Don’t Be A Flanagan: Never Marry A Jerk

Linda Hirshman, guest-blogging at TAPPED, has an interesting follow-up post about the debunked Newsweek scare story on marriage. One downside of the fact that most of the women got married is that many of them had to give up their careers. In light of this, Hirshman decided to track down a man interviewed for the article, who was all for equality as long as it didn’t interfere with his partner being an unpaid maid:

So I am wondering to myself, was this the price they had to pay to land a husband after 1986? The old article did include a warning from one bachelor, Rick Kurson, a Boston stockbroker, that “equality was okay, but when he came home from work, he wanted dinner on the table.” (For future purposes, I will refer to such female dinner providers as “Caitlins,” v.t., “to Caitlin.”) Although Kurson’s was clearly the most obnoxious interview in that article and still the subject of commentary twenty years later, nobody at Newsweek or elsewhere apparently thought to see how Kurson’s quest for the perfect Caitlin turned out. So I called him up.

“Are you the Rick Kurson who was quoted in Newsweek magazine’s article about marriage in 1986?”

“I am.”

“I see from your telephone listing that you have a wife. Does she make you dinner every night?”

“No, she works.”

[pause]

“And she drives the kids around and all that. So sometimes she makes dinner, sometimes I barbecue, sometimes we get carry out or go out.”

Hirshman: “But you told Newsweek magazine in 1986 . . .”

Kurson: “That was one line out of a four-hour interview. It didn’t represent what I meant even then.”

Turns out, after he appeared in Newsweek, Kurson left his job as a stockbroker, went back to school, got a master’s degree in social work, and became a therapist. At 39, he married his wife, they have two children. Like many of the women I described in “Homeward Bound,” she does not work full-time. But between her part-time work at a vintage store and her robust little business designing and selling jewelry made from vintage elements, she’s carrying a pretty full load. And he has the luxury, as a therapist, to control his hours so he can spend time playing golf, playing with their kids, and being with her.

When I asked him whether he would have married her if she had told him she always intended to work full-time, he said of course. “We fit together well, that was what was important. I immediately felt very comfortable, we sort of clicked. I was never married before, but we were engaged within six months and married within a year.”

“Although that quotation in Newsweek didn’t represent what I thought even then,” he continued, “I’m glad I waited until I grew and I grew up before I married.”

Now that Newsweek has retracted its prediction that college-educated women at thirty can not marry at all, it’s probably going to be only another decade or two before they recant the latest destructive suggestion: that they can marry but only if they accept a godly traditional lifestyle. They just have to follow the third Hirshman Rule: Never marry a jerk. Rick Kurson turned out not to be one, and I bet there are a few others out there, too.

I think this is an excellent point. In response to Aspazia’s recent question, I would say that (although marriage has historically been a crucial constitutive element in the oppression of women) there’s nothing inherently anti-feminist about getting married, at least under a legal framework that doesn’t dissolve a woman’s rights upon entering the contract. What is inherently anti-feminist is the constant pressure on woman to get married, as if you will cease to exist if you’re 30 and single, which is what compels so many women to make sacrifices that they wouldn’t otherwise and aren’t necessary.