New School for Social Research Sociology Professor and former Heilbroner Center Faculty Fellow Rachel Sherman recently wrote a piece for Quartz on why wealthy women are doomed to be miserable.
Sherma’s article looks at women “in their late 30s or 40s, with children at home. Nearly all were married to men working in finance who brought home $400,000 to $2 million or more in annual income. They had worked in, among other fields, finance, law, fashion, and medicine. And many felt deeply anxious, and guilty, about their socioeconomic status. The point is not that we should feel sorry for women with a personal chef and a house in the Hamptons. Rather, my goal is to illuminate who gets to be both wealthy and morally worthy in our society. In the modern-day US, our concept of meritocracy is inherently gendered. This means that women bear the brunt of negative judgments about wealth—and raises questions about what women “deserve,” and on what basis, that cut across social class.”
This article comes out of research for Professor Sherman’s recent book Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (Princeton, 2017), available for purchase here.