by Robyn Ryle
If you make it into your fifties and sixties without ever having been married, people might start to wonder why. This might be true even if you’re in a committed relationship with someone and living with that person. In places like the United States, it’s less accepted to settle into a long-term relationship without also getting married. Exactly how weird it is for you to not be married will vary depending on your gender.
You’re a woman. GO TO 106.
You’re a man. GO TO 107.
121
You occupy multiple identities at the same time. You don’t stop being a woman or a lesbian or Arab American at any particular moment. This is part of what people mean when they talk about intersectionality. Everyone experiences their lives at the intersection of many different identities. Gender isn’t the only identity that matters.
In your case, your gender and your sexual identity might complicate your Arab American background. This will more likely be true if you’re a first- or second-generation immigrant. That is, if you moved to the United States from another country with your parents (first generation) or if your parents moved here and you were born in the United States (second generation). Your family might associate your homosexuality with the influence of white, American culture. As Nadine Naber describes, based on her research on Arab American femininities, your parents might argue that you never would have been a lesbian in the country from which you immigrated. They might say that there is no such thing as homosexuality in their home country. In fact, like many people in non-Western parts of the world, they may claim that homosexuality itself is an American or Western phenomenon. For you, being a lesbian might be perceived by your family as a betrayal of your ethnic and national identity, in a way that might not be true for women of other backgrounds.
Your experience reveals a facet of gender and sexual identity that might remain invisible to those from other racial and ethnic backgrounds—gender and sexual identity are racialized. These identities interact with race and ethnicity, regardless of whether you’re Arab American, African American, Native American, Latinx, or white. Gender and sexual identities can also be used to draw racial and ethnic boundaries: the idea that we, as a certain racial or ethnic group, are different from another racial or ethnic group because of how we do gender or sexuality.
GO TO 65.
122
If you live in the early nineteenth century in places like the United States, you’ll never go on a date, regardless of whether you’re a woman or a man. Instead, you’ll either call on someone or be called on. During this time period, men court women by obtaining permission from the mother of the woman they are interested in to visit or call. If you don’t get permission from the young woman’s mother, you aren’t allowed to call. Your courtship is dead in the water before it even has a chance to begin. If you’re lucky enough to get permission, you and your young lady can sit in the parlor or on the porch, under the supervision of another adult—your chaperone. You aren’t allowed to bring gifts. In fact, to do so would be seen as rude and presumptuous—a definite violation of the rules of calling. That’s because bringing a woman a gift before you’re married to her presumes that she is obligated to you in some way. She owes you, and a gift implies some sense that the debt will be returned sexually. A woman’s reputation could be ruined by accepting gifts or money from a suitor.
So, you don’t need money to call on a young woman. You just need her mother’s permission, which means that the power in the courtship process lies with women. Fathers still have a say in who their daughter ultimately marries, but the decision about who can pursue her during the courtship process is in the hands of mothers and daughters. And although mothers and fathers certainly consider the economic prospects of their daughter’s suitor, the process of courtship itself is not an economic transaction.
If you navigate the system of calling successfully, you’ll hopefully end up married. But exactly what type of marriage will it be?
You end up in a companionate marriage. GO TO 109.
You end up in a traditional marriage. GO TO 110.
You don’t get married. GO TO 105.
123
You’re in a culture where dating is the predominant mode of courtship, so you might find yourself going out on a date. Dating first evolved as a courtship method in the early twentieth century. It started partly because of a lack of space. The previous system of courtship—calling—required some space in a house where a young woman and her suitor could hang out, under adult supervision. But what if you didn’t have a house to hang out in? Working-class women had already begun dating—leaving their home in the company of a male suitor without the supervision of an adult chaperone. When even middle-class women started moving out of their parents’ houses to go work in cities, they were usually stuck without a space in which to entertain male suitors and without any adult supervision. Dating began to make more sense.
Dating then meant that, as a young woman, you waited for a man to ask you out on a date and then went out somewhere with your suitor. This is often still the case today. The man often decides where you go on the date and pays for whatever your dating activities cost. A dating system turns courtship into an economic exchange, something that our nineteenth-century ancestors, who were raised under the calling system of courtship, would find horrifying. Because men do the asking, the planning, and the paying, the power in this courtship system is firmly in their hands.
Courtship is still around as a system as dating today. You might follow the rules as laid out above. Or, as a young woman, you might be the person who does the asking instead of the person who waits to be asked. You might split the costs for the date evenly, lessening the power imbalance of this particular courtship system.
If you successfully navigate the rules of dating, you’ll hopefully end up married. Or maybe not. If you do, what kind of marriage will you find yourself in?
You end up in a companionate marriage. GO TO 109.
You end up in a traditional marriage. GO TO 110.
You don’t get married. GO TO 105.
124
You live in a time and place where hookups have become an accepted form of sexual and romantic interaction, which means that you’re probably in the United States on a college campus, where hookup culture is most commonly found. You might not be sure whether hookups are a form of courtship or just a recreational activity, and you’re not alone. Because hookups are a relatively new phenomenon, the extent to which they may lead to serious, committed relationships isn’t clear.
In fact, there’s some debate about what exactly the term hookup means. A hookup is generally seen as a one-time sexual encounter that carries no further expectations or obligations. In theory, a hookup is generally not seen as a first date or a pathway to a more committed relationship. For some people, a hookup specifically involves sex, but for other people, it can mean kissing or making out or any variety of sexual activity. On your particular college campus, it might feel like everyone is hooking up, even if you aren’t hooking up yourself. In fact, research shows that although not many college students actually engage in hookups, they assume that everyone else is doing it. So hooking up does dominate the sexual and romantic terrain of many college campuses, even though it’s not what most people are doing.
You might view hookups as a form of sexual convergence, or the way in which norms regarding sexuality for women and men have become more similar over time. If your mom or grandma went to college, they probably would’ve thought that the idea of hooking up with a guy on campus was pretty strange. Women’s sexuality was much more restricted in the past, which meant that a woman openly pursuing an encounter that was about nothing other than sexual pleasure would have been frowned on. With sexual convergence, it’s increasingly acceptable for women to act like men in their sexual lives. You might see hookups as a reflection of that trend.
Interestingly, this hookup culture so far hasn’t resulted in college students today having more sex with more partners than
previous generations did. When researchers ask about the frequency of sex and number of sexual partners, the numbers are about the same as they were for their parents’ generation. Sometimes, hookups do evolve into committed relationships. You might transition from hooking up to being friends with benefits, and then, eventually, to being in an exclusive relationship.
Why have hookups become an important mode of sexual and romantic interaction on college campuses? Some speculate that it’s because of the sped-up, hyperinvolved lifestyle of today’s middle-class young adults. If you’re constantly on the go with schoolwork and extracurricular activities, you might not have time to date. But you still want some sexual activity, so hookups are an efficient solution.
Others have speculated that hookup culture is connected to the growing gender imbalance on college campuses. Most colleges and universities struggle to maintain a balanced gender ratio, because women are outperforming men academically and are therefore more likely to be admitted to college. It’s not at all uncommon to find campuses with three-to-two or two-to-one ratios skewed toward women. When men are outnumbered by women, men have more power to set the terms of heterosexual courtship and relationships, since heterosexual women are competing for a limited number of heterosexual men. College men dictate a system that meets their needs—casual, obligation-free sexual encounters.
The truth is that hookup culture doesn’t mean that most young people won’t end up married. If you do end up walking down the aisle, what exactly will that marriage look like?
You end up in a companionate marriage. GO TO 109.
You end up in a traditional marriage. GO TO 110.
You don’t get married. GO TO 105.
125
For most of the history of the United States, women of color and white, working-class women have worked outside the home. The popular narrative that women first started getting jobs in large numbers in the 1960s and ’70s, as a result of the women’s movement, really only applies to the small number of (usually white) women who were able to afford to be stay-at-home mothers in the first place.
If you’re an African American woman, you’ve inherited the legacy of slavery; your ancestors most likely spent long periods of history subjected to forced, unpaid labor. After the worldwide abolition of chattel slavery and emancipation in the United States, African American women still usually worked, and though they were paid, it wasn’t much. Other women of color and working-class white women historically almost always worked for pay, and they also weren’t paid very well.
The idea of the nuclear family, made up of a father who goes to work and a mother who stays home and takes care of the kids, has always been less accessible for women of color and working-class white women like you. Today, thanks in part to factors like inflation and wage stagnation, having one potential breadwinner stay home is a luxury that the majority of U.S. families—of all races and ethnicities—can’t afford.
GO TO 143.
126
As a white, middle- or upper-class woman, working outside the home might be a decision for you instead of a necessity. Your partner might make enough money to make your income optional, and, if so, you’re in a minority of today’s families in the United States.
Women like you—and especially women with children—began to enter the workforce in growing numbers in the 1960s and ’70s. Women began working partly because of the increasing independence that the women’s movement brought. That emphasis on independence and women’s empowerment made working outside the home much more attractive to you than it might have been in the past, pulling you into work. But you would’ve been pushed into the workforce as much as you were pulled. Another reason that more middle- and upper-class women began working was because of the decline in the real value of men’s wages. In other words, you were pushed into the workplace in order to help your family survive. This is called wage stagnation, and it happens when incomes don’t keep up with inflation, so that over time, people are effectively getting paid less and less. Some estimates suggest that, when adjusted for inflation, the median male, full-time worker in 1973 earned almost $3,000 more than his counterpart in 2014 ($53,294 in 1973 compared to $50,383 in 2014). Since 1970, men’s wages have decreased 19 percent due to wage stagnation. That means that even for white, middle- and upper-class women like you, surviving on one income is becoming increasingly impossible.
GO TO 143.
127
As a woman who doesn’t work for pay outside the home, you probably still do work—and possibly much more of it than men. In fact, estimates tell us that when we include unpaid work—like household chores and caring for children—women work longer hours than men. In developed countries, women work thirty minutes longer per day, while in developing country, you’ll work fifty minutes longer on average than men. Much of your work will take the form of housework and childcare. Even though the hours that you spend cooking or taking care of children are crucial to the household and allow your spouse the freedom to go earn wages, this type of work is viewed as something that you’re simply expected to do. The world’s economy couldn’t function without the unpaid labor of women like you, but when most people think of “work,” they generally don’t think of the unpaid labor performed by women. The idea of work itself is deeply gendered.
GO TO 144.
128
If you’re a man who does no paid work, you’re pretty rare. Working for pay, and usually doing so outside the home, is central to how masculinity is defined. Part of what it means to be a man is to be able to support your family financially. That means that you’re much less likely than women to do only unpaid work. Only 7 percent of fathers who live with their children are stay-at-home dads.
Why don’t more guys like you decide to give up the workplace in exchange for the hard work of taking care of a home and raising children? One answer might be the financial costs. Because men make more than women on average in just about every country in the world, it makes more sense, if you’re a heterosexual couple, for the woman to give up her salary and stay home—it’s usually easier to support a family on a man’s salary alone than it would be with a woman’s income alone.
But money doesn’t appear to be the only reason that you’re less likely to become a stay-at-home dad. In many Scandinavian countries, generous parental paid leave is available to both mothers and fathers. Unlike in the United States, paid leave in these countries is mandated by the government, rather than left up to individual employers. This paid leave reduces the financial costs to families when men stay home, yet men still don’t take advantage of it to the same extent that women do.
Take Sweden as an example. Sweden introduced a paid parental leave program for fathers forty years ago, but in the first year of the program, men took less than 1 percent of all paid parental leave. The Swedish government turned the tide when they added yet another financial incentive to the program. The “daddy month” gave couples an extra month of paid leave if both parents took at least one month of leave. With this change, the proportion of men taking paid leave jumped significantly. In 2016, the program was expanded to give three extra months of paid leave. Today, men take about 25 percent of all parental leave, and Sweden is still working to make parental leave even more equal. Other countries that have tried similar policies have seen comparable results. Two years after adding similar incentives to its paid leave program, Germany saw the rate of men taking parental leave rise from 3 percent to more than 20 percent.
There are rewards for you as a dad for spending more time with your children, and it’s good for women too. In Sweden, women’s income and their reported levels of happiness have both increased as more men take advantage of parental leave.
Outside of countries like Sweden and Germany, you’re less likely to be doing no paid work at all. You’ll probably still help out with housework and childcare, since in two-thirds of U.S. families, both mom and dad work. But you’ll probably spend less time doing this unpaid work. On average, fathers in the United
States spend seven hours a week on childcare, nine hours on housework, and forty-three hours doing paid work. Mothers spend on average fifteen hours a week on childcare, eighteen hours on housework, and twenty-five hours on paid work.
GO TO 144.
129
As a man, paid work is kind of your thing. The world is divided in such a way that men are assumed to be the ones who do paid work, even if it hasn’t always been that way. The doctrine of separate spheres—or the idea that men belong at work and women’s place is in the home—has really only been around for about two hundred years. Before that, all work was done at home and usually on a farm. That’s why the word housework didn’t become commonplace until the 1800s. Before that, all work was housework, or work done in the home by both women and men, as well as their children.
That paid work came to be defined as masculine has all kinds of implications for you as a man in the workplace today. Since the doctrine of separate spheres, workplaces have been largely masculine spaces, designed for men and assumed to be occupied mostly by men. You can see this in the fact that it wasn’t until the 1970s that employers began to develop any sort of sexual harassment policies for the workplace. Before that, the workplace was just assumed to be hostile toward women because it was a masculine space, not for women.
