The Disaster of Financial Dependence

by Leslie Bennetts

When this loss of power dawns on dependent wives, it often causes great unease. “My sister is a stay-at-home mom, and her husband is a very successful physician. She doesn’t need to work, but being financially dependent scares her,” says Susan Robinson*, an executive who lives in New Jersey. “Her husband keeps all the financial information from her. He has literally awakened her in the middle of the night and told her to sign the tax returns, so she wouldn’t review them.”

Robinson herself is a telecommunications executive, and is appalled by such subservience. “I don’t think women realize how easy it is to get into the mode of asking as opposed to stating. When the husband says, ‘I’ll let you know,’ you’re waiting for permission.”

Apprehensive about whether they will receive it, wives frequently resort to subterfuge in order to get what they want. “In my business, I see the shell game women play with their husbands, particularly where there’s this imbalance of economic power,” says Darcy Howe, a Merrill Lynch investment advisor in Kansas City, Missouri. “Women who don’t have economic power feel this need to sneak around if their husbands might not approve of the ways they’re spending the money. It’s a little game they’re playing.”

The more income a woman brings into her household, however, the more leverage she tends to have.

In the early years of her marriage, EllenWarwick* sacrificed her own career several times to follow her husband from one country to another. He was finally transferred home to Washington, D.C., where Warwick eagerly resumed her professional life.