Well, it's kind of hard to say that the ad actually endorses this arrangement, isn't it? I mean, the last line in it is "Dad really screwed this up."

I'm not sure I understand. Is this post a criticism of this type of relationship? My wife is a stay-at-home mom, and has often helped me with work issues. I appreciate her opinions; and it is clear to both of us that although the company signs the check to me, the income is ours.

What I don't appreciate about the commercial is how it is another in a long line of "Dad screwed up" commercials, making the men in a relationship seem like out of touch dunces. These are extremely common, but I can't recall a single "Mom screwed up" style advertisement.

I'm not sure that it's just wives of high-paying men, either. My husband is a high school social studies teacher, and I've done my fair share of editing tests, grading papers, researching topics, and even being a "guest speaker" in his classes (re: using our children as examples of Erikson's stages of development and lectures on the sociology of gender, which was my concentration in college). My help isn't necessarily "expected" -- yet when the holidays rolled around was he a bit pushy for me to make cookies for his principals and coworkers? You betcha.

I think it's just part of the gendered division of labor, unfortunately. I doubt that if our positions were switched, with me working and him staying home with our young children, that the same would be true. So I'm not sure it's as financially based as you may think.

Since she pays everything (or most) she spends with his money, isn´t she a little bit interested (or should be) in lubricating her husbands’ work relationships?

She will get half of it if they divorce a lot of it when he dies and he has to pay alimony if they divorce.

Where is the difference with him getting something at work on last notice?

This sort of arrangement can be seen as a legacy of the household as a single economic unit -- something that is still somewhat true today, though much less so than in the past. Back when most people were subsistance farmers or otherwise agriculturalists, while there was gendered division of labor, both spouses (and children too) worked more or less directly on tasks that sustained the household (both growing/raising food to eat and producing surplus to sell for extra money). When the main source of income moved outside the home -- and was more or less monopolized by men, at least in ideology -- it leaves women in an awkward position: still required (by ideology and real necessity) to make at least indirect economic contributions to the household, but without a direct way to do so beyond an auxiliary role.

One could, of course, look at this situation from the opposite perspective - women exploit men by sending them out to work in a dirty and dangerous world where their work is generally under the control of someone else, while staying at home in a less stressful environment where their choice of what tasks to perform when, and how they are performed, is under their own control. It is in their interest, of course, to make sure that the man is well-fed, well-dressed, and in top shape to perform well in the workplace. Helping with the man's duties and enhancing his social standing contributes to this, and has the advantage that it too is work that can be performed at home, under the woman's control, rather than in a separate job in an office under someone else's control.

One could also look at the arrangement as a cooperative one, where a married couple is a unit and various tasks are divided between them according to the norms of the culture and negotiation. Where the trouble comes is when individuals want to do something that does not fit into the norms of the culture, which can be a problem for men as well as women. Men are discouraged from staying at home as much as women as discouraged from working.

Dad left the macaroni in the pantry so Mum could save the day.

I'm not sure whether this means Dad does the grocery shopping and Mum does the cooking, or whether it says Mum can't solve problems without Dad's help.

But regardless, it's a rubbish ad. Everyone is unhappy. The tagline might as well be something like "Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese. Keeps you pissed off!"

I guess this is the joys of having a nurse as a bf. They can't bring work home, they're not allowed!

(I actually call on him to do stuff for me, with helping edit my postgrad essays and stuff - remembering to wake me for important things etc)

1. The issue isn't "should a wife serve as an unpaid aide to her husband?" Obviously, it would be a funny kind of partnership if you stayed at home but refused to edit your husband's work or wouldn't make dinner for a client. The issue is that we live in a nominally individualistic society in which women are responsible for their own careers and can end up divorced with nothing that will go on a resume and no earnings in social security. So it's a real risk--and one that I, frankly, would not take--to be a stay-at-home partner who puts a lot of work time into her husband's career. All it takes is a high-powered husband who divorces you for a new young wife when you're 45 and have no work history, and you're living in poverty til you die. And while there are certainly many enduring marriages there are a lot of divorces too.

Up until (I think) the phase of the industrial revolution where a lot of work became factory work/centralized, a lot of households did operate as economic units. It was a bit of a drawback that women couldn't legally own property until the late 19th century, but since divorce was pretty rare and the household was conceived of as an economic rather than a romantic unit, it seems like a much safer bet for the woman.

The thing is, our society is both officially individualistic (your own retirement account! working as your husband's assistant doesn't look good on a resume!) and relies heavily on uncompensated female labor with the cleaning and the cooking and the client-minding and the housekeeping. There could be a partial workaround if housekeeping were considered waged work for social security purposes, if we had a better safety net, etc.

Since she pays everything (or most) she spends with his money, isn´t she a little bit interested (or should be) in lubricating her husbands’ work relationships?

There's nothing in the ad that indicates that Mom is a SAHM or that she doesn't bring home a paycheck, only that Mom bears the responsibility for cooking and accommodating Dad's unexpected dinner guest.

And that is at the crux of the narrative presented here: not that a partner employed in the home is helping the partner who's employed outside the home, but that the woman (employment status undisclosed) is tacitly responsible for all the cooking, even when the man's suddenly shifting demands unexpectedly raise the bar.

My boyfriend has only been a practicing attorney for about a year now. When he was still in law school, I would proofread some of his papers for him, but now that he's practicing, I have a strongly ingrained resistance to doing anything secretarial. The pressure for me to help him is great, and I want to, because I know it would help him, but I want a job and a career of my own, and I'm afraid of going down a path increasing dependence that would prevent me from doing that.

It's actually working out, strangely, because he's been paying his sister to do some of that work for him, which she really needs because she just had a baby. If he and I had children, this might all be different.

It's always been very important to me in relationships to have a clear separation between my life and the life of my partner, but I'm really starting to appreciate just how unrealistic that is for some people. I someday want my partner to edit my comics and I can't expect him to help me if I don't help him. Already we share dinner preparation in a very interdependent fashion (when one of us is cooking, the other preps, and we switch frequently). Perhaps once upon a time it didn't go both ways, but it certainly does now, in no small part due to feminism. I'm encouraged by all the posters who are in these kinds of relationships with people who clearly appreciate what they add to the relationship.

Although the predictable chorus of people mistaking analysis for a clear judgment one way or the other is a little disappointing. We can have a discussion without taking everything personally, can't we?

Uh, what Elsa said.

Why are we all assuming this woman doesn't have a job outside the home?

According to Google, single income households with a mother at home are in the minority and shrinking, so statistically speaking, we should be assuming that the woman in the ad has a job outside the home. Maybe she's exhausted from a long day in surgery and can't believe that her Doofy Husband is now expecting her to entertain his clients.

It's interesting that the majority of commenters looked at a commercial in which a woman's employment status was undisclosed and immediately assumed that she was a SAHM.

The discussion seems to be focusing, as the 1960s feminist movement did, on the situation of upper middle class (white) women. Middle and working-class women were not agonizing over whether people talked to them at cocktail parties in the 50s.

Why not try deconstructing the commercial more? Would anyone who had clients who dressed in suits really serve macaroni and cheese to a client? Is this positioning the product as something more upscale than it is? (Which is not very - somewhere just above average, I'd say.)

And on whether she works outside the home or not, does she look like she just got home from surgery? Does the house?

Why is the client Asian?

What about the mixed messages between "dad's in the doghouse again" - the classic "men aren't very competent and are always screwing up at home" and implying that he does the grocery shopping?

As pointed out, "it’s a rubbish ad. Everyone is unhappy." Does that sell product? Did Kraft pull out an ad not ready for prime-time to get kudos for being the first to use Ted Williams?

@jfruh: those are valid questions (but I can't for some reason reply above). I recently read the book Sexual Paradox by Susan Pinker. She delves into this and comes up with some interesting observations about the choices women make. One example is from a kibbutz, where even after several generations of non-gendered work opportunities, it's still the women dominating the childcare area. She looks at several high-powered women who opt out of the workforce in spite of working for corporations who go to great lengths to accommodate their family life. Also, and this is most interesting to me, she observes that if they won the proverbial lottery, the first thing many working class women would do is stop working. To me that goes beyond simply having a shitty job. There are other factors at play and it's not as simple as fixing a structural problem in the workplace.

Reply to LdgE above:

Why should I pay part of my earnings so that someone whose skills won’t command much more than daycare can work outside the home instead of taking care of her children?

Well, but skills and earning power aren't static across a career. One of the reasons women tend to earn less money is that they often end up staying home w/kids at a time in their careers where they might otherwise gain skills and experience that would raise their earning power. It's something of a vicious cycle.

Interesting post but depressing to me to see women complaining but not doing anything about the work/family balance issue.

I have some of these phenomena in my family: (a) a woman over age 40, divorced, no education or job experience, on welfare, (b) other women in their 60s, no job experience in decades, very dependent and very reactive psychologically in their relationships - they seem terrified and clingy and controlling to me, (c) 40-something surgeon brother with educated but jobless wife, severe stress in the marriage and especially on the children (d) myself, 40-something female, childless, unmarried corporate lawyer - I will not likely be in poverty now or in my old age but I have had to sacrifice marriage and children, I feel, because other women have been willing to do the 1950s thing where I was not.

I think that these things can be fixed, though, especially now that there are more of us older women as role models in demanding, higher earning jobs and now that many younger men have the emotional availability for and interest in doing co-parenting. You can prevent the problems for children and others that are caused by male bread-winner marriage by focusing on setting up a 2 earner/2 parent family. This takes focus and commitment as well as skills at partnership (such as co-parenting, instead of the mother being the primary parenting) and at negotiation with employers. Just throwing up your hands and saying "it's complicated" and going with the path of least resistance will get you nowhere.

This could reform the workplace in just one more generation if people would really focus on it and plan, including who they marry, accordingly.

Some resources that may be helpful:

1. Third Path Institute - google their website
2. Equally Shared Parenting - book
3. Getting to 50/50 - book.

The idea of a child as the public face and spokes person of the family, and the implied idea that innocent and/or smartass children are smarter than their parents, annoys me to no end.

My grandfather was a diplomat, from the 50s through the 70s. I've heard him wax rather poetic about how, in his day, the State Department understood that they were not just employing the man they hired -- they were employing the spouse, and indeed the whole family. Entertaining and being entertained was part of the job. And, in my grandparents' case at least, they were also supplied with the staff and the resources they needed to entertain important people properly.

My grandfather never says how much attention the diplomat's family situation actually got when hiring decisions and posting decisions were made. I do wonder if there was someone in charge going, "Let's post Fred to Paris, he's good at his job and his wife throws the best cocktail parties."