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Working off those myths

Are men who marry career women asking for trouble? Absurd as it sounds, the question is being asked and debated to this day, writes BAGESHREE S.

Forbes magazine anointed Indra Nooyi the "fourth most powerful woman" in the world sometime ago. The CEO of Pepsico is credited with many big coups in her career, including the takeover of Tropicana. Indra's is an inspiring saga of ascent from a Chennai middle-class family to the highest echelons of corporate power, with many glass ceilings crashing along the way.

Interestingly, most articles on Nooyi talk about one thing besides her feats in corporate warfare: her feats as a multitasking supermom. Article after article talks of how her nine-year-old daughter is often in her office doing homework or having an after school fireside chat with the company's 81-year-old founder, Don Kendall. When Indra is travelling and her daughter calls office to ask for permission to play Nintendo, the receptionist has specific instructions on tackling the situation. She goes through a battery of questions ("Have you finished your homework?" and so on) and then decides whether or not Tara can be given permission. Then she leaves a voice message for Indra: "I gave Tara permission to play Nintendo."

One article gushes: "Despite the monumental successes of her career, Indra Nooyi remains a quintessentially Indian woman who has combined the high-octane energy of her job with the calm, collected demeanour required to manage the equally central responsibility of a mother and a wife."

The lesser mortals

But what happens to slightly lesser mortals who might be doing okay in their careers but may not quite have arrived at what's called "Nooyi's Ninetendo strategy"? Those who leave a pile of washing undone or don't read a bedtime story to the child because there's a deadline dangling over the head? Or rush off to an emergency surgery without feeding the child hot soup when she returns from school?

Most likely, someone will be whispering into the husband/partner's ears: "I told you to keep away from these career women, didn't I?" That's what Michael Noer, an editor with Forbes.com, did in an article titled Don't marry career women. The sort of article that will make you see that the "hearth angel" business is surely not as extinct as the woolly mammoth. He writes: "A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career." No, he wasn't joking. He was dead serious when he argued, apparently based on "research by social scientists", that a man's life with a woman with a career is likely to be a complete mess. "Recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat and less likely to have children. And if they do have children, they are more likely to be unhappy about it." Poor babies that they are, men married to career women are even likely to fall sick more often, he said.

Predictably, there was a huge uproar about this "anachronistic and wholly outrageous" article. So much so the publication withdrew it and re-issued it as a point-counter-point argument between Noer and Elizebeth Corcoran, another editor with the same publication. Corcoran said she fits Noer's definition of career woman to the T, and yet, all is more than well with her 18-year-old marriage. She wrote in conclusion: "So, guys, if you're game for an exciting life, go ahead and marry a professional gal." All this, interestingly, in a sister-concern of the publication that's called Nooyi a power-packed woman!

But there are others who think the question is too ridiculous in this time and age and should be treated for what it is worth: a bad PJ. Feminist Gloria Steinem reacted to the Forbes piece in a salon.com article: "I'm deeply grateful to Forbes magazine for saving many women the trouble of dealing with men who can't tolerate equal partnerships, take care of their own health, clean up after themselves or have the sexual confidence to survive, other than a double standard of sexual behaviour. Since a disproportionate number of such unconfident and boring guys apparently read Forbes, the magazine has performed a real service."

"My first reaction too was to just laugh," says Anasuya Sengupta, consultant on gender and developmental issues. "It's so nonsensical that it sounds like a parody." But then, she points out, it also points to an eternal, gut-level fear: of the patriarchal world eroding. The great nostalgia for good moms who cooked great stuff and kept the house spic 'n' span is still, clearly, a great value. In an article in AlterNet, Gasp! I married a career woman, Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett, compare this undying notion to a "winged chimera" with an enormous head and a mouth that keeps chanting: "Working women are miserable. Their marriages are terrible. Their husbands are miserable. Their children are wrecks." Slice the beast's head and 20 more take its place, each chanting the same mantra. Somewhat like our own Raktabeejasura, a demon reborn many times over from every drop of blood shed.

The great contradiction in all this, Anasuya points out, is that while a homemaker's "economy of care" remains unpaid and unrecognised, career women have to constantly contend with questions of the Noer kind. Anasuya, who is right now working on a UN-sponsored gender sensitisation programme with the Karnataka Police, says that we still don't quite see marriage as a "negotiated, mutually-agreed upon relationship".

Persisting prejudices

And this is a question that also bothers Jasmeen Patheja, an artist who has initiated a unique feminist project called Blank Noise. "It's amazing how the mythical idea of wife has remained fixed in the head without re-looking at today's situation." While on the one hand we speak of a new breed of men who share responsibilities without feeling emasculated, we still don't have advertisements where men make hot soup for the family or smile happily with a masala powder packet. But Jasmeen is glad to find at least some men around her who see marriage as an equal relationship. She admits, though, that such men are too few and far between for comfort.

Anasuya offers a simple test to check how far off the mark we still are. "Reverse the question and ask `Should women marry career men?' See how completely absurd it sounds. We can say we have arrived the day `Should men marry career women?' sounds equally absurd."

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