Within a generation, more households will be supported by women than by men. In The Richer Sex, Liza Mundy takes us to the exciting frontier of this new economic order: she shows us why this flip is inevitable, what painful adjustments will have to be made along the way, and how both men and women will feel surprisingly liberated in the end.
The bestselling author and Washington Post writer goes deep inside the lives of the couples on this cutting edge to paint of picture of how dating, marriage, and home life are changing. How does this new generation of breadwomen navigate paying for a night on the town? In whose interest is it to delay commitment? Are men for the first time thinking of marriage the way women used to—as a bet on the economic potential of a spouse? In this new world of men marrying up, are women learning to value new realms of male endeavor—like parenting, protection, and a margarita at the ready?
The future is here, with couples today debating who must assume the responsibility of primary earner and who gets the freedom of being the slow track partner. With more men choosing to stay home, Mundy shows how that lifestyle has achieved a higher status and all the ways males have found to recover their masculinity. And the revolution is global: Mundy takes us from Japan to Denmark to show how both sexes are adapting as the marriage market has turned into a giant free-for-all, with men and women at different stages of this transformation finding partners in other countries who match their expectations.
The Richer Sex is a wild ride into the future, grounded in Mundy’s peerless journalism, and bound to cause women and men of all generations to rethink what this social upheaval will mean.
About Liza Mundy
Liza Mundy is the bestselling author of Michelle: A Biography and Everything Conceivable and is a staff writer at The Washington Post. She lives in Arlington, Virginia.
Editorial Reviews
“Liza Mundy has written a visionary, optimistic, inspiring book about the future of gender relations in America. She writes with verve, rigor and a keen sense for the unexpected. This is the rare book about the future that not only tells you where we’re headed by why we should want to arrive.” —Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and president of the New America Foundation
“Liza Mundy has done something remarkable: she has taken all the major social and economic threads of the past decade, and woven them into a tapestry that explains, well . . . everything. About love, and sex, and family, and work, and the past and the future, and men and women and children. And she has not only written a book that’s important, but also one that’s a great read.” —Lisa Belkin, author of First, Do No Harm and Life’s Work
“It is an exciting time to witness changing standards in family life: women in charge, men raising babies, both longing for passion and affection. In The Richer Sex, Liza Mundy asks the poignant questions of how and why these changes are occurring. She deftly examines who wins, who loses, and who is left on the battlefields of love, sex, and money.” —Dr. Justin R. Garcia, author and Research Fellow, The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction
Rich Mom, Poor Dad: Women Become Breadwinners
NPR Book Review – March 20, 2012 (Excerpt)
As a mother of young boys, I can tell you that chatty, detail-oriented girls rule the world among the younger set. I’ve always wondered when the big switch would happen, propelling males to their traditional dominance of the adult working world, but Liza Mundy is here to tell us that it won’t. It turns out that in my lifetime, women will be the second sex no more.
Mundy’s The Richer Sex is like a fantastical trip through the looking glass into a future few of us dared imagine, but which Mundy forcefully illustrates is already well underway. Forget gender parity. Mundy culls a broad range of research to lay out how women are fast overtaking men in today’s economy, a shift that is happening worldwide.
Nearly 40% of U.S. working wives now out-earn their husbands, and Mundy says they’ll soon make up a majority. Women hold most managerial and professional jobs, they earn most college degrees and longterm economic shifts favor fields dominated by women.
As with her 2007 book on reproductive technology,Everything Conceivable, Mundy deftly draws out people’s conflicted emotions on the most intimate of subjects. Here, she explores the profound ways the new economic order is transforming the dating scene, the marriage market and the balance of power within relationships. [Read the full article...]
Book review: ‘The Richer Sex,’ on contemporary women, by Liza Mundy
The Washington Post Book Review – March 23, 2012 (Excerpt)
Are women about to replace men as the high-achieving sex? Women now earn the majority of academic degrees conferred in the United States. Their real wages have risen steadily over the past three decades, while men’s have stagnated. Today, wives in dual-earner families contribute, on average, 47 percent of family earnings. In 2009, nearly 38 percent of employed wives outearned their husbands.
Washington Post reporter Liza Mundy argues that “the Big Flip” in gender roles “is just around the corner.” Soon, she says, “women, not men, will become the top earners in households,” transforming the dynamics of male-female relationships.
Mundy deftly summarizes the remarkably rapid expansion of women’s economic and educational achievements over the past 40 years, demonstrating that women’s empowerment is an international phenomenon. I agree that women’s workplace gains, combined with the overthrow of laws and customs that once enshrined male privilege, add up to a true revolution. But I think she overstates its reach. [Read the full article...]
Breadwomen - ‘The Richer Sex,’ by Liza Mundy
The New York Times Book Review – April 13, 2012 (Excerpt)
Five or six years ago, my mother and I sat in a darkened theater talking about a couple we knew. The wife was an executive with Ivy League degrees. The husband had some nebulous part-time job, but mostly he stayed home with the kids. What, I wondered, does he have that’s attractive to her? There was a pause. Sperm, my mother replied.
Today, that conversation is as obsolete as “The Feminine Mystique.” For one, as The New York Times recently reported, more women are having children without marrying. In 2009 more than half of all births to women under 30 occurred outside marriage — an institution that is losing popularity in historic proportions.
Male underemployment, the surge in women’s economic fortunes and the decline in marriage swirled into a meme in 2010, when an article in The Atlantic asked, “What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women?” The next year, the magazine ran a long essay in which the writer observed that the pool of those considered “traditionally ‘marriageable’ men” — the highly educated, the financially secure — was “radically shrinking.” [Read the full article...]
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THE BLEEDING HILLS A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss
I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith. - 2 Timothy iv. 7
The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]
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THE BLEEDING HILLS
