Salary Warfare: When You Make More

Than Your Husband

Understanding the inner battles some women

fight to become comfortable with their success

By Victoria Secunda

hen my husband, Shel, and I were first married, he encouraged me to bag my day job as an editor and pursue my dream of becoming a full-time writer. I remember the exact moment that he said, "Go for it."  I gulped and replied, "Do I have to?"  It was a joke.  Sort of.  It meant that I had to go back to ground zero and start from scratch, totally dependent on my husband's income.

            Ten years later, one of my books—a  "breakthrough" book, in publishing argot-—fetched a phenomenal advance and got a huge amount of publicity.  That year I pulled in more money than my husband. "My investment has paid off," he said, beaming.  "I could get used to this."

            Shel had no problem with my outearning him; I was the one with the problem.  It felt, well, weird being the primary breadwinner.  On the up side, I was able at last to buy new couches for the living room and assorted other longed-for, high-ticket items.  The down side: I found myself alternately worrying (unnecessarily) about Shel's ego, and being royally annoyed that I was in the money-making lead. In my heart of hearts, I wanted

to be taken care of, if only theoretically.  I wanted my income to be the bonus, not the necessity, with Shel hauling in the bigger bucks.  This, despite my passionate feminism, my independent streak, my belief that women should pull their own weight.   The real feminist, it turns out, was the man I was married to.

            None of my thinking on this subject was sane.  Nor was it solely my problem— knew a number of women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who, Betty Friedan notwithstanding, felt enormously ambivalent about being the primary

breadwinners in their families.

            Tina, 31, a public relations executive, is such a woman.  Married to a painter who teaches at a local college, she earns twice as much as her husband does.  "I would love it if he earned more money," she says.  "I'm very protective of my earnings and instinctively feel as though he shouldn't ever rely on my salary to provide us with a better lifestyle.  Rather, I want my earnings, and his, to provide me with a better lifestyle.  Selfish?  Absolutely.  I don't love him less because he makes less.  But I can't help

feeling agitated whenever he complains about his finances."

             Why is it that some women suffer when they're more successful than their partners?  Do we really want to roll back the clock to the era prior to the Equal Pay Act of 1963 when women, doing the same jobs as men, earned half as much?  Given the strides women have made in medicine, law, and on Wall Street, is the old cliche about women's "fear of success" still true?  Well,

yeah.  For some women, anyhow.  Notably, the married ones who are 30 or older.  The reasons, experts say, tell us a great deal about the intractability of gender roles.

It’s Your Turn to Earn More!

             For one thing, women still earn only 74 percent, up from 59 percent in 1963, of what men earn, although among younger women, the gap narrows.  While this disparity reeks of injustice, it is still the norm for women to count on their husbands' incomes for the family's basic needs.

             And where "tradition" holds sway, so too do women's emotions; we've been trained not only by our parents, but also by the culture, to look for "good earners" to marry (and to be good looking in return).  And should wives find

themselves becoming the "good earners—either because their husbands have been downsized or because the women have done spectacularly well in their careers—it puts them on barely charted ground.  For most women, it's still lonely at the top.  Their friends might be jealous; their mothers might observe, "Shouldn't you be at home taking care of the kids?"; their husbands might feel inadequate.

            How do achieving women deal with these ill winds?  By minimizing their success to their friends, saying, "I was lucky."  By feeling guilty that they've achieved more than their mothers.  By working two shifts in their marriages—their day jobs, and the cooking, laundry, bed-time stories, cleaning house at night.  By appearing to be incompetent or fearful in other areas, such as using tools or negotiating car deals, in which their husbands

may excel.

            "The feeling is that if you succeed in one area, you better really screw up in other areas," says Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D., author of “Women and Madness.” "Frequently I have found that women who are high achievers have a number of phobias, which are a way of saying,  ‘I’m really a helpless little girl—there

are lots of things I can't do, so don't kill me’.”

            But it isn't just the culture that causes women to feel unaccountably blue when they're high achievers and high earners; much of their uneasiness can be traced to their childhoods.  Many women grow up believing that their happiness is contingent on emotional connections.  And the attachment whose loss women most fear is that with their parents.  When fathers are supportive, fair and involved, girls learn that being appealingly feminine and being competent are not mutually exclusive.  But when a father is an exacting and/or distant presence, his daughter may intuitively figure out that the price of Daddy's caring is her own "frailty."

         In the case of mothers, daughters may try to preserve the bond by denigrating or even sabotaging happy tidings because they don't want to invite comparisons that will make their mothers feel inadequate.  "Women are raised to protect the people they love," says psychologist Harriet Goldhor Lerner, Ph.D., author of “The Dance of Intimacy.”  "So they have a radar-like

sensitivity to the unhappiness of other women in their family.  When there has been suffering, as there often has been in previous generations, the daughter feels guilty and anxious about having for herself what her mother couldn't have."

            Other daughters may be influenced by their mothers' negative responses to their achievements in childhood.  If those achievements were ignored or ridiculed, women dare not feel good about them, because it puts them in opposition to Mom.  So they distrust or even avoid happiness to stay in her good graces.

            Another effect of early family life is the feeling that a woman didn't earn her achievements, and that her brother, because he's male, "deserves" more.  Talented girls often downplay their gifts so as not to make their brothers feel outclassed.  Says Alex Zautra, Ph.D., a clinical psychology

professor at Arizona State University, "We know from research that the degree to which events boost self-esteem is a consequence of taking ownership for them. Men are socialized to promote themselves and their own success and lay claim to it.  But women are socialized to share responsibility for positive

events [with others].  So if something good happens, they say, ‘I wasn't the only one responsible—we did it together’.”

Savor—and Celebrate—Your Success!

            The painful consequence of all this is that happiness can make some women feel unmoored.  But if we are trained to be the also-rans of joy, we can also be trained to treasure our good fortune.  It's a matter of unlearning old emotional habits, of defusing cultural messages, and of repatterning our reactions.

             *Taking a Stand.  As prosaic as it seems, re-patterning starts with the simple decision to give happiness a chance, to say to oneself, "No one will thank me for taking the low road of acceptability or waiting for permission to be happy."

             *Changing the Tape.  Negative childhood messages are usually the result of parents' own frustrations.  Mothers of the senior generation were defined by  marriage and motherhood, and fathers were judged by their incomes.  When you realize that your "unpleasable" parents are casualties of their own confining times and roles, it's possible to reinterpret their messages to you.

              *Making Joy a Priority.  If unhappiness is "learned behavior," so, too, is happiness.  "One can learn not to be afraid of positive emotions, as though your hand were in the cookie jar and someone's going to slap it away," says Zautra.  Adds Chesler, "Life is very precious, and it's important for women to seize happiness.  I don't mean being mindlessly happy, but finding a

place where you can have deep joy, whether or not you're socially approved of.  That means joy in oneself and one's being and the very life process."

            The happiest women I know are not necessarily rich or famous or beautiful or married.  Rather, they have these gifts: the capacities for singular joy and finding something of simple pleasure in every day.  Even if happiness is an acquired taste, life without it is fearful indeed.  

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Victoria Secunda is the executive editor of

MAKING BREAD magazine.       

E-mail this article.

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