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Okay, I'm going to go at this essay from a crusty old socialist feminist perspective. I'm no scholar, but I am an asshole, so here is my hottest of takes. https://www.marieclaire.com/career-advice/a34019494/caitlin-moran-more-than-a-woman-interview/
Skipping over the low-hanging fruit of this essay being a hetero, upper-class look at the marriages of people whose primary barriers to career success are their personal choices, it does not question the system that puts a loss of labor inside and/or outside the home in conflict.
I keep returning to this idea, recently repopularized, of social reproduction theory, which shows how the "production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process." https://socialistworker.org/2013/09/10/what-is-social-reproduction-theory
You go to work and generate some goods or services, you go home and regenerate for work, and you produce new workers to populate the goods and services factories for the next generation.
Feminists of all stripes have been sounding alarms about the broken care systems in the U.S. and the women, children, and families chewed up by them, but COVID has laid them all bare by, essentially, shutting down the kid factories.
"These activities, which form the very basis of capitalism in that they reproduce the worker, are done completely free of charge for the system by ppl within the household and the community. In the United States, women still carry a disproportionate share of this domestic labor."
"The most important insight of social reproduction theory is that capitalism is a unitary system that can successfully, if unevenly, integrate the sphere of reproduction and the sphere of production. Changes in one sphere thus create ripples in another."
The COVID response, in shutting down daycares and schools, has created ripple effects in our production system that unequally affect women because the capitalist system is also racist and sexist.
The material basis of women is tied to that oppression. A nice, supportive husband is just a pebble on that beach.
There is no real equitable way to balance paid labor in the workplace with unpaid labor at home without fundamentally upending institutions that rely on women's unpaid labor (spoiler: all of 'em).
There's a tendency for upper crust women with survivor's guilt - those who have "made it" through any combination of privilege, luck, and hard work while the rest of us continue to muck around in the muck - to attribute their success to a loving partner. Sexist? Not my Nigel.
They don't account for things like: Did I grow up feeling mostly safe? Was I fed? Was someone supervising me? Was my school dangerous? Was my neighborhood crawling with cops? Could I see a doctor when I was sick? All those layers of hardship that money and whiteness peel away.
The solution, you see, the ladder out of the muck, they say, is to date more wisely. Choose a Feminist Nigel ("he was a feminist before I was!").
I'd prefer they skip over the lukewarm handjob and advocate for universal healthcare and mandatory paid time off, so working women can take sick children to care providers without losing their jobs. And universal daycare, so little ones can learn while mom keeps the lights on.
Ensure that the women (because it will be women) who run those services are themselves paid, with paid time off, continuing education, and access to medical benefits.
Stuff like this ensures that it doesn't matter what kind of Nigel you have in your corner, if you have one at all, because you don't need his willingness to see you as a human being to participate fully in society.
And it would be nice to create a society where you don't need to prove your worth to institutions that hate you (and your needy kids!) to get access to services like housing, food, education, and healthcare, because your worth isn't dependent on the presence of any old Nigel.
Marriage is not a force shield that protects you from bad things. A society set up to award resources to well-married women only, however we define that today, is a bad one.
All of which is to say that while the idea of a good partner being better than a bad partner is correct, it's not fundamentally the problem at hand, and to make it so is a way to assuage the guilt wealthy people feel about their unequal accumulation of resources.
