In late winter 2018, in one of the more active mothers’ groups I had joined on Facebook, a spirited discussion about the contrasting social orientations of men and women was under way in the city of Chicago. It did not begin with, but seemed best surmised by, a woman named Arianne, who wrote: “I am 7 mos pregnant and I threw up on the way home from my son’s swim lessons b/c my acid reflux was so bad. We literally had to pull off the road and I threw up in a parking lot. Then my husband had the audacity to stop at Walgreens to get nasal spray while I sat in the car waiting to go home. Men don’t get it. They are often times oblivious to others’ needs and only think of themselves.”
The conversation went on to elucidate the different ways that women versus men considered the concerns of others. The women suggested strategies to get men to think about their needs (for example, with Post-it notes left on bathroom mirrors reminding them to “hug your wife” or “paint the bathroom”) and to help them to feel women’s pain (for example, by “going on strike” to make them “realize everything you do”). They also offered advice as to how a woman might more easily adjust to the unpleasant realities of heterosexual relationships—not only to the fact that men fail to imagine that their vomiting, pregnant wives might prefer to go straight home and not to Walgreens, but also to their lack of recognition of all the consideration their wives were routinely providing. “You probably don’t mind doing all the things you’re doing,” wrote a woman named Kim in response to one emergency medical technician’s announcement that, among other indignities, her husband had never gone grocery shopping in the course of their eleven-year marriage. “You just want to feel appreciated for doing those things. A simple thank-you goes a long way.”
I, for one, enjoyed feeling appreciated, but I also wanted opportunities to be similarly thankful to my spouse. It’s not that I never had them. George, for three years running and at great cost to his welfare, was the one to get up with Tess, never a good sleeper, in the middle of every night. After Liv was born, he became a champion swaddler, an origami-like aptitude that I never acquired, and which he revisited with Tess. Still, his tendency to overlook emergent needs—the nonroutine ones that were the patchwork of family life—never ceased to make my jaw drop to the floor. There was something very basic that I could not wrap my head around with my generally kind and hardworking husband: the capacity (and one he seemed to share with so many of his gender) to forgo keeping others in his mind.
One summer evening in 2018, we arrived home from a full day at the beach around the girls’ bedtime. They hadn’t eaten dinner, and in the car, we’d settled on chicken nuggets from our freezer. I started our sand-encrusted daughters bathing as soon as we got home, after watching George enter our kitchen. I assumed he was putting the nuggets in the toaster oven. When I emerged from showering and drying off my younger child maybe five or ten minutes later, he was only standing at the counter and drinking a cold beer.
I got out the nuggets, opened the box, put the pieces on the toaster oven tray. He watched me do this, failing to offer so much as an “oops.” It had not occurred to him that he might have cooked the nuggets, that I might have expected that, or that our children were tired and hungry and all but ready for bed. It was not laziness. It was something I had no name for and nothing I could hope to understand.
If gender essentialism makes a case for the innate, distinctive qualities of woman- and manhood, gender existentialism offers an alternative. Gender existentialists see gender as a social construct radically impacting the way we think, act, and see ourselves, linked to sex not by biology but by culture.1 More women than men are gender existentialists. In a recent Pew Research poll, of the 64 percent of Americans who believe that women and men have different approaches to parenting, 61 percent of women versus 41 percent of men believe these differences are socially (as opposed to biologically) determined.2
Deanna, forty-two, the teacher and mother of two in San Diego, said, “It’s so deep on so many levels. Culturally, the way we portray women; historically, the way we’ve treated women around the world for thousands of years. Women are seen as less important. I wasn’t fully aware of that until the 2016 election. It became so clear to me then. I see it in jokes my friends make, in how I talk about myself. Women are disrespected more. Women matter less.”
Deanna described how mattering less played out in her own life. She gave up the best job she’d ever had to relocate for her husband’s career. She did not request that he curtail his weekly business travel even when she was pregnant with their second child, working full-time as a teacher, struggling with anxiety, and taking care of a toddler: “I felt all of it was my responsibility.” Deanna’s own parents had divorced when she was two, and she’d been raised by an often single mother focused on finding a man. “I remember her bad broken relationships, and her talking to me about what it meant to be a woman.” Here is what it meant to be a woman: Keeping a husband was of utmost importance, and inasmuch it was a wife’s job to always maintain his absolute comfort.
Gender existentialism holds that trying to fit into one or another human category gets in the way of living authentically. It’s hard to imagine a person who has not felt encumbered by the mandates of group membership. Our preferences take a backseat to the rules of the gender system. I can’t be the only grown woman who remembers sneaking time with Matchbox cars when none of my classmates were looking. Observational studies of toy choice among children demonstrate that three- and four-year-old boys spend 21 percent of their time playing with “girl toys” when they’re alone; that drops to 10 percent when a peer is as much as playing nearby. From the get-go, girls are less tightly policed for gender violations, and they enjoy greater relative freedom with toys. Girls pick “boy toys” 34 percent of the time when playing alone and 24 percent of the time when another kid enters the picture.3 Hearts and minds allow for wider-ranging possibility than social pressures permit.
Gender socialization starts at birth. Parents have different expectations of boys and girls from infancy, and their perceptions of their children form alongside those expectations. Girl and boy babies reliably differ in only these ways: On average, male infants have a harder time self-regulating, and on average, they take longer to move from a unilateral to a mutually engaged state.
Even in the absence of any other objectively measured differences, parents of daughters are more likely than parents of sons to rate their children as softer, littler, finer-featured, and less attentive. When mothers and fathers are asked to watch a video of a baby they’ve never met, they describe the baby differently when they are told it is a boy than when they are told it is a girl. Mothers of baby girls consistently underestimate their daughters’ locomotor abilities, while mothers of boys overestimate theirs.4 Stereotyped expectations influence the acquisition of gendered behaviors, turning expectations into prophecies.
Historical evidence suggests that as men and women have moved into more similar public roles, we’ve begun to highlight sex from birth (or before) more dramatically. In the era of separate spheres, toys and clothing were gender-neutral. Baby boys wore nightgowns.5 Today’s gender-reveal announcements are not only an outgrowth of social media but also an effort to reassert the primacy of sex in a world where male and female roles are increasingly undifferentiated.
We classify people into two kinds. Each kind is expected to engage in specific types of thought, feeling, and behavior. These expectations are reinforced in endless small ways over the course of countless interactions across a wide range of settings. The expectations are universal and carry a moralistic bent, communicating directives, important norms of good behavior. Girls learn to behave in feminine ways that signal accommodation, and boys masculine ones that signal assertiveness.
Without much awareness, adults direct young children toward the “right” kind of behavior, and not even just in obvious ways like keeping dolls from boys. Take student-teacher interaction in preschool classrooms: In studies, thirteen-month-old boys and girls act the same, but adults don’t respond to them in kind. Girls get more attention from teachers for gesturing and babbling, boys for whining and screaming. At thirteen months, kids are equally likely to grab, push, and kick. But teachers intervene to modulate girls’ aggressive behavior only 20 percent of the time. In contrast, boys’ aggression ends in teacher intervention 66 percent of the time. In learning theory terms, boys’ aggression is reinforced more than three times as often as girls’. By the age of twenty-three months, the girls have become less aggressive and the boys more so. Both groups have learned to optimize the potential for adult attention by behaving in the ways that most reliably get them noticed.6
Clearly, socialization contributes to gender differences in behavior. It has been shown, for one, that boys raised in egalitarian homes show the same amount of interest in babies as girls, while boys raised in traditional homes show less.7 It will never be possible to parse the relative inputs of biology and culture, and at any rate, the two interact. In her 1999 book Why So Slow?, Hunter College psychologist Virginia Valian explains, “Hormonal effects . . . are context dependent. Even in rats, the effects of sex hormones differ, depending on the sort of handling the animals receive, the type and amount of stimulation provided by their environment, and the kind of maternal care they receive. . . . [H]ormonal and environmental effects act together—they coact—to jointly influence people’s and animals’ traits and behaviors.”8
Maybe the differences that eventually manifest between boys and girls are partly the outgrowth of genes and hormones. Cross-culturally, anthropologists have identified seven behaviors that diverge consistently between boys and girls by the age of three no matter where they are raised. These include: Girls work more; boys play more; boys spend more time at greater distances from their mothers than girls; girls spend more time in infant contact and care than boys; boys engage in more rough-and-tumble play; girls play-groom more; and boys play-fight more.
While it’s easy to assume that cross-cultural behaviors result from hardwiring, first consider that what almost all cultures worldwide share is that they are patriarchal ones—85 percent of them and rising, per a mid-twentieth-century survey9. Second, despite the fact that there are almost no behavioral differences between girl and boy babies, parental behaviors toward infant daughters versus infant sons vary in consistent and measurable ways. There’s a bunch of data on this, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll just say that, for one, parents of boys provide more playful physical stimulation than parents of girls. For another, mothers of girls engage in longer periods of caretaking touch than mothers of boys.10
Propensities for rough-and-tumble or grooming play could be outgrowths of infants’ earliest experiences. Nostalgia starts young. If warm emotional memory is associated with the physical experience of being either jostled or groomed, we are likely to re-create these experiences for ourselves as we grow. In line with this idea, gender scholars now speak of “the gender-enacted body” rather than one whose gender expression is simply formed by biology or society. In this model, gendered characteristics are not inborn traits or socialized givens but dynamic processes that depend on individual life history.
Social structural theory suggests that a culture’s division of labor by gender drives all gendered differences in behavior—and then certainly the actions of men and women in family life. Historically, men’s greater size and strength allowed them to pursue activities like warfare that gave them more status and power than women. Once in those roles, men became more dominant, and women’s behavior accommodated.11
Despite the contemporary irrelevance of sheer physical strength to achievement and status, this dynamic hasn’t shifted much. In her 1994 book The Lenses of Gender, the late psychologist and gender theorist Sandra Bem explored why the declining focus on both childbearing and warfare in contemporary societies did not, over the long haul, lead to less stereotyped behavior in women and men. She suggested three tenets for the maintenance of gender roles: androcentrism, gender polarization, and biological essentialism.12 Androcentrism is the belief in male supremacy and the attendant higher status attached to all things masculine. Gender polarization is the organization of social life around two distinct and unequal halves of a population. Biological essentialism is the idea that gender differences are directly tied to chromosomal ones. In the midst of these, we are saddled with deeply ingrained cultural notions about what men and women are best at and how they should conduct themselves.
Men should do for and think of themselves (behaving “agentically”), while women should do for and think of others (behaving “communally”). While this has harmed men in meaningful ways—what has been called the loneliness epidemic impacts them disproportionately—it remains the precursor to status and success. As Australian philosopher Neil Levy has noted, “It is not an accident that there is no Nobel Prize for making people feel included.”13
Katrina, thirty-five, a social worker and mother of two in Chicago, describes being a (communal) woman married to a(n) (agentic) man: “I feel overwhelmed in general. I feel frustrated often. I got mad this morning when my husband strolled downstairs at 7:05 and I’d already spent half an hour managing the chaos of the morning alone. It makes me angry. Why can’t he get up earlier and get downstairs and be available? Why does he sleep in on Saturday until eight? Why is that something that can happen?”
“Why is it?” I ask her.
“Because he doesn’t get out of bed! I could sleep in, too, but then nobody’s needs would get met, and the dog wouldn’t get out.”
I inquire further: “Do you ever ask that he get up?”
“If I did, it still probably wouldn’t happen. Or I wouldn’t be able to sleep in, and I’d get up. Or it turns into a nagging situation the morning of. ‘Hey, get up! Get up! Get up!’ I’m not his mom. So it’s a hard situation. One morning I went to the gym early. I said, You need to get up at X time and get them ready and fed before eight so we can get to gymnastics. I came home at nine. They had not eaten breakfast yet. The dog was still in her crate.”
Naturalists assume that the structure of parenting is biologically self-evident, that what is self-evident is instinctive, and that what is instinctive is inevitable. In contrast, a bioevolutionary perspective holds that women are primary parents now mostly because they always have been. The sexual division of labor was the starting point in the earliest human societies and has been perpetuated since. Feminist psychoanalysis expands on this idea. Noting that, “All children have the basic experience of being raised primarily by women,” sociologist and psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow outlines a process she calls “the reproduction of mothering,” a social and psychological—but not biological or intentional—process in which female mothering reproduces itself cyclically.
In her book The Reproduction of Mothering, Chodorow writes, “Women, as mothers, produce daughters with mothering capacities and the desire to mother. These capacities and needs are built into and grow out of the mother-daughter relationship itself. By contrast, women as mothers (and men as not-mothers) produce sons whose nurturant capacities and needs have been systematically curtailed and repressed.”14 In the earliest months and years of personality development, Chodorow theorizes, a girl feels connected to her mother by virtue of her sex, while a boy feels disconnected by virtue of his.
Accordingly, a boy’s development involves the repression of the need for relationships and sense of connection and then also, eventually, “the reproduction of male dominance.” Or, as the actor and author Michael Ian Black described it in a 2018 New York Times op-ed about young men and violence: “Too many boys are trapped in the same suffocating, outdated model of masculinity, where manhood is measured in strength, where there is no way to be vulnerable without being emasculated, where manliness is about having power over others.”15
The emphasis on masculine power among boys starts young. By nineteen months old, boys respond positively to other boys only when they’re engaged in masculine-type activity. In contrast, girls react positively to other girls no matter their style of play. In Why So Slow?, Valian describes play studies of young children: “Masculine activities gradually acquire a superior status, initially through fathers’ reactions to boys’ choices of feminine activities and later through the disapproval of male peers. . . . [B]oys were especially likely to punish their male peers for feminine choices by ridiculing them or interfering with their play physically or verbally. Boys thus learn to devalue feminine activities and to shun them in order to avoid compromising their higher status. Boys cannot risk the stigma of being girl-like.”16
Then neither can some grown men. As Shannon, the Oklahoma City mother, explained to me about her husband’s refusal to fold laundry: “You don’t want your buddy to see you doing this stuff. They’ll think you’ve given your pride to the woman.” Though frustrated by what it means for her, Shannon also feels some sympathy toward her husband’s social vulnerability. She swallows her pride in order to protect his, the ubiquitous feminine cost of masculine fragility.
Observational studies of two-year-olds in preschool classrooms demonstrate that while girls change their play behavior in response to the wishes of classmates of both sexes, boys do not allow themselves to be influenced by girls. Kids’ social behavior becomes more sophisticated around age three, when they begin to try to control their friends’ activity with increasing frequency. As attempts at influence increase with age, girls and boys begin to engage in different ways: girls with more polite suggestions and boys with more direct demands. Over time, boys become less and less responsive to gently delivered requests. And while boys continue to wield influence over all children, girls can generally influence only other girls.17
Without intention or explicit direction, we do become two different sorts of people. From the age of three, half of us begin to ask politely and consider the preferences and feelings of others, while the other half assert demands and ignore friends’ wishes, especially if those friends are members of the second sex.18
If you dated men while in your twenties, you know how this plays out in young adulthood. And if you’ve read the work of psychologist and couples researcher John Gottman, you also know how this dynamic shows up in a marriage. In watching hour upon hour of video of heterosexual couples engaged in conflict, Gottman found that husbands frequently “stonewall”—remove themselves mentally and emotionally from the conversation—when their wives raise issues. As it’s been described, “Stonewalling behavior makes it difficult for wives to influence husbands or even have a sense that their unease is being heard. Wives, on the other hand, tend to engage in their husbands’ concerns.”19
In my own interviews with mothers about their inability to effect change at home, I heard some version of Queens mother Monique’s sentiment over and over and over again: “How much convincing of the other person can you do?” It is no wonder that some research finds that among all gendered configurations of couples, lesbians have been found to co-parent most harmoniously.20
When I ask New Yorker April, parenting with another woman, what she makes of this finding, she attributes it to the fact that same-sex couples tend to have more role flexibility in general. “At this point, we’ve both spent time slowing down at work and then being the primary parent. When you’ve done that, you really know what it takes and make sure to step up in other ways. I have a straight female friend whose husband has never been the primary, and it’s clear that he doesn’t get it.” But it is female same-sex couples—and not male—whose relative ease with co-parenting is supported by the literature.
David, one of the gay fathers I interviewed, acknowledged that the issues he faces with his husband “are very similar to many heterosexual homes, and the main one has to do with mutual recognition.” When two men raise children together, they may each be more likely to face the same struggles that women have when parenting with men, of the my-husband-stopped-at-Walgreens variety.
In her 2011 book Joining the Resistance, the psychologist and psychoanalyst Carol Gilligan looks at gender in middle childhood. Years after the processes described by Chodorow have been set, Gilligan sees boys’ and girls’ reproductions of masculinity and femininity in action. Boys cast off their softer parts, and girls, their more assertive ones. Those aspects of their personalities go underground. Psychologists call it dissociation, the failure to know what we know and feel what we feel. Dissociation results from traumatic experience, including intense feelings of shame. Gilligan believes it’s no coincidence that boys are prone to depression around age eight, when expressions of tenderness and vulnerability become socially unacceptable. Girls, on that longer gender leash, are most likely to become depressed as they enter adolescence, the point at which they’re expected to become young ladies, “silent in the name of feminine goodness.” Gilligan writes, “[I]t is not surprising . . . that at times in development when children are initiated into the codes and scripts of patriarchal manhood and womanhood . . . it is not surprising that these times . . . are marked by psychological distress.”21
While gender differences are reinforced through social processes from the cradle to the grave, the arrival of a baby seems to intensify the usual behavioral prescriptions and expectations for women and for men. Motherhood has been called the most gender-enforcing experience in a woman’s life.22 The home itself has been called a gender factory.23 The transition to parenting, despite its magnificence, is a time marked by emotional distress. According to the World Health Organization, about 13 percent of women who give birth each year have symptoms of postpartum depression,24 and recent data suggests that it is equally prevalent in men.25 Many believe these occurrences are underreported. Is the unconscious imperative to contort ourselves into these rigid male and female postures a contributing factor?
We work to maintain our rightful relative positions and feel discomfited when we don’t. A recently divorced woman whom I know admitted with some surprise that she felt like she was “betraying” her sex now that her ex-husband has half custody—and, for the first time ever, is doing half the work. Vidya, forty-one, is a mother in Los Angeles. She reports doing less cooking and cleaning than her husband before noting, “I feel like I have to keep telling you I’m not a terrible cook!” She thinks about her impulse and concludes, “Not doing the housework casts doubt on my competence as a woman.” Vidya didn’t feel this way before she was married, though her housekeeping was just as minimal. It’s only in relation to a man who does more than she does that something feels notably off.
Psychologist Eleanor Maccoby and others believe that it is not exactly socialization on its own that accounts for gendered behavior but, rather, the “social relational context.” Women and men never behave so much like women and men than when they find themselves in each other’s company. Maccoby says, “Sex-linked behavior turns out to be a pervasive function of the social context in which it occurs. . . . The gendered aspect of an individual’s behavior is brought into play by the gender of others.”26
Gilligan concurs, writing, “[T]he good woman cared for others: she listened to their voices and responded to their needs and concerns.”27 What she also observes is that men, up to and including good ones, do not get this memo. Maybe you’ve noticed in living with one. At first it feels disorienting, watching another human being move through the world in this foreign way, not compelled to notice others, to anticipate their needs.
My husband, sprawled across our bed in the evening, reading on his phone, does not move to make space for me when I enter the room. It’s such a little thing, but acculturated to femininity, I am all but physically unable to lie still under the same circumstances. I’ve tried, and it feels wrong. In New York City, it’s common to see men sitting with legs wide open on a crowded subway, taking up more than their fair share of seat. The practice has come to be called manspreading, and it’s gained a notorious reputation. Women can hardly consider making themselves so comfortable at another rider’s expense. We fume when we see it, our outrage at least partially displaced on to that sprawling, hapless man. He becomes every guy we’ve ever known, every male we’re more reluctant to condemn.
Who wants to feel that outrage toward a person whom they love? Before kids, George and I had a biannual argument about cooking, which was my responsibility alone. “I’m perfectly happy to eat takeout,” he’d say with great sincerity, but no regard for mutuality, whenever I protested this arrangement. Every time the discussion rose to the level of argument, he’d put together exactly one very nice meal and then never cook again until our next fight. Eventually, I gave up. How much convincing of the other person can you do? I like to cook anyway, I told myself; it’s easier for me because I’ve been doing it longer; at least he cleans up.
It became harder to quell my frustration with rationalization once there were two more people in our home, both hungry for supper each night. I, too, wanted the occasional dinner prepared for me—though what I also half longed for was George’s comfort with his right to enjoy but never provide that meal. Writing in Glamour in 2018 about the last years of her marriage, mother of two Lyz Lenz explained: “I stopped cooking because I wanted to feel as unencumbered as [a] man walking through the door of his home with the expectation that something had been done for him.” I listened to the women I interviewed explain the fact that they did more of all varieties of caretaking even before they had children with statements like: “I was home more,” “I cared more about how the house looked,” “We were raised differently.” They wrote off the most prominent factor of the last, which was not that they had parents with different standards and expectations but, rather, that they were raised to be women, and their husbands were raised to be men.
We immediately understand that motherhood and fatherhood are hardly one and the same. Mothering, the poet Adrienne Rich has observed, is ongoing; fathering is a discrete act. Men are not mothers because they are not women, and are not expected to take note of other people in the same way, denying themselves, as Zimbabwean gender equality activist Jonah Gokova has said, “the experience of being fully human.”28 It is why none of the women I interviewed could imagine stonewalling their husbands in the way that they were often stonewalled.
“In the gendered universe of patriarchy,” Gilligan writes, “care is a feminine ethic, not a universal one. Caring is what good women do, and the people who care are doing women’s work.”29 If men have been socialized practically from birth to maintain their higher position by differentiating themselves from women, how better to do that in a dual-breadwinning adulthood than by sleeping late and failing to cook and leaving the dog in her crate? To resist these gendered assignments to provide or withhold care is a task that neither mothers nor fathers are currently pulling off as well as they might.
Imagine my excitement when, early in my research, I came across the 2010 book Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting the Rules for a New Generation of Parents by Mark and Amy Vachon. Here was the game plan I needed to move forward. Whatever George and I had been doing that had left me overly taxed, and him defensive in the wake of my anger, we could rectify it, and this was how.
Imagine my broken heart when the book’s first and strongest suggestion was that aspiring equal sharers work only part-time. The Vachons write: “Equally shared [parenting] means purposefully choosing to optimize your life rather than maximize your paycheck.”30 In theory, that was appealing. The Vachons recommend self-employment (check). But, like most couples raising two kids, George and I were in no position to work fewer hours. We’d scaled back a little over the years, but working less meant earning less, and none of our big expenses were discretionary. Canceling cable: That was the only cut we could ever foresee making to our budget, and it barely made a dent.
Inability to work part-time isn’t a deal breaker for ESP (equally shared parenting’s acronym), but the Vachons concede that when couples can’t swing that, hiring out help becomes a necessity. Mothers with the luxury of affording that get it instinctively. The data shows that women in two-career couples who outearn their male partners benefit not because they are able to negotiate a more equitable division of labor with their spouses but, rather, because they use their resources to hire that labor out.31 Per the research, as women’s income goes up, so does household spending on housekeeping services and eating out. The same cannot be said of the relationship between men’s earnings and such spending. In fact, every additional dollar earned by a wife will matter more to her housework time than every additional dollar earned by her husband.32
I had long since hired a woman to clean our apartment twice a month. I was all but in love with her. The points of consternation in our marriage-with-children, though, weren’t about anything we could realistically pay to eliminate. There is a limit to what money can buy. I didn’t want a personal assistant keeping track of all the emails from the school, even if I could have afforded such a thing. I wanted a husband who kept track of the emails with me (or, at the very least, didn’t route them straight to his spam folder without as much as running that plan by me first)—one who spared me the trouble of needing to issue a dozen chirping reminders for every singular task he committed to take on.
The further I read into Equally Shared Parenting, the more my hopes were dashed. I’d had some idea, apparently, that such hard change might be accomplished casually, if only with proper instruction. This was, of course, naive. As the Vachons describe it, equally shared parenting is its own part-time job. Its four very sensible domains of equality—childrearing, breadwinning, housework, and self—require “willingness,” “courage,” “surmounting barriers,” and prioritizing “living below one’s means.”33
In a nutshell, they suggest scaling back two careers rather than one in order to minimize the need for outside child care, and to ensure that neither party feels alone with the pressures of family life. The challenge for men, they write, is to embrace more work at home and with the kids, while the corresponding one for their wives is to share the financial burdens while ceding their traditional control of the home. There is no call to divide tasks down the middle with a hatchet but, rather, to “care in detail about how the home is run and own the responsibility for making it a happy place to be.34 Both of you are committed to learning how best to care for your children and put that plan into action. You are equally invested in your careers and can be assured that the other has no intentions of bowing out of paid work just to escape the frustration or politics. We think this leads to an authentic life because no one is hiding behind fake excuses to avoid the real work of caring for your family, yourself, and each other.” I was just as committed to my professional life and breadwinning role as my husband was to his. Ditto the women I knew. We simply hadn’t secured the corresponding concern for our children and homes from the men.
Here is one example of what ESP takes. The Vachons introduce a couple named Marci and David. Neither of them “wanted a life that centered on the standard American dream—the possessions and social status that are emblematic of success and unconsciously direct so many of our decisions. As David described their core desire, ‘We mostly just wanted to be equals.’”35 (Italics mine.) So earnest, so sweet, but it struck a strident chord. Why should the establishment of what should be a given require such primacy of purpose? But it does seem to. Without that primacy, one risks a life stacked against the woman’s self-interest. “Relationships don’t work out,” a colleague of mine likes to say, “relationships are a workout.” That is all well and good. Marriage is hard. But please take a moment to let it sink in that it requires intense, concerted effort and a very special breadwinning arrangement for a woman and a man to live together as if they have the same value. We mostly just wanted to be equals.
Sitting close on the couch in their Massachusetts living room, Mark and Amy Vachon are warm and engaging, a couple I’d want to be friends with. They have an easy rapport and take turns answering my questions. They look well rested, like people who work part-time and no longer have young children. Their two kids have grown into teenagers, and Amy says their parenting workload has lightened in some ways. “We traded the physical work for the mental work. We’re in that stage where we’re the taxi drivers, trying to figure out ways to have meaningful conversations in the car. And we also have more time to ourselves.”
Mark and Amy agreed on their first date to the kind of family life each wanted to build. Amy lost her father when she was eight, and she’d watched her mom do everything as a single parent. It looked lonely, and it made her carefully consider what she wanted in life from a young age. She says, “I thought, If I’m going to marry someone, I want to walk through life with that person, I want us to walk in each other’s shoes. And if I’m home taking care of kids or I’m the main parent, it’s a separation. For me, it’s more that we can do these things together, get inside each other’s heads. That is a good relationship. Mark said, ‘Wow, that fits a lot with what I’d like. I’m afraid to get married to somebody and have them expect me to be their provider. I don’t want a status male prescriptive job. I want a balanced life.’ His big goal was to have fun. Neither of us wanted what we saw around us. So we were very conscious about it, we talked about it. We do a lot of talking. That’s very important for couples, or else they find themselves by default falling into all this cultural stuff.
“It starts right away. You get into a social scene, people defer to the woman when it comes to kid stuff and baby stuff, and oh, isn’t the dad wonderful, he’s a hero if he does anything. That’s seductive. Who wouldn’t want to be called a hero? Dads start to think, ‘Oh, I do a little bit and I’m awesome,’ as opposed to ‘Stop calling me a hero, I’m doing my job as a parent.’ We have a president who brags about not having to change a diaper. So I don’t think we’ve made progress. Our book could be written today and not say hardly anything different.”
Says Mark, “We came up with two foundations. Equality, which is what Amy brought, and balance, which is what I brought. In the beginning, I wasn’t looking for an equal partner. I just didn’t want to lose the fun life I’d been cultivating as a single man. I was already working reduced hours before we were married. My friends were like, ‘What are you doing? Climb to the corner office!’ I was like, ‘No, I like having Fridays off!’ That’s what I brought to the relationship. Let’s find a way to enjoy our life.”
Their commitment to balance and equality ultimately worked so well—and diverged so much from what they saw around them—that they wanted to share their ideas with the world. Recalls Mark, “It got me going, early on, when I’d hear people say, ‘We’re so lucky, Mom can stay home and Dad can work.’ And I’m thinking, That’s not luck.” The Vachons interviewed fifty equally sharing couples in the process of their writing. Remembers Amy, “They were people who were just extraordinarily passionate about this and went to great lengths to make sure they could live this way.”
Mark: “Engaging in it is challenging. That’s what keeps people from doing it. It creates tension. It’s easy to live the standard expected roles. It’s difficult to work to try something different. We learn from early on. Girls are taught, as they’re being raised, here’s a doll, take care of it. Boys don’t get the same kind of encouragement. They’re allowed to be more physical, more active, grow up into strong adult men, instead of getting recognized for their nurturing capabilities.”
Amy: “As our son gets older, I see it, the culture he’s raised in has ideas about masculinity, and if he strays from those, he risks ridicule or being brought down a status peg. And he’s seen a different model in action at home, but it’s hard even for him.”
Whatever they’ve accomplished in their own family, Mark and Amy know that more traditional gender roles permeate outside of it, and that these are indelibly part of their son’s nurture as well. I was testament to this. My own father was a primary parent, at least from the time I was eight, when my mother went back to school. He never missed a band concert. He cooked most dinners for years. But I lived in a larger world, and I knew that my house wasn’t normal. I loved my dad’s attention, but I also wanted to be like the other kids on my block, with nominally present fathers and moms who got home early, took summers off, kept winter cupboards stocked with marshmallow Swiss Miss. From my perspective as a child, that breakdown looked really right.
It might have looked less right as I got older, but my eye was not on that prize. For most of my twenties, I was hardly thinking about marriage, let alone the raising of kids. I might have been well served to be. I came across Elizabeth, a thirty-two-year-old new mother in Northern California, after she responded on Twitter to a Medium article by journalist Jessica Valenti headlined “Kids Don’t Damage Women’s Careers—Men Do.” Elizabeth tweeted: “If you have an equal partnership, having kids is awesome. If you don’t you’re pretty much screwed. I’ve seen too many friends pushed to the edge of exhaustion (and, real talk, depression) by uneven responsibilities. It ‘just happens.’ But it’s completely avoidable.” (“How have you avoided it?” I wrote back, explaining my research. “My trick: Marry a Swede,” she replied before agreeing to an interview.)
It turned out that a decade earlier, toward the end of her time in college, Elizabeth had found herself in casual conversation with female classmates at Middlebury College about their career plans once they had kids. She was surprised that most of them were pretty sure they’d take a couple years off. This got her interested in family leave policy, which she learned was “absurdly terrible” in the U.S., which led to her and her friend Ingrid securing a grant that allowed them to travel around the U.S. and Europe interviewing young professionals about their work/family plans. “This has been on my mind for a long time,” she told me. “No one else probably decided at the age of twenty-two, ‘This is really important to me, and I’m going to spend all this time looking into this, and every dinner conversation I ever have is going to be about this.’ And then I went to grad school to study work and family.”
When she and her husband got together, Elizabeth recruited him to join in her great mindfulness around equal sharing (as she noted, it did not hurt that he was from a culture where gender equality is more of a given—where men, for example, have been known to volunteer to pay for half of their girlfriends’ birth control36).
Elizabeth started graduate school during a period when her husband was traveling a lot for work. She began taking more care of the home and addressed it with him posthaste. “That’s how it starts. It’s the pattern we read about, the woman happens to be at home more, and so more household things start falling to her. Neither of us wanted that. I thought we should create an Excel spreadsheet to divide the chores. He wanted it to be more organic. It wasn’t one thing that solved it, but we both kept starting that conversation often. And then before we had our daughter, we had the same level of thinking about it. Who was going to take how much time off, what were we going to do about child care, who will do drop-off, who will do pickup. It was just a constant conversation about the nitty-gritty of it.
“Ingrid and I, who’d been thinking about these things to a crazy degree since way before we were married, ended up with partners who really do their fair share, and careers that we’re trying to make work. Our friends who thought we were being too intense are really struggling. We have two other close friends with kids. One of them is a stay-at-home mom. Both of them are exhausted and resentful. There are all these structural issues that could be better in the U.S., but it’s a personal thing in the end, the decision to have those difficult and repeated conversations about expectations that a lot of people don’t have because they think it will work itself out. I feel like I was saved by having those conversations.”
Like the Vachons, Elizabeth offers a plan, and as with the Vachons, that plan entails a long-standing and steadfast attention to the maintenance of equality—the apparently necessary antidote to a history of so much less. Having spoken with all three, I could see where George and I had failed. We never once sat each other down to declare our mutual commitment to sharing—we mostly just want to be equals. Since we hadn’t made sharing an unambiguous team objective from the get-go, my anger left us at odds with each other rather than placidly recalibrating to meet a mutual goal.
Elizabeth said, “Our attention to this has meant things have worked out really well. It helps that I work for myself, so my hours are flexible, and my husband only works nine to five, which is a huge thing. But the people I know who are struggling—the socioeconomic class that we’re talking about—they have choices. My friend who is having the hardest time, her husband is an ER resident. It’s a tough job, but he’s also chief resident. You don’t have to become chief resident. They have a toddler, and she’s pregnant, and he’s training for a triathlon. He’s actually also one of my closest friends. I’ve called him out on this. He feels like he deserves it because he works really hard. I think it started with, she was breastfeeding, and they didn’t want to sleep-train, and because he works nights so he would sleep in another room, so she took on all of the waking up at night. Once you do that, it’s really hard to get back to ‘We’re equally responsible, and we really have to watch out for each other’s needs.’ She has to be home more, so he just takes a little bit more and a little bit more for himself. It’s not malicious. But it’s hard for me to say he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He tries to say things like, ‘Once I’m done with residency, it’ll be better,’ but I just think you cannot say it will be different later. You have to do it when it’s hard, because it’s always going to be hard.”
In the first season of the Netflix series The Crown, a dramatic re-creation of the early years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the queen’s husband, Philip, bitterly laments the costs of marrying a princess-turned-sovereign. After Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the queen grandmother agree, against Elizabeth’s wishes, that the couple’s children must take her last name, Philip explodes at his young wife, “You have taken my career from me . . . you have taken my name. What kind of marriage is this? What kind of family?” The duke’s rage is palpable, and for a minute I feel for the guy. But then, of course, it hits me that it’s exactly the kind of union that women have long been required to accept. Those age-old rules around relinquishing one’s name and ambitions feel so viscerally unacceptable when the gender roles reverse.
On the show, at least, Philip spends the next few years resenting Elizabeth, neglecting his marriage, shooting whiskey, and (maybe) sleeping around. Elizabeth is punished for her powerful position, and it wasn’t even one she chose. Backlash theory suggests that consequences like these await women who fail to conform to gendered norms. You don’t have to read Susan Faludi’s classic Backlash (though you should) to know the shadows that descend upon women who don the most forbidden crown of agency.
It does remain forbidden. While attitudes about women at work have become increasingly liberal in the last half century, attitudes about women’s role in the home have actually been moving in the opposite direction. Since 1975, the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan has surveyed high school seniors about their values. In 1976, 82 percent agreed that women should be considered as seriously as men for jobs in business and politics. That went up to 91 percent by 1994, where it has remained. In 1976, 76 percent agreed that women should have exactly the same job opportunities as men. By 1994, that had risen to 89 percent and has likewise held constant. In the same data set, positive attitudes toward working mothers continue to climb.
In sharp contrast, though, endorsement of gender equality in the family peaked in 1994—the very year I left college, so optimistic about a husband who would share—and has been on the decline ever since. In 1994, for example, when presented with the statement “It is usually better . . . if the man is the achiever outside of the home and the woman takes care of the home and family,” 58 percent of high school seniors disagreed. But that was domestic egalitarianism’s pinnacle. By 2014, the disagreement fell to 42 percent, back down to where it had been in the mid-1980s. Similar sentiments saw virtually the same trajectories and in other surveys as well. The University of Chicago–based General Social Survey, assessing American attitudes annually since 1972, reports that millennials remain progressive on the work front but endorse increasingly traditional attitudes about the home.37
Why would this be? Writing in 2017 for the Council on Contemporary Families, sociologists Joanna Pepin and David Cotter assert that these slippages defy expectations and can’t be accounted for by variables like race, region, religiosity, family structure, or mother’s employment and education. Instead, they hypothesize that “egalitarian essentialism”—the belief that men and women are entitled to the same opportunities but will ultimately make different life choices because of biology—is the ideology that has replaced the mandate of separate spheres. They explain, “In the 1980s and early 1990s, people seemed to be moving toward the idea that women and men could work equally well in both the public and private spheres. Yet the narrative that eventually emerged became a hybrid of . . . two approaches, promoting women’s choice to participate in either sphere while trying to equalize the perceived value of a home sphere that was still seen as distinctively female. The egalitarian essentialist perspective mixed values of equality (. . . gender discrimination is wrong) alongside beliefs about the essential nature of men and women (men are naturally . . . better suited to some roles and women to others).”
Since 1994, high school seniors have become increasingly likely to agree that “the husband should make all the important decisions in the family.” The dismantling of the patriarchy will not proceed in a linear fashion. Pepin and Cotter reach a conclusion that is at once obvious and startling: The rising status of women outside the home has actually increased our inclination to reinforce male dominance inside it.38
According to the census bureau, 28.8 percent of employed wives earned more than their employed husbands in 2017, down from a high of 29.4 in 201339 (this doesn’t include the households with an unemployed male partner—which was 7.1 percent in 2015, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics40). But women who make more money than their spouses remain reluctant to highlight this fact. Researchers at the U.S. Census Bureau compared self-reported income on census forms to employer filings with the IRS. They found that in couples with higher-earning wives, both men and women exaggerate the husband’s income and diminish the wife’s.41
In the 1980s and 1990s, relative resources theory posed that women did more unpaid labor only because they brought in less cash. Today that theory has been upended. Sociologist Veronica Tichenor, who wrote the book on women who earn more than their husbands (2005’s Earning More and Getting Less: Why Successful Wives Can’t Buy Equality), told me, “The women I interviewed hinted that they didn’t ask for more at home because to try to exert power over your husband is not to be a good wife. Some said, ‘I don’t want him to call me a bitch.’ We let men do that. Every time women show dominance, it’s unattractive. It’s unfeminine. Un-wife-like.” Rather than using their earning power to balance any scales, high-earning wives chose to demur to masculine prerogatives. The rising status of women outside the home has actually increased our inclination to reinforce male dominance inside it.
This inclination rears its head in a variety of ways. In a 2016 YouGov survey of British adults, 59 percent of women and 61 percent of men expressed a preference for female surname change upon marriage. This preference was stronger among the youngest group of women (ages eighteen to twenty-nine) than it was among their older sisters (ages thirty to forty-four)—59 to 55 percent.42 In a 2010 survey of twelve hundred American adults, over 70 percent of respondents expressed the belief that a woman should take her husband’s last name upon marriage, while half of those surveyed said that female name change should be required by law. The most common reason cited was the belief that women (but not men) should prioritize their marriage and their family ahead of themselves.43
To put those pieces together, if loosely: In the year 2010, 50 percent of American adults believed that women (but not men) should be legally bound to put their marriages and families ahead of themselves. In a nod to backlash theory, the study also looked at the potential ramifications of a woman’s failure to give up her name. After reading brief vignettes about women who had or had not, some groups of men expressed harsher attitudes toward the fictional women who had kept their birth names upon marrying.44
Even among couples who defy tradition and maintain different last names upon marriage, only a minority favor bestowing the wife’s name upon the child. In the YouGov study, only 12 percent of the men whose wives had kept their own names and 18 percent of women who’d kept their own names endorsed passing down the maternal surname.45
When Rich, born in Philadelphia in 1977, married Michelle, born in Kansas in 1973, he wanted her to keep her own last name. She remembers the couple’s conversation at the time: “He said, ‘I wouldn’t give you my name, because it’s the remnant of patriarchal society.’” When she gave birth to their son a few years later, “I wanted to give him both of our last names, but Rich said, ‘No. That’s confusing. If we have a girl, she can have your last name.’ There was a hole where I used to have a vagina, and I wasn’t in a good state of mind, so I just agreed. At the end of the day, I’m not upset about it, but it was so surprising. It’s interesting that these things come up that you would never expect. Some things are so culturally ingrained, they come out when we’re not even aware.”
Few men consider taking their wives’ names. The YouGov study found that only 1 percent of men and 2 percent of women favored a husband changing his name. In the U.S., research out of Portland State University found that in a nationally representative sample of 877 married, heterosexual men, under 3 percent had taken their wives’ names (earning the phenomenon the title of “micropractice”).46
Men who’ve engaged in this particular micropractice report social consequences from strange looks and ridicule to the refusal of relatives to attend the wedding. In 2009, California became only the seventh state in the nation to make name change after marriage as simple for men as it is for women. Six years later, Business Insider editor James Kosur (né McKinney) described the process he had to go through in Illinois to take his wife’s name after the birth of their child. Once he’d filled out paperwork and received a letter of intent from a court, he was required to take out an ad in a newspaper for three weeks to announce the proposed change (a very old law intended to preclude attempted fraud). When no one came forward to protest his new name, he finally appeared in front of a judge. Kosur wrote, “If I was a woman who had been recently married, I would have presented my marriage license to the court, paid a name-change fee, and moved on with my life.”47
New York University sociologist Paula England writes, “What is more striking than the asymmetry of gender change in the [home] realm is how little gendering has changed at all in dyadic heterosexual relationships. It is still men who usually ask women on dates and initiate sexual behavior. Sexual permissiveness has increased, but the double standard persists stubbornly. Men are still expected to propose marriage. Children are given their father’s name. Incentive to change these things is less clear than the incentive to move into paid work and into higher paying ‘male’ jobs. The incentives that do exist are largely non-economic.”48 (Or at least are less obviously and immediately economic. Many metrics back up a Bloomberg Markets headline from 2017: “The U.S. Economy Would Be Better Off if Men Did More Housework.”)
To the modern, involved mother, The Journal of Marriage and Family reads like a fortune cookie. Crack it open to find not exactly a prediction but an articulation of some circumstance. Here from a group of Australian social scientists in 2008: “[C]ultural expectations . . . point to . . . housework as women’s work and a display of love for her family and subordination to her husband. Men, on the other hand, display their masculinity and reinforce their . . . power, by limiting the time spent in household tasks, particularly those that are female typed.”49
We’ve assigned and continue assigning different responsibilities to male and female parents, though it is unclear exactly what if any child care tasks are routinely assigned to fathers. A mother in my neighborhood named Ivy told me about a trip she was organizing with her husband, Davin, and their two young sons. The vacation involved a flight and staying with friends. As they planned what to do with the family they were visiting, there was a text chain between Ivy, Davin, and the mother in the other family. At one point in the long and ongoing conversation, the other mother texted: “Ivy, do I need to have car seats for the boys when I pick you all up at the airport? (Sorry to bother you with this Davin!)” Ivy was her family’s sole breadwinner at the time. Davin had long been as committed as Ivy to their sons’ vehicular safety.
Even in the era of the modern, involved father, public discussions about balancing breadwinning and caretaking focus on women and not men. Mothers who travel for work note that they are invariably asked who is watching their kids, while fathers all but never hear the same question. Climate scientist and mother Zoe Courville recalls these words from a male colleague who, like her, was often in the field: “He said, ‘I was always grateful that my wife stayed home with the kids, because kids need their mothers.’” Courville, who already felt guilty about leaving her child, explains, “He very pointedly wanted to let me know he thought that was important.”
Combining work and family is conceptualized as a female problem rather than a human one. In 2018, novelist Lauren Groff “respectfully declined” to answer a reporter’s question about work-family balance, “until I see a male writer asked this question.” (The Internet met her refusal with virtual mass applause.) In a speech at a Women in Hollywood event in 2014, actress and mother of three Jennifer Garner noted that she was asked about pairing work and child care in every single interview she did, while her then-husband, also in show business, was asked nary a once.
Men, however, may still be called upon as experts in the work-family balance arena. I attended a seminar on it at an American Psychological Association conference in 2015, and I sat agog in a roomful of mostly young women in my female-dominated field as the male presenter informed us that sometimes he had to turn down writing opportunities to help his stay-at-home wife with their (six!) kids, but that he made time to train for triathlons.
I swallowed my discomfort as an old friend, whose college-age daughter was applying to medical school, thought aloud about the family-friendly specialties her child could comfortably choose. It was a reasonable conversation but one I knew we wouldn’t be having if the matter concerned her sons. To hear my friend so breezily ceding her daughter’s options—without a second thought, and despite her obvious pride in her eldest’s accomplishments—made me despair for all the girls who came before her. None of it was any of my business, but I couldn’t help hoping that her daughter would only sigh and roll her eyes in response to maternal concerns she deemed antiquated.
Though how would she? It remains true that girls are the ones implicitly instructed to consider marriage and family from early on. This is one more part of nurture, and not an insignificant one. “Mom, when do I need to start worrying about having a boyfriend?” Liv asked me when she was six. “Never,” I answered, taken aback by the question and regretting all the Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse episodes I’d been letting her watch.
As the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in her nonfiction A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, “We condition girls to aspire to marriage and we do not condition boys to aspire to marriage, and so there is already a terrible imbalance at the start. The girls will grow up to be women preoccupied with marriage. The boys will grow up to be men who are not preoccupied with marriage. The women marry those men. The relationship is automatically uneven because the institution matters more to one than the other. Is it any wonder that, in so many marriages, women sacrifice more, at a loss to themselves, because they have to constantly maintain an uneven exchange?”50
Research from the late 1990s suggests that a woman’s psychological well-being is more shaken than a man’s by marital dissolution. Even when controlling for socioeconomic status, women are more likely than men to become increasingly depressed after divorce. The same is not true for women after other losses, such as a layoff from a job or the death of a spouse. In fact, women are the more resilient sex in widowhood.51 If women are conditioned to see marriage as an achievement, as a crucial marker of success, and men are not conditioned to see marriage the same way, it makes sense that the end of a relationship through divorce but not death would have greater impact on a woman’s well-being. Divorce brings pain to a woman in a way that a partner’s death, with all its profound despair, does not. It confers the shame of failure at her most important task.
While racial disparities generally have not been found in studies of either the uneven distribution of care work within couples or the psychological impact of divorce (and researchers have looked), writer Tamara Winfrey-Harris, author of The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America, suggests that dictums around gender role conformity in the home are even stronger in the black community than in other communities in the U.S. “Black women have a particular history that, I think, makes it worse—we are given advice not about how we become more ourselves and how we seek happiness in relationships, but about how do you make men happy so they will choose you and not leave. A whole industry has cropped up in the last decade especially, telling black women how they need to be smaller and more feminine and more submissive to their husbands in order to restore the black family. It’s not just ‘Do this because that’s what women do,’ but ‘Do this because healthy black families rest on black women.’ What we need is a new paradigm for committed adult relationships that recognizes the humanity of both partners. We cannot save our communities with a template that only allows half of us to be free.”
Adichie advises in her manifesto, “Never speak of marriage as an achievement. Find ways to make it clear to her that marriage is not an achievement, nor is it what she should aspire to. A marriage can be happy or unhappy, but it is not an achievement.”52 Maybe this cannot be repeated enough. Consider the professed career aspirations of single women in 2016. In a study at an Ivy League university, newly admitted MBA students were asked about their job preferences. Some students were told that the information would be kept private. Among those, men, women in committed relationships, and single women answered similarly. Other students were told their answers would be public, shared with classmates. Under this circumstance, single women (but not others) reported wanting lower salaries, less work-related travel, and less demanding schedules than the other groups. They also renounced their own ambition and desire for leadership roles. During the semester that followed, while these single women performed just as well on exams and assignments, they ultimately had lower marks for class participation.53 Presumably under some pressure to secure a male partner, these women felt compelled to hide their extrafamilial ambitions in the name of being appropriately female.
“What individuals internalize about gender and use to make sense of their personal lives does not necessarily support their own individual well-being,” write sociologist Anne Rankin Mahoney and psychologist Carmen Knudson-Martin in Couples Gender and Power: Creating Change in Intimate Relationships.54 This is clear. Anne, forty-two, whom I met through the new mothers’ group in my neighborhood, tells me, “If we’re both home on a Saturday, he’ll voice the fact that he’s tired and get up and go take a nap for four hours. ‘I am tired, I am going to take a nap.’ I’m tired. I’m the primary caregiver. I remain tired. When he wakes up, he tells me I should nap, but that never happens. What I’ve done is I have No-Mom Thursday. Every Thursday after work, I take time to myself, even if that means just sitting in the office cleaning out my inbox. But he gets all the other days. Including weekends.”
As author and social activist bell hooks has noted, “[A]ll of us, female and male, have been socialized from birth on to accept sexist thought and action. As a consequence, females can be just as sexist as men.”55 So we are sexist against our very selves, and alongside our equally sexist husbands, we live in our families in ways that affirm and reproduce that sexism. “Why does Daddy always drive?” Tess asked me when she was four, at which point I began making a point of getting in the driver’s seat more often. I battled with Liv for years over brushing her messy hair, all the while wondering if I would’ve gone to the same trouble with a boy. At her request, George bought Liv a makeup kit for her seventh birthday. (“The reviews on Amazon said it was perfect for little girls,” George informed me upon the delivery of a multi-tiered, butterfly-shaped assortment of eye shadows and lip colors my grandmothers would have died for.) “Making yourself look pretty is not an activity!” I’d holler at Liv each time she asked to use it, though she was equally likely to make her sister up as some kind of green-faced zombie.
Women not only monitor the emotional temperature of the home, keep the mental lists, and perform the bulk of routine housework and child care; they also feel more responsible than men for this work no matter their income, outside commitments, or ideology.56 Woman after woman acknowledged this to me. But to acknowledge it without trying to alter it is to perpetuate what has already been perpetuated. I do it myself all the time.
DC-area writer and mom blogger Dara Mathis said, “I hear from a lot of people I know who are mothers—they tend to feel more burdened themselves. Even if they know their spouse is open to taking on more of a share, they feel more burdened to make it easier for him. That’s how I felt.” Men have been known to share this attitude toward having things made easier for them. The British cultural critic Jacqueline Rose, author of Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, has noted that while women feel that parenthood creates a surfeit of burdens, men experience those same burdens not as an excess but as a deficit—as activities that take something better (and deserved) away from them.57
Women go along with the moral story (or the oppressive one, you choose), the one that would actually be quite lovely if it applied to more than half of us. Penn State sociologist Sarah Damaske, who studies families and labor, says, “I find in my research that women feel obligated to frame things as if they’re doing them for their kids. It’s more culturally acceptable to say, ‘It’s good for my daughter to see me in the workforce’ than it is to say, ‘I’m in the workforce because I want to be, and if it’s good for her, that’s a nice side benefit.’ I argue that in some ways that framing has been good—it’s allowed women to push against these cultural demands about self-sacrifice while creating space for themselves. But it’s also bad, because it hasn’t changed that narrative of obligation to family first, over asserting one’s own desires and ambitions.”
Though shifting socioeconomic conditions do necessarily serve to modify cultural attitudes around gender, the beliefs that underlie them aren’t easy to erode. As sociologists Ridgeway and Correll have written, “The gender system will only be undermined through the long-term, persistent accumulation of everyday challenges to the system resulting from socioeconomic change and individual resistance.”58 (Italics mine.)
Individual resistance (see the Vachons and Elizabeth) is no small thing. It involves many effortful conversations on a to-do list that is already lengthy. The toll of just barely trying may also be high. Carissa, the woman in Seattle who’d just had foot surgery, sees the conundrum like this: “My husband and I will be fine. This for me is a bigger issue. I have two daughters, and we’re not setting the example I want for them. In my worst moments, I say things out loud after he walks out the door. In irritation. My daughters know. They say things to both him and me. ‘Why does Mommy have to do that?’ They’ll want me to do something, and I say, ‘No, I have to finish cleaning the kitchen’; they’ll say, ‘Why can’t Daddy do that?’ It’s not healthy. What happens next?”