What a great read…so far. I find it refreshing that I am not the only one in the world with lists. This New York Times Magazine article by Lisa Belkin is captivating, comfortable and real. I particularly like this sentence:
“Gender should not determine the division of labor at home.”
Novel idea? No. But dividing tasks by gender seems to be the template that we all fall into in performing our daily rituals.
Another good paragraph:
Where the housework ratio is two to one, the wife-to-husband ratio for child care in the United States is close to five to one. As with housework, that ratio does not change as much as you would expect when you account for who brings home a paycheck. In a family where Mom stays home and Dad goes to work, she spends 15 hours a week caring for children and he spends 2. In families in which both parents are wage earners, Mom’s average drops to 11 and Dad’s goes up to 3. Lest you think this is at least a significant improvement over our parents and grandparents, not so fast. “The most striking part,” Blair says, “is that none of this is all that different, in terms of ratio, from 90 years ago.”
The article itself is ten web pages long and I have not gone through it all yet, but I will. I find this topic fascinating.
I am constantly on the prowl for ways to make the world more equal and FAIR and this sounds like a good start.
