All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership

Written by Darcy Lockman

Narrated by Abby Craden

Picking up where All Joy and No Fun left off, All the Rage sets out to understand why, in an age of so-called equality, full-time working mothers still carry.

The inequity of domestic life is one of the most profound and perplexing conundrums of our time. In an era of seemingly unprecedented feminist activism, enlightenment, and change, data show that one area of gender inequality stubbornly remains: the unequal amount of parental work that falls on women, no matter their 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, mothers’ contributions—even those women who earn more than their partners—still outweigh fathers’ when it comes to raising children and maintaining a home.

How can this be? How, in a culture that has studied and lauded the benefits of fathers’ being active, present partners in child-rearing—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?

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 case-study as Ground Zero, 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 reasons both men and women are culpable. Her findings are startling—and offer a catalyst for true change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: May 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9780062930774

Darcy Lockman

Darcy Lockman is a former journalist turned psychologist. Her first book, Brooklyn Zoo, chronicled the year she spent working in a city hospital's psychiatric ward. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times and the Washington Post, among others. She lives with her husband and daughters in Queens.

Reviews for All the Rage

[arosoff-513117 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I became aware of this book when the author wrote a New York Times column based on it. It got passed around Facebook, and my friends who are mothers were all largely in agreement with it.

Luckily, the book lived up to the idea. Darcy Lockman has written a great assessment of the continuing gender gap in parenting, and how our talk of egalitarianism has not borne out in reality. It's a journalistic, not terribly long book, but while she does weave in her own experiences, she summarizes a lot of research in the field as well as interviews with other mothers. Given the length, she obviously can't go into great detail, but the amount of ground covered is substantial, and she makes sure that she doesn't just talk about middle class white mothers.

What drives inequality, in Dr. Lockman's view, is a system of interlocking parts. Men and women are socialized into gender roles regarding parenting, but are still bombarded with messages that these roles are innate. Women "choose" to do more... except that choice occurs because they know that if they won't do it, it won't be done. Men have it all because they have it on the backs of women's labor, but women cannot rely on men. If they want to "have it all", they need the paid labor of other women (as women's income increases, they spend more on outsourcing household tasks--men don't). Meanwhile, women face pressure and judgment to be perfect parents that men don't face.

Men, meanwhile, don't really want to change, and have little incentive to do so. They exhibit a range of strategies to avoid more work--assuming their partners will do it, passively refusing (and portraying it as maternal gatekeeping), strategic incompetence, and denial. If they break free of stereotypes, they are penalized by both their employers and their peers.

The US, moreover, is not alone. While our lack of societal support has an impact, all Western countries see a gap in household labor. Even in Sweden, the most equal country surveyed, has men doing less. Subsidized childcare has the greatest impact on women--Danish men spend the same amount of time with their children as American fathers, but Danish mothers spend less time than their American counterparts. (In terms of paternal involvement, the US does reasonably well.)

In order to change this, MEN need to change. What good would it be for women to let it go if the consequences will just fall on the kids? That's precisely why women keep doing it and allow the resentment to simmer. There's no use to women changing their expectations of themselves if men don't step up to the plate. The constant arguments about women choosing to work less and biological determinism are an attempt to sidestep this reality--that women can't choose to do otherwise unless men change. Their only option, as an increasing number of American women are doing, is to stop having children.

There's a constant litany of infuriating facts--the amount of time fathers spend on housework drops after their 2nd child; the same jobs are described as more flexible when women hold them--and some infuriating fathers. Not everything here was new to me, but she did an excellent job of putting it together.

Highly recommended, and men should try reading it.

[froxgirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an examination of mens' lack of involvement in carrying the physical, emotional, and mental loads of organizing a household and raising children. It has taken me three days to calm down enough to write a review. DAMN. The author's intent was to interview 100 women, and she only got to 40 before stopping, because every woman's story was the same: it's never 50-50, because men see taking on responsibilities as taking away their right to do whatever they want whenever they want. Amazingly enough, the author turns her sights on her own husband, who comes in for a fair amount of criticism. If I quoted all that I highlighted, this review would never end. As usual, and not a good thing, Lockman seems to have limited her universe and audience to middle and upper middle class white women, which was the primary reason for me not giving it a 5 star rating. One of the blurbs was from another author whose book title is How To Not Hate Your Husband After Kids. This book points out the issues, maybe that book comes up with solutions. Yeah, right.Quotes: "We condition girls to aspire to marriage and we do not condition boys to do the same." - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie"When women in the home spend all their time attending to the needs of others, home is a workplace for her, not a site of relaxation, comfort, and pleasure." - bell hooks"It's served men very well to assume that male-female differences are hardwired, rather than that brains are constantly rewiring themselves in response to real-time experience. It is the day-to-day experience of attending to children - and not biological sex - that encompasses what we call motherhood.""On becoming fathers, men find that patriarchy suits them rather well after all. In marriage, men simply feel entitled to our labor. It takes intense, concerted effort for men and women to live together as if they have the same value.""If egalitarian marriages didn't work out, young men anticipate becoming breadwinners with primary caretaker wives, and young women anticipate divorce.""When power issues are raised, they're generally not framed in terms of how husbands need to change, but rather how wives need to be more assertive."" I stopped cooking because I wanted to feel as unencumbered as a man walking through the door of his home expecting that something had been done for him.""Dads start to think 'Oh, all I do is a little bit and I'm awesome' as opposed to 'I'm just doing my job as a parent.' ""Strategic incompetence is a ploy to avoid doing work at home by doing it half heartedly or badly, thereby insuring that the mother has to step in and complete the task.""He said, "I might carry the same ideas about what we need to do, but I'm not going to get myself worked up about it." ""The expectation among my male friends is still that they will have the life they had before having kids. A switch goes on in a man's brain once there's a woman: I'm not responsible for anything anymore.""Hidden power is baked into ideologies that give one person advantage over another - like the right to interrupt or to sleep late all weekend long. Or to go to work when the kids are sick, without a second thought, because his work comes first.""Imagine if fathers said this to you, directly and out loud: your efforts are ultimately unnecessary, the needs of our family are not worth my attention, and I'll choose the more selfish thing.""I'm tired of always asking and feeling like I'm managing an employee who fails to take initiative.""The dynamic I saw was women, after doing and doing and doing alone, blowing up and the man saying "I'll do a few things" to get that under control."