Gender-Role Attitudes 99SIDEBAR 3.2:A 50–50 Relationship, the Case of Wendt vs. Wendt (Strober, 2002)
Lorna and Gary Wendt met in high school and married after college. While Gary completed
his M.B.A. at Harvard, Lorna Wendt worked as a music teacher. After they had their first child,
Lorna Wendt stopped working outside the home and Gary Wendt rose through the corporate
ranks to become chairman and CEO of General Electric Capital Services. After 30 years of
marriage, in 1995, Gary Wendt asked his wife for a divorce and offered her $10 million. While
Gary Wendt considered this sum of money more than enough for his wife to be “comfortable,”
Lorna Wendt said that the offer was not equitable. Because their estate was worth $100 million,
Lorna Wendt argued that she was entitled to $50 million or half the assets.
In cases where the estate is less than $10–$12 million, most courts divide the assets in
half upon divorce. However, when the estate exceeds that figure, women often do not receive
half the assets. This is when the court tries to figure out how much each party contributed to
the marriage. In cases where the husband worked and the wife was a homemaker, it becomes
very difficult to identify the value of the unpaid homemaker role. Lorna Wendt started out with
the responsibilities of managing the household and taking care of children, but as her husband
moved up the career ladder, she took on the added responsibilities of entertaining clients and
planning social events. In the end, the court awarded Lorna Wendt $20 million and an additional
$250,000 per year in alimony for life.
In 2001, Lorna Wendt was interviewed on National Public Radio Morning Edition (2001).
When asked why she contested her husband’s initial offer of $10 million, Lorna Wendt said:
“My thinking was that I was an equal partner. When I entered this marriage, at that time, we
were equal. We were partners in everything we did, every plan we made, even down to the
finances. We worked very hard together to get where we were in a position that afforded us this
money, and he could not devalue what I had brought to our relationship by putting a number
such as that.”
Since the divorce and settlement, Lorna Wendt has founded the Institute for Equality of
Marriage to provide people with information about managing finances before, during, and after
marriage. Lorna Wendt strongly advocates for prenuptial agreements, advising both partners to
ask each other before marriage if they are equal partners. She says, “Can you imagine if Gary had
said to me, you know, 35 years, ago ‘No, I think you’re about 10 percent.’”Summary
In this chapter, I moved beyond conceptions
of gender roles to the study of attitudes toward
gender roles and to the category of gender.
Attitudes consist of three components:
affective, cognitive, and behavioral. With
respect to gender, the affective component
is sexism, the cognitive component is
gender-role stereotyping, and the behavioral
component is sex discrimination. I reviewedinstruments that measure traditional and
modern sexism as well as distinguished
between benevolent sexism (positive view of
gender category) and hostile sexism (negative
view of gender category). Despite the
difference in valence, benevolent and hostile
sexism are positively correlated, both rooted
in the belief that women are less competent
than men. I also discussed unfavorableM03_HELG0185_04_SE_C03.indd 99 6/21/11 12:22 PM