The Forbes Dust-up

When I began writing this blog, the direction I received was simple: write from the perspective of being a "smart mom." Perhaps that's something I take for granted. After all, I live in one of those bubble-like communities where every woman I know is really smart, it seems. Where people make decisions about their lives and the way they love and the way they parent that often resist those offered by the mainstream culture. When last spring a book on motherhood advised women "to marry down" so they won't have to sacrifice their careers when they have kids, I looked around my neighborhood at all the couples I know who, let alone following such horrid advice, probably wouldn't ever conceive relationships in the crass terms of "marrying up" or "marrying down" in the first place. On a daily basis I feel nurtured by being in the presence of caring people who are trying to forge their way through challenging lives, as all our lives are, in whatever human ways we can.

Thus, it's always a bit of a surprise when the rustle of the real world breaks through. Surrounded by such nice people, by moms who think so carefully and lovingly about their work and their children, by dads who are often very hands-on, by women and men who seems to choose spouses out of love and desire, in every combination of gender, I'm always shocked by mean-spirited idiocy like that published in Forbes last week, where editor Michael Noer wrote an article urging men--business men--not to marry "career women" because they're less likely to be happy, more likely to divorce, and we might suppose

By now, every listserv and group of e-moms I know has dissected the piece. The article was retitled as "opinion" and paired with a counterpoint piece by another Forber staffer, a woman, who writes back to say that she's a working, career mom, nicely and happily married, thank you very much.

Our society is still so uncomfortable with smart women, or "career gals" as Noer so lightly calls us, referring back to 1930's lingo.

Articles and dust-ups like this make me realize, too, that we're still made very uncomfortable by the presence of egalitarian marriage. That's what the article goes after, with its odd use of social scientific surveys and numbers and fears about well educated women who cheat on their husbands. Underneath: discomfort, disregard for those of us who still believe in the ideal of egalitarian marriage, of marriages of love, of relationships that don't bear a calculus of who earns what and whether that person's a socio-economic "good catch," and where a potential spouse ranks on the scale of economic and social prestige. I'm glad that what I've heard today is real anger, people writing back to Forbes, demanding better. It is horrible to think that from so many angles, the ideals of relationships of equivalence, of unions that might actually include intelligent conversation with an equally educated and well-read and intellectually matched spouse, the kind of relationship I take for granted, is precisely that which is under attack.