Chinese and American Women: Managing Money vs. Managing Anxiety

Recently, my friend Sandy told me that her American husband takes turns with her when it comes to driving the kids around or running household errands. He even lends a hand around the house, sharing at least some of the housework. True, Jim (Sandy’s husband) would rather cook dinner and leave the kitchen a mess than clean it up afterwards, but domestic labor in their house, run along American lines, is divided, maybe not equally, but still divided between husband and wife.

One further thing is divided between the partners in Sandy’s house: money. Jim insists that they both participate in the handling of the family’s finances. That’s something that would never have happened in China: Chinese women are used to being their households’ secretaries of the treasury.

As her American husband didn’t cede management of the family’s finances to her, Sandy complained to me that her status within the family hierarchy suffered as a result. And, from a Chinese perspective, it had a recent report from a Chinese investment management company revealed that 76 percent of women who have a partner are in charge of their family's finances.

As a result, Chinese women have an influence within the home to which American women can’t lay claim. In the Chinese families Sandy and I saw growing up, all of the family’s income was managed by women.

Whence Sandy's difficulties. Growing up in China, her mother had always been in charge of money: her father handed over his salary card at the end of every month and she budgeted and paid the household expenses. Even after Sandy’s father took a mistress, her mother still got her pay card. When Sandy married in the United States, she therefore expected her husband would give her his paycheck so that she could take charge of the household accounts. She knew she was competent to do so, having learned from her mother how to manage the home thriftily, how not to waste money on needless expenses, and how to put aside savings. (The study referred to above also revealed that Chinese women have more savings than Chinese men.)

Rather taken aback by her husband’s insistence that they share fiscal responsibilities, Sandy asked me whether American women still played the main role in the family even though they weren’t in charge of money matters.

I explained to my friend that, unlike Chinese society, American society focuses on the family unit as a whole and, for example, stay-at-home moms aren’t held in low regard. Americans for the most part respect women who devote themselves to what is seen as the full-time job of raising a family and keeping the home organized and comfortable. Families also do more together in the United States: Americans like to take the whole family along when they go out for dinner, entertainment or recreation. In fact, many American married couples need to be reminded to have “date nights” for just the adults, so involved do they become with the children and the family unit. At the same time, the big and small things in the family are not decided by one person alone, but by joint decision of the parents working together (and, what would be unheard of in China, sometimes with the children allotted voting rights as well.)

Moreover, American society still advocates a degree of chivalry. American men still hold doors open for women, offer them their seats, let them off the elevator first and pay the check when they go on dates. To a Chinese woman, this looks as though American women are treated like queens. Chinese women may not see how some American women resent this treatment, which they see as coming from a mentality in which women were the “weaker sex.”

That mentality was pervasive through to the 1960s, when women were in many ways second-class citizens, either happy housewives or engaged in the very few jobs that were open to them: secretaries, teachers, nurses, salesgirls, waitresses or, if they were very pretty, airline stewardesses, jobs they were expected to quit when they got married so they could take care of their husbands. The most prestigious universities didn’t accept women until the end of the decade (1968 for Yale, 1969 for Princeton), and women who managed to become doctors or lawyers were viewed as slightly comical aberrations. Moreover, these limited professional openings were matched by a huge salary gap: women earned 59 cents for every dollar a man earned, even in those rare occasions when they did the same jobs as men.

Unmarried women were either expected to be young, pretty and, to one degree or another, sex objects, or, after they reached a certain age, old maids who were to be pitied. A woman who didn’t want to have a husband or children was viewed as an anomalous bluestocking. Unmarried women couldn’t open charge accounts, and even if they were married, they needed their husband's signature to do so. From that, infer that the bills went to the husband, who gave the wife an allowance for household expenses, but who maintained control of the purse strings for himself.

That began to change in the 1970s with the emergence of Women’s Liberation and the fact that more and more married women were remaining in the workplace. Although the women’s movement’s more vocal advocates were still viewed by men as semi-ridiculous shrews well into the decade, American women began really to care about being on an equal footing with men and to seize the opportunities that had been denied them until then. Much of this battle was professional, and, yes, sexual, but the liberated American woman seemed to be more concerned with her role in the workplace than with who controlled the domestic purse strings. If women did harbor expectations in that regard within the family hierarchy, those expectations were that they would at last be on an equal footing with their husbands. The key piece of feminist legislation at the time wasn’t called the Equal Rights Amendment for nothing. There was still a huge salary gap, but the days of husbands doling out money to their wives to pay the milkman were gone for good. Women were beginning to expect to participate more fully in family life and be unpaid domestic servants no longer.

That social upheaval in the United States set the stage for the far more independent and strong-minded American woman of the early 21st century. Although American men may no longer open car doors for their dates the way their fathers did, most American women today would probably happily open their own doors in exchange for the equality they are attaining, the best barometer of which is the fact that a woman is now second-in-line to the American presidency.

American women are in the best position they’ve ever been in, even if they lack the Chinese wife’s hold on the family treasury.

I also suspect that, on the average, American women are less stressed than their Chinese counterparts.

Chinese women have to worry about everything big and small at home and abroad: they have to manage their families along with their own careers. Unlike Sandy’s American husband, who actually insists that he be allowed to lend a hand, Chinese men as a rule don’t help with the housework or do much in terms of the day-to-day raising of the children.

Moreover, the life of a Chinese woman is fraught with a degree of anxiety I don’t think American women appreciate, however stressful their lives may be. Chinese women worry about their careers, their marriages, their families, their appearance, and their ages, and can’t seem to break free from the cycle of anxiety. 

One of the greatest pressures placed on Chinese women is ageism. Chinese women may enjoy considerable matriarchal status within the family, and may be exercising increasing influence on society, but age remains a very sore point.  To give two examples, actress Yi Nengjing, 52, has been both praised and criticized for her almost teenage appearance, while, on the other hand, dancer Yang Liping, 62, was almost universally condemned for her decision not to interrupt her dancing career to have a child .

For Chinese women, the age crisis begins when they turn thirty. For confirmation, look no further than the song “Thirty-Year-Old Woman”, recorded by the twenty-eight-year-old Zhao Lei in 2014. It was a hit in China, although Americans will probably be appalled at the lyrics:

She’s a thirty-year-old woman who is still unmarried;

There are a few wrinkles in her smiling face beside her eyes.

Thirty years old, she has been polished by the years.

Is the life of one person alone happier than that of two people together?

I like the gentleness of a thirty-year-old woman;

I know her loneliness in the middle of the night is unbearable.

You said that you have been busy at work for too long,

And it took thirty years for you to realize it.

You are too choosy as the choices pass you by.

She is a thirty-year-old woman who is still in shape:

Can such a woman retain the freshness of her younger years?

In this world sometimes appearance decides everything,

But no matter how good her looks may be for now,

They can't hold back age.

I hear the sound of lonely steps despite your smile:

Find someone to marry…

After the cold winter before the hot summer,

Who will give you the same love as in spring?

Something has got to be wrong with a society that can turn a misogynistic lyric like that into a hit, but Zhao Lei can be seen to reflect the majority of the Chinese public and the pressure they put on women over thirty to get married…if they still can.

On the other hand, the highly popular talent/variety show Sisters Riding the Wind and Waves recently featured sister acts by women over 30, while the hit TV series Just Thirty focuses on the kind of woman portrayed in Zhao Lei’s song. A discussion of older women’s societal roles is now taking place in China, although it is as yet unclear where it will lead.

Ageism is deeply ingrained in the Chinese mindset. Not only do men discriminate against women on the basis of age, but many women do it to themselves as well.  Behind the age discrimination lies, of course, the age anxiety of Chinese society in general, one symptom of which is the proliferation of cosmetic surgery in a country in which it wasn’t playing as large a role as in the United States. Plastic surgery has become part and parcel of Chinese millennials’ lives, and, to my eye, it seems as though everyone is trying to copy the monotonous pale and thin look of internet celebrities, as though the goal were for all Chinese women to look alike.

Getting back to Sandy and her difficulties with her American husband who won’t let her tend the family finances, I wonder whether she sees how much better off she is than a Chinese woman who does have, as Shakespeare puts it, the rule of her husband’s purse. Certainly, American women are faced with some of the anxieties that face Chinese women – anxiety is pretty much a factor everywhere these days – but, as Zhao Lei’s song shows, Chinese women have to put up with a kind of misogynistic ageism that American women don’t have to face (and certainly not as early as age thirty, although forty-year-old American women may well feel something like the pressures of Chinese ageism.)  Chinese husbands may turn over their paychecks to their wives, but Sandy’s husband will go to the market or take the kids out to the park so she can have some time to herself.

So the answer to Sandy’ question about American women retaining their primary status in the marriage even when not having single-handed control of the purse strings is that, no, American women don’t enjoy the same kind of status as Chinese women do in that sphere. Instead, they expect to be equal partners in their marriages, which means less influence, but also less responsibility – and, thus, less anxiety – than Chinese women experience.

The next time Sandy complains to me, I’m going to remind her how good she actually has it. She may perceive that not controlling the finances makes for a loss in status within the family hierarchy, but the reality is that women are far better off under the equal partners scheme that prevails in America today. Chinese women are still a very, very long way from any kind of a comparable discourse on the subject of gender equality.