The Stay-at-Home Girlfriend

Ever since feminists declared “wife” to be the ultimate four-letter word, women have been somewhat lost in the relationship funhouse. 

Modern women learned that housewifery was the ultimate in servitude,  to be avoided, often at a high cost.

Liberated women created hook-up culture. They were out seeking arrangements and sought starring roles on Only Fans. It was inevitable that they would create a new role, that of ersatz wives, that is, stay at home girlfriends.

It’s the latest thing. It’s such a thing that it made the pages of the Wall Street Journal. 

Naturally, feminists abhor the notion of a woman who stays at home, who keeps house, who pampers herself, and who lives off a man’s earnings.

It should not have been a shock. If the hookup culture told women, in the name of sexual liberation, to give it away for free, when someone comes along and offers you a fancy apartment and limitless beauty treatments in exchange for something you have been giving away for free, it is not going to seem like a very bad deal.

But, it is not just feminists. Naomi Schaefer Riley, presumably not a leftist radical, writes in the New York Post that being a stay at home girlfriend-- a SAHGF-- is bad for women.

To be fair, and to expose the other side of the argument, a woman who wants to place career before marriage might very well-- if we are to believe the #MeToo movement,-- be subjected to workplace harassment. Worse yet, if she is working long hours at her job she will have far less time to develop and sustain relationships.

Like it or not-- and you probably won’t-- the notion that a woman, even a married woman, should have an independent source of income, comes to us from no less than Friedrich Engels. You know him as the Number 2 Communist roader.

In his book, The Origin of the Family, written near the end of the nineteenth century, Engels offers a thoroughly paranoid explanation for institutions like the family and marriage. He said that they were designed to make women dependent on men, and thus more likely to be abused and oppressed. 

For Engels the solution was a Revolution, to overthrow the patriarchal order and to institute Communism. It produced some of the most miserable political and economic failures in human history.

Once the lite form was applied to marriages, we ended up with fewer marriages, more divorces, and a slew of broken homes. Since Engels had promised that independent women would have better marriages, reality belies his gauzy dreams.

If Engels had simply wanted to undermine the institution of marriage, he would have been considered a rousing success. What better than to see women sacrifice their marriages in the name of the Revolution?

Feminism presented a false dichotomy. It told women that they had to choose between independence and dependence. It forgot the third possibility-- interdependence.

You recall my comments yesterday about the division of labor. If you read Emile Durkheim on the subject-- written around the same time that Engels penned his diatribe-- you would have seen that he posited a division of labor within a marriage. One spouse was responsible for one area of familial functioning; the other spouse was responsible for the other. 

I will leave to the side the issue of who is responsible for what, but clearly Durkheim was saying that if each spouse was perfectly capable of doing all household and non-household tasks, neither would have any real use for the other. This would put the marriage on shaky ground.

And yet, we are not entirely clear about what a SAHG really is. At the least, it is not a defined social role. How do you introduce yourself in public when you are a SAHG. Other women are likely to look askance at your antics, no matter how charming they appear.

You are not really a wife because you are not married and because the man in question has not made a public commitment to love and honor you. You are not really a mistress or a courtesan or a concubine because the man in question presumably does not have a wife on the side.

So, it almost feels like modern women are reinventing the wheel, but calling it something else, lest they suffer the opprobrium that befalls those who become housewives.

The amusing part is that a certain group of men would rather have a relationship than a hookup. The SAHG is competing for men. Her competition consists of career women who insist on having men share all domestic household tasks. From that perspective it might not seem like such a bad deal.