What Could These Women Have Done if They’d Had Wives?
Several years ago, I edited a story by the historian Alexis Coe about the different ways literary husbands and wives publicly acknowledge each other in their books. Husbands tend to thank their wives for their actual labor, like editing and research, while wives tended to thank their husbands for emotional support, suggesting that men were less likely to offer practical assistance.
Books are obviously a lofty space, Coe notes, so she asked a sociologist friend to explain how the difference in acknowledgment plays out in day-today life for heterosexual couples who are not authors. The sociologist responds with an anecdote:
“In her home, she struggles to find the right words to recognize her husband’s efforts. ‘I don’t mean to say that I’m not grateful for you,’ she tells him, ‘but I really hate that I’m expected by society to be super-grateful for the fact that you’re not totally worthless around the house.”
I was reminded of this when I read Carmela Ciuraru’s new book, “Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages.” Ciuraru writes that her project is to “reposition the wife” in the lives of five authors: Roald Dahl, Kingsley Amis, Kenneth Tynan, Alberto Moravia and Radclyffe Hall.
The wives in question are Patricia Neal, who was a movie star before she met Dahl; Elizabeth Jane Howard, who had to divorce Amis to get time to work on her novels; Elaine Dundy, a best-selling novelist who was a “faithful assistant” to Tynan; Elsa Morante, an Italian novelist who had the closest thing resembling a true partnership of the five couples; and Una Troubridge, who devoted her life to the care and feeding of Hall. (Hall and Troubridge were a lesbian couple that never officially married. Hall “very much saw herself as a husband,” according to Ciuraru.)
Ciuraru writes: “The ideal wife of a famous writer has no desires worth mentioning. She lives each day in second place. Rather than attempt to seize control of her own fate, she accepts what she has been given without complaint. Her ambitions are not thwarted because she doesn’t have any.” But the women she features all do have ambition, and they were all made unhappy by having to subsume their talent and energy.
Some of their husbands were abusive — Tynan gave Dundy black eyes and a broken nose — and Ciuraru notes that the beginning of the end of their marriage may have been when Dundy published her best-selling and critically acclaimed novel “The Dud Avocado.” “Ken felt emasculated and betrayed,” Ciuraru explains. “‘You weren’t a writer when I married you!’ he yelled one night as he threw a copy of her book out the bedroom window.”
Because they had to eke out their own creativity while subordinating themselves, Ciuraru notes, “We must give writers’ wives their due, marvel at what they achieved and made possible, and reflect on what might have been.”
These marriages happened in the 20th century, and many modern marriages bear little resemblance to the uneven, volatile and sometimes abusive unions. And most people are not wedded to a creative genius.
Yet I could not help but think of the day-to-day of these couples when I saw a new data essay from Pew Research about the persistence of the gender pay gap in the United States, despite the fact that women are now a majority of the college-educated work force.
Pew found that the gender pay gap increases with age. This increase is linked to when women are likely to have children under 18 at home, but interestingly, it is not just because of the “motherhood penalty,” a term sociologists use to describe the disadvantages mothers face in the workplace. Pew found that “the widening of the pay gap with parenthood appears to be driven more by an increase in the earnings of fathers. Fathers ages 25 to 54 not only earn more than mothers the same age, they also earn more than men with no children at home. Nonetheless, men without children at home still earn more than women with or without children at home.”
Though the division of household tasks has become more equitable over time, women are still doing the majority of the work. When kids enter the picture, the division of household labor becomes more uneven. Mothers across many countries are still hampered by gender norms, including “the expectation that women shoulder a greater share of child care and household tasks than men,” according to a 2021 paper from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
While there are undoubtedly more female talents than ever who are able to be the creative and economic force in their unions, and more couples that are defying the old norms, I am still struck by the residue of the perfect wife ideal that Ciuraru depicts. She quotes a 2014 New York Times interview with Lorrie Moore, who wrote the short story collection “Like Life.” In the interview, Moore, who at the time was a single mom with a day job as a professor, said it was difficult to find space for her own creative work:
“It’s hard,” she explained. “I once said that I could get very self-pitying. There are some men I know who are teaching and writing who are single fathers. But not many. Most of them have these great devoted wives, some version of Vera Nabokov. Writers all need Vera. She famously taught some of his classes.”
For women, Veras are in short supply, though Ciuraru hopes her book will encourage people to take stock of their relationships. As she told The Guardian: “I hope that if they are someone who harbors creative ambition, they will learn from these women not to wait and to try to make that work within their marriage and claim the space to do so.”
Uneven labor at home allowed husbands to thrive.