More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 19 - June 14, 2019
When our daughter was born, a new category of glance: What (the fuck) was my problem? Why had I become so demanding? At great cost, I took this to heart. Maybe I should just accept my role as primary parent with grace. It wasn’t like he didn’t help at all.
There were small children dressed in the wrong season’s clothes, permission slips that remained in folders unsigned, the consistent failure to pack any sort of supply. (“Did you remember diapers?” George would ask me in a slightly accusatory tone each time we got into the car.) A message was delivered, unspoken but clear. Not my job.
I became my own worst enemy, conflicted about my right to ask, self-conscious about my rising anger, and too often stuck with the choice between fighting or just taking care of it, whatever it was, on my own.
Because, you see, I was living like a second-class citizen in my own home.
It is a truism that motherhood makes many women feminist.
Co-residential dads have tripled the amount of time they spend with their kids since 1965.
(Single women belonged to their fathers: The honorifics “Miss” and “Mrs.” serve to clarify whether a woman is beholden to a father or a spouse.)
Gross
It’s easier to feel grateful for all that has changed than to acknowledge all that has yet to.
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.”
Reports of the modern, involved father have also been greatly exaggerated—or at least, as some researchers have argued, “this change is more in ‘the culture of fatherhood’ than in actual behavior.”
MenCare, a global fatherhood campaign working toward child care parity in forty-five nations, estimates that at the current rate of change, it will be another seventy-five years before women worldwide achieve gender equity in their homes.
“Boys can do anything girls can do” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. So now Monique is a lawyer, but her husband is not a primary parent.
Must we continue to be only grateful?
They found that father-in-a-room-by-himself was the “person-space configuration observed the most frequently,”54 a piece of data that now pops into my head whenever I’m in the living room with the kids while my husband camps out in our room playing Game of War on his phone.
“Can you imagine,” I asked her, “a world in which your husband got up early with the baby every morning for ten months running and you never once offered to relieve him?” She acknowledged that she could not. I could not, either. None of us could.
“It’s my fault for not speaking up,” I heard these women conclude. Why they were left to speak up in the first place remained largely uninterrogated.
Recent data published in the Journal of Marriage and Family suggests that couples in which men do more than a third of the household work have more sex than those who do less,
Although perceived unfairness predicts both unhappiness and distress for women, it predicts neither for men,79 who often do not seem to fully register the problem.
A husband having more leisure time than his wife did not a happy marriage make.
She’s found that the increase in financial compensation for overwork plays a large role in maintaining the gender wage gap.
The women I spoke with described the personal toll of this status quo: intense disappointment in their partnerships, persistent underlying anger at their children’s fathers, dampened sexual desire, and fantasies of escape.
We do not exist for the convenience and pleasure of men. We will not be equal anywhere until we are equal everywhere, until we stop colluding in the most widely accepted form of cultural misogyny.
Idealism is well and good before one has to accommodate its burdens. As British author Rebecca Asher writes in Shattered, her book about the state of her feminist ideals after children, “on becoming fathers, [men] find that patriarchy suits them rather well after all.”
To quote the conclusion of the paper that examines this data, “Husbands’ gender ideology may be a stronger determinant of housework divisions than the wives’ gender ideology.”
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
...more
Studies of couples show that even when power issues are raised, they’re generally not framed in terms of how husbands need to change but, rather, how wives do—you know, she needs to be more assertive.
As Jacqueline exemplifies, the problem with accounting comes not when both partners are doing it in recognition of the other’s contributions but, rather, when it’s left to a mother alone, stewing in the math of a father’s apathy.
Based on the findings of her meta-meta-analysis, Hyde proposed “the gender similarities hypothesis,” which asserts that, distinctive reproductive systems aside, men and women are similar in more ways than not.
Michael Kimmel, director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masuclinities at Stony Brook University in New York, who succinctly states, “Gender difference is the product of gender inequality, not the other way around.”
Tropes give us license to delicately petition our partners for more effort but not to confront them with our wrath.
I am pointing out the way in which we breezily conflate men’s prerogatives with their essential nature, prerogatives that are not actually innate but are learned, and which the luckiest among us are not forced to contend with so nakedly until men are living as our partners in our homes. Then, suddenly, the outgrowth of their privilege becomes breathtaking.
The less intelligent an animal, the more its survival depends on instinct.
Hormones plus experience equals attachment. Nature and nurture work in concert. Mothering is biologically and socially determined.
derive our belief that primary maternal care is natural, inborn, and obvious from a long history of female subjugation. We call that history “nature” and continue to surmise that the sex bearing children must provide them with most of their care.
In 1971 President Richard Nixon cited evolution as one reason for his veto of a bill that would have provided universal government-subsidized early child care. He feared it would disrupt nature’s mother-centered plan.
Gaaaaaaah
When one parent gets into the habit of quickly responding to an infant’s needs, the other is likely to accommodate that habit by failing to respond.
“I’ll cut to the punch line,” she says. “There’s very little in human behavior that’s innate. Most of what we do is shaped by our conscious and unconscious experience. Calling gendered division of labor ‘innate’ is a convenient way of maintaining the power structure, period.”
The inferences drawn from brain-difference studies are often, to use another Fine-ism, neurononsense.
It has served men very well to assume that male-female differences are hardwired. It’s been harmful for women to live that.”
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.
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.
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.
Girls learn to behave in feminine ways that signal accommodation, and boys masculine ones that signal assertiveness.
She swallows her pride in order to protect his, the ubiquitous feminine cost of masculine fragility.
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.
Motherhood has been called the most gender-enforcing experience in a woman’s life.
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.
Per the research, as women’s income goes up, so does household spending on housekeeping services and eating out.
“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.
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.”
