The Marquises of Pompadour of Park Avenue

The Marquise de Pompadour was the pampered, glamorous, intelligent and cultured mistress of 18^th century French king Louis XV.  She entertained him, took charge of his schedule, managed his household, groomed his children, organized his sexual activities and acted as the de facto minister of culture.  For her excellent performance, the king rewarded her with titles and money, like bonuses in today’s parlance.

The Marquise de Pompadour’s lifestyle is alive and well on Park Avenue and on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City’s posh enclave of the well-heeled.  According to anthropologist and social researcher Wednesday Martin, these Pompadour-reincarnations are not actually mistresses but married women who unburdened by ordinary wife responsibilities (they don’t bake cake) indulge in all the mistress and kept-woman-type trappings and excesses. 

On May 16, 2015 the word got out that many of the Upper East Side wives received bonuses for “being a good spouse”.  The news went viral on line.  These gilded-cage creatures are married to young masters-of-the-universe husbands who allegedly reward them with generous bonuses to do tasks conventional and self-sacrificing wives do for free, whether working or stay-at-home.  On this important day for the advancement of urban anthropology, Ms. Martin published a titillating op-ed[1] to promote her forthcoming book Primates of Park Avenue.  In her op-ed she drew far-reaching analogies with other hierarchical societies in faraway lands. 

                                                           Jezebel Blog

The Park Avenue primates are Glam SAHMs (glamorous stay-at-home-moms) an acronym coined by Martin.  On the Upper East Side, there are twice as many reproductive age females than males.  So competition to catch unattached men is ruthless, very much like in the Disney nature film Monkey Kingdom where a female toque macaque outwits other females to mate above her rank.  In financial parlance it is a buyer’s market.  So pressure to shine and perform is enormous on these Glam SAHMs for whom managing the wealthy household is a full-time job.  While their high earning executive husbands run hedge or private equity funds, the equally talented wives with advanced degrees from top universities are the CEOs of the domestic firm strengthening the dynastic wealth.  However, their “intensive mothering” practice, i.e. “exhaustively enriching their children’s lives by virtually every measure” does not include menial work.  They concentrate on upscale activities like indoor cycling (“rich women don’t get fat”), shopping, hanging out with their girlfriends, organizing galas and charitable functions, newsletter editing, and compulsive grooming to deserve the glam part of their acronym.  “Intensive mothering” looks very much like remote control parenting.  Moreover, Glam SAHMs seem to enjoy their highly gender-segregated life (or is it by default?), interaction with their husband’s own world appears limited at best.

Female employment (age group 25-55) in the United States has gradually declined over the year from 75% in 2000 to 69% today, steadily leaving the US in a gender “dustbin”.  By contrast the majority of rich countries are going in the other direction.  The female employment rate is notoriously low in affluent areas like the Upper East Side of Manhattan where about half the women do not work outside the home.  Wealthy suburbs of Salt Lake City in Utah show similar figures.  Ms. Martin should be encouraged to check if wealthy Mormon husbands also pay wife (or wives) bonuses.  This blogger has some doubt because the deeply male-dominated Mormon culture is frugal by Park Avenue standards.  

In the posh Zona Sul suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, where this blogger lives, the Carioca[2] Glam SAHMs are easily spotted and their life style mimics the Upper East Side type.  They busy their days with vigorous work outs, Pilates and “appointments with dermatologists to get various beauty treatments.  On a more positive side, some of them volunteer time for charitable work”[3].  

So let’s go back to the bonus issue which has created the buzz in the media and went viral among my female friends.  According to Martin, these bonuses are set up in a pre-nup or a post-nup (I still cannot fathom the difference between the two, since most couples do not wait for the wedding night to assess one another’s bed performance).  The bonus amount is based on the wife’s performance in managing the household and bringing up her brood.  Key Performance Indicators (KPI for the insiders) must be agreed upon, e.g. zero defect product, customer satisfaction (i.e. the husband), progress towards specific goals, etc.? This indicator business is fairly opaque.  Do repeated failures to meet targets lead to divorce? Or does the wife go back to work as a less stressful option?  Alternatively, is the wife able to compensate for her performance shortcomings?  According to Martin, “there were jokes about possible sexual performance metrics”.  Madame de Pompadour must twitch in her grave.  She lived during a time when sexual performance was the bread and butter of mistresses.  “The wives of the master of the universe, I learned, are a lot like mistresses-dependent and comparatively disempowered” Martin writes.

This blogger fully agrees with this comment.  Bonuses are performance-based financial rewards subsequent to an evaluation by supervisors.  Therefore the stay-at-home motherhood job is appraised by the husband cum employer.  This arrangement does not strike her as very egalitarian.  In the altruistic spouse partnership common to middle-class families, the stay-at-home mom enjoys a certain freedom by working free-of-charge, a compensation to her economic dependency.  Does it not defeat the purpose to be paid to be a mom?

Now let’s quote John McDermott, a Financial Times columnist who probably cannot afford to pay his wife a bonus: “I was thinking about how a wife bonus demeans the economic gains made by women across the world in the past 100 years and corrodes the romantic bonds between partners…so rich men can keep their wives in dependency….Is this dependency worth the bonus?.”[4]

Further along in his op-ed, Mc Dermott reminds us that “bonuses” paid to households are not new.  In fact, European governments give generous allowances to encourage families to have children, the KPIs being the number of children born, not mothers to stay home.  It is not a totally pro-women policy, as European countries face huge pension liability and need young workers to pay for retirees as the pay-as-you-go pension system is overstretched.  In fact, complemented with paid maternity leave, the allowance helps many mothers to stay in the work force.

Through its social welfare program Bolsa Familia, the Brazilian government allocates stipends to poor mothers to encourage them to keep their kids healthy and in school.  It has another non-official purpose, that of bribing families to vote for the government candidates. 

Why do rich highly educated women with skills to match, business connections, and household help decide not to take up an interesting job?  There are individual as well as tribal reasons for these decisions.  May-be it is because the glass ceiling is so hard to break.  The masters of the universe do not make the work environment women-friendly and until women’s participation reaches a critical mass, nothing will improve on this front.  Unfortunately, since professional women are increasingly opting out in the United States, the remaining working women will have to fight harder to stay afloat, and as a result the goal of equal pay for equal work will remain a concept.  You have gone a long way baby, but it is still a man’s world! So stay put, and direct your intelligence into pleasing a wealthy husband.  Is this the message behind Ms. Martin’s survey?

Ms. Martin may have sexed-up her survey, the bonus thing may be an exaggeration.  However, having read some pre-nups on line, I believe that there is some truth in her story.  The Park Avenue tribe is a minute population, part of the 1%, the richest Americans, who often marry each other, and work in finance.  However, its social model is a return to the old patriarchal system, with the commodification of love as a new element.  Only money and privilege make is bearable for the Glam SAHMs; they may enjoy their gender-segregated world, but the real divide is between those who can afford not to work and those who have no choice but work. 

Balancing work and motherhood for American middle-class women is nearly mission impossible.  Opting-out is regarded as New Feminism which holds that women should be valued in their biological role of child bearers, as individual equal to men in the economic, social and legal senses.  Notably, the concept promoted by the Catholic Church doesn’t reject women’s participation in the economic and social sphere.  From reading the comments on Ms. Martin op-ed in the NYT (May, 24) it seems that this fact is lost on many women.  The multifaceted New Feminism is the mantra of the post-feminist generation.  In this new parlance, this blogger is a dinosaur, an old fashioned feminist, object of scorn.  However, she may be right to regard New Feminism is an old gender based prejudice in new clothing.

If every American woman decides to opt-out, men will be more than happy to take back the modicum of equality the women fought for over the years.  If many women have choices now, it is because the 20^th century feminists fought their battles.  Between Ann Romney and Sheryl Sandberg, this blogger chooses the second.  She worked all her life, enjoyed the stimulation, challenge and the friends she made.  However, she respects those women who took another track, should they remember the battles feminists won for them.  In Europe, women will continue to progress thanks to paid maternity leave (mother & father), crèches, better job opportunities, equal pay and a more audible voice in politics to keep the momentum. The marquises de Pompadour of Park Avenue could prove their usefulness by going to Washington DC and request the implementation of women-friendly policies for those less fortunate than them.

A study from the Pew Research Center (March 14, 2013) found “that 41 percent of American adults claim that the increase in number of working moms is bad for society”.  On the other end, a still more recent study by the Harvard Business School (2015) indicated that the daughters of working mothers were doing better at school and making more money than those of non-working moms.  Their sons were also better fathers.  The Economist of London seems to agree, it published several articles on hands-on fatherhood and children benefits pointing to society gains as a whole (May 16, 2015).

Blog dedicated to Linda C., Linda S., Marianne, Caryl, Donna, Kathleen, Inez, Fabienne and Tom.

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[1] Poor Little Rich Women, New York Times op-ed, May 16, 2015.

[2] Inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro.

[3] Information provided by I.M.S.

[4] FT, May 22, 2015.