Liza Mundy, a contributing editor at Politico Magazine, is program director at New America and author, most recently, of The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family.

That any American politician is truly self-made is a pretty hilarious notion. While some start out poor or disadvantaged, along the way every political aspirant benefits from mentors, donors, true believers, hangers-on, sycophants, consultants, friends, family, fund-raisers—and, in the case of male politicians, wives.

Maybe the wife holds down things on the home front, raising the kids and ensuring that the politician can present himself as a family man and therefore stable and upstanding. Maybe she brings in the earnings during his early, less lucrative years, then gives up her job when the demands of his career make hers unsustainable. Maybe she campaigns alongside him, listening to the same speech for hundreds of hours, channeling the love of the crowd as she gazes toward him. Maybe she has inherited wealth that provides him with material ease and lucrative connections. Maybe, at a certain point, he divorces her, thanks her for her service—or doesn’t thank her—and re-marries.


The point is, in the complex narrative of dependence and assistance and ambition that is the ordinary rise to political prominence, there are some life stories—the male life stories—that are so familiar, so common, we accept them as archetypal.

Given that winning political office requires help, it was probably a mistake for Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator who is now running for governor, to insist quite so ardently that she got where she did through her own pluck and determination. Davis, a Democrat who rose to national prominence during a dramatic filibuster of a restrictive abortion bill in the Texas legislature last year, is now campaigning for her state’s highest office on a life story that has her rising from humble beginnings through “hard work and optimism,” as she told NBC, then pursuing higher education, as her campaign website says, with “the help of academic scholarships, student loans, and state and federal grants.” Now that she is in a high-profile and hotly partisan race, it has come out that she also benefited from the moral and financial support of her second (now ex) husband, Jeff Davis. In the process, though, behavior we would expect and hardly notice in a man is being portrayed as freakish and problematic in a woman.

The kerfuffle began last weekend, with the publication of a profile in the Dallas Morning News that filled out gaps in her story, and continued all week as Davis was spun by her critics as a social climber, an ingrate, a neglectful mother. She has been chastised for starting out in her marriage as a dependent (golddigger!), and finishing it as a lawyer so financially successful that she was the one paying child support to her ex-husband (careerist harpy!). While this professional and relational arc is seen by some as deviant and unattractive, I’ll tell you what strikes me, reading her life story: how common it is. Countless women of Davis’s generation—she was born in 1963—grew up expecting one kind of marriage and then found themselves living another. Countless women started out in marriages where they were the junior partner, then at some point—to their own surprise as much as anybody’s—pulled ahead. In that way, Wendy Davis’s life is ordinary, but it’s something we haven’t come to terms with as a culture.

While some of the details have yet to fully emerge, most versions of her life seem to agree on this: Davis’s parents split when she was little. Life was tough; by age 14 she was working to help her mom, who has the wonderfully Dickensian name of Ginger Cornstubble, and her siblings. At 17 she moved in with her boyfriend, then married and had a daughter; that marriage soon ended and for a time she and her daughter continued to live in the trailer where the family had formerly resided together. According to the Morning News, Davis worked as a receptionist in a pediatrician’s office, attended community college and waitressed in her dad’s Fort Worth dinner theater—presumably learning, like many women, that the wage scale of the pink-collar professions was established back in the day when a woman’s income was intended to supplement that of a breadwinning husband, and has not been adjusted upward. During this time she met and took a liking to Jeff Davis, a lawyer who was 13 years older; they dated, married, had a daughter of their own.

With the support of Jeff Davis, who comes across in his comments as good-natured and generous, Wendy Davis was able to find her way into a life more materially comfortable and expansive. But it wasn’t a coddled, Real-Housewives-type existence of fluffy dogs and spa days. Instead, she went on to Texas Christian University, where she had financial aid and scholarships, did well, and from there to Harvard Law School. Jeff Davis reportedly paid for his wife’s last two years in college, cashed in his 401(k) to send her to law school, was the primary caregiver while she was away studying and took out a loan so she could finish. In a statement, Wendy Davis confirmed that he cashed in the retirement fund, but says “they” took out loans and that the children lived with her during her first year at Harvard, after which she commuted back and forth and her mom helped watch the girls. Though no phrase existed for what Wendy Davis was doing at the time, now we have one: She was leaning in.

While she has been portrayed as the materialistic beneficiary of a duped husband, let me offer another plausible interpretation: At some point Jeff Davis astutely realized he had married a woman who aimed to do more than answer phones and serve salads. He saw that it would be not just in her interest, but his, if he facilitated her advance. He helped her go to law school not only out of the goodness of his heart but because he was betting on her economic prospects, as women have long bet on the prospects of men. How many hundreds of thousands of American women worked to put a husband through law or med school? Did we criticize the men who benefited? Jeff Davis did for his spouse what wives have long done for husbands: He invested in her—their—future.

In this, he too was more typical than you think: As American women have become better educated—nearly 60 percent of college degrees now go to women—they have become so economically valuable that, according to the Pew Research Center, husbands now benefit, financially, from marriage, more than wives. Men aren’t stupid. They see this. That’s why, in a long-running study in which men are asked to name the most important traits in a life partner, “virginity” and “domestic skills” have plummeted in the importance men accord to them, and “financial prospects” has risen to near the top of the pack.

Just who was financially benefiting from whom? Davis graduated from Harvard in 1993, according to the profile, and when she came back, practiced law and also worked with her husband in the title company he founded. In 2003, she moved out—after Jeff Davis made the last loan payment on her tuition, he says, and they divorced in 2005. (She says she was a “vibrant part of contributing to our family finances.”) Their younger daughter lived with Jeff Davis (their old daughter was in college) and Wendy Davis provided her ex-husband with child support. Jeff Davis says that his wife—who referred to him as a “nurturing” father—recognized this as the right setup. He describes his former wife, even today, as the kind of bright, hard-charging, charismatic person whom people like to help.

In short, what seems to have happened is what happened in a number of marriages of her generation: Over time, their roles swapped and Wendy Davis became the spouse with higher-octane aspirations. For many couples, this is destabilizing; it may have been for Wendy and Jeff Davis. But it’s not unusual or weird. In most marriages now, both spouses work. In almost 40 percent of marriages where a wife is working, she is the higher earner. That percentage has risen steadily over the past decades. Younger women may now come into marriage expecting this; women of Davis’s generation did not. We don’t know whether Wendy Davis was the primary breadwinner, but she was clearly the spouse who wanted to go places. It seems to have worked for the Davises for a while, until it didn’t. She is now damned for being dependent, when she started out, and damned for going on to do well. “Tremendously ambitious” is what one anonymous colleague said about her; directed at a woman, it never feels like a compliment.

The other striking thing in her story, and our reaction to it, is how the phrase “single mother” is now touted as a sign of character. It’s hard to believe that not that long ago, single-mom Murphy Brown was held up as a harbinger of cultural degradation. Davis’s story shows that describing yourself as a single mom is now one way to telegraph your hard work and family credentials, as well as your commitment to government programs like Pell Grants and Head Start. But the strategy is risky, in part because our notion of a single mother is rigid: Critics have been picking holes in her story, saying that she didn’t live in that trailer long enough, or was too ambitious. We seem to have a pretty strict notion of who a single mother is and how she should live. Truth is, the lives of single mothers are multifaceted and hard to categorize. Forty percent of babies today are born to unmarried women, but many of these “single mothers” are cohabiting with the father. Many, if not married now, will eventually marry. Like Davis, they may be a single mother for a while, or move in and out of that status, but there is no one, pure description of a single mother.

This is not meant as an endorsement of Davis. I have no idea whether she would make a good governor, or whether she can withstand the scrutiny and a host of conservative critics who have dubbed her “Abortion Barbie.” Campaigning on one’s life story is something candidates do when they are newly arrived and rapidly elevated and lack a history of, say, substantial legislative achievement. But what does seem clear is that she is being subjected to a double standard. Behavior that would be unremarkable in a man—leaving your kids for prolonged periods in the capable hands of your spouse, as Barack Obama did, as did zillions of other fathers who campaigned for public office—is somehow suspect, even unnatural, in a mother. Following your fundamental nature; learning that there is a whole big world out there; adjusting your aspirations upward; getting some help from people who believe in you, people whose well-being is entangled with your own: this is the stuff of the typical American success story, the American dream. It’s a story we fall in love with, except, apparently, when the dreamer happens to be female.