This past summer, the New York Times published an opinion piece entitled Why Men Want To Marry Melanias, And Raise Ivankas. Author Jill Filipovic discusses the emerging dichotomy in today’s America, where men look to marry a beauty with old fashioned values, yet strive to raise modern minded daughters driven to succeed professionally. Filipovic looks no further than our country’s Republican Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, his wife, Melania, and daughter, Ivanka, to illustrate her point.
The couple ascribes to very traditional gender roles in the home; Donald brings home the bacon and maintains a very hands off approach to child rearing, while Melania keeps house and takes on the primary role raising their son, Baron.
Mr. Trump has spoken disparagingly of working women, does little in the way of child care, and expects women to be more aesthetically appealing than intellectually substantive. “We know our roles,” his wife has said. “I didn’t want him to change the diapers or put Barron to bed.” Mr. Trump agrees: “I won’t do anything” to take care of the children, he told Howard Stern in 2005. “I’ll supply funds and she’ll take care of the kids.
Oppositely, Donald has praised his daughter openly for her entrepreneurial zeal and general prowess in the business sector, having even helped kickstart her career with roles within the Trump enterprise. She has also taken on a prominent role within his campaign, acting as the female voice of the Trump camp to media outlets and the general public alike.
Now, there were, in fact, 2 predecessors to the Trump throne before Melania: Ivana and Marla. Ivana is the mother to Trump’s 3 eldest children, while Marla, the mother to his daughter Tiffany, was the infamous mistress that broke up their 15 year union.
In each of these 3 relationships, his wives have been very public about being the ones designated to take on the primary parenting role. In a piece written by The Hill, Ivana tells reporters that it was she who raised the children, even taking on sole custody after their divorce. A similar claim was made by Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples, in an article posted in Us Weekly,
Her daddy loves her, of course, but … I was the parent. I was the parent that was there in the flesh [and] with her all the time.”
Filipovic’s title, and assertion, is eye catching, enticing, controversial even, but it’s not true. Men like Donald Trump may want to marry Melania’s, but it is not they who raise the Ivankas.
It is their wives.
Ivanka is smart, strong, and ambitious because her mother raised her to be so. Undoubtedly, Ivana wanted a better, brighter, future for her daughter, so she equipped her with the tools to succeed in an evolving, gender inclusive marketplace that did not exist when she herself was younger. In families, such as the Trumps, where the wife is the designated caregiver, with a “hands off” spouse by her side, she is the only one to be credited for the child’s success.
Parenting in 2016, though, is not a one sided phenomenon, as it was not too long ago. As Filipovic touches on in her piece,
Today, 40 percent of women are their family’s primary breadwinners, and nearly 80 percent of Americans agree that women should not return to traditional roles in society.
Family dynamics have shifted in this country to share the weight in an increasingly complex society. Sure, some men may wish for days of old, where it was their wife’s job to look pretty, make the house pretty, make the children turn out pretty, but the data suggests that the majority of men today aren’t so much concerned with marrying Melanias, but, instead, Ivankas: the smart, strong, ambitious, independent women of the world (Ivanka herself is a successful, married working mother of 3, afterall). The men and women of today are in the market for someone who will love them, support them, share in their successes, and hold their hand through the hard times. They want a spouse who will challenge them to be better, do better, someone to help them grow into an even more wonderful version of their former selves. They want someone who is well equipped to help them handle whatever may be lurking on the horizon, understanding full well that life, marriage, and parenthood are a lot easier to tackle with 4 hands and 2 brains.
