How the sexes interact and the position they take in a relationship is clearly on show in at least one marriage - and probably much more prevalent than we think, even in 2011. Eilene Zimmerman in her piece "I shouldn't have left the finances to my husband" on Salon explains her "relationship" with her now ex-husband :
"A year ago I got my first American Express card. This might not seem particularly monumental, but in my case it is. I'm a 47-year-old mother of two, a professional journalist who writes about business -- entrepreneurs, careers and the workplace. I have a monthly column in the New York Times Sunday Business section. It's not a stretch to imagine I would be savvy about the business end of my own life. And yet I wasn't, until very recently. I had never seen a 401K statement, never made a mortgage payment, never bought or sold a car or stock in a company and didn't know anything about mutual funds.
I left all that to my husband. This despite the fact I consider myself a feminist. I grew up in the shadow of the 1970s women's movement. As a high school senior I was, to a large extent, supporting myself -- buying my own clothes and car, chipping in for groceries at home and even paying my own college application fees. I graduated from the largest women's college in the country at the time, and paid for it by waiting tables and taking student loans. Gloria Steinem gave the speech at my graduation. In 1986, I marched in Washington, D.C., to protest the death of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Yet 25 years later I had managed to become almost completely dependent on someone else for my survival. I felt more like my husband's child than his wife. At the beginning of each year he gave me a certain amount of cash (we were both too politically savvy to call it an allowance), which, combined with my comparatively low earnings as a writer, funded my life throughout the year. My expenses were all the things that made daily, upper-middle-class family life possible: piano lessons, organic strawberries, martial arts classes, soccer fees, swimming lessons, birthday parties."
"A year ago I got my first American Express card. This might not seem particularly monumental, but in my case it is. I'm a 47-year-old mother of two, a professional journalist who writes about business -- entrepreneurs, careers and the workplace. I have a monthly column in the New York Times Sunday Business section. It's not a stretch to imagine I would be savvy about the business end of my own life. And yet I wasn't, until very recently. I had never seen a 401K statement, never made a mortgage payment, never bought or sold a car or stock in a company and didn't know anything about mutual funds.
I left all that to my husband. This despite the fact I consider myself a feminist. I grew up in the shadow of the 1970s women's movement. As a high school senior I was, to a large extent, supporting myself -- buying my own clothes and car, chipping in for groceries at home and even paying my own college application fees. I graduated from the largest women's college in the country at the time, and paid for it by waiting tables and taking student loans. Gloria Steinem gave the speech at my graduation. In 1986, I marched in Washington, D.C., to protest the death of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Yet 25 years later I had managed to become almost completely dependent on someone else for my survival. I felt more like my husband's child than his wife. At the beginning of each year he gave me a certain amount of cash (we were both too politically savvy to call it an allowance), which, combined with my comparatively low earnings as a writer, funded my life throughout the year. My expenses were all the things that made daily, upper-middle-class family life possible: piano lessons, organic strawberries, martial arts classes, soccer fees, swimming lessons, birthday parties."
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