Commenter Slim mentioned reading All the Rage, by Darcy Lockman, and further mentioned having two copies to give away if we wanted to do something for Mother’s Day, which possibly we do. This is how Slim described the book:
Basically, straight married mothers’ brains are melting because our husbands think that doing a better job than their fathers is the same as doing a good job.
I don’t think I would mind dealing with all the stuff I have to do if I didn’t have to do it under the same roof as a grownass adult who makes my life harder.
Well, SOLD. I got a copy from my library, and I have finished it, and it is BRISTLING with slips of paper marking Good Parts. Some samples:
• “…couples with low levels of male partner participation in domestic chores are more likely to separate than couples in which men do more. As satisfaction with a male partners’ help increases, so, too, do positive marital interactions, closeness, affirmation, and positive affect. As it decreases, thoughts of divorce, negative affect, and depression go up—for mothers. Although perceived unfairness predicts both unhappiness and distress for women, it predicts neither for men, who often do not seem to fully register the problem.”
• “Writes [Stephanie] Coontz, ‘Self-reliance and independence worked for men because women took care of dependence and obligation.'”
• “Worrying to no purposeful end is unfortunate, but productive worry stimulates action: the scheduling of well-child visits, the installation of outlet plugs, the introduction of solid foods. The fathers in Walzer’s study both pathologized their wives for their vigilance and connected it to their babies’ well-being. It is not, however, connected to a mother’s well-being.”
• “Yana’s husband never explicitly turns down her requests [for help with housework and children]—but he routinely fails to fulfill them.”
• “Occidental College sociologist Lisa Wade summed up what she has seen like this: ‘Men find ways of being so difficult that it’s not worth it. You do it yourself.'”
• “Men do not pause to consider the experience of the other, or at the very least, they appear unmoved by it.”
• “Imagine if your children’s father said these things to you, directly and out loud: Women are easy to take advantage of, your efforts are ultimately unnecessary, the needs of our family are not worth my attention, and I’ll choose the more selfish thing. Fathers are implying every last bit of this with their resistance all the time.”
• I wish I had copied a quote from this section before returning the book, but I didn’t mark it so I forgot, but what I keep thinking about is the part where they found couples who said they were equals, where even the woman of the couple said they were equals and she was satisfied with the equal division of labor; and when the scientists/sociologists studied those couples, they found they were NOT equals and the women were doing more. In every single case.
The book did make me feel angry. But more than that, it made me feel Seen and Validated: the inequality I’m experiencing has been observed and analyzed in numerous studies; I am not imagining how unfair it is and how maddening it is; I am not the only one who can’t figure out how to fix it. And the WAYS in which it manifests, also Seen and Validated: the husbands who “forget” to do something, or just sort of Don’t Do It; the husbands who claim they just have to be asked to help (but the wives do not need to be asked); the husbands who know that if they drop the ball their wives will take care of it; the husbands who make their own lives the priority over everyone else’s while their wives work for the common good of the family; the husbands who simply Opt Out of responsibility for handling things, so that the wives are forced to handle all those things.
I recommend the book to you if your library has it—and, now that I’ve read it, would probably go so far as to recommend buying it if you can’t borrow it and can find it at an affordable price. And perhaps we will see about getting Slim’s copies out there for Mother’s Day—let’s think more on that.