Mundy '82 looks at the rise of female breadwinners

Published in the March 21, 2012, Issue

Liza Mundy ’82 (Photo: Sam Kittner)

New book: The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family, by Liza Mundy ’82 (Simon & Schuster)

The author: A staff writer at The Washington Post, Mundy also is the author of Michelle: A Biography — about First Lady Michelle Obama ’85 — and Everything Conceivable: How the Science of Assisted Reproduction is Changing Our World. With her latest book – which was the subject of a Time magazine cover story among other press buzz — she turns to the changing roles of men and women.

The book: In the coming decades, writes Mundy, “women, not men, will become the top earners in households.” In The Richer Sex, she examines how this “big flip” will change the workplace, dating, marriage, and home life. Drawing on interviews with men and women, she looks at how they already are dealing with women’s increased economic power and she makes predictions for the future. Men, she writes, “will rapidly adjust to the new state of affairs” and “we will see more and more men attracted to high-earning, dynamic, and successful women.” And women, she adds, “will change the way they look at men and what traits they find desirable in a mate.”

Opening lines: “The grown-up Hawkins siblings can’t tell you why it happened, or pinpoint when, exactly, they noticed the change in their family. Maybe somebody pointed it out at their annual Christmas gathering, or during one of the big reunions the Hawkins family holds every other summer. Or maybe there never was an aha moment. The knowledge just settled in until it became a fact they all knew, but hardly thought twice about. We have become a family of female earners.”

Review: “This thought-provoking exploration of the way women's expanding roles in the workplace is changing their lives at home is sure to create a stir,” wrote Publishers Weekly. “Mundy is adept at teasing out the various dilemmas and situations that will result if women do continue their path of usurpation in education and the workplace.” Booklist called The Richer Sex “a fascinating look at a trend that promises major social changes.”