Division of household labor is back in the news. One of the most talked-about and commented-on articles this past week was journalist-turned psychologist Darcy Lockman’s “What ‘Good’ Dads Get Away With” in the New York Times. You could almost feel the shifts in the air from the hundreds of moms nodding their heads in agreement — men don’t do their fair share! — while their hubs looked on, confused.
She writes:
“Inequality makes everyone feel bad. Studies have found that people who feel they’re getting away with something experience fear and self-reproach, while people who feel exploited are angry and resentful. And yet men are more comfortable than women with the first scenario and less tolerant than women of finding themselves with the short end of the stick. Parity is hard, and this discrepancy lays the groundwork for male resistance. Though many men are in denial about it, their resistance communicates a feeling of entitlement to women’s labor. Men resist because it is in their “interest to do so,” write Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams, leaders in the field of family studies, in their book, “Gender and Families.” By passively refusing to take an equal role, men are reinforcing “a separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.”
I am three-quarters of the way through reading Lockman’s just-published book, All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, and even though my married child-rearing days are long behind me, it brought up a lot of old anxiety and anger, as much when I recently read Megan K. Stack’s “Women’s Work: A Reckoning With Home and Work,” Shani Orgad’s “Heading Home: Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality, Molly Willwood’s “To Have and to Hold; Motherhood, Marriage and the Modern Dilemma” and Catherine E. Aponte’s forthcoming “A Marriage of Equals: How to Achieve Balance in a Committed Relationship” — all of which address the same topic: How women are basically getting screwed.
Women are fed up
Women do more more than men in the home and with our kids, and it’s hurting us and our romantic partnerships, and replicating gendered lifestyles for our kids. After reading the comments on Lockman’s article from men, who mostly come off as defensive, and women, who can’t agree more, it’s pretty clear that what I wrote more than two years ago — Dear men: Here’s why your wife may leave you — is, sadly, still true.
I plan to write more about Lockman’s book soon, but what hit me early on while reading it is (no surprise here) the need for relationship/marital contracts.
Why? Because very few couples, no matter how enlightened and egalitarian they imagine themselves to be, are actually paying attention to just how much having a child is going to fracture their relationship with long-lasting gendered ramifications and creating a plan for how they are going to address it at each and every step.
Here’s what Lockman writes about her own marriage after chatting with Mark and Amy Vachon, authors of Equally Shared Parenting: Recruiting the Rules for a New Generation of Parents (a book that had somehow slipped my radar but looks fascinating), as well as another woman who, like the Vachons, has worked hard to share chores and child-rearing equally (and are pretty much nailing it):
“I could see where George and I had failed. We never once sat each other down to declare our mutual commitment to sharing — we both 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.”
Earlier in the book, she mentions that when they became parents, it was “with the vague assumption that we were in it together, and no concomitant sense of all we were working against or the effort it might take to achieve that.”
You probably don’t need to guess how that worked out!
Accountability, not assumptions
Listen to her language — “unambiguous team objective,” “vague assumption,” “no concomitant sense.” And that is exactly what having a relationship/marital contract does: it forces you to have those conversations — not assumptions! — make a plan, commit to it and — this is key — hold each other, as well as yourselves, accountable.
I know, I know: it just doesn’t seem sexy. A contract is too clinical, businesslike, complicated, unloving, score-keeping, [insert your objection here].
OK, maybe it is. It certainly can be seen that way.
Being in a relationship and raising children with a man whose “resistance communicates a feeling of entitlement to women’s labor,” however, sounds a helluva lot worse unless you are willingly and happily offering up that labor.
What do you want?
Want to know how to create a marital contract so you don’t have to deal with gendered bullshit? (Of course you do!) Then read The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels (Seal Press). You can support your local indie bookstore (please do) or order it on Amazon.
Loading tweets...
