Then
I met the women I came to call the Glam SAHMs, for glamorous
stay-at-home-moms, of my new habitat. My culture shock was immediate and
comprehensive. In a country where women now outpace men in college
completion, continue to increase their participation in the labor force
and make gains toward equal pay, it was a shock to discover that the
most elite stratum of all is a glittering, moneyed backwater.
A
social researcher works where she lands and resists the notion that any
group is inherently more or less worthy of study than another. I stuck
to the facts. The women I met, mainly at playgrounds, play groups and
the nursery schools where I took my sons, were mostly 30-somethings with
advanced degrees from prestigious universities and business schools.
They were married to rich, powerful men, many of whom ran hedge or
private equity funds; they often had three or four children under the
age of 10; they lived west of Lexington Avenue, north of 63rd Street and
south of 94th Street; and they did not work outside the home.
Instead
they toiled in what the sociologist Sharon Hays calls “intensive
mothering,” exhaustively enriching their children’s lives by virtually
every measure, then advocating for them anxiously and sometimes
ruthlessly in the linked high-stakes games of social jockeying and
school admissions.
Their
self-care was no less zealous or competitive. No ponytails or mom jeans
here: they exercised themselves to a razor’s edge, wore expensive and
exquisite outfits to school drop-off and looked a decade younger than
they were. Many ran their homes (plural) like C.E.O.s.
It
didn’t take long for me to realize that my background in anthropology
might help me figure it all out, and that this elite tribe and its
practices made for a fascinating story.
I
was never undercover; I told the women I spent time with that I was
writing a book about being a mother on the Upper East Side, and many of
them were eager to share their perspectives on what one described as
“our in many ways very weird world.”
It
was easy for me to fall into the belief, as I lived and lunched and
mothered with more than 100 of them for the better part of six years,
that all these wealthy, competent and beautiful women, many with irony,
intelligence and a sense of humor about their tribalism (“We are freaks
for Flywheel,” one told me, referring to the indoor cycling gym), were
powerful as well. But as my inner anthropologist quickly realized, there
was the undeniable fact of their cloistering from men. There were
alcohol-fueled girls’ nights out, and women-only luncheons and trunk
shows and “shopping for a cause” events. There were mommy coffees, and
women-only dinners in lavish homes. There were even some girlfriend-only
flyaway parties on private planes, where everyone packed and wore
outfits the same color.
“It’s easier and more fun,” the women insisted when I asked about the sex segregation that defined their lives.
“We
prefer it,” the men told me at a dinner party where husbands and wives
sat at entirely different tables in entirely different rooms.
Sex
segregation, I was told, was a “choice.” But like “choosing” not to
work, or a Dogon woman in Mali’s “choosing” to go into a menstrual hut,
it struck me as a state of affairs possibly giving clue to some deeper,
meaningful reality while masquerading, like a reveler at the Save Venice
ball the women attended every spring, as a simple preference.
And then there were the wife bonuses.
I
was thunderstruck when I heard mention of a “bonus” over coffee. Later I
overheard someone who didn’t work say she would buy a table at an event
once her bonus was set. A woman with a business degree but no job
mentioned waiting for her “year-end” to shop for clothing. Further
probing revealed that the annual wife bonus was not an uncommon practice
in this tribe.
A
wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup,
and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund
had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget,
whether the kids got into a “good” school — the same way their husbands
were rewarded at investment banks. In turn these bonuses were a ticket
to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social
sphere where you don’t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the
benefit luncheon a friend is hosting.
Women
who didn’t get them joked about possible sexual performance metrics.
Women who received them usually retreated, demurring when pressed to
discuss it further, proof to an anthropologist that a topic is taboo,
culturally loaded and dense with meaning.
But
what exactly did the wife bonus mean? It made sense only in the context
of the rigidly gendered social lives of the women I studied. The
worldwide ethnographic data is clear: The more stratified and
hierarchical the society, and the more sex segregated, the lower the
status of women.
Financially
successful men in Manhattan sit on major boards — of hospitals,
universities and high-profile diseases, boards whose members must raise
or give $150,000 and more. The wives I observed are usually on lesser
boards, women’s committees and museums in the outer boroughs with annual
expectations of $5,000 or $10,000. Husbands are trustees of prestigious
private schools, where they accrue the cultural capital that comes with
being able to vouch for others in the admissions game; their wives are
“class moms,” the unremunerated social and communications hub for all
the other mothers.
WHILE
their husbands make millions, the privileged women with kids who I met
tend to give away the skills they honed in graduate school and their
professions — organizing galas, editing newsletters, running the library
and bake sales — free of charge. A woman’s participation in Mommynomics
is a way to be helpful, even indispensable. It is also an act of
extravagance, a brag: “I used to work, I can, but I don’t need to.”
Anthropology
teaches us to take the long and comparative view of situations that may
seem obvious. Among primates, Homo sapiens practice the most intensive
food and resource sharing, and females may depend entirely on males for
shelter and sustenance. Female birds and chimps never stop searching out
food to provide for themselves and their young. Whether they are Hadza
women who spend almost as much time as men foraging for food, Agta women
of the Philippines participating in the hunt or !Kung women of southern
Africa foraging for the tubers and roots that can tide a band over when
there is no meat from a hunt, women who contribute to the group or
family’s well-being are empowered relative to those in societies where
women do not. As in the Kalahari Desert and rain forest, resources are
the bottom line on the Upper East Side. If you don’t bring home tubers
and roots, your power is diminished in your marriage. And in the world.
Rich,
powerful men may speak the language of partnership in the absence of
true economic parity in a marriage, and act like true partners, and many
do. But under this arrangement women are still dependent on their men —
a husband may simply ignore his commitment to an abstract idea at any
time. He may give you a bonus, or not. Access to your husband’s money
might feel good. But it can’t buy you the power you get by being the one
who earns, hunts or gathers it.
The
wives of the masters of the universe, I learned, are a lot like
mistresses — dependent and comparatively disempowered. Just sensing the
disequilibrium, the abyss that separates her version of power from her
man’s, might keep a thinking woman up at night.
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