That new soap opera, “The Sanfords of South Carolina,” revives interest in a subject that intrigued me over decades of editing women’s magazines–the sexual politics of two-career marriages.
Working with ambitious women in their twenties and thirties, I was struck by how different their lives were from the Father-knows-best ethos of earlier generations. They weren’t holding jobs, as most of their mothers did, only until they could start homemaking and procreating.
In those “dormitory marriages,” there were fascinating variations of relationships between equals or, human nature being what it is, unequals on either side. In many cases, the wives were much smarter, sharper and more competent.
The Sanfords look like one of those couples. In a society that still gives power more easily to men (pace Todd Palin), however, a successful woman like Jenny Sanford has to morph from a New York investment banker to a helpmeet who “largely gave up her professional life and turned to helping her husband’s political career” even as she refused “to abandon her sense of identity, her direction, or her own opinions.”
His wife successfully managed campaigns for Congress and the statehouse while rearing four sons, but for Mark Sanford, such a powerhouse performance may have been hard on the libido, leaving him vulnerable to “a dashing new version of himself,” as Maureen Dowd puts it, in the eyes of an exotic stranger.
Sanford’s downfall is a sad example of a society that is still struggling with the idea of powerful women…