The Trap, a 2007 book by Daniel Brook, pretty much describes my life. It's about intelligent liberal-arts grads from well-off families who, by way of America's third-world level economic inequalities, are forced between corporate jobs (and never seeing their families again) or nonprofit or public interest work and poverty. Seeing as I have no idea how any corporation would ever hire me, I'm pretty much stuck with the poverty.
But it's the effect that "the trap" has on relationships which interests me most for my purposes here. Brook talks about a return to Victorian social mores in which people are yet again feeling forced to marry for money as the cost of living climbs. Emily, a teacher in Northern California (I guess this is supposed to be me, although I'm not a teacher), is quoted as saying: "Talking with my other friends who are teachers, who aren't married, most of them are saying 'I'm a girl'--er, 'I'm a woman, I'm a teacher, I don't make that much money. I better marry someone who makes at least this much or I won't be able to buy a house" (47). True, if Emily lived in, say, Omaha, maybe she could realize her dream. But in the not-so-distant past, people didn't have to choose between leaving their friends, families and jobs and home ownership.
Brook continues, "In the egalitarian economy of the 1950s, a single female teacher willing to buck the social pressure to marry could buy a house on her own. Despite our modern mores, in many parts of the country, this is no longer the case. Today's wealth distribution resembles that of the Victorian Age more than the 1950s, and it is shaping social life accordingly" (48). This wealth distribution has, indeed, impacted my own relationships (and my longtime ambition to own my own home). I had to leave my Inner Sunset neighborhood, where I felt some small sense of community, and move to another area in which I knew no one. Then, I had to move out of San Francisco all together. I've been described as having "a bohemian soul", and sadly for our times, this is true. As much as I want to cultivate relationships with my fellow starving artists and social change agents, there are no bohemian neighborhood left, like the North Beach of yore, where I can go and find them. As young idealists are constantly forced to move due to the rising cost of living, it's much harder to form those networks.
It's all enough to make you want to try to marry for money.
Well, at least the next post will be a happy one...report of the Pride parade!
10 comments:
oof, my mother was the ideal housewife and married a man that could take care of her (he was forced to retire earlier than planned due to health issues)... and he can no longer take care of her, hadn't planned out a retirement fund and otherwise left her in a bind as his caretaker, so she is unable to support both of them as well. hmmm. so my hubby and i are biologists (read: no $ in the jobs) and when i tell mom of our financial woes, she reminds me that i could have married for money. wtf =/
Ha, she's not kidding?
this was the mother that has been telling me since i was 17 that grandkids would be nice... for my father! (nevermind that i would have needed a b/f or fiance or husband for that) she also thinks there's something horribly wrong in the way she raised me because i don't want kids. and i was disappointed that she was THRILLED when i married *gasp* ..a man! because that proves i wasn't lesbian? she never did get the "asexual" thing, though she tried to tell me that it was ok for 2 women to live together for "financial" reasons.
Parents really do have odd ideas sometimes...although I have to say, the "financial reasons" part is pretty amusing :-)
you'd think that if finances and kids were not an issue, one would never need a spouse of any gender!
They must be paying teachers cr*p wages in the US. In Canada, teachers make piles of money (of course, they also have to go on strike every few years). But a teacher in Canada could easily save up enough to buy a house (unless they're living in Toronto where house prices are ridiculous).
Ditto police officers. My good friend is a cop and her husband married *her* for the money :)
-SarahT.
Yeah, teachers don't make very much money here. It's pretty unfortunate.
That reminds me of a conversation I recently had with my mother. I'm still in school, but I'm not sure what I want to do when I graduate. She wants me to start figuring out "where I see myself in twenty years" when I barely know where I'll be in three years. Frustrating as that conversation was, she does have a point. Mom didn't really plan her life, so she agreed to stay at home, thinking that she could go back to work once my siblings and I started school. Except there always seemed to be more work to do around the house. It's working out well enough for her, since we live in a college town and there are programs for non-traditional students, but if my dad made less money, or we didn't live close to a college, I don't know what she would do.
You're right when you say that it isn't just money at stake. A lot of young women, especially in the first few years of marriage, think that everything should be perfect, that they should agree on everything, and that they shouldn't have to fight for what they want.
From what I hear though the citizens of California are spoiled children, wanting more and more but wanting to to pay less and less.
Back to the topic at hand, even where I live (Manitoba) I see this sort of recasteification of society. In my faculty at university (engineering) almost every one has one or both parents that are engineers, I'm the exception, and when ever I here them talking up themselves to other people it is always the same "I'm going to make huge sums of money one day", not that they're smart, kind or really any other aspect of them selves. I actually get laughed at when I say "there's more then money". Beyond this it is even different then when my parents were in University, for them it was the norm for kids to move out to go to university, even if in the same town, to move closer to campus, or have a weekend job with there classes.
Both are now rare, most places won't employ you only on weekend, or give you hours that defer to school, so most students begin to leech off their parents or have to work well over full time during the summer (last summer I was doing 60 hour a week) and broke even. I know its not quiet the same as women devolving back, economically speaking, to a form of pseudo chattel; but there are parallels.
Californians aren't spoiled-- I take umbrage at that. We work as hard as anyone else-- do people from other states/countries think we just hang out on the beach all day?
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