Having it all: Why smart men marry smart women

[Al-khiyal]

Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women by Christine Whelan

Say goodbye to the "success penalty" - professional women have the best chance at marriage and children:

You can't have it all, women have long been told. The price of female achievement, goes the centuries-old conventional wisdom, is loneliness. And modern commentators have taken up the refrain. "The more successful the woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child," argued economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett in 2002. Last year, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd claimed that America faces "an epidemic of professional women missing out on husbands and kids" because men remain unwilling to enter equal relationships with educated, high-powered women. And in the first two-thirds of the 20th century, as women gained greater access to higher education and professional work, such was indeed the case. Women who earned bachelor's degrees and PhDs were more likely to miss out on their "MRS" degrees than their less-educated sisters.

But for women born since 1960, there has been a revolutionary reversal of the historic pattern. As late as the 1980s, according to economist Elaina Rose, women with PhDs or the equivalent were less likely to marry than women with a high school degree. But the "marital penalty" for highly educated women has declined steadily since then, and by 2000 it had disappeared. Today, women with a college degree or higher are more likely to marry than women with less education and lower earnings potential.

Highly educated women are also now as likely to have children as their less-educated counterparts - and much more likely to have children born in wedlock. At the same time, economically successful women are the fastest-growing segment of the minority of women who, if they do not marry, choose to have children anyway. The titles of two new books sum up the opportunities that women now have to mix and match their personal and professional lives: Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women, by Christine B. Whelan, and Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice, by Rosanna Hertz.

Whelan's book is aimed at the demographic group she calls SWANS - Strong Women Achievers, No Spouse. Whelan commissioned a poll of 1,629 high-achieving men and women ages 25 to 40 and found that almost half the women reported fearing that their success in the world of work was a disadvantage in the world of love. Whelan reassures them that men increasingly do want to marry equals, that most men are not intimidated by educational and career success.

One poll, a series of interviews with a second sample of "high-achievers," and a handful of research studies are a rather flimsy peg on which to hang a book. What could have been a focused, attention-getting article is muddled by considerable padding. Whelan's book does not answer the question posed by her title - why do smart men now marry smart women? - nor does she explore the declining marital prospects for poorly educated women and men. Low-income, poorly educated men have the worst prospects of any group in today's marriage market, suggesting that it is a mistake to frame the revolution in marriage as a woman's issue. More men than women describe being married as their ideal state, and men who remain single fare far worse emotionally than do their female counterparts.

Still, this book contributes to the cultural conversation about marriage by countering outdated stereotypes about male-female relations. Whelan's polls confirm what authors Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers showed in more compelling detail in their 2004 book Same Difference- that in the middle to upper levels of the education and income distribution, men and women are moving closer together, not farther apart, in what they want from relationships.

Whelan offers encouragement to everyone in her demographic. Career women who postpone marriage, she explains, still have a good chance to marry in their 30s or 40s, and she cites a study by three sociologists who find that, unlike in the past, wives' fulltime employment is now associated with a lowered risk of divorce. For women who marry too late to have children, her poll shows that many women believe they can have very satisfying lives anyway. For women who don't marry but want a child, she points out that this is now an option. Half her female respondents said that they'd consider having a child alone if they couldn't find a suitable partner.

Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice deals with women who made that decision. Based on in-depth interviews with 65 middle-class women, Hertz's book traces how women decide first to have children outside marriage and then whether to adopt, choose a known donor or become pregnant through an anonymous sperm donor. She explores how these women answer their children's questions about their biological fathers and how they integrate men into their children's lives.

Most of the heterosexual women Hertz interviews are "reluctant revolutionaries," women who would have preferred a male partner but who reached a point where they were willing to go it alone rather than miss out on motherhood. Her lesbian subjects, by contrast, consciously defied the idea that motherhood depends upon a heterosexual relationship. Neither group made these choices lightly. They enlisted the support of families and friends before embarking on this journey, and they have all had to grapple with their children's desire to picture their father and understand their kin connections. Contrary to some stereotypes, these women try mightily to include men in their children's lives. Hertz describes how they handle these thorny issues and gets the women to speak candidly about their trials, joys and dilemmas.

It's impossible to do justice here to the complexity of the portraits Hertz paints in this well-crafted book, including the different ways that women handle the often unexpected results of their decisions. Indeed, the details and variations in her stories are more compelling than her theoretical overview. Where Whelan fails to ground her data and advice in a coherent analysis, Hertz tries too hard to fit her material into an overarching feminist sociological framework. Concepts such as "compulsory motherhood" fail to capture the complex decision-making process her informants describe. Nor does the term patriarchy seem helpful in describing the messy mix of expanded options and continuing constraints these women confront. Certainly, male privilege still exists, but neither law nor popular opinion still enforces male dominance in most daily interactions. The freedom of single, economically secure women to raise children without the harsh economic penalties and social stigma of the past is a far cry from the patriarchy of yore.

I also question Hertz's claim that the "mother-child dyad" is the revolutionary family form of the future. Interviewed four years later, her subjects almost all reported that the two-person unit had been too intense. Some had added more children; others had added a partner.

Female-centered families are here to stay, and it is important to accept their legitimacy. But the same social changes that give women new options in their personal and professional lives also open new opportunities for paternal involvement in families, on far more egalitarian terms than in the past. That development is just as welcome - and surely just as revolutionary - as the new possibilities for lesbians and heterosexual women to rear children successfully without the involvement of fathers.

Having it all

[Al-khiyal]

Official Web site: Why smart men marry smart women

[Nectar77]

The book should bear a nota bene: except for Algerian men, who like to marry bimbos, niveau tabachir, ta3raf ettayeb, elle fait des enfants et reste a la maison, he has to feel superior to her at all times and behave like an arrogant twat.

Oh she should be at least 10 years younger than him....

No smilies here am afraid...am as serious as it gets and am not apologising for this post, those who don't deserve this "harsh" comment, know they don't so they shouldn't bother complaning about it.

[Bent_Bladi]

Sigh... not just Algerian men, ya habibty... In Syria, some guys marry girls w/ just a highschool diploma (and sometimes even less) and barely any brains at all so they can "rabiiha" (or "raise her")

-- bas who cares -- who needs idiots who have tarboushes instead of skulls? It's good that these so called "smart men" are getting w/ the smart women, Alhamdulilah - now we have more power and influence

[NinaGucci]

Sigh... not just Algerian men, ya habibty... In Syria, some guys marry girls w/ just a highschool diploma (and sometimes even less) and barely any brains at all so they can "rabiiha" (or "raise her")

-- bas who cares -- who needs idiots who have tarboushes instead of skulls? It's good that these so called "smart men" are getting w/ the smart women, Alhamdulilah - now we have more power and influence

it's actually really difficult to find your way around men when you are an educated woman. most of them dont accept the challenge, even of a simple conversation/debate.
also, surprisingly, many educated men tend to go for those very very young girls who barely know anything about life outside their highschools, which is a strange behaviour too from someone who went to big universities...etc.
i do not agree with the book though, i do not still feel like educated men are getting educated women and vice versa, this is both for our societies, and foreign societies too. rich men marry pretty dolls (empty minded usually even if they had something nice to say, it's a typical real life legally blond stereotype, without the brain of the girl in the movie of course) and rich women marry matchos. clever men marry nice girls (regardless of whether they re geniuses too or not!) and clever women marry comprehensive men (who will understand their passion for their work and be good fathers who will take care of the kids!)
so, this is pretty much the world im seeing so far, and believe me, i do not live in Tombouktou or Ain Defla! (wherever those are!).
we really hope to be one of those people this book is talking about, but we live on, EARTH!

[Bent_Bladi]

I think the title should be switched around to "Why smart women marry smart men"...

[Nectar77]

also, surprisingly, many educated men tend to go for those very very young girls who barely know anything about life outside their highschools, which is a strange behaviour too from someone who went to big universities...etc.

Hi Nina, we have never 'spoken' before
I couldn't agree more with the above statement....so TRUE!!
Is it a control thing? Or is it just because they're not strong enough MEN to handle an educated girl, who has control over her life, independant (financially and otherwise) and knows what she wants...and what's with the age gap?? I find it very disturbing, bordering on incest/paedophilia...
And that is why am still single

My TWO CENTS BY NECTAR77