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In her continuing attempt to reply to Linda Hirshman's checklist for women who decide to have children: "only have one kid, marry a liberal guy, only work full time jobs, yadda yadda," Laura of 11D writes up her own checklist for Equity After the Kids. "How do you make sure that you don't [get] stuck with the lion share of thankless drudgery after the kids come around?"
Laura comes up with a checklist of eight. Here are three:
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2. It is not "his career," it's "the family career". If you stay at home, you are investing in his job. Make sure you understand what goes on there. He is not free to accept whatever promotion or job change without mutual agreement. His job has an impact on the whole family. You made career changes to suit the family, and so must he. It's amazing how many strong women don't think that they can tell their husband, "no".5. A majority of weekend events must be your husband's responsibility. Religion classes, sports, dance, birthday parties. He must do the shuffling and be responsible for remembering that he's supposed to bring the snacks to soccer on the third week of October. With boys, it may be easier to delegate some of this stuff, but he's got to take the girls to ballet, also.
6. Actually, the most important thing is to marry a good guy. Should have made that number one."
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Laura points out that her assertations don't apply only to full-time stay-at-home moms. Evoking Arlie Hochschild's book, The Second Shift, she writes, "Many of the full time paid labor moms still do a majority of the work at home. [...] A full time job is no guarantee to equity."
As is true with many thoughtfully-written and thought-provoking posts, the real discussion of the topic comes out in the comments section.
Jen suggests a reading of Rhona Mahony's book Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, and Bargaining Power, which Elizabeth of Half Changed World reviewed a couple of years ago. In her review, Elizabeth writes of Mahony's book:
"Mahony argues that as long as women choose careers that don't maximize their earning potential and that give them flexibility, marry men who have more earning potential and less flexibility, and care more for their children as infants, they will always wind up doing more of the child care and housework."
Some commenters had problems with some of the points on Laura's checklist. Rather than let the discussion get sidetracked over a discusion of the checklist itself, Laura sums up the point of the post and the true meaning behind the discussion with a comment of her own:
"I think it's coming out in the comments that you can't have a checklist for equity. Employment itself is no guarantee. It's really a mental state that both partners need. If both people treat each other with respect and understand that both of their efforts are for some sort of common goal, then nobody is feeling abused."
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BlogHer Contributing Editor Mary Tsao also blogs at Mom Writes.
Image courtesy of Microsoft Clip Art.
