UPPER CLASS MEN … ARE no more likely to be shaken in their positions as heads of their families than they are to be shaken in their positions as heads of society’s economic institutions.
SUSAN OSTRANDER5
Marx and Engels acknowledged that women’s labor—in producing the labor force itself (reproduction) and in maintaining it (housewifery and motherhood)—was the underpinning of all economic activity. Having noted that, they went on to ignore it … otherwise, they would have wound up with a very different vision of the proletariat.
ROBIN MORGAN6
WHEN I WAS GROWING up, the world seemed to be divided into rich people and the rest of us.
The rich were magical families who went to country clubs and showed up in society columns; men who owned the factories in our industrial midwestern city and women who gave dinner parties with real linen napkins; sons who played at college and tennis before joining their fathers, and daughters who always seemed to marry someone a little older, a little taller, a little richer than they, or, if they had no brothers, perhaps a son-in-law to join their father’s business.
We were ordinary families whose names got in the newspapers only as part of an athletic team or an accident; men who worked in factories as long as they were able and women who cooked and cleaned for their own families if they were lucky, and for other families, too, if they were not; sons whose high school years were a last fling before the assembly line, and daughters who got pregnant and married in that order or, if they were very ambitious, worked at the gas company until the first baby came.
It was a world of difference marked by possessions. Between Saturday night movies and winter vacations; weekly pay envelopes and checking accounts; Easter outfits bought on the layaway plan and designer clothes ordered a season ahead; social security checks and stock dividends; kids who slept on sofa beds and children with nannies; in short, between an envious life and an enviable one. Because these symbols of class changed visibly from top to bottom, they seemed unnatural, perhaps unjust, and we resented them. Because male-female roles changed very little from their elegant dinner parties to our kitchen tables, they seemed natural, and very just indeed.
Were wives and daughters in these rich families the ultimate possession? We wouldn’t have understood the question, much less asked it. As members of enviable families, they lived in the same pretty houses and drove in the same fancy cars, and that was enough to make us resent them.
In retrospect, I remember only one clue that such women might be less powerful, even a different class from their fathers and husbands, and so a little more like us. In my high school, girls dreamed out loud of marrying into this world of country clubs and fur coats. Of course this didn’t happen, but in theory, a girl didn’t need any special education or skills to be the wife of a powerful man. All she needed was the magic moment of being chosen. On the other hand, boys didn’t dream out loud about becoming one of the factory owners. That would have been a betrayal of their fathers. Like enlisted men who would never think of becoming officers, they both envied and hated their superiors who ordered them into daily battle on the production line from the safety of their desks, fought against paying workers’ compensation when one of them got mangled by a machine, and handed out layoffs with a callousness that only an equally tough union could handle. Besides, real men didn’t wear suits and shuffle papers; they worked with their hands and used their strength—a bit of bluster that was also an admission that being a boss took a kind of training they didn’t have.
After I became one of the very few from my high school to go to college—an exception that was due more to my mother’s sacrifice and foresight than to my own—I noted but just accepted the differences between the rich young men and rich young women I was now seeing up close for the first time. At the women’s college where I was, my wealthy classmates seemed a little apologetic for having “daddyships” instead of the scholarships that marked achievers in this intellectual school; for having money they couldn’t have earned and didn’t control; for living a lifestyle they were likely to continue by marrying a man from the same circles, since fear that a poor man might marry them for their money was like a cold wind on their hearts; and generally for carrying by accident of birth something as unfeminine as power.
On the other hand, rich young men seemed quite comfortable with the thought of dating and marrying women who were not as rich as they were. It was a power difference that only enhanced their male role. If the women’s motives included something other than pure love, so what? These men, unlike their sisters, were not dependent on love for their sense of themselves, and buying a suitable wife wasn’t that different from acquiring other things appropriate to their station. They drove expensive cars, spoke easily of assured futures, and—with a few exceptions born of social conscience or rebellion against their fathers—seemed comfortable with the idea that their family’s power was just another attribute of their own. Indeed, even their rebellions took the form of choosing an unacceptable profession or political stance, not giving up or giving away their inheritance. If they married into a family of equal or greater wealth in a kind of corporate merger, that was OK too. I remember a young man who joked about the Securities and Exchange Commission giving permission for his wedding, such was the wealth that his fiancée was about to bring under his family’s control. Neither he nor those of us listening gave a thought to the idea that she could be anything other than a conduit.
Some of the rich young women rebelled too, but in a very different way. One eloped with a mechanic, fled her family’s efforts to have him arrested for abducting a minor, and proved her love by being disinherited. Another scandalized the campus by going to a local nightclub, wearing a mink coat with nothing underneath, and dancing on a tabletop each Saturday night until the college finally expelled her. A third married a socially acceptable man, but one so much older that she could expect few sexual demands in the present and early widowhood in the future. (“It’s a way of getting out of the house,” she explained, “and after he dies, I’ll be free.”) In short, these rebels punished their families, but only in the most traditionally “feminine” way. They punished themselves.
Most of my wealthy classmates conformed in the style of the day—by marrying men who had the profession we wanted but assumed we couldn’t have on our own. One intelligent, Candice Bergen–looking heiress from a literary family married the heir and executive of a major publishing house. After much publicity for a country wedding that featured shampooed lambs in pink ribbons—like the perfect toy farm created for Marie Antoinette—this talented young woman was never heard from again. Several young women who had no brothers to take over the family business were encouraged to marry proper sons-in-law who could play this dynastic role. Even the very few women who were politically radical and had control of their own money didn’t seem to have the confidence to give it away themselves. They married ambitious young radicals who published obscure magazines, contributed to political causes and candidates, started intellectual communities that pioneered everything except justice for women, or otherwise used their wives’ family money to pursue goals of their own. Oddly, those men seemed to be accepted by their still poor radical colleagues—it was almost as if they had sacrificed themselves for the cause by marrying a rich woman. Meanwhile, the wives not only relinquished their power but seemed so guilty at ever having had it in the first place that they often lived and raised children under very difficult conditions of pretended poverty. They had paid for entry into an idealistic world that promised power to everyone except them.
The civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s did little to change or even challenge this pattern. If anything, those important political events reinforced a kind of populist socialism that counted women as exactly the same class as their husbands or fathers, whether or not the women had any of the same power. Since rich wives and daughters were made to seem even more frivolous and less productive than rich men—by masculine standards that didn’t include child rearing and homemaking as work—the 1960s increased resentment of women in rich families for the majority of us who were not among them, and increased the isolation and guilt of those few who were. Besides, rich women could be ridiculed and condemned with far less fear of retribution than came from opposing men with real power. It was OK for male writers and revolutionaries, from Norman Mailer in An American Dream to Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice, to portray raping women from powerful families as a legitimate and manly way of fighting against the male adversaries they “belonged” to.
Certainly, many activist women went along with all this. Those who had grown up poor could take pride in it at last, and perhaps those from well-to-do families felt they had to cheer most of all. Being accepted in a male-led movement was still the measure of political seriousness, and going along with ridicule or even hatred of one’s own group was the admission price for some middle- or upper-class men too—but especially for women. Since feminist insight and mutual support were still a few years off—and since many white women identified with other powerless groups without knowing why, and many women of color were asked to fight racism as if only male suffering mattered—supporting these “masculine” rebellions seemed to be the only game in town. I’m sure there were many women feeling hollow inside as they listened to antiwar Vietnam vets telling stories about rapes and bar girls, or to sex jokes about women that made us laugh in order to separate ourselves from the victim. Only in retrospect did I realize that women born to certain families had been made to feel shame twice over, not only by jokes and stories but by hostile rhetoric based on birth, not deed.
Though the violent writings of Cleaver, Mailer, and many others who seemed intent on imitating their adversaries made me supremely uncomfortable, I, too, tried not to admit this in public. In a world that still seemed class divided between rich and poor—but offered the same place to women in both—I always chose the poor. At least I could find one reliable piece of empathy. Besides, I was still fighting my own demons. If you’ve grown up in a house so ramshackle and unheated that you’re ashamed to invite your friends over, it takes a long time to understand that your privileged friends may be ashamed to invite you home for the opposite reason. In college, I had a hint of my rich classmates’ isolation when they asked me to teach them how to iron and mend their clothes (an autonomy so satisfying that they helped me with French grammar in return). But I still couldn’t get past the fact that, unlike them, I had to earn money during the summer and would soon be completely on my own, a prospect that tapped into both my class and my female fears of being unable to do this. I hadn’t yet learned that small sums earned were more empowering than large sums given, and so I continued to envy them.
Even in the 1970s when many women began to realize that, if idealistic movements like those against the Vietnam war and for civil rights weren’t allowing women equal power, we needed women’s liberation too, I didn’t understand why women who earned a little money were more likely to use it in support of their sisters than were those who had inherited a lot. As a fund-raiser, I was being referred almost totally to women for the first time—especially by radical men, who assumed that, unlike any other social justice movement, this one should fund itself—and I was mystified to find that many of these women hadn’t been approached as donors on their own before, or had only given to the same causes as their families, or didn’t know how much money they had, or if they had enough control to write a check. To be honest, I didn’t try to understand. It seemed more important to disprove the media’s mischaracterization of feminism as a white-middle-class movement, and thus to phrase issues in a way that was least likely to touch the lives of the very women I was asking. So I talked about child care (in ways that excluded women who had been raised too little by parents and too much by servants), or about reproductive rights for poor women (even if that meant disparaging women who could pay for illegal abortions but had risked their safety and health nonetheless), or about battered women (as if violence weren’t just as frequent in well-to-do families, where women have money to flee, but society is even less likely to punish the batterer), or about equal pay (with little thought to women who were maintained on allowances in the midst of power and plenty and resented if they tried to get a paid job like everybody else). Obviously, all the issues being supported were crucial, but my exclusion, disparagement, and lack of empathy were not. I realize now that I was still seeking approval from my radical male friends who behaved as if women’s issues were frivolous and middle class—even though, statistically speaking, the women’s movement was far more multiclass and multiracial than the anti-Vietnam, environmental, and most other movements had been.
In fact, I’m not sure that if a woman from a powerful family had been present at one of those feminist meetings of the 1970s, she would have felt more welcome than many of us had in the unfeminist, male-led groups of the 1960s.
Nonetheless, the lack of textbooks or reporting that explained our own experiences eventually forced us to turn to each other’s lives as textbooks. The more I traveled during the 1970s and 1980s and listened to women’s stories, the more I learned about the problems of those who were supposed to have none. For instance:
• From the small towns of Alabama to the suburbs of Long Island, I met with women, especially the wives of powerful men, who had no work of their own (other than the job of homemaking, child rearing, and hostessing, which wasn’t honored as work) and identified emotionally with two other groups: prostitutes and domestics. In a glorified, socially approved way, that was the work those women felt they were doing. Their self-esteem was sometimes as low as or lower than those counterparts. Because it was harder for them to change employers, their feelings of dependence were higher, and so was their sense of being out of control of their lives; yet they were more likely to be envied than supported by other women. Given all that free-floating envy and resentment, they were also more likely than those at the bottom of the economic pile to assume that any problems must be their own fault, thus turning healthy anger into depression.
• Most of the wealthy widows I’d heard so much about—the basis of the belief that “women control the economy”—turned out to be conduits for passing power to children, especially to sons and sons-in-law. These widows had comfortable homes, good dental care, trips to exotic places, and other enviable benefits (though lifetimes of childrearing and homemaking, if properly valued, could have earned some of these pleasures anyway), but the real money and decisionmaking powers were consigned to unbreakable trusts and to family trustees who were generally paternalistic, often condescending, and occasionally corrupt. I met only one widow who was in control of her own financial life, and she had spent several hard years getting there—though the money in question had come from her family, and her husband had taken over as a son-in-law. Generally, these widows had been left uninformed, untrained, and scared to ask questions, much less mount challenges. “If General Motors is going to pass through your womb,” as a more typical widow explained to me in one of those unforgettable “clicks” of changing consciousness, “they make damn sure you can’t grab it on the way through.”
• While speaking at a national convention of the Young Presidents Organization, a group of executives who had become heads of large businesses before turning forty, I mentioned that, though inheritance in general was certainly more destructive for the country than a meritocracy, its restriction to male relatives cut even that talent pool in half and thus made it twice as limiting. It was a minor point in a general speech about feminism, but it turned out to be the major controversy with that YPO audience, most of whom, I was surprised to discover, were the heads of family-owned companies. (One turned to a male friend of mine sitting next to him and, wrongly assuming him to be a YPO member, said only half in jest, “You get the cross, I’ll get the hood.”) On the other hand, raising this subject also brought me invitations to private, late-night conversations with many YPO wives, especially those who would have inherited family businesses if their own fathers had not assumed only sons or sons-in-law could run them. They explained to me that:
Because so few women were YPO members on their own (indeed, it had been de facto segregated for years, and I had been refusing to speak unless they called themselves the Young White Male Presidents, but a handful of women and black men had just been admitted), you could always tell the status of women in general at these meetings by their decreasing average age. Old wives were being traded in for new ones. “Pretty soon,” as one explained, “the wives will be younger than the Scotch.”
If the business was in your family, not your husband’s, your marriage would last longer, mainly because the phrase “till death do us part” took on a new meaning. Sons-in-law tended to get a divorce only after their powerful fathers-in-law died, and could no longer fire or disinherit them. Even after divorce, the ex-husband remained more likely to control the business than the woman to whose family it had belonged. “It isn’t women who sleep their way to power,” said one woman. “It’s sons-in-law.”
If you got divorced from a man who wasn’t rich on his own or who didn’t stay in a family business, he was likely to get a settlement: a lump-sum payment that wasn’t conditional on good behavior (for instance, it couldn’t be withdrawn if he remarried), unlike the controlling monthly payments given to ex-wives. According to one of the wives who was a student of economics, the national total of these large settlements given to sons-in-law was greater in any given year than the total amount paid to women in the much-resented and publicized form of alimony. “Besides, men can start their own businesses or live off the interest from a lump sum,” she explained. “Women can’t do that with alimony.”
• We’ve read about rich girls who were victims of incestuous relationships, from the fictional Nicole Diver in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night to the real Edie Sedgwick as revealed in the 1970s or the son and daughter of J. Seward Johnson as made known in the 1980s—and innumerable others. Yet pre-feminism, a Freudian bias, eroticized incest as a fantasy of the victim, while class bias depicted it as an immorality of the poor. In fact, part of Freud’s reason for abandoning his interest in the sexual abuse of children was society’s hostility to the idea that so many abusers were solid patriarchs of the middle and upper classes, not to mention the possibility of Freud’s reluctance to believe it of his own childhood. Though I know of no abuse study that has pinpointed families of inherited wealth and power—which may be one more way in which privileged children are assumed not to need attention, an overview of a variety of studies tells us that about one in three women (and one in seven men) have been sexually abused before the age of eighteen by someone with access to their households, and that 90 percent of the abusers of both girls and boys are males. We also know that the greater the imbalance of power—between genders as elsewhere—the greater the abuse. In families where men are captains of industry and finance in the outside world, the internal power differences between men and women are extreme, and men’s sense of being able to do no wrong is often greater than elsewhere. So is the reluctance of authorities to intervene. Furthermore, children are more likely to be isolated, cared for by servants who may be passing on their own abuse or acting out a resentment of wealth itself. Many observers believe that sexual abuse is more prevalent among families of inherited wealth and power than in the population at large—and I agree. In the 1980s, when the Ms. Foundation for Women started a group for women managing wealth, for instance, it was one of the first subjects discussed. Violence against women in general and sexual abuse in particular remain the issues women from wealthy families are most likely to single out when they contribute.
• Even in the absence of any inequity or wrongdoing—and even with the best will in the world—there are still the problems of socialization and self-confidence that come from ladylike training in the upper classes. What happens, for instance, to a forty-five-year-old woman who has been shut out of self-sufficiency, has no training or experience at supporting herself by paid work, and feels dependent on a money source she doesn’t control or understand? I never forgot going back to see women from my high school neighborhood who were about that age, and then going to my twenty-fifth college reunion. The contrast was startling. Most of the first group had supported themselves or helped to support their families—they had no choice. As a result, most had found professions, gone back to school, even run for local office, and generally discovered they could be self-sufficient and affect the world around them. In the second group, some of the most privileged—the same rich young women of whom I had once been so envious—were self-deprecating, lost, and fearful of losing their looks or their husbands. They might have taken courses or acquired advanced degrees, but more as an end than a means. Generally, they seemed uncertain that they could be independent, much less have their own impact on the world. It echoed what I had seen in years of fund-raising.
By the mid 1980s, I had come to a conclusion I wasn’t sure I should state out loud: There are many ways in which class doesn’t work for women—and some in which it’s actually reversed.
Once I’d begun to look beneath the myth of class for women in families of inherited wealth, I noticed that it wasn’t an unmitigated advantage for middle-class and upper-class women either. Take higher education and advanced degrees, for instance. They were simply expected to go to college, whether it was related to their own interest and career or not. There were times when I listened to privileged young women on campus, and heard stories about lack of choice that sounded remarkably like my high school classmates who had felt forced into clerical jobs or factories. Yet being told on all sides they were fortunate had left them less prepared than my classmates to fight for themselves, or even to see the necessity. A study that followed a multiracial group of high school valedictorians through college was released in 1987. It found that intellectual self-esteem was about equal among females and males when they entered, but after four years, the number of young men who considered themselves “far above average” had grown, while the number of women who did so had dropped to zero.7 This was not related to grades, in which the women were equal or better, but apparently to the frequent invisibility of women in what they were studying, the rarity of women in authority in classroom or campus, more “masculine” competition than “feminine” cooperation in the academic atmosphere, and the approaching conflict between gender role and career role. One hopes that this disempowerment of women will change with a mainstreaming of women’s studies and other reforms, but many women on campus are still left feeling there’s something wrong with them.
There was also the lens of eating disorders through which to look at class. Anorexia and bulimia are almost unknown among the poor in this country, just as they are in the populations of poor countries. As Joan Brumberg reported in Fasting Girls:
Ninety to 95 percent of anorexics are young and female, and they are disproportionately white and from middle-class and upper-class families. … The rare anorexic male exhibits a greater degree of psychopathology, tends to be massively obese before becoming emaciated, and has a poorer treatment prognosis. Moreover, the male anorexic is less likely to be affluent. Anorexia nervosa is not a problem among contemporary American blacks or Chicanos; neither was it a conspicuous problem among first-generation and second-generation ethnic immigrants such as Eastern European Jews. As these groups move up the social ladder, however, their vulnerability to the disorder increases. In fact, the so-called epidemic seems to be consistently restrained by age and gender but promoted by social mobility.8
In other words, those eating disorders that literally starve females out of all sexual characteristics—from breasts to menstruation—are almost totally restricted to social groups in which the “feminine” role itself is the most restrictive, and to that time of life in which young girls are entering it. It’s as if young women look at the dependent, decorative, lesser, ladylike role that awaits them, and unconsciously starve themselves out of it. Young women born into African-American or white working-class families see less male/female power difference around them and behave accordingly. In the midst of the economic plenty of class, eating disorders are a political protest against the increased restriction of sexual caste.
Though this questioning of class was (and still is) an unpopular endeavor, it’s evident the moment we look at women’s individual experience instead of group myth. Here are an African-American and a Hispanic woman interviewed by Linda Sanford and Mary Ellen Donovan for their classic Women and Self-Esteem:
We lived in a very stable black neighborhood, and year after year my mother’s friends would come over to talk, and as long as I sat quietly, I could listen. They sometimes talked about sex and orgasms and how you had to ask for what you wanted sexually. They also talked about their work when I grew up, too—not because I would have to but because it was a good experience. And moreover, it was wonderful to have your own money. My white, upper-class women friends told me they had a totally different experience. Although it was always assumed they would go to college, it wasn’t assumed that they would work. Instead, their security was in getting a man to support them—even though they had skills to do it for themselves. I can’t imagine being raised like that—so unsure of my future, putting time and energy into being prepared for something I wasn’t expected to do.9
I didn’t particularly like growing up in Harlem, but the one thing it did is teach me survival skills and I see that as a big advantage. I teach self-defense now and there is a world of difference between the urban Hispanic kids I teach and my classes that have some middle-class white women in them. I try to get them to make a fist and hit the punching bag, pretending it’s an attacker, and most of them say, “Oh, I could never do that.”10
Those educational, physical and social underminings are probably familiar to many women, but the very rich add more safeguards against woman’s gaining control of real power. Most of them relate to depth training within the family—and nothing is more effective. At a 1990 conference of women managing wealth, I heard anthropologist Terry Odendahl, author of Charity Begins at Home, sum up her six years of research and interviews:
The lives of most wealthy women are defined by family relationships, especially their roles as wives and mothers, but also as daughters and sisters and widows of rich men. Gender roles are much more rigid in the upper classes than they are in the wider society. … Wealth is not a guarantee of authority. Women have less control over their assets. … Much of the money is in trusts and they just receive the income. Male attorneys and accountants are viewed as the culprits—keeping the money out of the hands of women. Usually, however, it is male family members who established the original trusts that limit the female beneficiaries’ control over assets. … The modern women’s movement affected most wealthy American women at least ten years later than it did women of the middle class.11
Even at that, more than a third of her interviewees had married into families of great wealth, and thus had escaped some of the training of those born into such families. But whether it was General Motors passing through one’s womb, in the memorable phrase of my early informant, or a daughter who hears secrets of the establishment passed around the dinner table; whether it’s an old-fashioned need to control women as the means of reproduction in order to keep the ruling class inheritance system in order—usually the task of first wives—or a modern need for what Fortune magazine called media-star hostesses or “trophy wives”—usually second wives—the general truth is this: The closer women are to power, the weaker those women have to be kept.
This is not the same as the poor-little-rich-girl myth that is so much a part of our popular culture. That story is half of a double fantasy that the rich are unhappy and the poor are a jolly lot; a fantasy still well represented by such television staples as the Dynasty genre of melodramas about rich white families, and the various comedies about white ethnic and African-American families of the poor or middle class. The political purpose is to convince us that the burdens of power are too great to seek, and the happiness of powerlessness is too great to leave—thus preserving the status quo. Looking at the lack of strength and power among women in families of inherited wealth has a purpose that is quite the opposite: upsetting the status quo—increasing those women’s strength to seize power and redistribute it.
This rethinking of sexual caste versus social class is also not—repeat: not—intended to diminish the importance of everything money brings for women of wealth, from good health care and housing, to travel, the arts, and time to enjoy them. A weakened body, a mind obsessed with survival, children who can’t develop their intellectual capacity because of poor diets and violent schools: all these are tragedies of poverty that must never be minimized. They cause a person to suffer more—and millions more to suffer—than do such tragedies of dependency as unused strength, atrophied talents, and a circumscribed knowledge of the world.
Nonetheless, there is a clear continuum from the feminization of poverty to the masculinization of wealth. It’s no accident that women and their dependent children are 92 percent of those on welfare, and female-headed families make up most of the working poor, while the gender of those who control this country’s great concentrations of wealth is even more uniformly male. It’s simply not possible to attack one ghetto without also attacking the other. The concentration of wealth is extreme. According to a 1987 report of Forbes magazine, for example, the total net worth of the four hundred richest people and/or families in the United States—about half of whom have inherited wealth and almost all of whom are likely to pass it on to descendants—was $220 billion, more than enough to pay off the entire U.S. budget deficit accumulated to that point. To get an idea of how disproportionate this distribution is, a minuscule top 0.5 percent of the country owns between 20 and 25 percent of the wealth—a figure derived from taxes on estates worth $60,000 or more, and one that has remained relatively unchanged throughout this century.12 One clear but undiscussed way of breaking up these hereditary concentrations is to seize and disperse them from within—a process that at least some women would be ready for, and a handful have begun. Therefore, it’s in the interest of women at both ends of the spectrum to consider the class system as women experience it, not as women have been taught it—to see the ways it disguises and preserves a deeper system of sexual caste, and to explore how we might pool strengths and support one another for mutual benefit.
To do this, the range of women from poor to middle class have to go against class myth by trading envy of those above us for a recognition of our strengths. We are more likely to have the experience of supporting ourselves, and thus to discover our abilities and learn about the world. We may underrate the fact that we also have had to learn to run a household and navigate the shoals of daily life on our own. The men we live with are not accustomed to great power in the world, and they probably know we can earn at least half as much as they do. In other words, the imbalance of power between us and them may be painful, but it’s not as extreme as at society’s upper reaches. We need to look realistically at rich women, who have no excuse of necessity, the most common reason for anybody’s discovery of confidence and capabilities, not even a responsibility for managing the family portfolio. A wealthy wife or daughter who tries to learn self-sufficiency by entering the daily work world may be resented, ridiculed, or forced to conceal her background. The men she deals with intimately are accustomed to command, including female service, and their egos may be overblown by women who treat them like the pot of gold at the end of a marital rainbow, as well as by men in their sphere of power. Meanwhile, the dependent woman knows she could not earn a fraction of the family income if she were on her own, may worry about female competition for this gold-plated meal ticket, and often witnesses adulation of a man she knows to be very human indeed. Though she may start out loving her husband—or her father or her brothers—it’s more difficult for love to survive years of such imbalance of power without the worm of resentment eating it away. Nor is it easy for a daughter who has seen what dependency has done to her mother.
But women in such families do have an intimacy and access to power. Otherwise, their rebellion would not be so dangerous that all the weaponry of gender roles and a patriarchal legal structure are brought into play. At the upper levels, it’s patriarchy pure.
Our suffragist foremothers had a better understanding of these anomalies of economic class. For one thing, the laws about marriage and property were more obviously oppressive in their day, and there was less need for psychological seduction to keep women in line. When men could drink up their paychecks with no obligation to save even subsistence money for families, take children away from mothers without bothering to accuse them of anything, and legally beat their wives, providing they used a rod no bigger than a thumb (hence, “rule of thumb”), there was less need for the sugar coating of gender persuasion. Even Victoria Woodhull got considerable support for announcing: “They say I have come to break up the family. I say amen to that with all my heart.” Susan B. Anthony shocked and alienated even abolitionists by offering shelter to the runaway wives of violent men, just as she did to runaway slaves. About the pain of dependency, with or without violence, she wrote: “There is not a woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence, no matter whether it be from the hand of father, husband, or brother, for anyone who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it.” There were also the constant reminders from black women in or newly out of slavery, with all the parallels that had made seventeenth-century slaveholders adopt the legal status of wives as the “nearest and most natural analogy” for that of slaves, as Gunnar Myrdal wrote in An American Dilemma. The seduction of being a lady was the subject of Sojourner Truth’s famous speech: “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages. … Nobody ever helps me into carriages. … I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well.” As Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote: “The Negro’s skin and the woman’s sex are both [used as] prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white saxon man.”
With all the parallels between sex and race to bind the abolitionist and suffragist movements into one drive for universal adult suffrage—until this unity was fractured by white liberal males who helped to get the vote for black males fifty years before women of all races, plus white women who then used racist arguments for their own “educated” vote—there was a long and activist period in which consciousness of caste exceeded that of class. It was also the peak of European immigration, and thus a greater belief in class mobility. Women could see similarities in their female status across chasms of class and make alliances and be less seduced by a conventional, male-centered sense of class as a result. Only a handful of women had control over money, usually as widows or because of tolerant men in their family, but some acted on the unselfconscious connections with shop and factory girls, prostitutes and domestics, that I was to hear upper-class wives discussing privately a century later.
The most famous was Alva Belmont, a Southerner who had divorced a Vanderbilt, then married and been widowed by Oliver Belmont, a man of almost equal wealth. She paid many of the operating expenses of NAWSA (the National American Woman Suffrage Association), of which Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were the first two presidents. In 1909, even before the Triangle fire had forced the country to face the truth of immigrant women’s working conditions, she endorsed a strike of women shirtwaist workers and hired the Hippodrome in New York for a rally of eight thousand to support them. At the podium with her were Clara Lemlich and Rose Schneidermann, radical trade unionists who were Belmont’s enemies by class. A shirtwaist manufacturer sued Alva Belmont and other suffragists for triple damages under the Sherman Act, accusing them of organizing an illegal boycott, but his action only created more publicity for this cross-class alliance. As an officer of the Women’s Party during World War I, Belmont also opposed President Wilson’s hypocrisy in saying that the nation was fighting for democracy, when the female half had none. It was a radical act in wartime, and one that supported workers’ groups who were then saying that only an international ruling class would benefit from workers fighting each other.13
Though there were many tensions on the basis of class, some of these women’s coalitions would be hard to match today. To organize working women’s suffrage clubs in Connecticut, for instance, NAWSA hired the well-known socialist Ella Reeve Bloor, later known as “Mother Bloor” of the Communist Party. The meetings she organized were held in halls rented and paid for by a niece of J. P. Morgan, a financier who headed the list of socialism’s enemies.14
In fact, suffrage might not have been put over the top had there not been a bequest of $2 million from a woman known as Mrs. Frank Leslie (she had taken the name of her third husband after his death, for it was also the name of his publishing empire). It was money she had made by saving the failing magazines she had inherited. In the words of her will, this sum was left “to Carrie Chapman Catt, leader of the cause of woman suffrage, to further that cause, so that all the women of this country will be able to live women’s rights and shoulder women’s responsibilities, so that for the women of the future all things will be possible.”15 However, even a woman of her business acumen wasn’t able to conquer the rich woman’s bane of condescending lawyers and corrupt trustees. After her death in 1914, her lawyer, William Nelson Cromwell (the founder of the still famous law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell), spent two years contesting the purpose of her will, and thus cut the bequest in half by collecting $1 million in lawyers’ fees from her estate. Nevertheless, the remaining half was finally used as she intended.
Of course, both Alva Belmont and Mrs. Frank Leslie had lived relatively independent lives before marrying into wealth, and so had missed some upper-class conditioning. There were a few women born into powerful families who may have had less control over family wealth, but who lived in settlement houses with immigrant women, taught the knowledge of contraception they themselves had once been denied, established shelters where prostitutes could flee from pimps and corrupt police, and provided homes for newly arrived young working women who might otherwise have been forced onto the streets—just as teenage runaways are now.
In this modern wave of feminism, however, there are fewer places for women to come together across class boundaries, and no obvious institutions like the settlement houses where women lived together while doing feminist work. Though feminist groups often share an American denial of some of the deep effects of class, it’s also true that a Marxist class analysis has entered the popular culture since the suffragist wave. Some of that insight has been especially valuable to women in helping us separate nature from nurture and appreciate the unlimited human diversity among us. In its absence, our suffragist foremothers often fell back into the biological determinism of arguing that women were more moral “by nature.” But now we need a whole fresh look at what class means to women, and at the way caste and class intersect.
Anne Hess, an effective and compassionate activist, grew up with a stronger tradition of philanthropy, handed down by her great-grandfather Julius Rosenwald, of the Sears fortune, and by women within her family, than most women of wealth; yet she still remembers sitting silently in antiwar, women’s liberation, and black power meetings of the 1970s. “We were the enemy,” she said, “even though we were there as friends. More women than men are in the closet about their wealth, partly because they’re drawn to other powerless groups, by their own experience as women—and then shunned by them.” Shad Reinstein, a woman from a family of relative wealth in her upstate New York community, remembers hearing a line from an antiwar song of the 1970s—“We’re going to rape the daughters of bankers.” “It was harder to come out as a wealthy person, even though I was doing constructive things with my land and resources,” she said, “than it was to come out as a lesbian.” When she moved to a different part of the country, she didn’t use her given name or share her background until she had established herself as a working part of that community. These are the exceptions. Even though there are now a few groups of women of wealth around the country who are supporting each other in taking control of their money, breaking trusts, and initiating a new kind of philanthropy to empower women,16 it’s still not easy to overcome the sexual caste system of families in which, for generations, only men have been socialized to power. Jenny Warburg, the forty-one-year-old daughter of the German-Jewish banking family, was trained as a social worker and a photographer, but she didn’t go on a retreat with women peers struggling with the same issues of wealthy families until five years ago. “I was terrified of talking about money,” she explained. “I didn’t want to admit to myself that I had it, much less talk about it with anyone else. Growing up, I was embarrassed to have friends over to the house because of things like finger bowls.” None of this seemed to be as difficult for her brothers, who had very different expectations set for them and who were automatically given more power and credibility on the family foundation board. “It took many years to be taken seriously on that board—even though I am the most politically active member and chaired a community foundation board for four years.” While she lobbies hard for the support of issues she cares about within her family foundation, emotional and economic ties to her family still make it difficult to seek out independent investment or legal advice.
The point is not to romanticize connections among women or to ignore class differences, but to figure out why many women in today’s powerful families seem even less able than their foremothers to work on their own behalf, and to support other women who are doing so. Their giving and volunteering are more likely to support socially approved causes and organizations that do little to change women’s lives; for example, statistics show that most widows keep on donating to their dead husbands’ colleges while ignoring or giving less support to their own. When giving to their family’s charitable priority of a local symphony, they rarely make that gift conditional on employing more women and people of color as musicians; or to an art museum while challenging the absence of a diversity of women artists; or to a drug treatment program while insisting there be more programs for female addicts and addicted babies; or to political candidates according to their positions on issues of special importance to the female half of the country; or to Israel and other group causes while making sure that at least half of those dollars are going to women. In spite of the one-in-nine breast cancer rate that affects us all, fundraisers for major cancer organizations say confidentially they are surprised that women donors—including those giving very large gifts—rarely earmark their gifts for breast and other reproductive cancers, or even ask tough questions about where organizational resources are going.
Tracy Gary, a San Francisco activist who has used her own inheritance experience to become a pioneer organizer among women trying to gain control of family money for the empowerment of women, has done research showing that poor women actually give away a slightly larger percentage of their incomes than do women with incomes of $50,000 and more. Looking at the human truth behind those statistics often reveals women of wealth who lack control of their own money, the self-confidence and knowledge to use it, or support from other women in gaining that confidence and control.
The first step as the support groups of women in wealthy families that are now spreading (and are listed in the endnotes), but we also need to develop more women’s communities that are welcoming across class lines. The integration of some women into the mainstream—for which our foremothers fought and we continue the battle—has meant that we can buy entry and approval into male provinces; all the more so if we are willing to ignore our own interests. A woman with a checkbook is welcome in many places, but if she wants to be welcome as herself, with or without money, she needs to use that checkbook to attack the system of sexual caste. Yet if she wants to do this, how many feminist groups offer her understanding of her situation?
The vast majority of us who are not in powerful families must admit that we have not been very open to those who are. And I mean really open—not with preconceived ideas or envy or an effort to create guilt, but with honest questions and answers, and an understanding that we each bring a part of the mix that the other may need. Those of us who have the confidence and well-developed muscles that come from survival must recognize our worth and stop thinking that money would solve whatever problems we may have. In a way, we treat problems of women in rich families like those of the famous. It’s the rare listener who isn’t thinking: “Oh, come off it, you really love it—how about trading places?” Yet fame is democratic enough to give some women, athletes, rock stars, and other members of “out” groups a power they could have in no other way, while the internal workings of powerful families are often hierarchy in its most intimate form. It takes strength to challenge family traditions, powerful trustees, and investment advisers, plus relatives who are also the country’s rulers—or even to roll over in the morning and say to your husband that from now on, half of the family’s charitable gifts are going to be distributed by you—and women in those situations need support.
What we all need, as adults or children, is at least one person who has confidence in us, so we can have confidence in ourselves. We also need community. Women can become that for each other.
The good news is that, even with less encouragement than almost any other group, some women in powerful families are rebelling. In addition to those groups of women managing wealth who meet to support each other in many cities, there are individuals like Sallie Bingham, a sort of matron saint for rebellious women born into wealthy families. A playwright, short-story writer, and novelist, she asked questions and raised challenges which eventually led to the sale in 1986 of the media properties that the Bingham family of Kentucky had owned for two generations, a conscious political rebellion against their patriarchal control as well as what she considered their mismanagement. Now she has started the Kentucky Foundation for Women to aid women in her area, and she also redistributes on her own about half a million dollars each year. (“I give out of rage,” she writes, “rage that there is never an end to giving … rage that I didn’t use to believe what I gave was mine.”) Some of the women in such famous families as the Rockefellers have become active—in a setting where there was definitely no Rockefeller Sisters Fund—and are giving in new ways designed to empower the powerless. There is also Peg Yorkin, a longtime activist and theater producer, who emerged from a thirty-year marriage to a television producer—which both had entered without inherited money—with enough to give a $10 million endowment in 1991 to the Fund for the Feminist Majority, a multi-issue action organization that she started with Eleanor Smeal, former president of the National Organization for Women. It is the largest grant to be given by a woman for advocacy on behalf of women as a group since Mrs. Frank Leslie. Like her, she has become an inspiration to women whose marriages, and their own work within those partnerships, have given them resources to use on women’s behalf.
They and many others have rebelled with very little support from their sisters. Imagine what could be done with that support. As I sit in meetings of the Ms. Foundation for Women and see brave women donors helping other women who are survivors of violence, especially sexual abuse in childhood—and yet are themselves still silenced about their own experiences by the powerful families from which they come—I realize how far we have to go. It is often a struggle to bring up the forbidden and unladylike subject of money in those families, much less subjects still more forbidden.
I think it will be women from the bottom of the class structure—with strength and a literal knowledge that “money isn’t everything”—who may be more able than middle class women to welcome this personal and political connection to women at the top. I realized this again in 1990 while listening to the generosity of spirit in which Byllye Avery, founder and director of the National Black Women’s Health Project, addressed a few women of inherited wealth. “Women with wealth and women without wealth share a sense of isolation, alienation, and powerlessness,” said this woman who had every reason to feel bitter and estranged. “We feel this way no matter where we are … people like me need people like you, and people like you need people like me. Together, we make a wonderful whole. … We must look inside ourselves, take the risk to learn who we are and acknowledge all the pieces.”
Is the world of women so neatly divided into the rich and the rest of us? I no longer think so. Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.