The Disaster of Financial Dependence

by Leslie Bennetts

But these days, young women seem increasingly inclined to ignore such considerations. Like Julia Jamison, many spend more time planning their weddings than figuring out how they’re going to support themselves for the rest of their lives.

The renewed popularity of stay-at-home motherhood has led a lot of young women to believe they don’t have to get serious about a profession, because they’re just going to quit when they have children anyway. Instead of dreaming about individual achievement, they imagine a career of domestic bliss, enjoying an affluent lifestyle that will be paid for indefinitely by an obliging husband.

For many working women, it’s difficult to believe that today’s young women would subscribe to such an old-fashioned attitude.

But in a suburb of Chicago, a 17-year-old confides that her primary goal for the future is to have an enormous, extravagant wedding, which she refers to as her “Bridezilla” fantasy. In the Bronx, a 17-year-old with the highest grade-point average in her class is admitted to Harvard, but says she’s planning to stop working and stay home as soon as she has kids. In Houston,yet another 17-year-old reports that all her friends’ mothers are telling them to find a rich man to marry, so they won’t “have to” work.

But as many older women learn too late, that scenario doesn’t always work out so well. “My husband’s niece is very pretty, and her parents raised her to marry a rich guy so she wouldn’t have to work,” says Amanda Barron*, a former dancer who lives in a New York City suburb.