urban anthropology

Will You Earn Your Wife Bonus This Year?

Kate Winslet playing a wife-to-be in <em>Titanic</em>.
Kate Winslet playing a wife-to-be in Titanic. Photo: Paramount Pictures

If a “Glam SAHM” — a glamorous stay-at-home-mom — proves proficient at being the wife of an Upper East Side bajillionaire, she might be rewarded with a nice, fat “wife bonus.”

What’s that fun, wealthy-sounding thing you ask? A wife bonus, explains Wednesday Martin (who studied this tribe for her forthcoming memoir Primates of Park Avenue), “might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a ‘good’ school — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks.”
 
This bonus might come in the form of a generous clothing allowance, pocket change, or really anything that grants the SAHM a “modicum of financial independence.”

We’re only in Q2, so if your toddler didn’t get into Goddard and your Hamptons place won’t be ready by Memorial Day weekend, you have until Q4 to make it up in “sexual performance metrics.”

Will You Earn Your Wife Bonus This Year?