Genre: Nonfiction
Length: 352 pages
Audiobook Length: 8 hours and 53 minutes
First Published: 2019
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Rachael’s Review
With all the work that has been done to push women’s equality forward, why are modern progressive couples falling back into traditional gender roles once they have children? Why do women do so much more in the home than men? Lockman looks at why the promised true domestic partnership didn’t come to pass for modern married dual-income households.
Be aware that All the Rage is a book that will get you all riled up. Instead of looking at all marriages, Lockman zeroed in on progressive dual-income households where the domestic labor was equally split before children. Yet in nearly every case, once the couple has a child, they fall back into traditional gender roles, with the wife taking on disproportionately more of the childrearing responsibilities. Hearing other women’s stories, I felt validated in my own frustrations and enraged that we haven’t made more progress toward equality. But it also helped me understand why progress toward equality can be frustratingly slow; it’s hard not to slip back into the patterns we have seen modeled for us our entire lives.
Publisher’s Description
Why do men do so little at home? Why do women do so much? Why don’t our egalitarian values match our lived experiences?
Journalist-turned-psychologist Darcy Lockman offers a clear-eyed look at the most pernicious problem facing modern parents—how progressive relationships become traditional ones when children are introduced into the household.
In an era of seemingly unprecedented feminist activism, enlightenment, and change, data shows that one area of gender inequality stubbornly persists: the disproportionate amount of parental work that falls to women, no matter their background, class, or professional status. All the Rage investigates the cause of this pervasive inequity to answer why, in households where both parents work full-time and agree that tasks should be equally shared, mothers’ household management, mental labor, and childcare contributions still outweigh fathers’.
How, in a culture that pays lip service to women’s equality and lauds the benefits of father involvement—benefits that extend far beyond the well-being of the kids themselves—can a commitment to fairness in marriage melt away upon the arrival of children?
Counting on male partners who will share the burden, women today have been left with what political scientists call unfulfilled, rising expectations. Historically these unmet expectations lie at the heart of revolutions, insurgencies, and civil unrest. If so many couples are living this way, and so many women are angered or just exhausted by it, why do we remain so stuck? Where is our revolution, our insurgency, our civil unrest?
Darcy Lockman drills deep to find answers, exploring how the feminist promise of true domestic partnership almost never, in fact, comes to pass. Starting with her own marriage as a ground zero case study, she moves outward, chronicling the experiences of a diverse cross-section of women raising children with men; visiting new mothers’ groups and pioneering co-parenting specialists; and interviewing experts across academic fields, from gender studies professors and anthropologists to neuroscientists and primatologists. Lockman identifies three tenets that have upheld the cultural gender division of labor and peels back the ways in which both men and women unintentionally perpetuate old norms.
If we can all agree that equal pay for equal work should be a given, can the same apply to unpaid work? Can justice finally come home?
About Darcy Lockman
Darcy Lockman is a clinical psychologist and author of the books Brooklyn Zoo and All the Rage. She currently lives in Queens. Visit the author’s website →
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