The past two years have been heralded as the era of the divorce memoir, with books like Leslie Jamison’s Splinters, Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife, Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful and Sarah Manguso’s slyly autofictional Liars reframing divorce not as personal failure but feminist awakening.
These writers strip away the myth of marriage as a natural haven for ambitious women and expose its reality: unequal domestic labour, stifled careers, the exhausting choreography of tending to a partner’s needs while being told to be grateful for the “help” they occasionally offer.
Corinne Low’s Femonomics belongs firmly in this cultural moment, though it comes not as memoir but manifesto. It opens with her own divorce and the disorienting, delicious discovery of what she suddenly possessed in abundance: time. Time to think. Time to work. Time, crucially, to herself. What followed was not loneliness but clarity.
Low, an economist at Wharton, makes the personal political by asking what, in economic terms, heteronormative marriage is doing for women. Her answer is damning. Decades of research show that women partnered with men lose time, money and happiness after marriage. They do more housework and childcare regardless of earnings, their careers stall as their partners’ ascend, and their mental health declines.
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Women’s happiness, she says, has been falling relative to men’s for two decades, even as pundits fixate on a supposed “male loneliness crisis”. This cultural anxiety over falling marriage and birth rates has curdled into scolding of women: stop being so picky, stop wanting equality, stop ruining everything. Low flips the question. When women choose not to marry or have children, she writes, it is not because they are selfish or deluded but because they are rationally rejecting a bad deal.
This is what makes Femonomics so bracing. Low asks us to see women as economic agents maximising their personal utility like firms maximising profit. She smuggles in the dry tools of economics – personal utility functions, constrained optimisation – and uses them like crowbars to pry open the cultural narratives that trap women. Women are not failing to “lean in”, she argues; they are operating within systems rigged to siphon their time and energy.
Time is the crucial variable, and Low’s research shows how men’s refusal to be equal partners at home drains women’s time, happiness, careers and earning potential. “Time spent picking up the slack at home can’t be spent investing in our careers,” she observes with mordant understatement.
It is this forensic focus on time that makes the book revelatory. Where Lean In peddled the fantasy that women can simply work harder, Low insists they must guard their time as the scarce and precious resource it is. She recommends women gather data on their relationships, logging their and their partners’ time in 15-minute increments to expose the quiet theft of their days. The exercise is part shock therapy, part liberation strategy. As Low puts it, “We’re often told ‘time is money’, but no one ever says ‘time is utility’.” This deceptively simple reframing shifts the question from how women can earn more to how they can live more.
Low does not pretend she can single-handedly overhaul sexism, though the book’s closing section sketches policy fixes – normalising paternity leave, giving women predictable work schedules, investing in women’s careers. Instead, she writes as if speaking to students and colleagues who corner her after lectures, asking how to choose a partner, when to have children, whether to freeze their eggs, how to survive a divorce.
Her answers are rigorous but never patronising. She skewers the fairy tale of the high-earning husband as a shortcut to security, showing that what predicts happiness is an equal partner who does their share of domestic labour and actively invests in their partner’s career.
She advises women to interrogate potential partners with the seriousness of hiring a cofounder: if one of you gets a big promotion, who moves? When a child is sick, who stays home? It feels radical only because women are so rarely encouraged to demand that men plan their lives around women’s ambitions.
If Femonomics has a flaw, it is that it still orbits the concerns of middle-class, professional women. Though Low acknowledges structural inequalities such as sexual harassment, gender bias and discrimination, the book’s strategies assume some economic wiggle room. This makes sense – she is explicit that she is writing the anti-Lean In, not the anti-capitalism – but it narrows the book’s revolutionary promise.
Yet even with this limitation, Femonomics is exhilarating. Low threads anecdotes from her own life through dense research without condescending, and often with crackling wit. At one point, describing a graph, she refers to women’s mid-thirties as “peak hating-your-husband time,” a line so sharp it should come printed on mugs. The book is full of these sentences that slice through decades of cultural gaslighting to reveal the machinery underneath. But Low’s voice is never cynical. She is deeply invested in joy and still believes in love – just not in the self-sacrifice women are told is its price.
Femonomics feels like an intervention and a permission slip. It intervenes in a culture that blames women for retreating from marriage and motherhood while refusing to ask why these institutions so reliably erode women’s joy. And it gives permission to prioritise their own time, happiness and ambition, even if that means refusing the roles they were promised would complete them.
If the divorce memoirs of the past year exposed how marriage can grind women down, Low explains why – and, more crucially, how to choose differently. She is clear-eyed that today’s decisions become tomorrow’s constraints, but also that constraints can be managed. Time, she reminds us, can be converted into money or directly into happiness. It is the most precious capital women have, and too many are giving it away.
