Unhappily ever after

An article in Forbes says that marrying a woman who makes over $30,000 a year will ensure a life of illness, filth and cuckolding. How did we get here again?

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Feminism, Marriage, Rebecca Traister, Life

Aug. 24, 2006 | "Don't Marry Career Women" is what the headline of the Aug. 22 Forbes.com story read. Just like that. "Don't Marry Career Women." It was easy to blink, shake your head like you were seeing things. Surely it was a joke, something out of the Onion. A provocative headline on a more nuanced story. But then came the text, by Michael Noer, an executive editor and writer for Forbes.com.

He conceded that his flashy suggestion might come as a buzz kill for many guys, "particularly successful men" who might be "attracted to women with similar goals and aspirations." And why shouldn't they be, he continued. "After all, your typical career girl is well-educated, ambitious, informed and engaged. All seemingly good things, right? Sure  at least until you get married. Then, to put it bluntly, the more successful she is the more likely she is to grow dissatisfied with you. Sound familiar?"

Yeah, it did sound familiar. Familiar like a figment from the 1950s, the bad old days that today's young women know about only from their mothers and from kitschy retro-magnets. But it was 2006 and here was a genuine dinosaur of unenlightened gender incivility, published not in some righty rag but in a supposedly mainstream business publication -- in which Bono recently invested! -- a magazine that ostensibly has female readers and that covers female business people and that has for several years published an annual list of the 100 most powerful women in the world. That publication was telling its readers that working women make bad wives!

Well, for 48 hours at least. Sometime around 5:30 on Wednesday, Aug. 23, two days after its publication, "Don't Marry Career Women" disappeared from the Forbes.com Web site, along with an earlier story by Noer, titled "The Economics of Prostitution," in which he compared "wives" to "whores" and wrote that "the implication remains that wives and whores are -- if not exactly like Coke and Pepsi -- something akin to champagne and beer. The same sort of thing." Both stories had been linked on many Web sites that almost uniformly derided them and their author.

But about three hours after the story's sudden absence from the Web, a visitor to the Forbes.com site found "Careers and Marriage," a debate. Editors had reframed Noer's story as one half of a "point-counterpoint" discussion, lightening its heft as an institutional statement by pairing it with a rebuttal by married female columnist Elizabeth Corcoran. "Don't Marry a Lazy Man" was the title of Corcoran's take, which flaccidly asserted that "Studies aside, modern marriage is a two way street. Men should own up to their responsibilities, too." Corcoran's retort rested on the fact that despite being the kind of woman Noer thinks would make a bad wife, she and her husband have been married for 18 years and that this month they plan to engage in some "snuggling at a mountain-winery concert." As of this writing, Noer's "Economics of Prostitution" story was still unavailable online.

"The story about careers was taken down so we could put up a new, enhanced package which includes Michael's original story," said a Forbes.com spokeswoman in an e-mail late Wednesday. She said that she did not know when or if the "wife or whore" story would go back up. On Tuesday, the same spokeswoman had e-mailed Salon to say that "the piece and its sourcing speaks [sic] for itself. Forbes is known for its provocative opinion and Forbes.com's readership -- both male and female -- expects nothing less." Noer was out of the office this week -- it has been reported elsewhere that he was ironically attending a wedding -- and Forbes.com editor Paul Maidment was also on vacation.

The furor over "Don't Marry Career Women" is a testament to the speed of an angry blogosphere, but also to the anachronistic and wholly outrageous tone of the article. It was easy to wonder how we had traveled through space and time to a moment at which it was OK to publish this kind of thing. Was it a result of the recent press success of Caitlin Flanagan, who urged women to stay at home and service their spouses? Was it the repeated chirruping of David Brooks and John Tierney about how educated women will end up lonely spinsters? Had our sense of what passes for enlightened thought eroded so steadily that at last some twerp at Forbes was able to just explode it without any of his bosses even noticing for a while? A while being since February, in the case of the "Economics of Prostitution" piece.

In "Don't Marry Career Women" Noer earnestly cataloged the deficiencies of an employed wife, cheekily dropping phrases like "career girls" and "folks," and putting "feminist" in scare quotes as if he were a wannabe Rat-Packer, his hair slick with Bryl-Cream.

Much of the data on which Noer drew came from conservative think tanks or dubious-sounding publications. The National Marriage Project. "What's Love Got to Do With It," a 2006 study that even Noer admitted is "controversial." Sylvia Ann Hewlett. (He also cited more mainstream sources, like USA Today.) But the traditionalist, reactionary bent of many of his footnoted sources only amplified his police siren of a thesis.

An accompanying slide show listed the "Nine Reasons to Steer Clear of Career Women," starting with the news that a professionally successful woman won't want to marry you -- "you" being Noer's male reader; he didn't bother to pretend that he might have any female eyes skimming his work -- because high-achieving women "search less intensively for a match," and "have higher standards for an acceptable match than women who work less and earn less."

If your working girl should unwisely deign to hitch her wagon to your star, according to Noer, it won't be long before she's cheating on you, a quagmire illustrated by a photo of a hussy lounging in red lingerie, barely concealing her adulterous assets. According to Noer, working women stray when a wife ventures outside the home, because a job increases the chances that "[she'll] meet someone [she] likes more than you." That surely doesn't sound like a stretch in this case.

Next page: Rosie, your riveting bride, will be less likely to bear you children. If she does, shell be unhappy