A Marriage Disagreement

...when I met my second husband I was twenty-six), I had struck with my husband the traditional, if unspoken, romantic deal: I would be the devoted wife and mother, he would be the family man, the good provider...

...But many others acted without regret and some like me struggled in the name DISSENT / Winter 1998 • 43 of feminism to improve family life by making it more equitable, flexible, and thus viable...

...NM (pausing to scratch his head, as he fails again to get it): Hmm...

...Even though the goal of domestic equality between cohabiting parents is honored—like the marriage vows themselves—mainly in the breach, at least it is now a commonplace, no longer an outrage...

...When we consulted movement lawyers, both leftist and (that newly emerging breed) feminist, whom I expected to be sympathetic to my ideas, they echoed the straight lawyer, warning us that if we didn't have a standard adversarial divorce we would be guilty of "collusion" and the divorce might not hold up (divorce by agreement was invalid, though all this would be changed by NewYork's 1975 divorce law reform...

...Gradually our marital battle escalated, until at the end of each skirmish we were threatening one another with divorce grenades— now he would brandish the word, now I would, but in the end I was the bolder one...

...Or maybe he was just too preoccupied to be bothered...

...No longer...

...As my good friend, Jungian analyst Barbara Koltuv, who followed with a marriage agreement of her own, told a reporter, "Part of the reason for thinking out a DISSENT /Winter 1998 39 contract is to find out what your problems are...

...Having dropped out of Columbia's Ph.D...

...but Life readers, ignorant of our private history, and not knowing that our Marriage Agreement was by then three years old, could easily presume a causal connection between the Agreement and our precipitous separation...

...Like so many lives, mine began to change drastically as soon as I connected with the movement...

...But I've always regretted that I didn't drop my married name then...

...But during the previous year, when the electrifying ideas of women's liberation had lifted me out of my marriage into the world, I had become sensitized to the issue of traditional divisions of domestic labor by reading sisterRedstocking Pat Mainardi's satirical broadside "The Politics of Housework," then circulating in mimeograph (subsequently published in the 1970 collection Notes from the Second Year), which wittily detailed her mate's ploys for avoiding housework...

...The Agreement certainly upended the original basis of our marriage—and my husband often complained that I was changing the rules on him, just as I, seeing the family man I'd thought I'd married become a traveling man, accused him of changing the rules on me...

...If he were obliged to have a roommate, he would pick a man...

...The only thing that would be essential is that the couple—or the triad or the quintet—agree freely...

...Perhaps he thought it trivial...

...It's mother who's still held accountable for (the children's] moral development, their emotional stability, and their worldly success or failure...

...to which de Cleyre, despite having refused on principle to marry the father of her own child, responded hotly: "Why don't you run when your feet are chained together...

...His betrayal particularly galled because in marrying him and starting a family I had myself renounced sexual adventure and quit my editorial job to accept as graciously as possible what I, as a 1950 graduate of white middle-class Cleveland Heights High School, took to be my fate...

...Although the idea had been explored experi38 DISSENT / Winter 1998 mentally in California, elsewhere it was still widely considered harmful to children for subjecting them to the vicissitudes of their parents' disputes and leaving them without a clear-cut line of authority...

...As I once pointed out to a man who accused me of having caused his wife to run off with the baby after reading one of my novels, he may have had something to do with it, too...

...Acutely aware of the government's infiltration and subversion of the movement, I suddenly saw what folly it would be to invite Big Daddy into the heart of my family, no doubt to take the side of little daddy...

...sTILL, CONTROVERSY was exactly what I wanted...

...We...

...Hard on the children (like our own, who unfortunately were spared none of the hardships of growing up in an embattled household...

...Even editors willing to publish it tried to subvert it...

...2. We believe that each partner has an equal right to his/her own time, work, values, choices...

...For, contrary to media reports, women's liberation was not monolithically opposed to marriage...

...At that point, unlike most of them isolated in their disappointing marriages, I, fueled by feminist insight, anger, and pride, felt the power of a burgeoning movement backing me...

...I would no longer complain about his absence from the 40 DISSENT / Winter 1998 dinner table and he would no longer complain about my housekeeping...

...But to me, the soul of the Agreement—even more important than the process—was its founding principles...

...Or perhaps simply the more reckless...

...The exception is in black families: "Black men are the most likely to be real participants in the daily life of the family and are more intimately involved in raising their children than any of the others...

...I remember the moment—back before we had children—when I was first stung by the profound injustice of the arrangement...

...Compared to their white, Asian, or Latino counterparts, the black families look like models of egalitarianism...

...Instead of the unstated, conventionally gendered patriarchal rules we had unconsciously lived by before, I would formulate principles we could embrace consciously...

...Families on the Faultline, Lillian B. Rubin's recent examination of working-class families, shows that many working-class men who would not even pay lip service to gender equality two decades ago are now "quite sensitive to the needs and wishes of their wives...

...I managed to put her off by fudging my husband's address, but I was terrified she would somehow discover his whereabouts...

...worse, if we insisted on joint custody, every time we had a disagreement or squabble the state would be free to step in and interfere, even, if it so chose, stripping us of custody of our children altogether...

...and several short stories, including one about a baby-sitter, another about an abortion, and finally one called "Traps" about a woman leaving her husband—were written before I found the movement...

...But it does nothing to correct or even address the gendered division of labor that permeates our society...

...The question [with which he began his inquiry, Who finally would do the dishes?] had been answered...

...THAT REMARK signaled to me that the time had come to write about and try to publish the Agreement...

...Consider: though I got Life's firm promise to use my title before I granted permission or signed a release, Life got around the restriction by using a huge one42 DISSENT / Winter 1998 word title, "CONTRACT," on one page opposite a sentence describing it on the facing page, in letters a fraction the size, as "A 50-50 Marriage Agreement...

...I missed that...

...Still, an improvement over the cavalier dismissal of housework as "trivial," and better by far than the unconscious, pre-feminist alternatives, which, in any case, have become increasingly untenable now that most women, regardless of class, race, or age of children, hold down outside jobs...

...Still, as an incurable movement person, for all my skepticism I can't help hoping that if attitudes keep on changing at the rate they have, then maybe, just maybe, in another twenty years...

...AL.X KATES SHULMAN'S most recent books are the memoir Drinking the Rain and a 25th anniversary edition of her novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen...

...The Agreement became another of those sly inside jokes, so common in those days, that knowing women crowed over together but that many men just didn't get—or perhaps, being their butts, got only too well.' Though in his footnote to my article Mailer had carelessly cited Off Our Backs instead of Up From Under and had misspelled my last name with an Sch, at least he got the title right...

...In a May 14, 1994 column in the New York Times, Peter Steinfels proposed a "thought experiment" doing away with legal marriage altogether: "The state would have nothing to do with it...

...Even certain feminists, while agreeing with the principles of the Agreement, objected to its "legalistic" tone and purported rigidities...

...After these Principles followed PART II: Job Breakdown and Schedule, detailing chores and tasks involved with (A) Children (Mornings, Transportation, Helping, Night-time, Baby Sitters, Sick Care, Weekends) and (B) Housework (Cooking, Shopping, Cleaning, Laundry...

...Perhaps it was the Agreement's very reasonableness that made it seem so threatening, transgressive, outrageous to men like Mailer...

...Father need only make a living for them to satisfy his part of the bargain...

...Indeed, so powerfully did I feel the swelling force of the movement that I wondered if perhaps it wasn't my personal feminist genie that had delivered Life its death blow to save face for me and the movement...

...And not only by traditionalists: in those days radical men, too, often felt justified in dismissing feminism as politically lame because of its concern for such distracting questions as who does the dishes...

...Since our meals were simple and casual there were few dishes to wash...

...Over the next several years it was reprinted, with slight modifications, in such disparate magazines and books as Redbook, New York magazine, Women's Liberation: Blueprint for the Future, the premiere issue of Ms., Life magazine, and eventually—indeed, to this day—in many sociological, feminist, and legal textbooks and anthologies, including the standard casebook on contract law compiled by Harvard Law School's late Lon Fuller...

...We shopped for food together after work, and though I usually did the cooking, my husband was happy to help...

...When I objected to this falsification it was corrected, but the offending contract remained...

...Nevertheless, in good faith we both believed that reestablishing our relations on an egalitarian basis was bound to improve them, freeing us from guilt and recriminations...

...Adults may fairly be expected to make sacrifices for them...

...Instead, to accommodate paternal flight or enact eternal hope, there has been an irrepressible proliferation of new de facto forms of family life—from jumbled, blended, divorce-extended families to singleparent, lesbian or gay domestic partnerships, and even the occasional innovative experiment...

...Though our marriage was strained to the breaking point, I could not bear the thought of our children fatherless...

...The number, the sex, the hierarchy or permanence of spouses in any household would be no more a matter of legal requirement—or ultimately, of social concern—than the number or size of the rooms...

...Several years later I met Mailer at a book party for a children's anthology to which we had each contributed a story and introduced myself as the author of the Marriage Agreement...

...And with consciousness changing so much faster than practice, and far more on the part of women than of men, discontent and resentment must be at record highs...

...As long as all duties are performed, each of us may use his/her extra time any way he/she chooses...

...Now, many years after my second divorce, looking back across a quarter century of social change to try to recover the feelings that led to my Marriage Agreement, I wonder if writing it was an act of political imagination, personal conciliation, or feminist revenge...

...Tied down by two small children, I had strenuously opposed his new business, knowing that it would take him away from us, but he had gone ahead with it anyway...

...46 DISSENT / Winter 1998...

...True, the group called The Feminists was against it, limiting to one-third of their membership women who lived with men, and Boston's Cell 16 was associated with a policy of celibacy...

...With what delight I penned that second sentence...

...I do know that when I tried to involve him in thinking out our arrangement he took little interest...

...This principle went for the jugular of traditional marriage by challenging the basic rationalization of the division of labor in conventional nuclear families: money for services (which had been the unspoken basis of mine...

...In the late sixties, however, it was not yet legally feasible to obtain joint custody in the State of New York...

...Worse, its failure was as emblematic as it was personal: in the absence of economic equality and/or a strong movement, decades after women's liberation launched the battle over housework, married men in the United States still do precious little domestic labor—only 10 percent more than they did two decades earlier, according to one survey...

...Any unanticipated ripple in the children's development is quite simply mom's failure...

...The first principle of my Agreement, that a woman's work was by definition as valuable as a man's—indeed, that the comparison was henceforth impermissible, not least because absent the opportunity that must follow domestic equality no one could know what women might do—this Mailer could not swallow...

...When dozens of feminist activists, myself included, had staged a sit-in on March 18, 1970, at the editorial offices of that bulwark of traditional gender roles, the Ladies' Home Journal, to demand a platform in its pages for feminist ideas, one of the reasons we selected that magazine was to challenge its famous monthly column, "Can This Marriage Be Saved...

...But with two children to care for and a hefty rent, I always returned to the nest before dark...

...not until 1972, just before publication of my first novel, did it occur to me to reclaim my maiden name Kates, even though I had for several years been cheering the work of such self-named feminists as Kathie Sarachild, Betsy Warrior, and Laura X. Since by that time I had already published three children's books, two edited collections, and one biography, all under the name Alix Shulman, I felt it would be imprudent to switch midstream to my maiden name, so I compromised by inserting it in the middle...

...When I was finally divorced in 1985 I tried to delete Shulman in my private life—the name on my checkbook, for instance, is Alix Kates—but even then I wondered how my children must feel seeing me shed their name...

...As I came to his concluding section, which opened by quoting in full the Principles of my Marriage Agreement, I exulted over having hit the mark...

...Indeed, one triumph of the early movement was to make men responsible for child care at large movement gatherings...

...That last sentence was my code for sexual freedom, one of several messy subjects, including finances, I wasn't prepared to see muddy up the document...

...Parenting...

...Except for the story "Traps," published under my pseudonym, all my early writings were signed with my married name, Alix Shulman...

...As I wrote for a "Symposium on Marriage" in the feminist literary journal Aphra (Fall 1973— before New York reformed its divorce law): "Children will continue to be born and reared...

...In fact, that tantalizing combination of reasonable and outrageous that colors so much early second wave feminist writing may account for the wide range of reader response...

...PART I. Principles...

...Now, humiliated and angry over his affair (with a woman more than twenty years his junior, whom he finally married many years later) and terrified that the DISSENT / Winter 1998 37 children would be deprived of their father's physical, emotional, and financial support (the little money I earned by freelance editing scarcely paid for the baby-sitter I hired a few hours a week), I fought back with all the strength I'd developed in the movement, soon taking a young lover of my own...

...And even among couples who share more equitably in the work at home, 44 DISSENT / Winter 1998 "women do two-thirds of the daily jobs, like cooking and cleaning up—jobs that fix them into a rigid routine," while men do less-frequent tasks like fixing appliances or changing the oil in the family car...

...Once you have the contract, you don't have to refer back to it...

...But when I published my analysis DISSENT / Winter 1998 41 of the two-thousand–plus letters in Redbook a year later (September 1972), I was appalled to find the editors going beyond a mere disclaimer in their headnotes to misrepresent my entire analysis...

...I had avoided using percentages in my article because so many of the most thoughtful letters were too complex to categorize readily, but no such scruples restrained the editors, who reported their own percentages of letters for/against/undecided (36/53/11) as if they were mine, and edited my key paragraph to make it appear I agreed with them...

...Nevertheless, many women did extricate themselves from intolerable relationships, and many others raised their standards of the tolerable...

...Like most women of my class and generation born in the United States before World War II, I had accepted, if sometimes grudgingly, traditional gender arrangements whereby the home belongs to women, the world to men...

...Twice a month we'd spend Saturday cleaning and doing our laundry at the laundromat...

...No, he would not be married to such a woman," wrote Mailer of himself in the third person...

...To name earning power privilege was to challenge the very basis of value and strip the arrangement of its cover of justice...

...We both worked full-time in New York City, so our small apartment stayed empty most of the day and taking care of it was very little trouble...

...Despite the upheavals of the sixties, the idea of shared child care and housework was then still widely considered unnatural and fatal to the male ego...

...IREALIZE THIS confession may be construed in some quarters to feed the notion that feminism destroys marriages—a charge akin to the one that feminism destroys fetuses...

...Ardent feminist though I was, my consciousness changed slowly...

...one my husband, incensed by my admission that I'd long been faking orgasms, adamantly refused to heed...

...Even the marginal literary subject matter, female and domestic, to 36 DISSENT / Winter 1998 which I'd felt condemned by my limited experience, began to seem increasingly tenable subjects for fiction, and under cover of my pseudonym I started to submit my work to the new feminist journals suddenly springing up...

...Feeling the press of time (thirty was then generally considered the outside age for having a first child...

...but my group, Redstockings, although sometimes divided on the issue, was concerned less with overthrowing the institution than with overhauling it to better serve women's interests by somehow forcing men to be responsible mates and reliable fathers...

...Not so many another, who persistently referred to the Agreement as a Contract...

...The unspoken sanction for my Agreement, the secret force behind it (and a reason, perhaps, to call it a contract after all...

...Which is not so far-fetched, given your political activism," cautioned movement lawyer Carol Lefcourt...

...a long letter-to-the-editor of the Village Voice...

...45 strong feminist movement, keeps me asking cautiously of each, Who will benefit, who will lose, and who will wind up with the housework...

...pARENTING IS still profoundly gendered, and the nuclear family is still the setting vastly preferred for child-rearing, but in fact fewer and fewer children grow up in a traditional household or even one where both biological parents reside...

...Like every ideal, our Marriage Agreement fell far short of the standard it proposed...

...Trivial...

...I do remember the elation with which I wrote it...

...The article then goes on to describe the great changes and strains that overtook our marriage once I left my job to stay home with the children...

...If he/she wants to spend it with spouse, fine...

...In principle, jobs should be shared equally, fifty-fifty, but deals may be made by mutual agreement...

...Not that I don't have a cheer for every imaginative or brave attempt...

...And later, as it became increasingly clear that our Agreement did not really "work" despite our best intentions—that, since my husband's work took him so often out of town, I continued to do most of the parenting (and gladly, too, knowing how much calmer and freer we each felt during our long stretches apart), and for the same reason, by default as it were, he let the housework slide, and eventually our marriage, like so many, foundered— I wondered which was better for the movement, particularly in face of the conservative attacks: to hide these failings or confess them...

...Herein lay the utopian core of the document, its challenge to class society, plumbing purposes deeper than domestic guidelines...

...With no sanction for the arrangement but our good will, if ultimately it didn't work out and shove came to slam or bam came to bolt, we could always hire two tough lawyers to slug it out...

...For though I certainly meant my proposal in earnest, I also relished the ironic face with which I presented it: a sardonic lift of eyebrow as I laid out the principles, a curl of the lip as I listed the tasks in excruciating detail, a wicked chortle as I mocked man's self-importance as a mere ruse for getting out of the dishes...

...Nearly three-quarters of the men in the African-American families in this study do a substantial amount of the cooking, cleaning, and child care, sometimes even more than their wives...

...After all, what mere marriage could match the movement for excitement...

...Thinking of the fun Mailer and the others could have with the news of our breakup if they got wind of it, I dreaded an exposé—particularly when Pat Coffin suggested that perhaps she could interview each of us separately...

...I puzzled over the effect on the movement of admitting this straight out: would it help or hurt the cause?—help it by revealing the necessity of struggle, good will notwithstanding, or hurt it by exposing the all-but-prohibitive stakes...

...for after that first separation my husband and I got back together and remained married until the children were grown...

...The terms of this agreement are rights and duties, not privileges and favors...

...The process is what's important...

...Rather, I searched, dragging us off to one lawyer after another in hopes of devising the sort of innovative divorce that would somehow render my husband at once a dependable hands-on father and a civilized hands-off mate—as if divorce were simply marriage by other means...

...1. We reject the notion that the work which brings in more money is more valuable...

...was my bottom-line willingness to divorce him if he wouldn't agree...

...Around the same time, through a contact with the (male) editor of a young-adult book series on "Women of America," I began a biography of the (then) forgotten anarchist Emma Goldman, whose works had all long since gone out of print...

...Yet how easy to undermine our simple idea by substituting one word for another...

...If he/she wants to use it making money, fine...

...It is this domestic inequality, not the form or legitimacy of marriage, that continues to worry me...

...Maybe he regarded the domestic concerns of such a document as outside his domain, despite our struggles...

...Our domestic life was beautifully uncomplicated...

...My husband, a large-minded but deeply traditional man, obligingly acquiesced— whether to ward off divorce, or out of conviction, or simply to humor me I'll never know...

...The whole business would be strictly a private agreement...

...Frustrated and fuming even as I laughed at these ludicrous legal conundrums, so oddly confirming of the anarchist case for having as little as possible to do with the state, I followed the lawyers' advice...

...Energized by my affair, bursting with sexual bravado, no wonder I volunteered to write the sex article for my Redstockings group...

...Let the man do his job, not buy out of it...

...In fact, according to Hochschild, "the most important injury" to women in unequal marriages is not the unfair leisure gap between the sexes, not women's exhaustion from the double day, but rather that they "carry into their marriage the distasteful and unwieldy burden of resenting their husbands...

...My impetus for the Agreement, which I intended as a critique of the inequities of both conventional marriage and divorce, was based on my own recent bizarre experience with divorce lawyers...

...but as it was only a few months later that I began attending meetings, the two activities, writing and women's liberation, those twin threats to my marriage, are inextricably connected in my mind...

...but when the error took on a life of its own despite my repeated objections, I could hardly avoid concluding there were political motives at work...

...Yet, despite that action, two years later I evidently still thought it my duty to shield Life's audience from the truth about my own marriage, as if the point were to save it...

...The first introduction I attempted told the divorce saga, complete with the ironies that had inspired me...

...Perhaps the mistake was set in motion by the inclusion of the Agreement (under its own name) in a sidebar in Susan Edmiston's provocative essay, "How to Write Your Own Marriage Contract," published in the premier issue of Ms...

...The first lawyer we went to, a smug, square-jawed traditionalist, literally laughed us out of his office—to my husband's relief and my fury...

...What I didn't tell her was that, his business having recently folded, he had followed his young lover, then a student at Berkeley, to California...

...My ten-year-old (second) marriage had become increasingly shaky as my husband, the father of my children, preoccupied by a new business he'd opened in a neighboring state and a clandestine love affair he'd begun there, was spending so little time at home that I felt virtually abandoned...

...It also gave me the right to go into my room and close the door to write, even with the children still awake or dirty dishes in the sink, when my husband was on duty...

...Entitled, simply, "A Marriage Agreement," the piece first appeared in the second issue of the new feminist journal Up from Under in August 1970...

...We automatically accepted the traditional sex roles that society assigns...

...Marriage insures that women will not be the only ones to make those sacrifices...

...Good for the movement—but for one hitch: when Pat Coffin called to set up another interview, I had to tell her that my husband was on the West Coast and couldn't be reached...

...AKS: Only if you didn't get it...

...Among the mostly childless women in both small groups I joined—Redstockings, which favored theory, and WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), which favored action—I was surprised to find myself suddenly valued for the very identity I had long felt ashamed of: for being a genuine full-time housewife-mother...

...Staying in the heterosexual arena to do close combat —planting, as it were, a subversive in every bed—was widely seen as a far more effective way to topple male supremacy than was any separatist path...

...I remember the mounting excitement with which I read Mailer's notorious attack on feminism, first serialized in Harper's—the same excitement with which I had once relished philosophical debate, the subtleties of law, and sexual adventure but had traded for family life...

...In turn, when he'd opposed my testifying about my illegal abortions as risking his reputation, I'd defied his wishes...

...But we genuinely tried for fifty-fifty, even if our compliance was somewhat erratic...

...Yes, our Marriage Agreement failed, and our marriage after it...

...Perhaps a mainstream journal like Life must inevitably try to tame and depoliticize everything between its covers: in the galleys of the article, the reporter, Patricia Coffin, had me spending my free time at art galleries instead of at political rallies...

...The first working title for the piece was actually "A Divorce Dilemma and a Marriage Agreement...

...three chapters of a never-finished family novel...

...The daughter of a lawyer, myself a lawyer manqué, I took special pleasure in the precision of the document...

...Best not to marry at all, advised Lefcourt, but if married already, especially if there were children, safer not to be divorced...

...My earliest writings—a children's book (with one human character, a boy...

...Quite a contrast to the way I'd felt as recently as 1967 when, on the eve of committing civil disobedience at a military induction center in protest against the Vietnam War, I'd begged my husband's indulgence (and, if necessary, bail money), knowing that if I were arrested I wouldn't get home in time to make dinner or get the children ready for school the next morning...

...Just as, following the signing of a book contract some months earlier, I'd suspected my genie of exterminating the editor who had laid a hand suggestively on my knee, and would again some months later suspect her of conveniently delivering back to me my compromising love letters only hours before my lover's fatal heart attack...

...At least during the first year of this agreement, sharing responsibility shall mean dividing the jobs and dividing the time...

...And if it was unjust for "the larger earner to buy out of his/her duties and put the burden on the partner who earns less," then how comparably unjust must it be to put the burden on someone who earns still less...

...My first personal essay was a piece I volunteered to draft for my Redstockings group when someone pointed out that despite our extensive consciousness-raising on the topic of sex we had no sex article to hand out...

...In a marriage complicated, unlike Mainardi's, by the presence of two impressionable children, I came to see domestic equity not only as simple justice but as one means of transforming society: by reforming the rearing of the young...

...After it appeared in Redbook (under the editors' title "A Challenge to Every Marriage" and their cautious hedge that they found it "provocative") more than two thousand letters poured in, one of the largest responses in Redbook's history...

...Our arrangement, which we had established in part precisely to escape the law, had no legal status or intention...

...If these tasks were too insignificant to mention, then no father should mind doing them...

...When Life unexpectedly announced to the world that it would be folding before the end of the year, I was jubilant...

...So much interest, in fact, that by the time I came to write my Marriage Agreement I had done sufficient brooding on "the marriage question"—and had developed enough feminist confidence— to dare to revise my life in light of it...

...Once the feminist challenge pushed open the door on traditional marriage and took a good look inside, it could not be the same again...

...A few months after we began following the Agreement, we were rewarded when one of our children memorably said, "You know, I used to love Mommy more, but now I love you both the same...

...program in philosophy more than a dozen years before, it pleased me to apply my dormant analytical and critical skills to the minutia of domestic management...

...But then, why not...

...If the law could not accommodate us, then why not sidestep it and design our own joint custody...

...Despite the gloomy news on actual housework done, the ideal of egalitarian marriage has steadily grown (espoused by 48 percent of the wives in Hochschild's study, if only by 20 percent of the husbands), that of traditional gender roles within marriage has steadily shrunk (down to 12 percent of the wives and 18 percent of the husbands), and the rest (40 percent of the wives and 62 percent of the husbands) are somewhere "in transition...

...Much had happened to us in those brief months, including the nearly simultaneous publication of my first novel and collapse of my husband's business—events that together loosened our ties...

...He could love a woman and she might even sprain her back before a hundred sinks of dishes in a month, but he would not be happy to help her if his work should suffer, no, not unless her work was as valuable as his own...

...Based on my research I wrote essays on Goldman and on her sister anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre for the new Women: A Journal of Liberation (Spring and Fall issues, 1970), whose editors finally convinced me in the name of feminist courage to drop the pseudonym and sign my name) Childless Goldman was impatient with women who remained in unhappy marriages, cavalierly asking (like certain second-wave feminists, whose gibes I sometimes fielded) why they didn't simply leave their husbands...

...We had separated only months after our Marriage Agreement's appearance in Life...

...Now there was an audience for "Traps," which appeared pseudonymously in the second issue (Winter 1970) of the feminist literary journal Aphra and eventually, in a slightly altered form, as the opening scene of my 1972 novel Memoirs of an Ex -Prom Queen...

...THE TRUTH...

...and if some of them, like helping with homework, were as important as I thought or, like brushing their hair, as pleasurable, a father should treasure them...

...yet because they fail to translate this sensitivity into action, the housework question is now often "a wrenching source of conflict...

...But that's only part of the story...

...The criticisms it later sparked centered mainly on the details, though I'd tried to make clear in my commentary that these would obviously vary from family to family, and that the schedule must be flexible, subject to frequent revision and renegotiation...

...Conflict, discontent, resentment: a bitter legacy...

...Before the Marriage Agreement, I had been writing for over a year, having begun on the morning I dropped off my youngest child at nursery school, freeing me for three hours This article is adapted from an essay that will appear in Live from Feminism!, edited by Ann Snitow and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, forthcoming from Crown...

...Before feminism, divorce, like abortion, was often regarded as scandalous...

...3. As parents we believe we must share all responsibility for taking care of our children and home—not only the work but also the responsibility...

...Such proliferation ensures that even in the face of punishing institutional biases that restrict nontraditional families' rights, traditional hierarchical marriage will not again be monolithically entrenched...

...indeed, it failed...

...If not, fine...

...it forces you to take charge of your life...

...By the time of its apotheosis in a six-page spread in a 1972 Life magazine cover story, the Marriage Agreement was the subject of much debate in the popular press, where it was sometimes celebrated but more often derided by such antifeminist critics as Norman Mailer, Russell Baker, Joan Didion (in a front-page article in the New York Times Book Review), and (a little later) the infamous S.I...

...jusT AS my husband and I had once searched among obstetricians for one who would quietly agree not to breathe life into a seriously deformed newborn, so now, inspired by feminism, we searched among lawyers for one willing to draw up a radical separation agreement that would give us joint custody of our children...

...Agreement sounds amicable and voluntary, whereas contract sounds adversarial and legal...

...And when my husband had tried to move us all to rural Pennsylvania to be near his work, I had felt willful and selfish refusing to go, knowing that a wife was supposed to follow her husband's job...

...Rubin notes that housework more than child care is at issue in these families, "for despite the enormous ferment in family life over these last decades, the cultural definition of the good parent has changed little...

...Perhaps in the face of my relentless, to him fanatical, feminism he was merely practicing avoidance...

...What had he to lose...

...True, a few women, torn by ambivalence and carried away by movement rhetoric that seemed at times to condemn all marriages (and families) as oppressive, committed acts they later regretted—ending relationships, postponing pregnancies, leaving children—only to change their minds after it was too late...

...Hayakawa, who as president of San Francisco State College had summoned state troopers to suppress the 1968 student strike...

...Those spunky young women, mostly in their twenties, treated me like a treasured resource instead of the useless has-been I considered myself at thirty-five, and I began to shed my diffidence—first in the group, then in my writing, though I prudently continued to hide from my husband the subversive nature of both...

...which Redstocking Ellen Willis proposed retitling "Can This Marriage...

...AKS (throwing Mailer's own familiar slur back at him): That's because you antifeminists have no sense of humor...

...hard on everyone involved...

...The same feminist understanding and confidence that enabled me to stand up to my husband despite my dependency turned my love affair into a grand passion, complete with the orgasms I (like so many other heterosexual middle-class women of my generation, as we were discovering through consciousness-raising) had never experienced in fifteen years of marriage...

...In any case, he left it to me...

...As it turned out, my husband, with higher standards of housekeeping than mine, did more cleaning than I. (A would-be bohemian, in my first marriage I had refused to own either a vacuum or a broom...

...NM: That was a dumb idea...

...The ability to earn more money is a privilege which must not be compounded by enabling the larger earner to buy out of his/her duties and put the burden either on the partner who earns less or on another person hired from outside...

...In that feminism offers women the possibility of autonomy, giving us permission to leave a bad marriage or terminate an unwanted pregnancy, both accusations are partially true...

...I'd show them trivial—and rub their noses in it!—from packing the children's lunches, taking them to the dentist, phoning around for a baby sitter, to cleaning, shopping, cooking, or stripping and remaking the beds...

...IT WAS with feminist irony, idealism, audacity, and glee that I sat down to compose my Marriage Agreement...

...In the long wake of this first principle must eventually come equitable pay, universal child care, class and gender justice...

...As if a person, or a marriage, should be immortal, or as if our marital breakdown must be laid at the door of our singular Agreement rather than of our accumulating disagreements...

...In the table of contents Life used the title "Living by Contract...

...Yet I could hardly fold my wings and meekly surrender to the status quo...

...Why don't you cry out when a gag is on your lips...

...If this principle freed my husband to spend as much time as he liked in Pennsylvania as long as he pulled his weight at home, it also established my right, for the first time since I'd found the movement, to attend meetings as many nights as I chose without having to feel either negligent or guilty...

...Still, under whatever title, that Life coverage did help to get people thinking about alternatives to conventional marriage, including the controversial idea of domestic equality— so well, in fact, that when the magazine decided to do a follow-up of the major stories of the year for their late-December wrap-up issue, their April 28 report on "The Marriage Experiments" was among those selected...

...Oh, exquisite triumph...

...Under the movement's spell we sometimes fancied raising our children together and growing old in joyful women's communities that would satisfy all our needs for companionship, sex, autonomy, power, and family, free of oppressive —or merely dull—marriages...

...and I also remember that later, as I read letter after wistful letter from Redbook readers applauding the Agreement and envying me my "understanding husband" or begging for the secret of how I managed to get him to go along with it, I sensed an uncomfortable disparity between my power and theirs...

...Or we imagined ourselves as roving vigilante bands who through our indomitable solidarity would enforce our justice and wring compliance from men unable to live without us...

...I wrote secretly at first, fitting my writing into the cracks between domestic duties, thinking it too self-centered and pretentious an activity for one who had, as the times required, dutifully renounced personal ambition in favor of family life, and I sent out my stories under a pseudonym so that not even my husband (to whom I'd made the mistake of showing my first effort only to hear him declare it "a shambles") would know I was doing it...

...I was heartened to find that though some readers were hostile, far more were supportive, and all but a few took the proposal seriously—hardly surprising, given Redbook's predominantly housewife readership...

...Imagining women's autonomy, we demanded free, round-the-clock, universal child care and explored all sorts of alternatives to traditional marriage: free love, serial monogamy, lesbian partnerships, communal families, celibacy...

...remains woman's work...

...Like other feminist proposals, mine was initially greeted with wildly divergent responses: it was called liberating or stultifying, reasonable or cracked, lucid or legalistic, principled or petty...

...That housework was up for political grabs, subject to maneuvering and negotiation, was only one of many previously unexamined premises of private life whose political bases were suddenly being exposed in the powerful light of feminist analysis...

...Like other newly fledged feminists trying our wings, I was sometimes carried away by our own wishful rhetoric, soaring high into the clouds where feminism seemed invincible...

...But the unbearable status quo, to challenge which I had written the Agreement in the first place, also collapsed— fell in a whirling freefall that, like so many utopian fictions and experiments, landed us somewhere we never imagined...

...a disagreement in which I took a more than scholarly interest...

...My feminist intent was neither to bring down nor to shore up marriage but to improve women's lot within and without it...

...and on the cover, beneath a small photo of my husband and me—one of four pictured examples of "Marriage Experiments" that included: "Unmarried Parents in a Boston Suburb," a "Collective Family in a Big House in Berkeley," and a "Frontier Partnership in Idaho"—appeared the caption "Work-sharing Contract in New York," with no mention of agreement at all...

...I immediately protested such highhanded treatment and reluctantly gave my own, very different summary figures (60/30/10) in a long letter that was eventually printed on the letters page over an editorial apology...

...In lieu of divorce, the finality of which terrified both me and my husband anyway, I decided to draft a private agreement to suit our needs...

...we simply wanted to divide up the duties for our own education and convenience, to improve things at home...

...The Second Shift, Arlie Hochschild's important study of divisions of domestic chores among married, predominantly middle-class working couples in families with young children, reports that what the women's movement began is now a "stalled revolution": only 18 percent of the husbands in the study did half the housework, 21 percent did a moderate amount, and 61 percent still did little or none, though their wives held down outside jobs...

...until the 1970s, in many states the only ground for divorce was (criminal) adultery, the only ground for abortion threat to the mother's life, while now, thanks in part to feminism, divorce and abortion are widely accepted as basic rights...

...Does this sound far-fetched...

...The schedule may be flexible, but changes must be formally agreed upon...

...NM: You mean it was supposed to be ironic...

...On my side, working as I did at home, I did more child care than he...

...Despite our love affairs, neither my husband nor I really wanted divorce, with our children so young and our entire domestic establishment at stake—though I, emboldened by the power and thrill of the movement and at once bolstered and shaken by its critique of marriage, was more willing than he to pull the pin and lob the deadly weapon...

...That's what I always say about you feminists...

...Oh, the power of the movement...

...But why, I wonder now, should the "failure" of my marriage, or any marriage, have seemed to me so potentially embarrassing for the movement—any more than the cancer death of food-reformer Adele Davis should have so scandalized the health-food movement...

...Why don't you raise your hands above your head when they are pinned fast to your sides...

...when I shook him off, objecting that I needed to finish the dishes, he turned me around, looked me over with an expression of such disenchantment I can see it still, and said in a voice full of sorrow how dull, how matronly I looked in an apron standing over a sinkful of dishes...

...I was standing at the sink washing the dinner dishes when, as he often did, my husband approached me from behind, untied my apron strings, slipped his arms around my waist, and began kissing the back of my neck to lure me away from the sink...

...ALL AT once, instead of finding humiliating rejection letters in my secret post office box I began to receive acceptances...

...But the inevitable slippage between intentions and their outcomes, particularly in the absence of a DISSENT / Winter 1998...

...It was not only that I had class and other privileges many of them didn't share, like rewarding remunerative work and no more toddlers at home...

...When our son was born, our domestic life suddenly became quite complicated...

...a day (actually two-and-a-half hours, after subtracting fifteen minutes to deliver her and fifteen minutes to collect her...

...But after a first draft I abandoned that strategy as tactless, introducing the document instead with a brief history of our domestic arrangements, pre-children and post-: When my husband and I were first married, a decade ago, keeping house was less a burden than a game...

...and two years later, when our daughter was born, it became impossible...

...Consider: though I granted permission to Hayakawa to quote from my article only on condition that he use the word agreement instead of contract and even saw corrected galleys that met my condition before I sent in my written permission, in the finished book there was contract back in place in every instance where it had been changed to agreement in the galleys...

...I titled the piece "Organs and Orgasms" and brazenly ended it with the admonition, "Think clitoris...

...Utilizing the methods of inquiry and self-examination I'd been developing through consciousness raising, I wrote down every task and detail of child care and housework I could think of, no matter how small, in order to discover and expose exactly what was involved in those trivial pursuits...