The language of equality—a belief in the modern, involved father—creates a myth central to the idea of these contemporary marriages. It conceals a sort of female subordination that would otherwise be intolerable in many twenty-first-century homes, the taken-for-granted notion that a mother is in charge of the tracking and the knowing and the thinking and the planning and the feeding and the caring and the checking and the doing unless she has worked to make other arrangements (which then entail more knowing and more thinking and more tracking and more doing). He’s-happy-to-do-it-if-I-ask is
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