“Not bringing in money left some of these women feeling vulnerable.” I’m surprised this article doesn’t mention the most obvious issue with being dependent on your husband for money: how hard it is as a “wealthy” woman to leave your husband when none of your “wealth” actually belongs to you. I put “wealthy” in quotes because of course these women aren’t actually wealthy in their own right; they’re married to wealthy men, which is very different. These women have nothing of their own, which is a very scary place to be in – living in luxury while knowing that none of it is yours and it could all be taken away at any minute.
I’m speaking from experience as someone who grew up in a very wealthy neighborhood where the domestic violence shelters were full of battered women every night, most of whom would go back to their rich husbands in the morning because they were scared what would happen to them and their kids if they left. These men had the best lawyers and could take everything in a divorce, including the kids (a doubly scary option for a mother if your husband is abusive).
Money is power. When your husband is also your employer (as in, he supports you financially in exchange for which you provide domestic/emotional/childcare labor), that means he has the power to dictate what you do “on company time”, so to speak (which, since a marriage has no contract, no predetermined salary, and no fixed hours, is all the time). Many a man believes he has a right to dictate how his wife spends “his” money, including how she spends her free time, where she goes, what she wears, who she socializes with, how she raises “his” kids, and so on, because he’s paying for all of it. And the difficult thing is, so do we, because even without the misogyny we as a capitalist culture are deeply invested in the idea that paying for something gives you certain “rights” over the thing you’re paying for, and that naturally the person who “contributes” more should have a bigger say in how things get done.
