On Marriage - Working Women and the Shift that's Coming...

Marriage and the working mom - it's a hotly debated topic. Many conservative thinkers would like to blame the working mom and,"the hairy legged feminists" for the "skyrocketing" divorce rate and the decline of the family in the United States. Well, none of it is based on fact, and I would argue that as women are sorting out their place in society, and um, well gaining more power, this will indeed continue to level off or perhaps even decline. Because the divorce rate isn't really skyrocketing. It is actually staying put. It spiked to it's highest point, depending on what graph you read (US Nt. Ctr. for Health Statistics or US Census for example) around 1979, but has returned to about a 4.95 % level per 1,000 people, the same as it was in 1976. The divorce rate, of course, varies on what state you live in (Nevada is high for obvious reasons). The conservatives might be on to something though. Did women make huge strides in that period? YES. Did our culture change? YES. Let's explore what happened.

On marriage, there is no doubt that things have changed significantly for women in the last 50 or so years. When my mother was pregnant with my brother in the sixties, women were dismissed from their teaching jobs when they started to show. It might have cause a fervor, or be disruptive to the students was the thinking of the time. Read this paper, written by at Georgetown Law School in 1987, to try to understand:

Rosa Wiener, Pregnant Teachers in the Classroom (1987), Revised July 24, 2003 (MD)

By 1919, 86% of teachers were women. Some feared that the prevalence of women teachers would "warp the psyches" of boys. In response, some school districts passed rules barring the employment of married women as teachers. The Depression exacerbated this condition. Married women were not given jobs because men and single women were believed to need them more. Work, some said, interfered with the duties of married women to care for home and family. Many viewed married women as economically superfluous or believed that work endangered the reproductive capacity of women and risked the extinction of "the race." Only when World War II created a labor shortage were married women widely employed as teachers.

Though married women stayed in the teaching corps after the war, they frequently were not permitted to do so while pregnant. A 1948 National Education Association survey revealed that 43% of school districts had no maternity leave policies, but the rest had compulsory maternity leave, usually starting in the fourth to sixth month and lasting until well after childbirth. School boards opposing the presence of visibly pregnant women in classrooms feared that liability might arise in case of injury to mother or child, that the sight of pregnant women would unfavorably influence students, that pregnant teachers' minds would not be on their work or that the physical demands of teaching could not be met by pregnant women. Over the next 17 years, compulsory maternity leaves gradually were shortened and made more flexible, but the proportion of school districts adopting such polices increased. In general, these policies assumed that female teachers were incapable of making their own decisions about work, health care and the needs of the nation's children.

A few teachers challenged compulsory maternity leave even before the 1960s. These challenges were based on contract theory and produced mixed results. Two Supreme Court cases, Goeseart v. Cleary and Hoyt v. Florida , had ruled against equal protection claims made by women women, using the rational basis test to permit discrimination against them. The outcomes of these cases discouraged pregnant teachers from bringing equal protection claims. With the passage of Title VII and the emergence of the women's movement during the 1960s, the time became ripe for pregnant teachers to argue that compulsory maternity leaves were illegal.

In 1971, three teachers who wanted to stay in the classroom longer than their school districts' maternity leave policies allowed-Susan Cohen, Jo Ann LaFleur and Ann Nelson-filed lawsuits against their employers. In LaFleur's challenge of the Cleveland public school leave policies, the school district claimed that the policy was instituted to protect the health of pregnant teachers. The teachers asserted that the policy had no legitimate purpose, that compulsory maternity leave violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, that teaching was safe for pregnant women and that maternity leaves interfered with continuity in the classroom. The district court in LaFleur upheld the maternity leave. But Cohen, pursuing relief in Chesterfield County, Virginia, worn her case at the trial level. Both cases were appealed and reversed by different Circuit Courts of Appeals. In 1974 the United States Supreme Court took on the cases and ruled that compulsory maternity leave was unconstitutional. The Court held that such rules deprived women teachers of due process by interfering with their fundamental rights, including their right to bear and raise children. The Court avoided the equal protection claims.

Marriage - Before 1970, Who Was Wearing the Pants?

Pretty amazing what our moms endured. And they couldn't have their own bank accounts either. Or credit cards. See this amazing video from Carol Gilligan, Professor, at NYU and Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge about women in the 1960's,it is fascinating. And try to think about it when someone puts down feminists. I love the thoughts of Freud, that "this so called intellectual inferiority of women is due to the need to suppress their sexuality. To not think about your needs is to start restricting that you could think at all." Geez, that is huge. So before the sixties, women couldn't feel legitimate about wanting or feeling anything, but were scorned as "selfish," for doing so. Until the mid sixties, they couldn't even wear pants to work!

Out Came The Deadly Marriage Secret

A veil of secrecy was pulled off marriages in the late seventies. This was when we heard more about domestic violence. Remember the Farrah Faucett drama, "The Burning Bed," in 1984? As a grade-school gal (of a working mom) it seemed that every time I turned the TV on there was yet another drama airing about domestic abuse. Before that time, it was kept hidden from public view, and women suffered in silence, or until death. In the seventies, with the women's movement and more support offered, the reports of domestic violence spiked. From 1983 to 1991, the number of domestic violence reports received increased by almost 117%. Source: New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, 1983 and 1991. Studies by the Surgeon General's office reveal that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44, more common than automobile accidents, muggings, and cancer deaths combined. Other research has found that half of all women will experience some form of violence from their partners during marriage, and that more than one-third are battered repeatedly every year. Source: Journal of American Medical Association, 1990. In 2003, among all female murder victims in the U.S., 30% were slain by their husbands or boyfriends. Source: Uniform Crime Reports of the U.S. 1996, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2003 (January - June). And so, violence is the reason stated for divorce in 22% of middle-class marriages. Source: EAP Digest November/December 1991.

And so, how could it be startling that women were not asking for divorces before 1973? They had no financial resources. They were completely dependent on their husbands, and even if gainfully employed, were removed from their jobs when they were pregnant. And most terrifying, a large portion were threatened with physical harm for leaving. On top of all of this, it was considered scandalous to be a divorced woman before this time. Who can forget the old "Happy Days" episode where Richie Cunningham and friends were intrigued by the "hot to trot" divorcee that had moved in next door?

Marriage and the Future

I believe the times are changing for marriage in America. It's just not as black and white anymore. The troubles that marriages face are not as simple as the old cliche of, "my wife wants to go back to work, but I think she should stay home with the kids." While this is certainly still true in some cultures, there is a bigger and more growing tension in our materialistic American culture. The resentment I hear now is coming from the men that have wives that don't want to return to work after having a baby. Or, from the women that are make a substantial salary and feel that they are cheated out of their baby time by having to go back to work. These tensions were repeated over and over again in my interviews with women. It places a huge stress on the marriage, and is why we need to alleviate all of it, give new families a foundation, by providing more paid leave time for mothers. However, I do believe that women who return to rewarding careers can also find themselves in balanced relationships that can withstand these pressures.

I do not pretend to be in a perfect relationship. My husband and I have certainly had our share of ups and downs, but I do believe the first key is to have a partnership. There must be shared responsibilities in a marriage. Your partner must do his share when he or she is on deck. The second most important part of getting over all the bumps associated with going back to work is communication. A great tool that helped me learn how to understand my spouse is a book called, "The Five Love Languages." Read more at FiveLoveLanguages.com. I can't say enough about how it helped me understand how to treat my husband. On a practical note, hang a communication center in your house with a calendar, a place for notes, and a menu planner with instructions. That way, the days you work late, your spouse can smoothly take over with dinner or getting the kids backpack ready for school.

Plan date nights each week. Your relationship should come first, before the children. It is the foundation and should be revered. This is the philosophy of Rabbi Shmuley, who is a relationship writer, adviser, and frequent guest on Oprah:

A relationship "Shmuleyism" from Oprah.com:
"For many women, the adage that 'marriage is whereby a woman exchanges the attention of many men for the attention of one,' is all too true. And yet, only marriage provides for our two chief human desires, to have a lifelong partner with whom we experience both passion and intimacy, making us feel both completely alive and completely understood."

Most of all, I can't stress to not give up on your marriage when a rough patch hits. A girlfriend of mine hit the nail on the head when she said, "Wow, who would've thought this marriage stuff would be tough?" Simple, but true. She's a working mom and worked though the tough stuff, and so can you.
Here is Shmuley.com to find books on marriage written and recommended by America's Rabbi.