All the Rage

Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership

Darcy Lockman

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780062861467
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Relations interpersonnelles en psychologie

Why do men do so little at home? Why do women do so much? Why don't our egalitarian values match our lived experiences?

Journalist-turned-psychologist Darcy Lockman offers a clear-eyed look at the most pernicious problem facing modern parents—how progressive relationships become traditional ones when children are introduced into the household.

In an era of seemingly unprecedented feminist activism, enlightenment, and change, data shows that one area of gender inequality stubbornly persists: the disproportionate amount of parental work that falls to women, no matter their background, class, or professional status. All the Rage investigates the cause of this pervasive inequity to answer why, in households where both parents work full-time and agree that tasks should be equally shared, mothers' household management, mental labor, and childcare contributions still outweigh fathers'.

How, in a culture that pays lip service to women's equality and lauds the benefits of father involvement—benefits that extend far beyond the well-being of the kids themselves—can a commitment to fairness in marriage melt away upon the arrival of children?

Counting on male partners who will share the burden, women today have been left with what political scientists call unfulfilled, rising expectations. Historically these unmet expectations lie at the heart of revolutions, insurgencies, and civil unrest. If so many couples are living this way, and so many women are angered or just exhausted by it, why do we remain so stuck? Where is our revolution, our insurgency, our civil unrest?

Darcy Lockman drills deep to find answers, exploring how the feminist promise of true domestic partnership almost never, in fact, comes to pass. Starting with her own marriage as a ground zero case study, she moves outward, chronicling the experiences of a diverse cross-section of women raising children with men; visiting new mothers' groups and pioneering co-parenting specialists; and interviewing experts across academic fields, from gender studies professors and anthropologists to neuroscientists and primatologists. Lockman identifies three tenets that have upheld the cultural gender division of labor and peels back the ways in which both men and women unintentionally perpetuate old norms.

If we can all agree that equal pay for equal work should be a given, can the same apply to unpaid work? Can justice finally come home?

Chapter 1
On How Life Is

The Fallacy of the Modern, Involved Father

Per every metric I’ve come across, men who live with their children today are more involved than the fathers of fifty years ago. Co-residential dads have tripled the amount of time they spend with their kids since 1965.1 Thirty-two percent of fathers in the most recent census reported being a regular source of care for their children, which is up from 26 percent a decade before.2 The National At-Home Dad Network estimates that there are 1.4 million stay-at-home fathers in the U.S., and that this is twice the number there were ten years ago.3 Roughly the same percentage of fathers as mothers report that parenting is extremely important to their identity.4 Mothers spent four times as many hours on child care as fathers in 1965, and only twice as many hours in 2010.5 Cross-nationally, between 1965 and 2003, men’s portion of unpaid family work went from under 20 percent to almost 35 percent,6 where of course it has remained ever since.7

Historians have documented significant changes in fatherhood in the last five hundred years. In colonial times (~1600–1800) work took place on family farms, and men were responsible for their children’s education and moral upbringing. During industrialization (~1800–1950), waged work moved outside the home, bifurcating the lives of Western men and women into separate spheres, the public and the private. Women were tasked with unpaid domestic duty even when they also brought in wages with home-based or other often marginalized efforts. Men went to work in factories and stores. Fathers became distant and uninvolved. Finally, with urbanization in the last half-century-plus, there was an increase in maternal employment and earnings, creating the conditions that spawned the modern, involved father.8 He takes his kids to school. He knows where they keep their socks. He’s responsive to nightmares and to vomit. He does not refer to being alone with his children as babysitting. He attends parent-teacher conferences. He makes dinner some of the time.

The arc of the moral universe is long, and it has bent toward justice, and now women have it better than their mothers and than theirs. You don’t have to be a history major to have absorbed this merciful fact. It wasn’t so long ago that married women had no legal rights at all because they were their husband’s property.9 (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.)10 Until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, it was legal for certain classes of employers to fire or refuse to employ a married woman because she already had a job—as the physical and emotional laborer of her family.11 Only in 1980 did the U.S. Census officially stop calling every husband “the head of household.”12 I came of age in a time of equal opportunities in education and entry-level employment for young women, and I assumed this trajectory to have a boundless run. In podcasts, I’d hear women like Sheila Nevins, the longtime president of documentary films at HBO, born in 1939, explaining the difficulty of beginning a career in theater after finishing her MFA at the Yale School of Drama: “[My husband] wanted me home evenings. And he wanted me home weekends. So like theater is evenings and weekends so that nixed any chance of theater.” (This was her first husband, whom she “long ago divorced.”13) But that was marriage in the 1960s. A man could assert his desires and expect his wife to cede to them, no matter the cost to her personhood. It sounded just so very long ago.

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.

It’s easier to feel grateful for all that has changed than to acknowledge all that has yet to. Gratitude is the precursor to less conflict rather than more. For women raising children with the modern, involved father, there is some pressure—self-imposed and otherwise—to land on the side of appreciation, of sugar and spice and everything nice. (“When a dad comes, we clap,” reports Jay Miranda, a mother and blogger from Los Angeles, describing her weekly mommy-and-me class.14)

How lucky to share egalitarian ideals about marriage, even if they don’t always manifest in behavior. After all, those ideals are still not universal. Molly, twenty-seven, a foster care worker and mother to a toddler in Tennessee, tells me, “It’s unusual to see equal partnership around here. Even my friends without kids yet will say, ‘I’m working late, so I have to make sure I have dinner prepared for my husband.’ I would die if my husband ever threw a fit because I was working late and he had to feed himself. So when I say I’m grateful to be married to him, I mean it, even though I’m really spent from doing most all the work for our son.”

Shannon, forty-two, an Oklahoma City mother who works as a court liaison, explains to me, “Where I live, it’s still very backwards and old-school. My husband thinks he is supposed to bring home a check and do nothing else. He makes no bones about it. It’s not that bad. He doesn’t beat me. He doesn’t drink excessively. I’ve learned how to manage things to where I can keep everything done. There’s no point in fighting about it now, it’s not going to change.” Though she adds, “In all honesty, life would be easier if I were single. I wouldn’t be expecting anyone to help me, and I wouldn’t be upset if they didn’t.” Oklahoma, it’s worth noting, is among the U.S. states with the highest divorce rates.15

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. Michelle, forty-four, a Portland, Oregon, marketer and mother of a nine-year-old, says, “I don’t know how equitable we are. But I do feel really lucky when I hear about other people’s husbands. I have so many friends whose husbands have never put their child to bed because it’s her job, because she’s the mom.”

Laura, thirty-eight, a New York City business owner and mother of a four-year-old, tells me she feels like a single parent but agrees with her husband that things could be a lot worse. 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.”

Erica, thirty-eight, a project manager in Portland, Oregon, and the mother of two kids under seven, expresses her mixed feelings like this: “He’s great with the kids when he’s here, and from friends I talk to, my husband does a lot more.” She interrupts her thought to make sure I’ll be changing her name (I am changing all parents’ names). They’ve just started couples therapy, and she feels guilty talking about this. “He’s on his phone or computer while I’m running around like a crazy person getting the kids’ stuff, doing the laundry. He has his coffee in the morning, reading his phone, while I’m packing lunches, getting our daughter’s clothes out, helping our son with his homework. He just sits there. He doesn’t do it on purpose. He has no awareness of what’s happening around him. I ask him about it, and he gets defensive. It’s the same in the evening. He helps with dinner, but then I’m off to doing toothbrushing and bedtime, and he’ll be sitting there on his phone.”

Why do men act this way? Why do women tolerate it?

“Conventions embodying male dominance have changed much less in ‘the personal’ than in the job world,” New York University sociologist Paula England, author of The Gender Revolution, Uneven and Stalled, tells me from behind the desk in her wide-windowed office overlooking Greenwich Village. “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.”

Indeed, many of the women I spoke with—the partners of the modern, involved fathers—remain in what journalist Jill Filipovic, in her book The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness, refers to as “a strange limbo where men’s actions haven’t totally caught up to women’s expectations.”16 Or, as Berkeley psychologists and pioneering family researchers Carolyn and Philip Cowan have put it, the ideology of the new egalitarian couple is way ahead of its time.17 Monique, thirty-two, the mother of a toddler in Queens, New York, explains how her husband sees the problem: “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.”

I’ll take the time to state here—and then, because it is obvious, I will not repeat it again in the course of this book—that the vast majority of modern, involved fathers are well-intentioned, reasonable human beings. Today fewer men are in touch with their childr...