Feminism, marriage, and equality

Lately I have been reading a wonderful book called Composing a Life. The author is Mary Catherine Bateson, who is the daughter of Margaret Mead and who also has a rich life story in her own right. The book is about how we — especially women — weave together the many strands of our experience, interests, education, and culture to “compose” our lives in ways that do not always follow societal expectations about how lives are made. There’s so much in the book that resonates with me, I have been note-taking in the margins and marking some chapters to reread and explore more slowly.

One of the chapters in particular, Chapter 6, speaks strongly to lessons I’ve learned in marriage. Bateson says that in American culture, we are so fixated on equality that we have warped its definition into something very narrow. Because we hold so strongly that people must be equal, we force symmetry where there is none (as in the case of turning a corporation into a “person” for legal purposes); because we believe so strongly in equality, we sometimes assume that relationships are hierarchical and therefore unequal (boss dominates employees, one partner must be dominant and one submissive, etc), when actually there may be more interdependence there than the positions suggest. The chapter resonates so much with me because I have found from my own experience that symmetry and equality are not only false, but impossible, expectations when it comes to a marriage.

I used to think of Erik’s and my relationship in terms of how much equality and symmetry we could achieve. This never worked, and frequently made me unhappy. We can’t be symmetrically equal in the 50-50 way I used to want — it’s not just biology, though I’ve come to realize men and women do have real physiological differences — because we are totally different people. Erik is steady and methodical. He prefers to concentrate his attention on one task at a time, and he prefers to leave housework to be done in short, intense bursts. He naturally gravitates toward long-term planning, like parceling out our income into savings and investments, and keeping an eye on our health insurance. If he had his way, we might socialize a couple of times per month. I am impulsive and successfully slapdash. I enjoy piling on projects to my to-do list, and I go crazy if I don’t keep up with the housework in small, light, regular increments. I tend toward short-term planning, as in home decorating or meal preparation, and I like to see friends and family and have guests over all the time. Because of these differences, we end up taking on different tasks. We discuss everything, in greater or lesser detail — I’m not ignorant of the finances, and he knows our home-decor and garden plans — but responsibilities are largely divided, as in the case of financial matters, or else alternated, as in the case of day-to-day cooking.

Whenever I’ve grown frustrated by our lack of symmetry, it’s been because Erik has not been behaving just like me — because clearly mine is the right way! I fall into 50-50-or-nothing thinking: “I did dishes twice yesterday, now he should do them today!” I start thinking of our activities as an equation that needs balance. Insert two loads of laundry here, reap two loads of laundry next week. But we’re not machines with such clearly defined inputs and outputs; there can be no simple measure of equality because human beings are such complex creatures. Whenever I’m irritated with Erik’s “failings”, I remember that the inequality is built in. We’re different, therefore we cannot be the same. Sometimes this calms me down, and sometimes it pisses me off. I love Chapter 6 in Bateson’s book because she points to this so-called inequality as a source of strength, and when I’m not in a snit about having to do chores when I don’t want to, I see her point. Whenever I aspire to equality, I get upset, and I should, because it’s impossible. But when I recognize the complementarity in our relationship, I’m grateful for our differences, and I value them because they make the relationship work as well as it does.

Erik has always been more comfortable with our “unequal” relationship than I have, which I think speaks not only to our divergent personalities, but to the general gender inequality that pervades our society. I haven’t asked Erik about this, but it’s conceivable that one reason he accepts my dependence on his money is that he grew up thinking men needed to be selfless supporters and breadwinners. And I know for certain that the reason I get mad when I do more daily housework than he does (in spite of the fact that he, when he does get around to it, does more and tackles more unpleasant tasks) is that I’m all too aware of how women have been oppressed by confinement to domestic tasks. Moreover, thanks to the gender roles of my upbringing, I tend to feel that it’s laudable that Erik does housework at all, and I (albeit with some ambivalence) accept his financial support because it replays the relationship my parents had — and thus my own childhood/adolescent relationship to household breadwinning, which is that someone else (a man) did it.

As a feminist, I’ve been trained (and have chosen) to get angry when I see a woman doing all the housework (or otherwise carrying much of the responsibility) in a relationship, whether it’s me, my mom, my sister, or my friend. As a partner in a relationship, though, this anger has been both constructive and deleterious. My sensitivity to inequality has spurred me to speak up, initiate discussions, and resist my tendency to take on more and more obligations. But it has also led me to see injustice where there is none, to complain and feel martyred when it’s not called for, and to cast Erik in the role of Typical Insensitive Man when anyone can see he isn’t. I think in general, I’d rather have the stop-oppressing-me reflex than not, but it’s important to recognize that it is not always helpful.

Likewise, one of the failings of earlier women’s movements is that for so many years they defined equality for women as being “just like men.” Women are not just like men, and thoughtful feminists now have recognized this failing and are trying to figure out what to put in its place. What does equality look like when it doesn’t mean “just like men”? Can we, as a society, celebrate complementarity as a virtue? Of course I’m not criticizing older feminists; they fought for and gained many changes that really were long overdue. Equal pay for equal work? Yes, please! Not letting men control every household, company, government, and social standard? Rock on! But “just like men” gets sticky when discussing issues where it’s absurdly clear that women are not like men. Childbearing — what do we do about that? How about breastfeeding? Some women celebrate the unique female capacity to do both, some celebrate their liberation by choosing not to bear children or, if they do, to not breastfeed them. Are these steps forward? I think so. But we still haven’t figured out what a truly free, equal (without false notions of equality) society would look like, and that’s something we need to be constantly discussing. As Erik and I do, constantly, in our marriage!