Sady Doyle wrote a great article about the ways in which women journalists writing about feminism, like The Atlantic’s Kate Bolick, still do so from a wealthy, white perspective. They “focus on the ladies’s-magazine variety of female concerns,” she writes, “motherhood, marriage, dating.”
Doyle takes issue with Bolick’s idea that only wealthy women are “literate” enough to care about women’s progress. She also takes issue with the idea that working class women are the enemy of wealthy women because their lack of ambition might be less intimidating to successful men.
Bolick seems concerned not that straight women will miss out on marriage, but that upper-middle-class women will have to “marry down.” She equates job attainment with desirability. She tells us what “we” could learn from “the African-American community” (implying that “we,” her readers, aren’t part of it).
I agree with Doyle’s points, but can’t help wondering why “marrying down” is still a thing. It reminds me of an article I published in YourTango almost two years ago now, called “Skip the Soul Mate, Find a Trophy Husband.” In a world with true gender equality, it doesn’t matter who makes the money or takes care of the kids. Successful women would choose their mates for the same reasons that successful men choose theirs. From my article:
Men who are accomplished will often settle for a wife who is attractive and pleasant, but not an intellectual match. A man doesn’t need a partner to validate him, so it doesn’t matter if her brains don’t measure up to his… Women want their partner to have it all. If [they] were to look for a less significant significant other, might [their] dating pool widen?
The feminist movement never equated “having it all” with having a wealthy spouse. If anything, we were supposed to replace the need for wealthy spouses with our own hard earned cash (see Gloria Steinem’s quote on becoming the men we wanted to marry). Men don’t fret about marrying down. Even if it’s obvious that a guy’s hot wife is only with him for his money, he’ll somehow turn it into a source of pride.
The idea that, across classes, women have to compete for the same “good” men or else they’ll have to (shudder) marry down means that no matter how accomplished a woman is, she still needs a man to validate her.
