It's possible to be a woman married to a very wealthy, powerful man but to be relatively disempowered. Not just relative to him, relative to a middle class woman who works.
I feel that rich women are soft targets.... There's a lot of legitimate resentment and anger about inequality in our culture, about money... I feel like a lot of the anger about income disparity is aimed not at wealthy men, but at wealthy women.
I think the most relative thing is that women in a way that I think people haven't given us credit for, want to return to this idea about equality in marriages and financial autonomy. And if the richest women don't have financial autonomy, what does it mean for the rest of us? That's all.
This is a culture of female display. And the reason it's a culture of female display is that on the Upper East Side women far outnumber men, if you do the sex ratios. I can't say exactly what they are, but you could google it. People have said two to one. So, it's a female display culture because sex ratios are skewed toward men, and they sort of have their choice, even if they're married.... Also, women are economically dependent on men, and so there's that aspect of needing to perform your beauty and your scarcity.
If you're trying to forge bonds on something other than kinship, and forge a tribal identity on something other than relatedness, conformity is a good way to do it. And if you're wealthy, you can do it with a very expensive It bag, or whether it's Vuitton or Valentino at the moment, and it's a way to signal to one another, We're part of this tribe.
On the Upper East Side, women are prisoners to the ideology of intensive motherhood, which is that you should be enriching your child's well-being on every measure you possibly can at every moment. So when your kid is sitting down playing with Legos, intensive motherhood dictates that you should be engaging with him or her somehow, praising, questioning, making it into a learning opportunity. It's not enough to just tell your child, "Do your homework." It's not enough to help with the homework. You go to the school and learn how they do math, so that you can tutor your child in math.
Women are looking out for other women and their children. There are some great nannies, and there are some horrible nannies. And I don't blame individual women for wanting to keep an eye on it. I blame the government for not having subsidized high-quality day care. Should it be on a woman no matter how rich she is to be a one-woman show where she finds the nanny, interviews the nanny, does a psychological evaluation of the nanny, supervises the nanny? It's criminal how little America cares about child care, which is to me the pressing issue of our nation.
I'm a primate, you know? I need to be pro-social, like all of us; I need to be pro-social and affiliative. I need to sit at the campfire with other women.
