Female Supremacy Articles - Page 19

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Unlike the threatened Stepford men, modern husbands are not turned off by women who can succeed at work. Women's earning power does not appear to get in the way of pleasure. Psychologist Janet Hyde conducted a year–long (1996) longitudinal study of 500 couples. She found that couples who said they had the most rewarding intimate lives were those in which both partners worked and experienced high rewards from their jobs.

If they were in the real world, married couples in Stepford would find they were paying a huge financial penalty for their hubby-earns-most-and-best approach. The median household income gap between single-earner and dual-earner couples has been steadily widening and in 2001 the two-income couples earned a staggering $30,500 more, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Despite movies such as the "The First Wives' Club" and the emergence of "displaced homemaker" as a job-seeking category to which a slight sense of desperation adheres, we still tend to think that the traditional homemaker, safely behind her white picket fence, has the most stable marriage. Not so.

A 1999 nationally representative sample--meaning it mirrors the population as a whole--of 4,405 couples found that divorce was more likely when a woman has no earnings than when she brings home a paycheck. In particular, the marriage of a woman with no earnings was more than twice as likely to dissolve as that of a woman who had a paycheck.