In today’s column, "The Happiest Housewives," John Tierney writes about a recent study of 5,000 married couples. Researchers found that women were most happy with husbands who were affectionate and understanding. After that, women were made most happy by primary bread winner husbands and tidy husbands.
(I know. Quite a shocker.)
"Women today expect more help around the home and more emotional engagement from their husbands," Wilcox says. "But they still want their husbands to be providers who give them financial security and freedom."
The blogosphere is going to go crazy with this one. Heh. Looking forward to it. Totally late getting the kids to school, but let me just add two points.
– Making a lot of money doesn’t buy you out of picking up your socks.
– Women may be reporting that they prefer traditional relationships, but only because the two high earning model is too difficult to maintain — packed weekends of chores, managing babysitters and cleaners, stress. What we need are new nontraditional relationships.
UPDATE: Funny response by Amanda. Women are so weird, seriously. Who knew that having more money coming into the home would make women feel more secure? By god, next thing you know you’ll be telling me that women enjoy naps and trash TV, like honest-to-god human beings.
Apt. 11d 
Tierney’s column stinks, but the underlying paper is pretty interesting. I have to say, though, the takeaway from it is that the secret to a happy marriage is low expectations.
By the way, you’re showing up on the Times webpage in the “related blogs” section. Congrats.
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I felt like Tierney had a punch line to this column that he kept backspacing over because he knew it was going to offend everyone. It was something like “So, you women should stop asking their hardworking husbands to clean up. Isn’t it enough that they are earning the paychecks and making you all happy?” or “So, you women should stop griping about work, because you know that you really don’t want a job anyway.”
When I checked sitemeter this morning, a ton of people had already shown up here by googling “Tierney Happy Housewives.” I had to dash out a couple of thoughts.
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Laura, you are the go-to blog for comment on New York Times pop sociology columns. No doubt about it.
I kind of miss reading Tierney now that he’s behind Times Select. Him and Kristof. Kristof because he’s always writing from an unexpected dateline and it gives his columns punch and flavor. Tierney because he seems so wide-eyed and perplexed by whatever he’s writing about. He’s the ingenue opinionist. (The rest of gang is just dull. You can predict any particular column just from the lede.)
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I’m a little suspicious of the underlying research. Wilcox is a darling of the social conservatives who did the controversial “fundamentalists are better husbands” research a few years ago. All of his outcomes appear to have a very specific, social conservative bent to them.
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I hadn’t heard of Wilcox before. Thanks for the dirt, Michael.
Kristof is my favorite. His series on human trafficking was fantastic.
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I’ve read Soft Patriarchs, and although Wilcox is open to criticism based on the fact that much of his material is self-reported, I don’t think that Michael’s remarks are at all fair or illuminating. Here are a few remarks from Wilcox, talking about why he did his fatherhood research:
http://www.yourcatholicvoice.org/insight.php?article=1753
Q: What inspired you to study and write about the state of Protestant fatherhood?
Wilcox: I was raised in the liberal wing of the Episcopal Church, but migrated into the evangelical wing of that church as a young adult. So I had personal experiences with mainline and evangelical Protestantism, though I am now Catholic.
When I started reading critical academic accounts of evangelical Protestantism, I found them unconvincing. One article by a Princeton Seminary academic, for instance, argued that there was an intrinsic link between evangelical Christianity and child abuse.
I set out to test these academic accounts with serious empirical research of evangelical fathers and husbands — something which, for the most part, was sorely lacking in academic discussions of evangelicalism.
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I would particularly like to take exception to Michael’s remark that “All of his outcomes appear to have a very specific, social conservative bent to them.” That’s a pretty broad brush to paint with, and it’s also false, if you look at “Soft Patriarchs.” In “Soft Patriarchs,” Wilcox tries to demonstrate that compared to other fathers, conservative Evangelical fathers spank more, yell at kids less, are more overtly affectionate to kids, do less housework, but spend much more time with their children. What “specific social conservative agenda” are all these findings supposed to be about?
I guess I’m just really disgusted by the idea of going ahead and condemning a scholar’s work based on his outcomes and who likes his work, rather than doing a substantive critique of his methods and data!
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Having read much of Wilcox’s work, I think his assumptions are often based on very weak data and he makes convenient–usually very conservative–assumptions on often weak data. If you look at the breadth of his work, it all has a very conservative, traditionalist outcome. If you read the conservative media, he is quite the darling.
In other words, I stand by my assertions.
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Tierney and Tolstoy
I don’t have anything to add to Laura or Amanda’s comments on Tierney’s column from Tuesday’s Times. I do have a bit to say on Wilcox and Nock’s underlying paper, which is far more subtle and interesting. The article tests
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Affectionate and good sex can certainly be intertwined but the latter is not necessarily a part of the former. Why doesn’t this article or any related mention that a happy housewife needs to “get some?”
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