by Miriam Horn
Betty’s divorce is not atypical: Fathers (and their money) often disappear. A third of the children of divorce see their fathers just once a week and a third not at all. In 1995, half of the 5.3 million fathers who were supposed to did not pay the child support they owe, reneging on $34 billion to 23 million kids. The success of the women’s movement was undoubtedly as much a consequence of the collapse of this paternal responsibility as its cause. As women came to see the fragility of the institution that had traditionally sheltered them, they came to see as well the necessity of securing their own independent income.
In the Wellesley class of ’69, those who failed to secure such financial independence invariably suffered the toughest divorces, while those who were the principal breadwinners had much greater leverage and latitude in their choices. Susan Alexander and Nancy Young both had violence in their marriages, but because they were also their family’s wage earners, they had the wherewithal to leave. Others in the class, also financially self-sufficient in their marriages, have managed what can only be called successful divorces. Newspaper publisher Catherine Shen’s divorce cost her a lot: She had far more assets, which in California were treated as community property and equally shared. But, for her son’s sake, “I was willing to spend whatever it took to preserve the peace. His father now lives a mile away and we get along better than we ever did before the divorce.” Fashion model Michelle Lamson was also the money-maker in her family at the time of her divorce, which came not long after she adopted a baby boy; on the day she brought him home, her husband disappeared for the night, explaining the next day that “it was all too much for him.” A few months later, he left her for another woman. As her ex-husband, he has been a devoted father, seeing Nicholas every weekend, calling him every day, spending Christmas with the family. “I don’t think he’d have been such a good father if we’d stayed married,” says Michelle. “Nicholas has thrived.”
That the children of divorce suffer less if they do not end up poor is obviously true. Beyond that, it is hard to assess how the kids of the broken marriages in the class of ’69 have fared; their mothers’ optimistic testimony reflects some unmeasurable mixture of truth and wishful thinking. In their usual fashion, these women have foraged among the countless studies for insight, cringing at those that find kids of divorce more prone to substance abuse, depression, and trouble in school, relieved by those that find them faring as well as those in intact families if their family income is adequate and their mothers are well educated and their fathers remain involved. All worry deeply for their children.
Mary Day Kent, ’69, was her family’s breadwinner. In 1971, she was living in Philadelphia and working for the American Friends Service when her boyfriend moved in. Eight years later, “because I was pregnant and my mother was weeping,” they got married. After her son’s birth at her midwife’s farm, Mary went back part-time to the Friends Peace Committee, working on human rights in Latin America. She earned little, but it had to serve: Mary’s husband spent his time putting out a newsletter promoting bicycle riding. Until they had children, Mary did not object to subsidizing her husband’s work. “Then money becomes one of those things that is suddenly much more important. When our kids were young and we were broke, it was a source of great stress to be living with someone who could have helped out and just never got around to it. It was always going to happen any moment. He would have had to work just twenty-five hours a week to ease the enormous financial pressure on me.”
A number of Mary’s classmates have landed in similar circumstances: supporting husbands whose higher consciousness or free spirit required a life outside the system. Johanna Branson never minded that her husband, Jock, didn’t get a bachelor’s degree, but she was bothered by “his lack of interest in preparing himself to support his family, and that he managed to shed that traditional imperative without shouldering domestic responsibility. I spent a lot of time when my kids were little chafing, wanting to work more. I’d have to get home by midafternoon, then try to work when they were in bed. I was exhausted and sick all the time.”
Mary Day Kent was fortunate to have good subsidized day care at her workplace; she could nurse her kids at work and watch them play in the courtyard, and because she set her own schedule, she could take them to the doctor or attend a school play. “My husband wasn’t willing to take on those responsibilities any more than he was willing to get a job, and my experience was that when he was taking care of the kids, he would try to combine that with lots of other things. He wasn’t giving them full attention. I felt I was carrying 95 percent of the load. I had to make all the decisions about their schools and get them to do their homework. I had to arrange and pay for summer camp. I had to fight to get him to do any household chores.”
“Marrying down,” in Mary’s case, did not turn out to be a liberating choice. “When I was young, I had vowed I would not get into a conventional marriage, feeling that if I married a high-powered man with lots of goals, he’d make all the decisions and I’d never make my own. I way overdid it. We both were terribly unhappy for a very, very long time. I got counseling and suggested marriage counseling, because it seemed the right thing to do. My husband didn’t want to do it. Frankly, by that time I didn’t either. I couldn’t have stayed with him. I would not have been able to stand it. After ten years of marriage, when our kids were ten and five, we got divorced. My mother was heartbroken. But at one point she said to me, ‘Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to push you into marriage. It didn’t provide you security after all.’
“I have no doubt that we made the right decision, but I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the devastating impact that divorce has on children, even under good circumstances. My kids did not have to move. They see their father frequently. Their economic circumstances, if anything, improved: My husband does not give me child support, but I don’t have to support him anymore. But my ten-year-old son’s academic work suffered. He was extremely depressed and had lots of counseling. He’s a progressive and sensitive kid, and right now he’s doing well in a special arts high school. But I cross my fingers to say that he is through it. I just hope maybe he’ll make it to college and get a self-supporting career.”
When I first met Kris and Jeff Rogers in the spring of 1994, their family seemed proof that a marriage could be truly equal, granting both partners a chance for a deep, sustained relation with their children and for a dedicated working life. Like Bill and Hillary Clinton’s, theirs was a political marriage, though not in the cynical sense that is usually meant; their alliance was not simply a way to aggrandize their individual power but a foundation from which to pursue joint aspirations that were public as well as private. It was, as Jeff said at Kris’s swearing in as U.S. attorney, a genuine “life partnership,” a fair sharing of responsibilities and sacrifices and rewards.
Jeff made the first professional sacrifice: When, on their arrival in Oregon, Kris landed a clerkship with a federal judge, Jeff gave up a position in the U.S. attorney’s office to avoid a conflict of interest, becoming a state public defender instead. After the birth of their second child in 1980, they became the first couple ever to share a federal Justice Department job—two desks in an office, alternating workdays—so that they could share fully in their children’s care. For years, the couple worked as a team: managing cases together, co-teaching courses on sex discrimination at Lewis and Clark College, continuing to take turns stepping out of each other’s way. In 1984, after being forced out of her job, Kris took herself out of the running for Portland city attorney and Jeff got the job, a favor he returned when Congresswoman Elizabeth Furse came to him urging he seek nomination as U.S. attorney. Jeff declined and proposed Kris instead.
When I next talked to Kris, in the summer of 1994, she began our conversation by saying, “There’s something you have to know.” She then told the first chapter in what would unfold as a terribly sad story, ending with: “So, if you were planning to continue with this theme of the perfect marriage, I need to
disabuse you of that illusion.” The tale would become more complicated over the years as I spoke with the two of them, in alternating conversations that made it easy to imagine what masterful persuaders both must be in the courtroom. While denying most of the central allegations, Jeff finally did not wish his words to be on the record, feeling a public battle would only do more harm to his children.
In the spring of 1994, Kris told me, her mother was diagnosed with liver cancer and was told she would live only a few more weeks. Kris flew to New York in May, and for two days sat with her father to watch her mother die. She remembers those hours with amazement: her mother’s calm; her father’s efforts to express what their life together had meant to him. But she also felt afraid. Just two weeks earlier, she had lost one of her closest friends. “I felt the props knocked out from under me. Life seemed terribly fragile.”
After spending a month with her father, Kris returned home to Portland in late June. On the Fourth of July, Jeff told her that for more than a year he’d been having an affair with a woman named Kathryn, who worked as his deputy; he was by then city attorney. Kathryn’s husband had discovered the affair and was threatening to tell Kris if Jeff did not. “At that moment, I related in a major way to the first Mrs. Newt Gingrich [who was handed divorce papers by her husband the day after her cancer surgery]. It rocked me to the core—such utter deception. I felt like I’d been living with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Twenty-three years. I didn’t know what we would do.”
Worried for their daughter, Karen, then seventeen, and son, Ty, fourteen, Kris and Jeff went to a therapist. “I was doing my labor breathing to help me through. Not that I was coping. I was in free fall. It was the most difficult period of my life. The sense of betrayal. My total lack of comprehension over how we could have devolved to that point. My fear of what would come.” The pain kept being refreshed for Kris: Searching for answers, she found on their home computer a statement Jeff had composed—a statement seemingly meant for his staff, though never delivered—voicing regret at the pain that he may have caused but describing the undeniable intensity of his new love.
By the fall, Kathryn had resigned as Jeff’s deputy and left her marriage and Kris had decided to file for a divorce. Jeff was, at the time, in a race for local office and didn’t want to move out right away, says Kris: “He wanted to keep up appearances.” When Kris filed for divorce anyway, the local paper ran an item: PORTLAND’S TOP LEGAL COUPLE IS CALLING IT QUITS. Jeff moved out, finally, on Labor Day. “I had to threaten to file a motion to get him to go. In the meantime he was … well, it was a difficult time. There were days that I could barely get out of bed, when the tiniest thing would put me over the edge. I’d never been that despondent, for months on end. I felt particularly precarious after the Republican triumph in the November elections, knowing my professional position might crumble. I was kicking myself, thinking if I’d only come to terms with this when I was younger, knowing how difficult it is for women my age to find someone new. I felt my life was over.”
Kris’s friends were “extraordinarily supportive,” especially Hillary Clinton, who happened to visit Portland on her health care tour in the midst of the marriage’s collapse. Work also provided some respite, giving form to Kris’s days. Like many in the Wellesley class of ’69, Kris counters the perception that women are incapable of separating enough from their feelings to function well in the impersonal working world; many have in fact found there the same diversion from painful emotions historically used as an escape by men.
Kris thought about leaving town—moving east to be near her father, becoming a tribal lawyer, joining the Peace Corps, taking a trip with women friends. Her beautiful home in the woods, once so serene in its silences, had come to feel secretive and airless. The smallness of Portland also closed in. “I felt like my nose was being rubbed in it all the time.” To illustrate the point, she sent me an article from a local weekly paper, Willamette Week, published after the divorce, when Jeff rehired Kathryn. Headlined DANGEROUS LIAISONS, the piece asked, “Should the city of Portland allow managers to supervise workers they sleep with?” It described Jeff as “the son of Nixon’s secretary of state … law school chum of Bill Clinton and former husband of U.S. Attorney Kris Olson.” Kris’s accompanying letter struck a note of bitter satisfaction: “He always said he wouldn’t stand to be known as S.O.B [son of Bill], F.O.B. [friend of Bill] or S.O.K. [spouse of Kris], but there it is.”
Drowned for months in waves of rage and self-recrimination, tossed up eventually on an unfamiliar shore, Kris began to reflect on her marriage from her new vantage. As she did, she began to discern a story different from the one she had so long told herself and the world. Again experiencing the ricochet between the personal and the political, Kris was spurred on in her reconception of her marriage by an unlikely catalyst: the passage of the Violence Against Women Act, which made domestic abuse a federal crime for the first time. Charged with new prosecutorial responsibilities, Kris began looking through materials from a local women’s shelter, which included two warning lists outlining the signs of an abusive relationship, one detailing “emotional and economic attacks,” the other “acts of violence.” While Kris had never experienced physical violence in her marriage, many of the signs on the other list, ranging from lying and infidelity to “not giving support, attention, or compliments,” she concluded, “described my own marriage.”
That private conclusion brought with it, for Kris, a sense of public obligation. “I feel fortunate that I don’t need to keep up appearances the way Hillary does. In fact, I feel this absolute compulsion not to cover up anymore, to share the experience so that people can learn from my mistakes.” Kris acted on that compulsion quickly, in the fall of 1994, when she gave a talk to women lawyers at the annual Oregon Bar convention. Because she’d been with the Clintons for the signing of the crime bill, the convention organizers asked her to talk about violence against women. “I ended up tossing the talking points from D.C. and speaking totally from my own heart. I told them that I believed the sixties had been a true revolution, with women daring finally to speak out, but that we’d hit glass ceilings and backlash and the religious right going on about women ‘forsaking’ their families and that we were losing ground. I’d just read Peggy Orenstein on the collapse of self-esteem in girls; I’d seen my women law students unwilling to speak up and the women in my office sniping at each other because they were afraid to confront problems head-on. I’d seen women lawyers who felt stuck—either they swallowed shit and became one of the boys, or they fled. They had no ground on which to fight; there’s rarely strength in numbers inside the firm, and it’s taboo to go outside for support: If they press, they end up blackballed as troublemakers. I told those women that we need to sustain our support networks, that consciousness-raising is not outdated, that we need to shed our shame and talk to each other in order to break these cycles. Then I told them what I’d learned about myself. I said, ‘Look at me, I’m the first woman U.S. attorney of Oregon, and I’ve let this happen to me, and I’m not sure how and it’s a really slippery slope.’ ”
Kris’s public declaration was in fact veiled, but the message got through. “It was the most nerve-racking talk I’ve ever given. I felt like I’d stood up and said, ‘I’m Kris Rogers and I’m an alcoholic.’ I just felt it necessary that we face the degree to which women who gain power are subjected in the workplace and in intimate relationships to a backlash, to people’s efforts to control them and put them in their place. I asked all the women in the room to do some group comparison of life experiences, ‘Right here, right now.’ I read them the list of abusive behaviors, and asked how many had experienced any of them in the workplace or with their partner. I guessed that because they are more public and so more threatening, they would have experienced abuse more than women who aren’t pushing the edges. Of the two hundred women there, about eighty percent raised their hands. It was a collective coming out that left me drained. When it was over, my Wellesley classmate Susan Grab
er [then an associate justice of the Oregon Supreme Court, now a judge on the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals] had to help me down off the podium and out to my car.”
For a woman left by her husband for another woman to diagnose abuse retrospectively sets off every alarm: She has jumped on a bandwagon, cloaked herself in the victim’s mantle, is out for revenge. Kris herself acknowledges having “seen countless examples of women who are hurt and lash out and demonize their ex-husband.” But the question is more complicated. Women have long been mistreated by their husbands—but secretly, and without language to talk about it. Only with feminism did women begin publicizing those private miseries, developing in the process a new vocabulary. It is possible, as some argue, that this new vocabulary has mostly had the effect of leading people like Kris to see pathology where there was just ordinary human unhappiness, that it has turned the confused misdemeanors inevitable in a relationship into stark crimes. The problem with the word abuse is that it conjures an abuser and an abused; it obscures the collaboration not only in destructiveness but also in the aspiration to integrity and love.
But it is also possible that the new language has given women the capacity to recognize mistreatment that they had previously explained away or blamed upon themselves. Having insisted on stepping free of the shields of the old social rules and making their own choices about sex and intimate relationships, women soon discovered that they needed new, publicly agreed-upon rules, rules that they participated in crafting and that made finer distinctions as to what was an intimate injustice or a sexual crime.
