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May 19 - June 14, 2019
Mothers took charge of caring for others, fathers embraced personal autonomy, and, in the U.S. at least, society removed itself entirely from the equation.
Developmental psychologist Holly Schiffrin feels conflicted about her lack of gratitude. “My husband is a very involved dad, more than average, and when I complain to my mom, she says, ‘Oh, he is so wonderful.’ She’s comparing him to my dad. I’m comparing him to me, and I know that I’m doing more!”
“Embedded in the use of the verb ‘help’ is the notion that parenting is ultimately the mother’s responsibility—that fathers are doing a favor when they parent.
Because arguments over housework are not insignificant. The unfair division of labor is a big reason for the breakup of marriages.” (The third-most-cited reason, actually, after adultery and growing apart.)
Prior work had established that this inequity fuels depression in women.
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.”
Feminism often plays the straw man in these discussions, as if the very desire for equality were problematic, rather than the fact that equality has yet to materialize.
One may have a conscious belief that men and women should be equal while simultaneously maintaining a less conscious commitment to the primacy of male desire.
because even men who don’t realize it typically continue to feel at complete liberty to put their own personal autonomy ahead of their wives’.
mothers on the lower end of the income scale may be forced out of work altogether not only because their wages come in at less than their male partners (and below the cost of child care) but also because their work is disparaged.
Mothering, as Miranda attests, is a task evaluated not only by outcomes (the general health and happiness of children) but also by how much deprivation a woman is willing to endure.
She told me, “I don’t know who raised the bar, but once it gets raised, there’s anxiety that if you don’t go along, your child will be left behind.
But here is where we lose them: Fathers do not swim in our water. In fact, as the traditional pressure on men to be primary breadwinners has lifted, the traditional pressure on women to be primary caretakers has not.
Society puts all of the pressure of having perfect children on women. We translate that into micromanaging men’s parenting.
Gatekeeping is not the prime mover for pushing men out of the home: they were on the periphery or absent anyway. But it exacerbates a situation that already exists.”
Laura in New York said, “I’ll be out of town for work, and I’ll call my husband at ten at night, and our son, who is four, is still up. And I’ll say, ‘Why is he awake?’ And my husband answers, ‘He told me he wasn’t tired.’ If I suggest to him that this isn’t acceptable, am I nitpicking, or am I asking him to behave like a responsible adult? It’s hard putting a kid to bed when he doesn’t want to go. Accepting that our son is not tired is a good excuse. It’s complete self-absorption. They prioritize themselves.”
I made careless financial choices in my twenties because of this message, which in truth came from everywhere. Why would a young woman bother to save when she’d someday have a man to do it for her?
understood as “a largely successful male resistance.” Do not ask why change is so slow; instead, ask why men are resisting. “The short answer is that it is in men’s interest to do so,” sociologist Scott Coltrane has written.
Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar, and forgetting is not just forgetting. To employ “limited attention” is to announce that one cannot be bothered, and when the task must ultimately be completed by someone, the forgetter is asserting his right to fail to attend.
As had so often been the case, enlisting his participation had turned into more trouble than it was worth.
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.
I’d have preferred you just not do it and tell me to do something.” I reminded him that he often forgot the things I asked him to take care of, and that having to ask in the first place was just another form of responsibility.
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.
Inasmuch, the concept of fairness comes to dominate the minds of mothers but not dads, who are willfully blind to their own copping out.
“[T]he ideology of intensive mothering serves men in that women’s commitment to this socially devalued task helps to maintain their subordinate position in society as a whole.”
People perform better when a lot is expected of them and worse when it is not.19
Their immune systems work to maintain their patriarchal privilege without ever forcing them to reckon with the fact that they have it in the first place.
One solution to that might lie in encouraging men to fully embrace the identity of dad.
You’ve asked me, what can we offer? How can we sell this? We sell this by saying, ‘You’ve cut yourself off from half the human experience by embracing this traditional notion of masculinity, the thing that we call toxic. You’ll have a better life if you could actually be a person.’”
His conclusions made such intuitive sense to so many male scientists that few bothered to look closely at the data.
Moore speculates that appreciating her partner’s caretaking effort—in contrast to feeling entitled to it—supports this overestimation.
As we see reflected both at work and at home, women have become more like men, men have become more like men, men have not become more like women, and women have not become less like women.
Therein lies the problem with our biases: Men see nothing to gain in becoming more like women.
We smile when lauded for our giving, even as we’re left little more than a stump.
What Chen and Williams highlight is that benevolent sexism is the spoonful of sugar that helps the patriarchy go down.
Men can choose to be blind to the himpathetic lengths women go to, and women can allow them to maintain that blindness. Men have been raised to compete for power, and women to keep their mouths shut.
Precisely because people would rather feel good than bad, they respond defensively and engage in more system justification when you point out all the problems.
Women are so good at child care, we continue to assert, taking that trade-off, complicit in our own subordination.
“The women who were successful in achieving an equally sharing relationship were pretty relentless, for the most part, in just articulating it.
When parenting is a conscious collaboration, men, like women, track their own responsibilities and think ahead about what their children need. They do not look to their wives for orders or direction. Strong gender egalitarianism means a family life free from assumptions about who does what based on activities deemed more appropriate for fathers or for mothers.
