Yahoo Finance New York City concubines: Upper East Side moms?
Imagine a husband rewarding his stay-at-home wife with some extra cash for keeping a neat and tidy house or taking especially good care of the kids. It sounds like the kind of misogyny reserved for 1950’s American television but it’s happening, at least anecdotally, among the upper echelons of New York City families.
Wednesday Martin is a cultural studies specialist who has been studying the women of the Upper East Side of Manhattan from within. According to a column she wrote for the New York Times in advance of her book Primates of Park Avenue, Martin moved from Greenwich Village to the Upper East Side in 2004 where, as she puts it, “I lived and lunched and mothered with more than 100 of [Upper East Side women] for the better part of six years.”
In that time she found some surprising behaviors that suggested these powerful and mostly accomplished and well educated women were “cloistered” by their husbands who would reward them for things like getting their children into elite schools. The women would spend the money on trips with their friends, shopping sprees or their favorite charity.
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“I think it’s a little bit tongue in cheek here,” cautions Yahoo Finance’s Jen Rogers (a denizen of the Upper WEST Side). “You can go to any community in the United States and find a stay-at-home mom and then say, ‘well look, they’re getting a present, they’re getting something for being home.’ It’s hard when you have one person that makes most of the money.”
Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Michael Santoli (who also calls the Upper WEST Side home) says attention-getting details aside, there may be some interesting research opportunities afoot.
“You have these women - most of them in this profile who are high achieving, very accomplished women - who probably left the kind of hard core job. And it’s not just a competitiveness but the decision was made at some point to channel energies into this other area. And they have husbands who are MBA’s and essentially very bottom line, performance-oriented people.”
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