Lyz, I might have missed it, but a key dynamic in motherhood as a "vocation" is that the stay-at-home mother/wife remains in the position of lower power and authority as compared to the working spouse. My mother would have fled my abusive father decades ago but she was an immigrant with children and had no funds or support system of her own. Later, when we (kids) left, she gained a good job and pension against my father's wishes. THEN she massively rearranged her relationship with my father for the better, he had no choice but to settle down and treat her better. It is a reality that women who have access to financial security have a fighting chance for a more balanced relationship, hence less abuse. Anyone who thinks that relative earning power and options to walk away for a better life do not influence the mutual respect and marital power dynamics hasn't been married for very long.
There's no doubt that wealth changes the dynamics. Handled properly, it can create more fairness in a marriage. With hired help, a wife can have options to pursue a career and generally live a life where she chooses how she wants to be a mother and wife. When it's a choice, not an obligation, I think that makes a huge difference.
Because the subject of your post is motherhood. And that's the lived reality with most couples. We can't pretend that housework is shared equally in contrast to the surveys that you've put forth.
A housekeeper and a nanny will help both parents, but on average they'll help the woman more.
They only help the woman if you think of raising your kids as woman’s work. Your implicit bias is showing here. Literally the point of this article is talking about the implicit bias that sees this work as women’s work. A housekeeper and a nanny are still poorly paid work and not the solution you think it is. And I’m asking you to take a second as interrogate why you think this is the solution and your own implicit bias. Just because it’s statistically true doesn’t mean it’s actually true.
Who pays for that hired help? The woman? From her new "be grateful I let you do this" salary? The reality is: the interior duties of a household are considered women's work regardless of who earns what and why. Most marriages have had a communication divorce in the first 5 years; they only survive because of economic and/or social expectations.
Look, if it takes wealth to create fairness in the marriage and opportunities for the wife, then the wife would do better to use that wealth to extricate herself from an inequitable marriage to someone who apparently couldn't be arsed to do his fair share and had to buy his way to the appearance of equality. Wealth doesn't create fairness that wasn't already there. It just lets the husband off the hook.
What if the wealth was there from the beginning? And what if the wife chooses to remain home with the children?
Some marriages are inequitable, some are not. I've become more nuanced in my own views on marriage, divorce, and the burdens imposed upon women. The key word is nuanced. Happy marriages that are true partnerships exist. That doesn't conflict with the fact that some marriages are soul crushing.
Neither of those questions is relevant, nor is the fact that some marriages are equitable. Your comment posits the presence of unfairness in a hypothetical marriage and states that that unfairness can be alleviated by wealth. The wife's situation may be improved, but she is not magically in an equitable relationship by the addition of wealth.
This was a fascinating thread. It shows how easy it is for us as men--even good and well-meaning and progressive men as I am and I'm assuming David is--can see these issues in light of our personal situations. Which doesn't make us completely wrong or even bad, but does show how the patriarchal systems that we have unconsciously lived in and supported for our lives set the boundaries for societal discussions.
We live in a dualistic culture and all of us want to be on the side of the angels. What I have come to believe is that we need to learn the art and grace of holding truths in tension. It is true that not all men are clueless products of systemic patriarchy; it's also true that we need to fundamentally change the basis upon which value is made, including (especially) rethinking free market capitalism.
As a side note: I think an additional perspective that can be held with all of the above in mind is this: it may be true that all work is, in some sense, sacred. And if "sacred" is too charged a term, maybe it's better to say that everything we do is both a physical and spiritual act. We have chosen to value certain kinds of work and, as Lyz has written, glorified motherhood as a way to keep women from competing with men and limiting their influence. Since I believe there is no returning to the world Harrison Butker pines for, it's going to be interesting to see how we as a planet rethink our societies, our politics, our faiths, our lives.
You are ignoring the systems that we are critiquing and instead making it personal. There are systems that perpetuate inequality and that drive inequality even in marriages that feel "equitable" to toss that aside and just be like "personal choice" really intentionally ignores what's at stake here.
I'm agreeing that some marriages are inequitable, that "the slow erosion of a marriage due to the unbearable burden of domestic labor" is unfair, and I'm glad that people like you are calling out those marriages. And I also agree that women "should be as fully equal as the men."
I'm not sure what we're disagreeing about unless your position is that ALL marriages are fatally flawed. In which case, yes, I think your position is unsupportable.
You come to my newsletter and in the comments make some pretty blanket and uninformed statements and then, when you get pushback or people disagreeing you double down. I wrote a whole book about how the system of heterosexual marriage is unequal. This newsletter is about the ways we ferishize and spiritualize that inequality. You can either engage in good faith and listen and learn or double down and attack and I see you are choosing the latter. FWIW I simply do not care what you think about my position as I’m a literal expert on this topic. But it’s worth pointing out that your comments here are so widely missing the mark of the conversation it might be worth some self reflection.
My ex used to pick me up every payday and take me to the bank, where he deposited it into the joint account - which was a passbook that I did not have access to.
He did not work, and I did not drive. Questioning any of his actions resulted in shouting that felt that it could at any time tip over into physical violence.
It wasn't until 2000 that I had a card so I could take money from the account, and 2006 when I had the password to the account so I could see how much was in the account. Not that it was any help, as he spent most of it as soon as the deposit appeared in the account.
In 2007 I was finally in a position to open my own bank account, and that was when I could finally plan my escape.
In 2021 he left in an ambulance, and the social workers at the hospital finally listened and didn't automatically send him back to me. It was the only way I could get him out of my home - and yes, it was only in my name.
Right, money is power, and saying you can't have it is the ultimate move. If you think about the meat packers, janitors, trash haulers, fast food workers, cleaners, and countless others we don't deem worthy of a living wage, it shines a glaring light on the misogyny of "women's work." Capitalism continues to look for an "other," by color, nationality, or gender, or what have you, and push its face in the dirt. Specifically, their own dirt, which they require to be cleaned up, but refuse to do so.
As a man who has done care work for more than three decades (nursing), I'm often criticized, pitied even, for "settling" for my job; the presumption is that I wasn't good enough, and/or lacked the opportunity, and/or the ability, to be a physician. I chose nursing because nurses do what I wanted to do. Care work is also marginalized because it undermines power based on wealth, fear, aggression, and force. It shatters class barriers. It removes, often literally, the emperor's clothes. Nurses and teachers know secrets.
A new friend recently told me his son is a nurse. It never occurred to me that he was a nurse because he didn’t have the ability to be a doctor! My only thought was great!
There was one memorable incident in ICU that comes to mind. I was cleaning up a patient who had just suffered an unfortunate combination of IV equipment failures simultaneously, what happened wasn't dangerous, but it was messy, and the patient was unconscious and ventilated. A rather notorious and powerful surgeon was with me as I was making all this right and he whispered over my shoulder supportively "I could never do what nurses do." I just looked over my shoulder at him and deadpanned "We all know that."
Also loved that you brought in an academic perspective, because the *only* other way I have *consistently* experienced something talked about as a "vocation" (by all genders, all religions, all skeptics) was my PhD program. The "vocation" that was being an English PhD student was also exploitative: we were doing so much labor for the university for a pittance of a stipend (with no benefits), with a dismal job market ahead of us, and justifying it as "a calling." And our professors did, too. In hindsight, horrifying!
(Editing to add, DEEPLY amused at all the men in these comments. Sending you all the love and solidarity today, friend.)
I read Heretic, and I've been meaning to mention it in one of my own posts, but the writing isn't always easy. Seeing you here, I just want to say thank you so much for your work!
Ugh - so true. What has it cost me to pursue this career? Welp - deep in debt and struggling to find full-time work. No support for doing research or writing, and too exhausted from adjunct work to really get anything written.
My partner has an English PhD, and the extent to which he was exploited in the name of "vocation," and the "greater good," and "don't you want to contribute to the pursuit of knowledge?" was endlessly infuriating. And the amount of relationships I saw crumble under the strain of academic exploitation was wild. We also skipped kids because of the instability of academia and have had so many conversations about what I was willing to endure as a partner (where and how many moves I was willing to make for temp post-docs--answer: none). Not to mention how much it actually crushed his soul and turned him into a shell of his wonderful self. I am thankful every day that he is now a public school teacher with good healthcare, a union card and a pension (and he got his soul back and gets to teach Shakespeare).
So I haven't gotten far into this yet, and... scanning further, I'd say it's so complicated. I got stuck at the assertion that vocation "marries work and religious purpose." What? When did that become the primary definition? I had to look it up. Butker MAY have meant it to be interpreted that way, based on his audience, but i did not interpret it that way.
The truth is that staying in the home to do the non-stop work and drudgery of raising children, backstopping and caring for a husband, and making an ever-nicer refuge for the family unit, all while unpaid and generally underappreciated, is a horrible trap for many women. I often found it profoundly depressing. But choosing to do that job should not be denigrated; that demeans an awful lot of women. I worked full-time for many years, remotely, as a writer/editor/layout designer for excellent remuneration while also doing all the non-stop unpaid drudgery, and I would absolutely say that both were vocations. Would I have preferred to choose another vocation for remuneration? Yes, but I stayed home (in a household, by the way, where we were all vociferous atheists) as much out of love and hope and belief in the people in the house, as out of the necessity for someone in the family unit to do it, and I was by far the most capable. I had a lot of dreams that I did not fulfill, and often wonder if I should have, could have, made different choices. But II will never know.
But what made you the most capable? The mental labor of the home and family? If someone else, your spouse for instance, had stayed home, wouldn't they have then become the most capable?
What made me the most capable? Prior training as the oldest daughter in a trad family, a higher level of overall intelligence, and a much stronger ability to multi-task and stay focused. My husband agrees with that assessment, then and now, easier for him to do than most men, I suspect, because he is much younger than I am. I'm pretty sure he would never have become nearly as capable because he too was raised in a trad family and got no training at all (much less modeling) as far as I could see, and is as ADHD as they come. Even today, after 6+ years of living more than half the time as a subcontractor in other cities, I am confident I could not live in any household that he ran. However, I would not extrapolate much from my individual experience to apply more widely, except that I strongly believe most marriages are pretty crappy for women, and am anti-cohabitation for men and women in general. I think women should be able to select someone to mate with if they desire, and discard them when they get in the way of a happy life. For years, I've been pondering the imperative of communal living options for women and their children. No men allowed.
Thank you for calling out the ‘anti-capitalist’ pseudo-leftists who complain about women’s ambition. These are the people who deride ‘girlboss’ feminism for demanding that men vote for women candidates with a few flaws instead of waiting for The Perfect Jane Unbeatable, because Flawed Woman is running against an open fascist.
I formulate this as ‘misogyny is respectable.’ Misogyny is not worse than racism, but people can advocate horribly misogynistic policies or opinions in places and organizations that would never tolerate obvious racism. The quoted Times article is an example of this. Progressives need, to use a particularly apt metaphor, to clean their own houses now.
As I read this, I kept thinking about this classic article from my field, where Fobazi Ettarh coins the term vocational awe: https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/ Other fields have started to adopt it (occasionally not citing the source which adds some wild layers, but I digress).
Capitalism is basically the exploitation of unpaid labor!!! Opting out to be UNPAID HOUSEHOLD LABOR for someone who works IS NOT OPTING OUT it’s how the system was designed
Just brilliant, Lyz. I always say, if childcare and housework are so rewarding and fulfilling (and sacred), why don’t more men want to opt out of the workforce to do it full-time ?
As someone who lived in the patriarchal culture of Western Christianity for most of my life, I think I can shed a little light on this. I intuitively hated the privilege of men even as I saw it and knew that I benefitted from it. This intuitive understanding is what eventually led me (among other reasons) to leave this culture.
Why did I not leave sooner or why was I unable to see the truth of your comment here? It was because I had bought into a well-constructed theology that defined the roles of men and women in a marriage, in a society. Or to put it in other terms: I believed that God had set these roles in place and that this was what was taught in the Bible. My way to freedom from this thinking was unravelling the assumptions upon which my faith had been built, but that is another story. The point is: I stayed in the role of "head of the home" because I believed this was what God wanted. It took me over fifty years to extricate myself from this thinking.
I chose to marry a man who is 10 years younger than I am, who had yet to start a career and was still raft-guiding, rangering, skiing, mountain-climbing when I met him. I had early retired with a substantial buyout and was "working" at an community activist type job and back in school studying what I wanted. I firmly believe that the difference in our ages and power dynamic has played an instrumental role in how successfully we have lived together (bickering all the while) throughout our lives. I strongly recommend women marrying men who are a lot younger, but I don't see that it has grown any more common.
So glad there’s at least some work being done by Luther and other mainline seminaries on this. I’m a former Lutheran pastor and the comments I got on my children and my house while SERVING THE CHURCH were absolutely wild.
When you try to parlay the “sacred” work of mothering/childcare into a paying profession the framing changes quite a bit. The pay isn’t anywhere near what it should be and employers are frequently petty, suspicious and judgmental. Raising children is the most important job in the world! You want guaranteed hours and PTO? Fuck you! You’re lucky to have a job!!
I grew up the eldest of 6 kids. My mom married at 19, had me at 20, and had the last kid at 27. Kid 3 and 4 are 11 months apart. Kid 5 was born with Williams Syndrome so has some intellectual and physical disability (my mother was 26 when she had this child). My dad worked and wasn't the kind of dad who came right home after work (he preferred pool). While I know with 100% certainty that both parents loved us, I also know that my mother NEVER saw it as a vocation. It was what you did because you got married and had kids (Catholics). And neither parent wanted any of us girls (4 of us) OR boys to feel tied down to marriage or kids. They just felt like they didn't have choices.
Sometimes I think these "vocation" and sanctimonious moms are just trying to make themselves feel better about choices they might regret but don't want to admit to. Sort of like Trump voters doubling down
Can so relate to your Catholic upbringing. Overwhelmed parents who I know loved us doing their duty but not having enough left after care work and paid work to fully attune to all their children when they were babies. I was the second of five, 12 months after the oldest and a very sensitive child. The sister that followed me 24 months later was also. I now understand a big part of the mental health issues and suffering my sister and I have experienced for decades were because my mother (I am not blaming her!) did not have the time or energy bond with us, at least in the way we needed. After child #5, when I was 10, I saw my Mom had birth control pills in the bathroom cabinet. My catechism teacher at church told me that birth control was a "mortal sin", so I thought my mother was going to hell. I am still angry about the misogyny of the Catholic Church.
My dad recalled asking a priest if they could use birth control. Of course they said no. I think my mom didn’t even ask, she just did it. She’s spiritually devout but disregards the “rules”.
I always say they did the best they could with what they knew/had at the time.
Lyz, I might have missed it, but a key dynamic in motherhood as a "vocation" is that the stay-at-home mother/wife remains in the position of lower power and authority as compared to the working spouse. My mother would have fled my abusive father decades ago but she was an immigrant with children and had no funds or support system of her own. Later, when we (kids) left, she gained a good job and pension against my father's wishes. THEN she massively rearranged her relationship with my father for the better, he had no choice but to settle down and treat her better. It is a reality that women who have access to financial security have a fighting chance for a more balanced relationship, hence less abuse. Anyone who thinks that relative earning power and options to walk away for a better life do not influence the mutual respect and marital power dynamics hasn't been married for very long.
There's no doubt that wealth changes the dynamics. Handled properly, it can create more fairness in a marriage. With hired help, a wife can have options to pursue a career and generally live a life where she chooses how she wants to be a mother and wife. When it's a choice, not an obligation, I think that makes a huge difference.
With hired help, a husband can have options to pursue a career and generally live a life where he chooses how he wants to be a father and a husband.
So fascinating that you perceive the hired help replacing the women’s work
Because the subject of your post is motherhood. And that's the lived reality with most couples. We can't pretend that housework is shared equally in contrast to the surveys that you've put forth.
A housekeeper and a nanny will help both parents, but on average they'll help the woman more.
They only help the woman if you think of raising your kids as woman’s work. Your implicit bias is showing here. Literally the point of this article is talking about the implicit bias that sees this work as women’s work. A housekeeper and a nanny are still poorly paid work and not the solution you think it is. And I’m asking you to take a second as interrogate why you think this is the solution and your own implicit bias. Just because it’s statistically true doesn’t mean it’s actually true.
My bias is based on all your writing about the inequality of marriage work
My observation holds that on average having a nanny and a housekeeper will in today’s society provide more flexibility to a woman than a man
And I’m specifically addressing what happens in wealthy households where in many cases the employees are well paid with benefits
The original comment was that wealth changes the calculus
And if a woman chooses to be a full time mother, I’d assume you’d agree that is different than being given no choice by default
So men don't benefit when their kids are cared for? Fascinating assumptions here. And I think very revelatory of your thinking.
Who pays for that hired help? The woman? From her new "be grateful I let you do this" salary? The reality is: the interior duties of a household are considered women's work regardless of who earns what and why. Most marriages have had a communication divorce in the first 5 years; they only survive because of economic and/or social expectations.
Look, if it takes wealth to create fairness in the marriage and opportunities for the wife, then the wife would do better to use that wealth to extricate herself from an inequitable marriage to someone who apparently couldn't be arsed to do his fair share and had to buy his way to the appearance of equality. Wealth doesn't create fairness that wasn't already there. It just lets the husband off the hook.
What if the wealth was there from the beginning? And what if the wife chooses to remain home with the children?
Some marriages are inequitable, some are not. I've become more nuanced in my own views on marriage, divorce, and the burdens imposed upon women. The key word is nuanced. Happy marriages that are true partnerships exist. That doesn't conflict with the fact that some marriages are soul crushing.
Neither of those questions is relevant, nor is the fact that some marriages are equitable. Your comment posits the presence of unfairness in a hypothetical marriage and states that that unfairness can be alleviated by wealth. The wife's situation may be improved, but she is not magically in an equitable relationship by the addition of wealth.
This was a fascinating thread. It shows how easy it is for us as men--even good and well-meaning and progressive men as I am and I'm assuming David is--can see these issues in light of our personal situations. Which doesn't make us completely wrong or even bad, but does show how the patriarchal systems that we have unconsciously lived in and supported for our lives set the boundaries for societal discussions.
We live in a dualistic culture and all of us want to be on the side of the angels. What I have come to believe is that we need to learn the art and grace of holding truths in tension. It is true that not all men are clueless products of systemic patriarchy; it's also true that we need to fundamentally change the basis upon which value is made, including (especially) rethinking free market capitalism.
As a side note: I think an additional perspective that can be held with all of the above in mind is this: it may be true that all work is, in some sense, sacred. And if "sacred" is too charged a term, maybe it's better to say that everything we do is both a physical and spiritual act. We have chosen to value certain kinds of work and, as Lyz has written, glorified motherhood as a way to keep women from competing with men and limiting their influence. Since I believe there is no returning to the world Harrison Butker pines for, it's going to be interesting to see how we as a planet rethink our societies, our politics, our faiths, our lives.
You are ignoring the systems that we are critiquing and instead making it personal. There are systems that perpetuate inequality and that drive inequality even in marriages that feel "equitable" to toss that aside and just be like "personal choice" really intentionally ignores what's at stake here.
I'm agreeing that some marriages are inequitable, that "the slow erosion of a marriage due to the unbearable burden of domestic labor" is unfair, and I'm glad that people like you are calling out those marriages. And I also agree that women "should be as fully equal as the men."
I'm not sure what we're disagreeing about unless your position is that ALL marriages are fatally flawed. In which case, yes, I think your position is unsupportable.
You come to my newsletter and in the comments make some pretty blanket and uninformed statements and then, when you get pushback or people disagreeing you double down. I wrote a whole book about how the system of heterosexual marriage is unequal. This newsletter is about the ways we ferishize and spiritualize that inequality. You can either engage in good faith and listen and learn or double down and attack and I see you are choosing the latter. FWIW I simply do not care what you think about my position as I’m a literal expert on this topic. But it’s worth pointing out that your comments here are so widely missing the mark of the conversation it might be worth some self reflection.
My ex used to pick me up every payday and take me to the bank, where he deposited it into the joint account - which was a passbook that I did not have access to.
He did not work, and I did not drive. Questioning any of his actions resulted in shouting that felt that it could at any time tip over into physical violence.
It wasn't until 2000 that I had a card so I could take money from the account, and 2006 when I had the password to the account so I could see how much was in the account. Not that it was any help, as he spent most of it as soon as the deposit appeared in the account.
In 2007 I was finally in a position to open my own bank account, and that was when I could finally plan my escape.
In 2021 he left in an ambulance, and the social workers at the hospital finally listened and didn't automatically send him back to me. It was the only way I could get him out of my home - and yes, it was only in my name.
Earning power, sadly, isn't the whole story.
oh /anne. this is tragic. So glad for your escape and new normal. <3
Thank you Dana!
People don't realize it can take years to extricate yourself from these abusive relationships. So glad you are finding a new path.
If we could 'just leave', it wouldn't be domestic abuse. Making it almost impossible to leave is an essential part of the abuse.
I will remember this for a long time!!!
Thank you! ♥️
And who has to make that gingham dress in the first place?
Right, money is power, and saying you can't have it is the ultimate move. If you think about the meat packers, janitors, trash haulers, fast food workers, cleaners, and countless others we don't deem worthy of a living wage, it shines a glaring light on the misogyny of "women's work." Capitalism continues to look for an "other," by color, nationality, or gender, or what have you, and push its face in the dirt. Specifically, their own dirt, which they require to be cleaned up, but refuse to do so.
As a man who has done care work for more than three decades (nursing), I'm often criticized, pitied even, for "settling" for my job; the presumption is that I wasn't good enough, and/or lacked the opportunity, and/or the ability, to be a physician. I chose nursing because nurses do what I wanted to do. Care work is also marginalized because it undermines power based on wealth, fear, aggression, and force. It shatters class barriers. It removes, often literally, the emperor's clothes. Nurses and teachers know secrets.
A new friend recently told me his son is a nurse. It never occurred to me that he was a nurse because he didn’t have the ability to be a doctor! My only thought was great!
There was one memorable incident in ICU that comes to mind. I was cleaning up a patient who had just suffered an unfortunate combination of IV equipment failures simultaneously, what happened wasn't dangerous, but it was messy, and the patient was unconscious and ventilated. A rather notorious and powerful surgeon was with me as I was making all this right and he whispered over my shoulder supportively "I could never do what nurses do." I just looked over my shoulder at him and deadpanned "We all know that."
Lyz, this is so, so good.
Also loved that you brought in an academic perspective, because the *only* other way I have *consistently* experienced something talked about as a "vocation" (by all genders, all religions, all skeptics) was my PhD program. The "vocation" that was being an English PhD student was also exploitative: we were doing so much labor for the university for a pittance of a stipend (with no benefits), with a dismal job market ahead of us, and justifying it as "a calling." And our professors did, too. In hindsight, horrifying!
(Editing to add, DEEPLY amused at all the men in these comments. Sending you all the love and solidarity today, friend.)
I read Heretic, and I've been meaning to mention it in one of my own posts, but the writing isn't always easy. Seeing you here, I just want to say thank you so much for your work!
That's so kind! Thank you for reading!
Coincidentally, this appeared in my Wednesday reading list just a few minutes ago:
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2024/06/05/can-parents-in-academia-have-it-all/
To quote our author: different lipstick, same pig.
Ugh - so true. What has it cost me to pursue this career? Welp - deep in debt and struggling to find full-time work. No support for doing research or writing, and too exhausted from adjunct work to really get anything written.
My partner has an English PhD, and the extent to which he was exploited in the name of "vocation," and the "greater good," and "don't you want to contribute to the pursuit of knowledge?" was endlessly infuriating. And the amount of relationships I saw crumble under the strain of academic exploitation was wild. We also skipped kids because of the instability of academia and have had so many conversations about what I was willing to endure as a partner (where and how many moves I was willing to make for temp post-docs--answer: none). Not to mention how much it actually crushed his soul and turned him into a shell of his wonderful self. I am thankful every day that he is now a public school teacher with good healthcare, a union card and a pension (and he got his soul back and gets to teach Shakespeare).
So I haven't gotten far into this yet, and... scanning further, I'd say it's so complicated. I got stuck at the assertion that vocation "marries work and religious purpose." What? When did that become the primary definition? I had to look it up. Butker MAY have meant it to be interpreted that way, based on his audience, but i did not interpret it that way.
The truth is that staying in the home to do the non-stop work and drudgery of raising children, backstopping and caring for a husband, and making an ever-nicer refuge for the family unit, all while unpaid and generally underappreciated, is a horrible trap for many women. I often found it profoundly depressing. But choosing to do that job should not be denigrated; that demeans an awful lot of women. I worked full-time for many years, remotely, as a writer/editor/layout designer for excellent remuneration while also doing all the non-stop unpaid drudgery, and I would absolutely say that both were vocations. Would I have preferred to choose another vocation for remuneration? Yes, but I stayed home (in a household, by the way, where we were all vociferous atheists) as much out of love and hope and belief in the people in the house, as out of the necessity for someone in the family unit to do it, and I was by far the most capable. I had a lot of dreams that I did not fulfill, and often wonder if I should have, could have, made different choices. But II will never know.
But what made you the most capable? The mental labor of the home and family? If someone else, your spouse for instance, had stayed home, wouldn't they have then become the most capable?
What made me the most capable? Prior training as the oldest daughter in a trad family, a higher level of overall intelligence, and a much stronger ability to multi-task and stay focused. My husband agrees with that assessment, then and now, easier for him to do than most men, I suspect, because he is much younger than I am. I'm pretty sure he would never have become nearly as capable because he too was raised in a trad family and got no training at all (much less modeling) as far as I could see, and is as ADHD as they come. Even today, after 6+ years of living more than half the time as a subcontractor in other cities, I am confident I could not live in any household that he ran. However, I would not extrapolate much from my individual experience to apply more widely, except that I strongly believe most marriages are pretty crappy for women, and am anti-cohabitation for men and women in general. I think women should be able to select someone to mate with if they desire, and discard them when they get in the way of a happy life. For years, I've been pondering the imperative of communal living options for women and their children. No men allowed.
Thank you for calling out the ‘anti-capitalist’ pseudo-leftists who complain about women’s ambition. These are the people who deride ‘girlboss’ feminism for demanding that men vote for women candidates with a few flaws instead of waiting for The Perfect Jane Unbeatable, because Flawed Woman is running against an open fascist.
I formulate this as ‘misogyny is respectable.’ Misogyny is not worse than racism, but people can advocate horribly misogynistic policies or opinions in places and organizations that would never tolerate obvious racism. The quoted Times article is an example of this. Progressives need, to use a particularly apt metaphor, to clean their own houses now.
As I read this, I kept thinking about this classic article from my field, where Fobazi Ettarh coins the term vocational awe: https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/ Other fields have started to adopt it (occasionally not citing the source which adds some wild layers, but I digress).
Wow, thanks for sharing this. I've already shared it with others.
BECAUSE CAPITALISM RESTS ON THE UNPAID LABOR OF WOMEN.
Hello you just radicalized me as an anti-capitalist
Capitalism is basically the exploitation of unpaid labor!!! Opting out to be UNPAID HOUSEHOLD LABOR for someone who works IS NOT OPTING OUT it’s how the system was designed
How many likes can I give this
Just brilliant, Lyz. I always say, if childcare and housework are so rewarding and fulfilling (and sacred), why don’t more men want to opt out of the workforce to do it full-time ?
As someone who lived in the patriarchal culture of Western Christianity for most of my life, I think I can shed a little light on this. I intuitively hated the privilege of men even as I saw it and knew that I benefitted from it. This intuitive understanding is what eventually led me (among other reasons) to leave this culture.
Why did I not leave sooner or why was I unable to see the truth of your comment here? It was because I had bought into a well-constructed theology that defined the roles of men and women in a marriage, in a society. Or to put it in other terms: I believed that God had set these roles in place and that this was what was taught in the Bible. My way to freedom from this thinking was unravelling the assumptions upon which my faith had been built, but that is another story. The point is: I stayed in the role of "head of the home" because I believed this was what God wanted. It took me over fifty years to extricate myself from this thinking.
I chose to marry a man who is 10 years younger than I am, who had yet to start a career and was still raft-guiding, rangering, skiing, mountain-climbing when I met him. I had early retired with a substantial buyout and was "working" at an community activist type job and back in school studying what I wanted. I firmly believe that the difference in our ages and power dynamic has played an instrumental role in how successfully we have lived together (bickering all the while) throughout our lives. I strongly recommend women marrying men who are a lot younger, but I don't see that it has grown any more common.
That final paragraph is so powerful.
So glad there’s at least some work being done by Luther and other mainline seminaries on this. I’m a former Lutheran pastor and the comments I got on my children and my house while SERVING THE CHURCH were absolutely wild.
When you try to parlay the “sacred” work of mothering/childcare into a paying profession the framing changes quite a bit. The pay isn’t anywhere near what it should be and employers are frequently petty, suspicious and judgmental. Raising children is the most important job in the world! You want guaranteed hours and PTO? Fuck you! You’re lucky to have a job!!
I grew up the eldest of 6 kids. My mom married at 19, had me at 20, and had the last kid at 27. Kid 3 and 4 are 11 months apart. Kid 5 was born with Williams Syndrome so has some intellectual and physical disability (my mother was 26 when she had this child). My dad worked and wasn't the kind of dad who came right home after work (he preferred pool). While I know with 100% certainty that both parents loved us, I also know that my mother NEVER saw it as a vocation. It was what you did because you got married and had kids (Catholics). And neither parent wanted any of us girls (4 of us) OR boys to feel tied down to marriage or kids. They just felt like they didn't have choices.
Sometimes I think these "vocation" and sanctimonious moms are just trying to make themselves feel better about choices they might regret but don't want to admit to. Sort of like Trump voters doubling down
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Bingo. My mother's biggest message was "don't waste your life." What that meant, she left up to us to figure out.
I think in the day when women didn’t have choices, they saw motherhood a lot differently.
Well said.
Can so relate to your Catholic upbringing. Overwhelmed parents who I know loved us doing their duty but not having enough left after care work and paid work to fully attune to all their children when they were babies. I was the second of five, 12 months after the oldest and a very sensitive child. The sister that followed me 24 months later was also. I now understand a big part of the mental health issues and suffering my sister and I have experienced for decades were because my mother (I am not blaming her!) did not have the time or energy bond with us, at least in the way we needed. After child #5, when I was 10, I saw my Mom had birth control pills in the bathroom cabinet. My catechism teacher at church told me that birth control was a "mortal sin", so I thought my mother was going to hell. I am still angry about the misogyny of the Catholic Church.
My dad recalled asking a priest if they could use birth control. Of course they said no. I think my mom didn’t even ask, she just did it. She’s spiritually devout but disregards the “rules”.
I always say they did the best they could with what they knew/had at the time.