All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership

by Darcy Lockman

Or did it? When George and I moved into our first one-bedroom walk-up a few years before we got married, he soon after volunteered that he would do the vacuuming and the dusting. He liked those things, he told me, and he’d do them every week. What I didn’t say in response, because I was a woman and he was a man, was that being left to clean the bathroom and the kitchen did not float my boat. He could have dusting, which I’d never bothered with anyway, but I wanted vacuuming. If I was going to scrub the bathtub, he needed to do the kitchen floor. I thought to say these things, but time froze, and instead, I didn’t speak because wasn’t I lucky that he wanted to do anything at all. We silently agreed upon the last part. This was in the year 2005.

Given that there is always a nameless, faceless partner in the background whose laziness or inattentiveness is worse than your husband’s, women who appreciate their lives and their relationships feel reluctant to acknowledge their displeasure. Sociology explains this with relative-deprivation theory: Only when one feels more deprived than other members of her reference group will she feel entitled to adamant protest.

Indeed, her partner’s standard response whenever she tries to address their imbalance is “I do a lot more than other men,” a sentence much easier to utter than “Yes, our arrangements are unfair to you, but that is the lot of women, so suck it up.”

“If you get down to it, we talk about equality, but the part people grasped on to was women changing. Women can have careers, be in the military, become clergy. But the fact is that all of that doesn’t work if household stuff doesn’t shift. And some things are more impervious to change than others. The implicit assumption that change is continuous is probably unrealistic.”

“He notices the unfairness, but he just accepts it as something we have a disagreement about. I think he feels like there’s nothing he can do. In fact, he’s told me this before. There’s nothing he can do, so it would be helpful if I wasn’t so bothered by it.”

Deutsch identified the unequal families among her subjects, the ones in which the women were the default parents. She divided the husbands in these pairs into three categories of secondary caregivers: helpers, sharers, and slackers.

For example, as one mother related, “Eric will do stuff, but he wants to be asked. He wants to put it on his list. It’s not something that he’s thinking about unless I get him thinking, although he’s really helpful.”6 Eric is a helper. Sharers are fully involved in parenting, but only when other commitments to work or leisure aren’t getting in the way. Slackers relax while their wives work a second shift at home. In all the unequal families Deutsch studied, “There’s an assumption that women’s schedules are freer. It’s always easier to infringe upon mother; mothers are supposed to be infringed upon.”

Mothers avoid not only interpersonal conflict but also a more internal one when they resist forcing their partners’ hands. When men decide to become equally sharing fathers, they may give up money or status, but in exchange for something more virtuous, the elevation of family life. When women reject their role as default parent, they’re not taking on that same goodness. They cannot bask in its treacly moral glow. They are faced with relinquishing their virtue in the name of self-interest, or even just the occasional nap.

Mothers and fathers butt heads in this mismatch of ideas about what makes an adequate parent. If I believe in my bones that being a good mother means thinking about my children’s needs a hairbreadth short of all of the time, and my husband does not believe in his bones that being a good father means thinking about his children’s needs a hairbreadth short of all of the time, we are reaching for different rings. I am bound to be baffled when our divergent internal pressures show their outlines—when he fails to register that spring break is approaching and we will need child care, or that the babysitter is coming and the kids will need dinner, or their teeth cleanings are months overdue.

‘It’s great if you want to help, but I’m juggling balls, and if I throw you one and you drop it, I might as well be doing everything myself.’ We’d have these discussions: ‘Can you take the balls and keep the balls? It’s draining me.’ I can’t trust him to do anything, to actually remember.”

The dynamic with my husband barely shifts. Without intention, he continues to perpetuate a gender order that privileges men over women, him over me—and continues to deny that this is so.

It might not surprise you to learn that interviewing men about their division of labor at home proved difficult. While they were generous with their time, it was not an idea that most of the fathers had given much thought, and even under direction, it failed to spark interest.

He sounded defensive as he spoke, and as was not atypical for me, some trace hostility in his voice shut me down. Nothing he was saying was untrue. But his dilemmas applied equally to me, and I hadn’t responded by keeping my head down. Another woman might have had the stamina to remark on this. Characteristically, I did not—I knew it would lead to a fight I didn’t want to have.

Here is what I would have preferred to hear from my husband—unequivocally and without shame: “I am sexist.” That was the headline of a New York Times opinion piece by Emory University philosophy professor George Yancy, who took it upon himself, late in 2018, to implore men to join him “with due diligence and civic duty, and publicly claim: I am sexist,” to take responsibility for misogyny and patriarchy.3

When men deny their sexism, they gaslight their partners, compounding an already painful problem by insisting that its clear and obvious precursors are the imaginings of a hysterical mind.

“The belief or expectation that women will step up to the plate is a pretty important factor in all of this. . . . The reason why [the women are] doing it, at least in our study, appears to be because they’re expected to.

leave. Research has found that men living with children in countries where they are eligible to take paid parental leave continue to perform 2.2 more hours of domestic work per week than men living with children in countries not offering that time long after their children are older and they are back at work.12

“[G]endered behavior is kept in place in part by the latent and invisible power that accrues to men in a society based on a gender hierarchy. This is hard to identify and address.”

As long as cultural scripts remain largely intact, evidence suggests that even the modern, involved father will remain less likely than his female partner to see his transition into parenting as a major life development. Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy reports that in industrialized countries, almost half of all children lose touch with their fathers not long after their parents divorce (within ten years, that number shoots up to two thirds).

The relative failure to see fatherhood as that major life development underscores all sorts of misfortune.

Cultural critic Jacqueline Rose believes that it is the very fact that men can’t tolerate truly knowing about the visceral mess of mothering and the emotional complexity it requires—what transpires as mothers are winning—that keeps them asserting their scanty privilege in the slippery ways they do.

Gretchen in Baltimore plays the game of chicken like this: “One night I did what my husband often does to me. I told him I wouldn’t be there in the morning, and he’d have to get the kids ready, then drive them to different schools, including our daughter’s preschool, which doesn’t open until nine, thus making him late, like I am every day. He looked at me like I was crazy. Exhaled loudly. Said nothing. Of course, I felt guilty. I got on the phone and found a friend’s house where he could drop our preschooler off.” I didn’t bother with a follow-up question. I, too, am a woman living with a man. What more is there to say? Gretchen imagined the strain her husband was facing and acted to spare him the inconvenience, one that she manages regularly.

This is something only I should have to manage in the end. Acting out male privilege is hardly an exclusively male endeavor.

The stronger these unconscious associations between moms and caretaking versus dads and breadwinning, the more likely participants were to say that mothers should resolve work-family conflict on the side of the family and that fathers should do just the opposite.

How many holiday meals does a daughter have to attend, how many coins does a girl need to drop into her piggy bank, before she understands her lower position in the world?

Therein lies the problem with our biases: Men see nothing to gain in becoming more like women.

kind. As Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said, “Too few of us are eager to relinquish our place on the pedestal, even one that doubles as a cage.” We smile when lauded for our giving, even as we’re left little more than a stump.

Women who violate norms of communality, who don’t behave as women should, are punished. Research in applied psychology in both the laboratory and the workplace has shown that saying yes to altruistic behavior improves the favorability ratings of men but not women.

Psychologists suggest that a woman who believes she is the master of her home is less likely to seek influence outside of it.

“Exercising power over household decisions may bring a semblance of status and control to women’s traditional role, to the point where they may have less desire to push against the obstacles to achieving additional power outside the home,” explain Williams and Chen.

Ultimately, however, women must at least partially abdicate their role as household decision makers—and men must agree to share such authority—in order to realize true gender equality in both the public and private spheres.”23

“You’re a very good mommy,” is all men have to say.

Sociologist Anne Rankin Mahoney and family therapist Carmen Knudson-Martin defined equality thus (and check yourself out in this mirror): Partners hold equal status, attention to the other in the relationship is mutual, accommodation in the relationship is mutual, and there is shared well-being.

My point is that couples work hard to maintain gender inequalities at a time when it would be easy to dismantle them.”

You can’t tell women that they’re too dumb to do anything but stay home and make sandwiches (that would be hostile), but you can point out how their loving nature makes them especially well suited for that task. Social psychology calls this “role justification,” and it “contributes to the perceived legitimacy of the status quo by characterizing cultural divisions of labor as not only fair but perhaps even natural and inevitable,” Jost notes.

Equality is not so much an end point as a process.

Responsibility for that process can too easily fall on mothers. Social psychologist Francine Deutsch tells me, “The women who were successful in achieving an equally sharing relationship were pretty relentless, for the most part, in just articulating it. I think most men are not horrible people and have a sense of justice and can hear that, but still, sometimes it has to be more than one time.