Do wives deserve a "wife bonus"?

[Kimstu]

@even_sven

[…]you expect wifey to find scrubbing the dishes intrinsically rewarding because she should find joy in the fact that you get to use clean silverware every day?

Maybe for some people it like that. But for most people, housework is dull, tedious, and unrewarding. Very few people feel any deep sense of reward from, say, changing a baby’s diaper […]

As Voyager pointed out, the women that the OP’s links are talking about don’t seem to be spending most of their time on the “dull, tedious and unrewarding” menial-labor stuff:

The women I met, mainly at playgrounds, play groups and the nursery schools where I took my sons, were mostly 30-somethings with advanced degrees from prestigious universities and business schools. They were married to rich, powerful men, many of whom ran hedge or private equity funds; they often had three or four children under the age of 10; they lived west of Lexington Avenue, north of 63rd Street and south of 94th Street; and they did not work outside the home.

Instead they toiled in what the sociologist Sharon Hays calls “intensive mothering,” exhaustively enriching their children’s lives by virtually every measure, then advocating for them anxiously and sometimes ruthlessly in the linked high-stakes games of social jockeying and school admissions.

Their self-care was no less zealous or competitive. No ponytails or mom jeans here: they exercised themselves to a razor’s edge, wore expensive and exquisite outfits to school drop-off and looked a decade younger than they were. Many ran their homes (plural) like C.E.O.s. […]

There were alcohol-fueled girls’ nights out, and women-only luncheons and trunk shows and “shopping for a cause” events. There were mommy coffees, and women-only dinners in lavish homes. There were even some girlfriend-only flyaway parties on private planes, where everyone packed and wore outfits the same color. […]

WHILE their husbands make millions, the privileged women with kids who I met tend to give away the skills they honed in graduate school and their professions — organizing galas, editing newsletters, running the library and bake sales — free of charge.

Which sounds pretty much like what Voyager described. And of course, if that’s the way these couples want it, that’s fine with me. But I doubt that these women adopted the “wife bonus” business model because they felt they needed the structure to help motivate them while spending long days in relentless domestic drudgery.

[TheSeaOtter]

If one spouse works and the other is a homemaker, they should be sharing the income and working together to figure out how to use it. If you can’t manage to share and cooperate, what are you doing married to each other?

Slightly off topic side note: I must say that these articles do an impressive job of making it sound as though being part of the 1% is pretty miserable. Neither ‘intensive mothering’ nor negotiating a bonus for doing it well sounds like any fun whatsoever to me.

[Malthus]

If it isn’t tounge-in-cheek, it’s very odd, and in my opinion not in a good way.

I view marriage as essentially a union of equals. It doesn’t matter who is bringing in cash and who isn’t - the money “belongs” to both.

The notion that the spouse not bringing in the cash is somehow ‘employed’ by the one who is, and so eligible for perfomance reviews and a “bonus”, takes commodification way too far.