Feminist Parenting, and Why Men Who Do Their Fair Share Aren't Doing Us a Favor

My husband does all the cooking, food preparation, and food shopping in our house. We split the cleaning. I manage the finances. We're equally involved in planing for the arrival of our child. From reading studies about birth to picking clothing and helping my family plan my baby shower, my husband has been right there alongside me every step of the way.

People constantly tell me how lucky I am, how grateful I should be, how good I have it.

I love my husband. But I'm not grateful.

Don't get me wrong. I'm thrilled to have a spouse who values an equal partnership. My issue is that this should be the default. Getting married should mean less work, not more. Otherwise, you don't have a partnership. You have a master-slave relationship.

When we praise men for doing their fair share around the house or in parenting, the message is clear: they're doing something extra. Women who do it are just being normal. This approach props up sexist norms about how to run a household, and allows men to get away with doing less than their fair share.

I constantly thank my husband for his work around the house, just as I praise him for being handsome and congratulate him for winning cases. But I'm not lucky. I chose someone who respects me. Telling me otherwise is like telling me I'm lucky that my spouse doesn't beat me.

When Men Buy Their Leisure With Women's Exhaustion 
I live in something of a bubble. Most of my friends are feminists who work full-time. When Jeff and I fight about the division of labor in our household, it's usually because I think I'm doing 5% more than my fair share, not because he won't do anything at all.

So when I step outside of this comfort zone, I'm pretty galled by what I see: women who are grateful that their husbands did the dishes once last week; women who think it is perfectly acceptable that men just won't read childbirth or parenting books; men who think a second after-work shift of endless housework is perfectly fine to inflict on their wives because, well, they're women. That's their job.

The notion that we should praise men for equality contributes directly to this idea that housework is somehow less challenging or exhausting for women. It's not. Men who play video games, read, or post on Reddit while their wives clean, read childbirth books, or play with the children are using their wives as slaves. They are purchasing their leisure time with their wives' work. I really struggle to understand how women can see this as anything less than exploitation, or how men who do it can assert that they respect their partners.

Equity Is Not Necessarily Equality 
I can hear the protests already. "But I don't work outside the home, so of course I do most of the housework!" Yes. Of course. Fair treatment does not demand that both spouses do the exact same thing, dividing every task 50/50. But if mom stays at home with the kiddos, that's not an excuse for dad to do no housework. Raising children is work, which means that both parents are working during the day. When dad gets home, he needs to help.

True equality means adjusting according to each partner's needs. When my husband is sick, I do all of the cleaning and food preparation. Now that I'm pregnant, he does a lot more since I get tired easily. It's really not that hard.

The Challenge of the Entitled Man
A couple of friends have asked me what to do about a man who won't do his fair share. The truth is that I really don't know. In my experience, an orientation toward equality is something a guy either has or does not have. Men who won't help their partners are unlikely to change, because they have a fundamental sense of entitlement. Even if you manage to get him to do his fair share for a while, he'll probably resent it.

Women deserve better than this. At the very least, they should know that men are not innately inclined toward laziness. This is a cultural issue; our society does everything it can to support them in their attempts to get women to do everything. Thanking men who do the right thing only normalize this laziness. We need to focus instead on stigmatizing men who exploit their partners.