My grandmother is a big believer in the power of a greeting card. Every January, she carefully populates her wall calendar with a year’s worth of birthdays, anniversaries, and other notable occasions. On her routine trips to the Hallmark store, she rarely leaves with fewer than a dozen cards. Grandma never forgets to send a thank you note, and you’d better believe she notices when someone forgets to thank her.
A couple years back, my grandmother’s nephew and his wife had a baby, and Grandma dutifully sent off a gift. But a month later, the thank you card still hadn’t materialized. This perceived slight sparked Grandma’s anger—not at her nephew, but at his wife, who we’ll call Laura to protect the innocent. “Laura never sent us a thank-you card,” she huffed on one of our weekly phone calls, before going on to list the woman’s other failings, which include not cooking dinner for her family.
At the time, I was new to the field of gender sociology. I’d been reading about how one reason women do more of the housework and childcare is that they are the ones “held accountable” for things like how clean a home is, how well-behaved the children are, and, yes, whether the family fulfills its obligations to extended kin.
Naively, I assumed this accountability was largely symbolic, perhaps even in women’s heads. Surely in the second decade of the twenty-first century it is the perception or fear of others’ judgment, rather than actual judgment, that prompts women to take up a mop and broom before their mother-in-law visits.
The incident I privately termed thank-you-gate cleared up that misconception real fast. My grandmother’s blood relative—who presumably has the skills to address an envelope or throw together a casserole—got off scot-free, while his wife shouldered the blame. Though she never said as much, the subtext of my grandmother’s complaint was that her niece-in-law (is that a term?) was derelict in her womanly duties.
This is perhaps an extreme example, but I’m confident that the pattern of judgment and blame falling disproportionately on women did not end with my grandmother’s generation.
I’ve interviewed a number of couples, currently in their 30s and 40s, who are trying—and in some cases succeeding—to live out their egalitarian ideals. Many of them face subtle (or not-so-subtle) pushback from friends, family, teachers, doctors, and the like. There was the woman whose pediatrician commented on how very nice it was to finally see Mom at a check-up, after years of only seeing Dad. Or the man who struggled to convince his mother that his wife was “not a slacker,” even if he did do most of the cooking.
In other cases, the problem is less about pushback than about well-meaning people’s reliance on inaccurate assumptions. These are at play when the school calls Mom in case of an emergency, even though Dad is listed first. Or when friends text Mom to ask what they can bring to dinner, because they fail to consider the possibility that Dad is in charge of the menu.
No single instance of criticism or implied judgment is likely to significantly harm these couples. Cumulatively, though, the slights take a toll, reminding the couple that they are swimming upstream. Egalitarian women need to prove over and over again that you can be a good mom without taking your kids to every birthday party. Egalitarian men need to remind themselves that being the only Dad at the birthday party says nothing in particular about their masculinity, regardless of the jokes other parents may make.
I bring up these stories in part because much of the writing and thinking about household gender (in)equality takes place at one of two levels. Often, we focus on individuals and couples: what can you do to make your marriage more equal? How can you get your partner to do their share of the work?
Or, we focus on capital-S Society, and how it’s broken in ways that impede gender equality. There isn’t enough high-quality, affordable childcare. Employers expect their employees to be on-call at all hours, or they routinely demand overwork, or they grant too little paid childcare.
These individual- and society-level issues are critical. We should work to bring our personal behaviors in line with our beliefs. We should fight for better family policies. But there is also a community-level set of problems, and a community-level set of solutions. In between working on your own relationship and, you know, fixing American culture, there are a lot of ways to be a better “ally” in the push for gender equity.
What might such allyship look like? One relatively easy solution is to short-circuit your assumptions about how different-gender couples do (or should) divide responsibilities. This may mean emailing both partners with a question about scheduling a social gathering or what to buy a child for her birthday, for instance, rather than defaulting to Mom. Err on the side of overcommunicating until you know the couple’s preference—or, better yet, just ask!
If you work with parents in any official capacity, you likely have opportunities to build gender-neutral assumptions into your policies. That might mean explicitly asking which parent should be called first in an emergency or defaulting to including both partners on any email updates. And then honor those preferences! I’ve heard from multiple couples that even though they listed Dad first, Mom still gets the calls. Twitter concurs:
None of this is especially revolutionary. Still, you can rest easier knowing that you’ve done your small part to normalize a range of different parenting arrangements and to retrain your brain away from holding women responsible for domestic affairs. (Grandma, I’m looking at you…)
Have you ever been on the receiving end of others’ judgments or mistaken assumptions about your role? If so, what happened? Bonus points if you have any particularly witty comebacks to recommend! Comment here or shoot me an email (daminger@g.harvard.edu).
For your consideration: My absolute favorite yoga studio is o2, based in Somerville, MA. They do creative pose sequences, and their classes tend to be more fast-paced and workout-like than a lot of the others I’ve tried. If that appeals to you, check out their livestreamed classes. Or better yet, if you’re in the Boston area, come join me at the studio! I knew I missed in-person classes, but I didn’t realize how much until I recently started going again.
Bonus rec: If you’re a fan of yoga, chances are you’ve come across the YouTube sensation that is Yoga with Adrienne. If so (and quite possibly, even if not), you will love this profile of her dog Benji. I literally LOL’d throughout.