My childhood friend Mollie sent me not one, but two copies of her former professor's book, when she noticed that I was thinking and writing a lot about work/family balance issues (thanks Mollie!). Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples Can Have it All by Sharing it All by Joanna Strober and Sharon Meers is a deeply-researched, very practical guide to getting real about some of the most critical unfinished business of contemporary feminism.
Unlike Linda Hirshman's Get to Work, which leaves many readers feeling judged and misunderstood, or Leslie Bennett's The Feminine Mistake, which leaves many readers thinking doomsday thoughts, Strober and Meers approach the subject with healthy doses of both realism and optimism. They are women who have been through it, and lived to tell the tale. (Both are heterosexual, and so their own life examples are from this perspective. Unfortunately they didn't do much to look at non-hetero couples or non-marrying types).
After reviewing all the research that proves that dual working families are actually healthier, happier, and more economically viable, they go on to talk about some of the roadblocks to making it work and their suggestions for getting past those roadblocks.
One of the insights that really struck a personal chord was that women have to truly let go of the notion that they are inherently more fit to parent, that they can simply do it better, by virtue of being women.
This essentialism has seeped into my own thinking, I realized upon further reflection, and wouldn't serve my future partner or kids. Even language is an issue, they explain: the shift from my baby to our baby in one's mind can actually change the dynamic of shared parenting.
They advocate lots of interesting ways to have a shared parenting plan--from low tech like a white board in the kitchen that everyone writes things that need to get done on to high tech like a shared Outlook calendar. But doesn't all this "planning" get tiresome? Isn't there all this writing on how peer marriages end up un-eroticized? They've got an answer for that too:
Working couples need to problem solve more than 'traditional' couples with one breadwinner simply because daily planning tends to be more complex. But the ongoing negotiation and interacting is its own kind of intimacy--common ground, common interests, common life.
I'm not sure about all that in the real messy, emotional struggle that is egalitarian partnership, but I know one thing. Reading this book makes one feel like nothing has to be perfect and everything is actually possible. It touches on both the psychological blocks that have been keeping women from the work/family balance that they crave (guilt, perfectionism, not asking for needs, essentializing their own maternal gifts) and the practical ones (negotiating, working smarter for less hours, giving up some responsibilities). Definitely one to add to the "how the hell does anyone make it all work?" bookshelf.
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One of the insights that really struck a personal chord was that women have to truly let go of the notion that they are inherently more fit to parent, that they can simply do it better, by virtue of being women.
Hopefully we can get media and advertising to start helping with that message. No more "Dr. Mom," please.
Couldn´t agree more with the italics. Btw, that is something the father´s right movement is saying for years...
A broken clock is right twice a day.
MRAs sometimes have valid points, but since they're less concerned with challenging gender stereotypes and more concerned with hating women, they don't do much more than make a lot of noise.
NO, I think the MRA's use that as a cover for their hate against women. After all, its feminists that have been saying 50/50 and fathers should be involved in kids lives, not MRA's.
The way I see it, we can propose or we can oppose. Oppositional thinking has driven many of our positions but I don't think Feminism should be limited to just pushing back. Propositional thinking such as expressed by this book really is what we're needing.
Sometimes there is no well documented, well reasoned strategy to be undertaken and followed to a T. My parents, and probably many peoples' parents fell prey to the notion that successful parenting was just a matter of reading the right books or listening to the right teacher. I wish it were that simple, but sometimes trusting ourselves for once might be the best solution of all.
There seems to be an awful lot of assumptions and generalizations made here about single income families. Yuck.
I hadn't noticed that. Could you elaborate?
... women have to truly let go of the notion that they are inherently more fit ... that they can simply do it better, by virtue of being women.
I hear things like this all the time from women, but with regard to CLEANING rather than child-raising, and not necessarily based on "women-do-it-better" essentialism. I've had one married coworker tell me that her husband intentionally does a shitty job of cleaning things so that she won't ask him to do it again. Another told me that she thought her husband didn't do a thorough or decent enough job of cleaning, and she got so tired of constantly asking him to fix it that now she automatically does it herself. So I wonder ... what's a couple supposed to do in this situation? Cleaning is a subjective task; different people have different ideas of "clean" and varying levels of tolerance for uncleanliness before they get so annoyed they'll do a task themselves. I, for example, am not much bothered by a pile of dishes in the sink, though most people I talk to think it's disgusting. Some people feel things have to be sparkling; some don't mind never making the bed.
And what if some men really do do crappy jobs of cleaning half the time, perhaps "intentionally"? And why? And what could a woman do about it?
How should a couple reconcile what is "clean enough"?
You do it the way a functional couple deals with all conflicts-- by sitting down, talking it out, and being willing to revisit the situation later. For chores, the couple should talk about what chores they feel are a priority, what needs to be done in each room and how often for it to be considered clean, and find a way to decide together how to reconcile that difference. One partner gets away with crappy cleaning jobs because they aren't being asked to step it up. It sometimes feels easier to ignore the shoddy work and just take over instead of hashing it out, but in the long run it's better to talk it all through.
My relationship is by no means perfect in this area, but one time my husband and I made separate lists of every single cleaning/maintenance chore we do for the household (from lawn mowing to car maintenance to picking up clutter to toilet scrubbing) then we compared lists. My husband was SHOCKED to see how much more I was actually doing every single day. He genuinely thought we were closer to 50/50 before he saw my list. It was a great place to start talking about how to reach parity.
Another help can be printing out cleaning lists from a place like flylady.com which gives a list of every single thing that should be cleaned in each room and how often. Then you can decide together what you agree with on the list and make that the new "rule" for what constitutes, say, cleaning the bathroom.
"women have to truly let go of the notion that they are inherently more fit ... that they can simply do it better, by virtue of being women."
I think society encourages quite the opposite self reflective impulse in mothers. Ie, that theyre not doinga good enough job, that working will cause them to become psychotics, ect, ect. The media perpetuate this crap. I remember reading that kids say they didnt feel neglected by their mothers regardless of whether or not they worked or stayed at home but most all of them reported feeling neglected by their fathers.
"I've had one married coworker tell me that her husband intentionally does a shitty job of cleaning things so that she won't ask him to do it again. Another told me that she thought her husband didn't do a thorough or decent enough job of cleaning, and she got so tired of constantly asking him to fix it that now she automatically does it herself. So I wonder ... what's a couple supposed to do in this situation?"
In my family we call this "strategic incompetence." And I think it's rampant in our society, if for no other reason than it's so effective. My boyfriend and I deal with it by being honest about it. He is strategically incompetent about cleaning the bathroom and driving. I am strategically incompetent about cooking and making the bed. Basically, we've decided to just let each other refuse to develop certain skills if we really, really hate them. And it works! By being honest about it, it's much simpler to make sure we're running our household in a fair way. It really comes in handy - for example, the other day, he wanted to show me how to cook something so I could help him. I said, "No - strategic incompetence! I don't want to learn!" And while that may sound ridiculous, he does the same thing if I get tired of cleaning the bathroom and want him to help. It works out really well in the long run, and no one gets resentful.
My husband and I are taking a slightly different approach to splitting the work 50/50: we're each being the primary parent serially; i.e., I did more of the child rearing/housework for the first 10 years of our relationship, and he's going to take on the next 10 years.
We've both always worked, but previously he had an intense job with lots of travel that did not lend itself to equal parenting. But he left that last year to start his own business. Now that he's at home to cover more, I've moved in to a more intense job.
It doesn't get us completely away from the "mom as better nurturer" mindset. It think we both fell in to the trap that I dealt better with the baby/little kid phase. But I think he'll be great at dealing with the teenage boy phase, which we are rapidly approaching.