John Synal, a Westchester County school superintendent, was 56, burned out and bored when he told his wife he was going to retire. But Jean Synal, at 49, was just reaching the peak of her professional life.
“He was adamant he was going to retire,” said Jean, who raised three children before becoming a teacher and then a principal. “I wasn’t too thrilled, because I wondered what he would do with himself. But I never had any doubt that I was going to go on working, because I was in my prime.”
So she worked full-time for six years after her husband retired, and even after she joined him in retirement, she initially felt so restless that she did part-time consulting for several years.
The Synals, like other couples of their generation, took it for granted that women would stay home to care for babies and that wives would move to follow their husbands’ jobs.
But with the advent of the women’s movement, economic necessity and the opening of job opportunities, many wives joined the labor force. And with both husband and wife working, the decision about who should retire, and when, has become a complicated one.
If the issue of the 1980s was how two-career couples would handle children, the issue of the 1990s may be how two-career couples will handle retirement.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, half of all men are out of the labor force at age 62. Women’s retirement patterns are less clear, because it is only recently that large numbers of women have been in the work force.
So while the bureau’s surveys show that in 1992, half of all women were out of the work force at age 60, it is unclear how many had retired and how many had never worked.
A 1992 bureau study found that the number of working women nearing retirement had increased to 6.2 million in 1989 from 5 million in 1968. But, it said, “while the retirement behavior of women is becoming an increasingly important issue, little is known about their retirement decisions.”
One study of retirement decisions, based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women-a survey of women who were 30 to 44 when the study began in 1967, and 52 to 66 when last surveyed in 1989-found that among couples in which both husband and wife had retired, about a quarter of the women did so the same year as their husbands.
Another 44 percent retired before their husbands and 30 percent retired after. Data on the larger group of couples in which either husband or wife was still working in 1989 are not yet available, and the authors of the study caution that the couples who retired early may not be fully representative.
For many working couples, the stereotyped image of retirement-the husband who leaves his job, joins his wife at home, to travel, play golf or move to a retirement community-no longer reflects reality.
And even if women, on average, continue to retire at slightly younger ages than men, many will be working after their husbands’ retirements, since most men are several years older than their wives.
In many cases, husbands and wives find themselves troublingly out of sync as they approach retirement age. Husbands who have worked for 40 years may be eager to leave their job pressures behind, while wives who entered the work force late find those same pressures exhilarating.
Women who took jobs after rearing a family also may be reluctant to drop out before they accrue substantial pension and Social Security benefits.
“Many women still decide to retire when their husbands do, but I think the wives’ continuing to work is a growing trend,” said Lou Glasse, president of the Older Women’s League, an advocacy group based in Washington.
“That’s a positive thing, since the median income of women over 65 is less than $8,200, and most older women do not have the income they need to last through their lifetime,” Glasse continued. “For myself, I was quite anxious when my husband decided to retire, because I wondered what the pressures would be on me. But now it’s a very comfortable arrangement.”
For many couples, retirement prompts a renegotiation of marital roles, with husbands who find themselves home all day taking on more of the cooking and housework, while wives who made dinners for decades rejoice in getting out of the kitchen.
“Retirement is a big transition, and there hasn’t been much attention yet to how it works in dual-career couples,” said Rose Dobrof, 68, director of the Hunter Brookdale Institute on Aging and the working wife of a retired social worker. “It’s important, because most couples are not going to retire simultaneously.”
For the Synals and many others, retirement has become a staggered process. Synal retired as assistant superintendent at 56, as he wanted, but for several years he took a part-time job as a lobbyist for the Westchester and Putnam County schools.
And Jean Synal kept working, as she wanted. But while she became more and more interested in moving on to some districtwide job, perhaps following in her husband’s footsteps and becoming a superintendent, John Synal became increasingly interested in spending the winters in Florida.
The year that Jean turned 55-and, not coincidentally, became eligible for early retirement-John announced he was going to Florida for at least a month, and Jean decided to retire.
“I knew he meant it, and I didn’t want to be there having to shovel the snow on my own,” said Jean, now 65.
“If I were doing it again, I would love to have tried to go on from my position as principal to something districtwide. But I think a woman has to understand the man’s position. He worked and supported the family, that was his responsibility, and after doing that for years, he had the right to the retirement life he wanted.”
The Synals now spend seven months a year at a home on a golf course in Stuart, Fla., and summers at their house in the Adirondacks.
John said he never regretted his decision to retire: “I worked awfully hard, and in 20-plus years of school administration, we reinvented the wheel three times,” he said. “My ambitions grew less and less as I got older. I didn’t want to have to work that hard or think that hard. I don’t think my brain could do it anymore.”
But for Jean, the transition to retirement was difficult.
“I used to joke that I had retired from everything that I was good at to everything I was lousy at,” she said. “It was very traumatic for me.
“One day in Florida, I just got dressed and decided I was going to get a job, and I did. I did consulting to the schools for four years. But now I’ve taken up oil painting, and I’m happy with our life.”
Some women who have kept working after their husbands retire say they believe their husbands would rather they stayed home, but others say they think their husbands are happy to have time to themselves.
“If I were under his feet all the time, it wouldn’t work,” said Mary Dunn, a 65-year-old San Francisco woman who is a concierge at a retirement community. “At our senior community, the happily married older couples are the ones where each has built an independent life.”
Gilbert and Ernestine Starks have taken turns being the one at home. Gilbert retired from his job at the Veterans Administration in 1985, when he was 65. But he quickly became restless.
“Sometimes I would go uptown and plan to come downtown when I could get caught in rush hour,” he said. “It made me feel like I was working.”
So Gilbert got a three-day-a-week job at the American Legion. In 1988, at age 62, Ernestine retired from her job in the police department, but now she, too, is thinking about getting a part-time job.
She and her husband both say the retirement years have been some of the best of their marriage.
“We have been married 31 years, and we have not always been friends,” Gilbert said, “but now we have gotten to be friends. I learned to appreciate her more when I was in this house and she was working.”
It has been 17 years since Fred Zimmer told his wife that he wanted to retire and get out of the Brooklyn retailing business that his father had left him.
Since then, the Zimmers have slowly renegotiated their roles within the marriage, with Fred Zimmer, now 76, taking on more responsibility for cooking and housework, and Anna Zimmer, at 71, continuing her career in social work.
“He’s been home for a long time,” Anna Zimmer said, “but it’s constantly evolving. He began doing a little marketing very soon after he retired. But it was many years before I would ask him to take my shoes to the shoemaker. I leave for work while he’s still asleep and every day I leave a note telling him what’s for dinner and what he could do. At this point, it’s a nice shared thing.”
