The Patriarchal Roommate
For the millennial mothers out there: have you ever had the experience where you look around, jaw agape, wondering “How is this my life?”
Growing up in the 80s and 90s in white liberal Madison, Wisconsin, I ingested a very specific brand of second-wave feminism. In Madison public schools, we were raised to be proud feminists, but learned that the feminists who came before us had already done the lion’s share of the hard work: they’d won the vote, secured our reproductive justice rights, and ensured that we could be and do anything. Feminism felt like a battle nearly won. Our role in the story was simply to tip feminism over the edge to full equity with our inevitable career success and take a high-five victory lap for a job well done.
When I looked around at my girlfriends in our progressive public high school, I believed it. We were smart, we worked hard, we got good grades, and we out-performed many of our male counterparts. On top of our honors high school courses in Literature and Spanish and Calculus, we took courses like Philosophy and Gender Studies and African American History, which left us feeling like we really got feminism.
And out male counterparts were feminists too. Senior year, our guy friend even made and gave out t-shirts that read “This is what a feminist looks like,” and we were all proud, thinking, Hell yes feminism is for everyone. I loved him for it. I still do.
Sure, we knew there were anti-feminists out there, but they were in the boonies, in the south, not in Madison. We felt pretty confident that in our little pocket of the world, gender inequity was all but conquered. Every story we heard seemed to assure us that our futures were ours for the taking.
The stories we didn’t hear, though—in classes or amongst each other—were the stories about motherhood. We didn’t talk about motherhood as a societal expectation. We didn’t talk about which of our mothers worked jobs outside of childrearing, which didn’t, or why. We didn’t talk about how race and class and culture played into those choices. We didn’t talk about who did the laundry and the dishes, who cooked the meals or packed the lunches, who arranged drop-offs and pick-ups and play dates and summer camps. We didn’t talk about the role that marriage and motherhood and the nuclear family played—or didn’t play—in any of our feminist theory classes. And we definitely didn’t talk about the laid-down dreams of the feminist mothers raising feminist sons and daughters.
This particular millennial feminist petri dish was fertile ground for a future crash collision between our second-wave feminist ideals and the realities of motherhood. There were two simultaneous paths laid out before us: the expected, explicit path of career success and the simultaneously expected—but less explicitly spoken—path of marriage and motherhood.
How many of us are here living amidst the clash collision of motherhood and second-wave feminism—with a COVID magnifying glass held up to it all—and wondering what the actual fuck?
Last summer, I grabbed drinks with a high school buddy. We caught up on our lives, the choices we’ve made, the positions we’ve found ourselves in. He shared where all his guy friends landed: mostly married, working full-time as heads of product or sales. I shared where my girlfriends landed: non-profit managers, therapists, teachers, mothers. He shared sheepishly that for every ten work drinks he goes out for in the evenings, his wife gets about one.
The starkness of it all did not go unnoticed by either of us. Here we were, two humans, playing out these roles we both found frankly dumbfounding. Where did all the millennial boys sporting “This is what a feminist looks like” t-shirts go?
The gulf between our expectations of the feminist boys of our youth and our lived reality with the patriarchal men of today is perhaps the hardest part to reconcile, partly because it holds up an undeniable mirror to the gulf between our own expectations and lived realities. We grew up believing that we were collectively paving a world of gender equity and linking arms with our feminist male counterparts as we moved toward a just future, only to find many of us in these cis-het relationships are now living out very gendered, unequitable lives. The white capitalist patriarchal systems that we swim in were stronger than our ideals, leaving us millennial mothers scrambling to meet the mercurial expectations of third-wave feminism trying to be all the things, all at once.
The reality is, so much of what my generation expected to structurally change for the better by the time we entered the workforce simply didn’t. In 2018 for example, when I was in my early days of motherhood, women were still only making 60% of what their male counterparts made in the highly-skilled managerial professions in which I swam, making gendered income dynamics a prominent feature of millennial cis-het relationships. And as the gendered income gap stubbornly remained, so too did the traditional divisions of domestic labor in cis-het relationships. Moreover, with the economic realities of today–a decreasing middle class, income stagnation and inflation–millennial couples find it harder than the generation before them to sustain a home on a single income, which puts many millennial women in a position where they are obligated to both participate in the workforce and to serve as the person tasked with the lion’s share of the domestic labor. Millennial mothers in cis-het relationships are out there trying to walk both paths simultaneously, with no structural support to do either successfully, and butting up against our patriarchal roommate within our homes for good measure.
Before COVID, finding a balance was hard, but survivable. But when COVID wreaked havoc on the childcare and education systems, that juggling act became impossible. Mothers became society’s default safety net, tasked with not only the roles of mother and worker, but also of educator and daycare provider all at once, often within the same room. The acute reality laid bare just how much we carry and how completely stripped so many of us actually are of our agency and self-determination.
In Claire Cain Miller’s New York Times article, Why Unpaid Labor Is More Likely to Hurt Women’s Mental Health Than Men’s, she writes that women take on an average 4.5 hours of unpaid care work each day, compared to 2.8 hours by male counterparts. Men feel less stressed by the housework they do take on, not just because they do less of it, but because the tasks they do—mowing the lawn, for example—tend to be more enjoyable than the tedious tasks women are responsible for, like daily meal prep or laundry folding. She writes:
It’s not unpaid labor itself that is problematic, research has found. Rather, it’s all the baggage around it — whether it conflicts with someone’s other responsibilities, like paid work, and whether it’s what someone wants to be doing…
“Time poverty” — a term social scientists use to describe not having enough time to do work or leisure activities — particularly affects women with caregiving demands and people with inflexible, low-paid jobs. Time poverty contributes to declines in mental health, research shows, and also makes it harder to do things that improve health, like exercising, sleeping or nurturing friendships. One study found that while opposite-sex couples are increasingly likely to share responsibility for paid and unpaid work, men spend significantly more leisure time on weekends while women do more housework.
As a product of the millennial petri dish, fully experiencing the collision of career and motherhood expectations, and working out what it means to be both a mother and a feminist, I recognize more and more that my temporal autonomy—my agency to consciously choose how I spend my time—is fundamental to my redefinition of feminism.
Cindy DiTiberio describes it beautifully in her essay Mothering on My Own, where she writes about her separation from her husband. She says:
Dividing duties was one of the hardest parts of my marriage. One of these days I may write an essay about how our Fair Play discussion foreshadowed the end of our marriage. Because really, I don’t do much more than I used to. I did most of the things around the house and for the children during my marriage; I was just bitter because I didn’t want to be the one doing it all. I was not a stay-at-home mom; I worked part-time but that setup still meant I took on the brunt of all care… I feel like I can mother more completely without the extra burden of having to mother him. I have more of myself available to my children because I am no longer having to feed and nurture that relationship as well.
How many mothers can relate to that sentiment?
It is possible to be in a cis-het relationship with a man and not play out these gendered dynamics. These skewed divisions are not an inevitability, nor should they be. It is our fundamental right to have equity within our relationships. Millennial fathers can do so much better.
As a living example, my partner and I do not have traditional, patriarchal divisions of labor in our household. This is partly because of our values, but also because of our wiring. As someone who works best in sprints and bursts, I am particularly ill-equipped at the steadiness required in running a domestic home. My partner is a nurturer and a steady and consistent caretaker. He does the laundry, cooks breakfast, packs the kids’ lunches, and often makes dinner. I fold the laundry when I get to it, or he does when he gets to it. He deals with health insurance and bills, pulls out the garbage Thursdays nights, and changes the air filters and light bulbs. Basically, he deals with the annoying, pretty invisible, mundane household chores that my brain kind of refuses to hold.
He works full time, and I’ve worked part-time, flexible, consulting hours since becoming a mother, which means I own the brunt of the childcare and childrearing. I read the parenting books and manage the school relationships, and I am the primary caregiver, the burden keeper, the emotional holder for our kids. I plan the camps and childcare and playdates. We share drop offs and pick-ups for my eldest; I do all the midday preschool pickups for my youngest. But as I steer the particular ship of child-rearing, I expect that he will show up as a present co-pilot. And he does.
Our arrangement isn’t perfect, by any stretch. Like many mothers who take on the domestic tasks, my partner feels burnt out on household tasks post-COVID, so I am finding that place in me where I can take on more meal prep for our family without letting it swallow me whole. We are constantly having conversations about who owns what tasks, whether our arrangements are equitable, and how to keep each other from burning out. We have also found ourselves drowning and left filled with deep compassion for those who’ve found divorce to be the easiest answer to the last three years. The nuclear family is a bust. The reality is, two adults is just way too few people to bear the burden of raising children.
But millennial mothers shouldn’t just resign to their patriarchal roommates just because the nuclear family construct itself is flawed. As mothers and feminists, we need to both reclaim equitable divisions within our partnerships and build more robust networks of care within our wider community. We need policies that center our care and support our thriving.
The problems do not magically get fixed by better divvying up our time with our male partners, but it sure as hell gets easier to fight for policy changes that protect our basic rights—to both our bodies and our time—when we have a household partner who is on our side, taking on the mundane tasks so we can have a modicum of breath to organize.
We need to demand our temporal autonomy. We do that by discerning what time we need for our own thriving and setting firm boundaries around those time blocks, by sitting with our partner and consciously divvying up the household responsibilities in a way that’s equitable, and by looking outside our nuclear families and figuring out how we can build community for interdependence around meal prep, school commutes, and date night swaps. We do it by looking at the current constructs and figuring out how we can build bridges to better ones. Most of all, we do it by knowing in our bones that there is a better way than this one, and working in partnership to dream it into existence. That is how we begin to reclaim our freedom.
Cover photo by S.Hossein Hassanpour on Unsplash
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