Wifework: What Marriage Really Means for Women

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Maushart assembles an overwhelming amount of data documenting how marriage has perpetuated inequities between husband and wife.'-Christian Science Monitor Daily Anti-prostitution feminists and even policymakers often ask sex workers whether we would have sex with our clients if we were not being paid. Work is thus re-inscribed as something so personally fulfilling you would pursue it for free. Indeed, this understanding is in some ways embedded in much anti-prostitution advocacy through the prevalence of unpaid internships in such organizations. Equality Now, a multimillion-dollar anti-prostitution organization, instructs applicants that their internships will be unpaid (adding that “we are unable to arrange housing or visas”). Ruhama advertises numerous volunteer roles that could easily be paid jobs. In 2013 Turn Off the Red Light, an Irish anti-prostitution NGO consortium, advertised for an intern who would not be paid the minimum wage. The result of these unpaid and underpaid internships is that the women who are most able to build careers in the women’s sector—campaigning and setting policy agendas around prostitution—are women who can afford to do unpaid full-time work in New York and London. In this context, it is hardly a surprise that the anti-prostitution movement as a whole has a somewhat abstracted view of the relationship between work and money. In the public eye, she's perhaps best known for serving as both secretary of labor and transportation. But outside of government, Elaine Chao has also held several private-sector positions. These include business roles, such as serving on the board of directors for Kroger, as well as working for non-profits such as the Ronald Reagan Foundation. Still, she had some powerful words on the ANNHPI community that she wrote in the same Washington Post op-ed. She reminded the public that, "our history is too often overlooked, our contributions to this nation are sometimes forgotten, and our right to be here is too often questioned."

To be honest, I was shaken by her concern. I thought we - not just she and I and the wider family, but everybody, the whole society - were beyond that. I was wrong, I think, about all of us. While it's true that the middle classes no longer openly stigmatise single mothers, we do not really accept them as the social equals of partnered mothers. Even a child knows this. It's the same with our attitude towards cohabitation. We see it as a sort of B-grade alternative to marriage. This book looks at all the things in marriage that make a relationship unequal - there are no conclusions as to who's fault it is but an awful lot to think about.

Understanding coefficients

As a compendium of amazing statistics and sociological research about marriage, and the effect of marriage on men and women, and especially the disparities between those two categories, this book was 5 stars. If I were in a position to require that other adults read books, I'd make this required reading, especially for men. In the US, family-court decisions regarding custody are increasingly based on a gender-neutral parenting evaluation process, a formal investigation that attempts to assess the level of each partner's parenting skills. Ironically, and inaccurately, we now describe as 'traditional' those judges who persist in reflexively granting custody to mothers.

Consider, for example, the exhaustive 11-year study of traditional, two-parent families that found 'the influence of fathers is relatively minor' for adolescents. Researcher Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, is the first to admit that such findings 'run in the face of common sense... my own theory,' he adds, 'is that once you have one good parent in place, having another parent doesn't have a huge effect.' Since we've done this we're now doing more of the other's stuff when one of us is overloaded, and appreciating more what the other does.The next afternoon we returned to what had been his apartment and was now, for the very first time, ours. I remember how I kept stealing glances at my ring during that cab ride. 'I'm married now,' I tried to get myself to believe. 'I'm somebody's wife.' Somehow or other, I just couldn't get it to sink in. Not counting the relief I felt that the wedding was mercifully over I felt exactly the same as I'd felt the day before. I think he should learn to fend for himself. Especially as he's forced me into this co-habiting arrangement. second method is the more traditional method, and the one we will use from this point forward. Understanding coefficients