“Beside Every Successful Man”

With leading economists predicting that the current recession will be the longest since World War II, families across America are looking for novel strategies to maximize their earnings. Enter Megan Basham, author of “Beside Every Successful Man”, whose controversial claim is that women, by quitting their jobs and applying their skills, education, and talent to advance their husbands’ careers, can achieve greater financial security for their families than with two incomes. Marketed to business savvy career women who desire a “slower-paced, more graceful, family oriented life,” Basham’s book outlines a plan wherein wives transform into indispensable career partners for their husbands by mentoring, advising, and pushing them to get ahead.

Basham’s reasoning—that women don’t want careers anyway—draws mainly on opinion polling and anecdotal evidence: “Ask a group of mothers if they would continue to work full-time if they didn’t have to and the answer will overwhelmingly come back ‘No!’,” she writes. Despite the fact that this statement is a near truism (wouldn’t the majority of people cut back on work if their monetary circumstances permitted?), Basham proceeds to cite additional surveys proving that, while working women strongly desire to drift back into domesticity, men want to remain in the workplace, even in the absence of a financial imperative to do so. What better solution, Basham reasons, than to abide by these apparently biological urges and allow the man to work, while the woman acts as a productivity and profit maximizing sidekick?

However, given the notorious inaccuracy of polling data, the answer is not nearly so simple. The wording and framing of the survey question can have a decisive impact on the results, so much so that alternative polls demonstrate the exact opposite of Basham’s findings: namely, that the majority of high-achieving males would prefer to stay at home if money allowed and that most mothers married to men with annual earnings of over $120,000 remain in the workforce, in spite of their financial freedom. More damagingly, Basham confuses the distinction between correlation and causation: women’s stated desire to revert to the home may have stronger grounding in the cultural myth of the happy homemaker and in the pervasive prejudices against women in high-powered jobs, rather than in a genuine lust for the kitchen.

Beyond her absolute reliance on dubious data, Basham’s argument obfuscates the socioeconomic structures that render her step by step plan unfeasible for the bulk of American families. When Basham alludes to a “group of mothers,” she would be more truthful to reference a “group of white upper middle class mothers with equally well-to-do husbands.” Indeed, the women that Basham upholds as paradigms of her “career partner” include the wife of the founder of Amazon.com and the wife of the former CEO of Time Warner. These are women who relinquish financial autonomy and rely on their husbands for monetary support. Yet, for the majority of women, the decision to leave the workplace in order to become their husbands’ most dutiful cheerleaders is far more risky. With a 50-50 chance of divorce and the unforeseeable risk of spousal death and illness, ordinary women who heed Basham’s advice may well find themselves high and dry.

The statistics speak for themselves: according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, in 2006, only 7 percent of people living in households headed by a married individual were poor, while households with an unmarried leader (83 percent of whom were female) boasted poverty rates of 40.3 percent. The authors of the NBER’s June 2006 digest further concluded that changes in household structure—namely, the increase in female-headed families—were largely to blame for the rise in domestic poverty rates since the 1980s. Due to the myths perpetuated by “pro-family” Basham-types—that women need not cultivate their own careers, but should merely nurture those of their husbands—the removal of the man from the family, whether due to death or divorce, can impoverish its remaining members.

Intensifying these trends is the disproportionate effect of the recession on women, who, due to pervasive economic disadvantage, have fewer personal assets and marketable skills to leverage when times turn hard. With unemployment among women rising faster, and women’s wages falling more quickly, than those of their male counterparts, it is now more important than ever that women reject Basham’s advice—not only for the sake of leading their own fulfilling lives, but also to ensure the financial safety of their families.

In addition to her erasure of socioeconomic diversity, Basham neglects to comprehend that her solution may perpetuate the alleged distaste of women for work that initially motivates her argument. The inflexible culture which drives many women away from the professional world is only exacerbated when men have full time “career partners” at home, streamlining their activities so that they can clock even more hours at the office. If Basham believes so strongly in her own hypothesis, perhaps she should stop writing books that encourage women to find security in renouncing their ability to support themselves, and move back home to live vicariously through her husband’s career.

Courtney A. Fiske ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.