The Marriage Book (76 page)
Authors: Lisa Grunwald,Stephen Adler
Tags: #Family & Relationships, #Marriage & Long Term Relationships, #General, #Literary Collections
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
THE SECOND SEX
, 1949
Some scholars feel it was the French philosopher and author Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) who was the mother of the twentieth century’s second wave of feminism. In her sweeping history of women, she traced the origins of women’s subservience to men, calling on women to see themselves, marriage, and motherhood in a new and harsher light.
The situation has to be changed in their common interest by prohibiting marriage as a “career” for the woman. Men who declare themselves antifeminist with the excuse that “women are already annoying enough as it is” are not very logical: it is precisely because marriage makes them “praying mantises,” “bloodsuckers,” and “poison” that marriage has to be changed and, as a consequence, the feminine condition in general. Woman weighs so heavily on man because she is forbidden to rely on herself; he will free himself by freeing her, that is, by giving her something
to do
in this world.
JOSEPH MANKIEWICZ
ALL ABOUT EVE
, 1950
With his unforgettable screenplay for
All About Eve
, Joseph Mankiewicz (1909–1993) introduced the world to the brilliant but aging actress Margo Channing (played by Bette Davis) and to the sycophantic assistant Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), the would-be usurper of Margo’s professional and personal life. Never married, jealous of Eve, and suspicious of her director and lover, Bill, Margo in this scene ponders the personal sacrifices that have come with her professional success.
Karen is Margo’s best friend.
MARGO: | More than anything in this world I love Bill. And I want Bill. And I want him to want me. But me, not Margo Channing. And if I can’t tell them apart, how can he? |
KAREN: | Well, why should he, and why should you? |
MARGO: | Bill’s in love with Margo Channing. He’s fought with her, worked with her, and loved her. But ten years from now Margo Channing will cease to exist. And what’s left will be—what? |
KAREN: | Margo, Bill is all of eight years younger than you. |
MARGO: | Those years stretch as the years go on. I’ve seen it happen too often. |
KAREN: | Not to you. Not to Bill. |
MARGO: | Isn’t that what they always say? . . . About Eve. I’ve acted pretty disgracefully toward her too. |
KAREN: | Well— |
MARGO: | Don’t fumble for excuses, not here and now with my hair down. At best let’s say I’ve been oversensitive to—well, to the fact that she’s so young, so feminine, and so helpless, to so many things I want to be for Bill. Funny business a woman’s career, the things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you’ll need them again when you get back to being a woman. That’s one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not. Being a woman. Sooner or later, we’ve got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we’ve had or wanted. And in the last analysis nothing’s any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed and there he is. Without that you’re not a woman. You’re something with a French Provincial office or a book full of clippings. But you’re not a woman. Slow curtain, the end. |
JESS OPPENHEIMER, MADELYN PUGH, AND BOB CARROLL JR.
“JOB SWITCHING,”
I LOVE LUCY
, 1952
I Love Lucy
head writer Jess Oppenheimer (1913–1988) and writers Madelyn Pugh (1921–2011) and Bob Carroll Jr. (1918–2007) had a simple premise for a classic episode: the husbands and wives disagree about whose work is harder, and they swap roles for the day, each trying to prove their point. At home, Ricky and Fred come close to destroying the Ricardos’ apartment in the course of cooking and cleaning. As for Lucy and Ethel, they land jobs coating and wrapping chocolates, and in one of TV comedy’s most famous scenes, try desperately to keep up with a fast-moving conveyor belt. The dialogue below represents the “before” and “after” of the day.
RICKY: | Brother, if they had to make the dough, they would think twice before spending it that fast. |
FRED: | Yeah. |
ETHEL: | What’s so tough about earning a living? |
LUCY: | Yeah. |
RICKY: | Have you ever done it? |
LUCY: | No. But I could. |
RICKY: | Hah! |
ETHEL: | I could too. |
FRED: | Hah! |
RICKY: | Listen, holding down a job is a lot more difficult than lying around the house all day long. |
LUCY: | Lying around the house! Is that all you think we do? |
RICKY: | Yeah. |
FRED: | Now, let’s be fair, Rick. Every once in a while they get up and play canasta. |
LUCY: | Who do you think does the housework? |
ETHEL: | And who do you think cooks all the meals? |
LUCY: | Yeah. |
RICKY: | Oh, anybody can cook and do the housework. |
LUCY: | Ha! I’d just like to see you two try it for a week. |
RICKY: | Okay, we will. |
FRED: | We will? |
RICKY: | Yeah. |
LUCY: | This I’ve got to see. |
ETHEL: | I wanna get a load of this too. |
RICKY: | Yeah, but wait a minute. You will have to go out and earn a living. |
LUCY: | Okay, we will. |
ETHEL: | We will? |
LUCY: | Yeah. We’ll change places. We’ll get jobs, and you take care of the house for a week. Okay? |
RICKY: | Okay. |
ETHEL: | Okay? |
FRED: | Okay. |
. . . . | |
RICKY: | Listen, we don’t know how you girls feel about it, but we’d like to forget the whole thing. We’re lousy housewives. |
FRED: | Hideous. |
LUCY: | Well, we’re not so good at bringing home the bacon, either. |
ETHEL: | We got fired off our first job. |
LUCY: | Yeah. |
RICKY: | Well, let’s say we go back to the way we were. We’ll make the money and you spend it. |
LUCY: | Well, that’s great with me. |
RICKY: | And listen, girls. We never realized how tough it was to run a house before. So just to show you our appreciation, we brought you a little present. |
LUCY: | Really? |
ETHEL: | You did? |
RICKY: | For each one of you, a five-pound box of chocolates. |
Vivian Vance, Elvia Allman (as the factory foreman), and Lucille Ball
DAVID SIPRESS, 2011
It took David Sipress twenty-five years before one of his cartoons was accepted by
The New Yorker
. Since then, more than five hundred have appeared, on topics ranging from international to household politics.
“You make a very compelling case, Jeffrey, but I still maintain that my day was worse than yours.”
SHERYL SANDBERG
LEAN IN: WOMEN, WORK, AND THE WILL TO LEAD
, 2013
As the chief operating officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg (1969–) became both role model and lightning rod with her publication of
Lean In
, a bestselling exhortation to women to overcome personal and cultural barriers and reach for leadership opportunities. A key chapter, “Make Your Partner a Real Partner,” cites her own marriage to SurveyMonkey chief executive Dave Goldberg in emphasizing how much a professionally successful woman needs a supportive husband who does his fair share of child rearing and household work.
I truly believe that the single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is. I don’t know of one woman in a leadership position whose life partner is not fully—and I mean fully—supportive of her career. No exceptions. . . .
. . . The image of a happy couple still includes a husband who is more professionally successful than the wife. If the reverse occurs, it’s perceived as threatening to the marriage. People frequently pull me aside to ask sympathetically, “How
is
Dave? Is he okay with, you know, all your (
whispering
)
success
?” Dave is far more self-confident than I am, and given his own professional success, these comments are easy for him to brush off. More and more men will have to do the same, since almost 30 percent of U.S. working wives now outearn their husbands. As that number continues to grow, I hope the whispering stops.
Dave and I can laugh off concerns about his supposedly fragile ego, but for many women, this is no laughing matter. Women face enough barriers to professional success. If they also have to worry that they will upset their husbands by succeeding, how can we hope to live in an equal world?
X
X-WIVES AND HUSBANDS
CHARLES LEDERER, BEN HECHT, AND CHARLES M
AC
ARTHUR
HIS GIRL FRIDAY
, 1940
The Front Page
, a popular play—and later film—written in 1928 by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, told the story of two hardened newsmen in the heyday of print journalism. In 1940, director Howard Hawks had the inspired idea of changing the gender of one of the lead characters, thus creating one of the great screwball comedies of all time. In this version, Walter Burns (played by Cary Grant) and Hildy Johnson (played by Rosalind Russell) are colleagues who married, then divorced. On the eve of Hildy’s remarriage (to an insurance salesman), she stops in at her old office, and Walter, with the help of a huge news story, attempts to lure her back to the work (and the man) she loves.
