creator and life sustainer.”9 As the anthropologist Margaret Mead explained, a female has two choices: either she proclaims herself “a woman, and therefore less an achieving individual, or an achieving individual and therefore less a woman.”10 The popular press of the day proclaimed the homemaker a wondrous creature [who] marries younger than ever, bears more babies and looks and acts far more feminine than the “emancipated” girl of the 1920’s or even ’30’s. Steelworker’s wife and Junior Leaguer alike do their own housework. . . . Today, if she makes an old-fashioned choice and lovingly tends a garden and a bumper crop of children, she rates louder hosannas than ever before.11 Such housewives were applauded as “feminine, women with truly feminine attitudes, admired by men for their miraculous, God-given, sensationallyuniqueabilitytowearskirts...

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