January 18, 2015

"Kids need taking care of. Money needs earning. Those are two very unequal jobs. You can’t split them equally..."

"... because they are not half-time jobs. So you might think I’m a throw-back to the ’50s when I say, stay-at-home dads is a bad idea. You might think I am self-hating when I say that women don’t crave power as much as men do. But don’t say I don’t understand how hard women fought for equality. Because I was part of that fight. I gave up my childhood for the fight for women’s equality."

Writes Penelope Trunk, who says she resisted something her grandmother said for a long time, but finally "realized there’s positively no way to keep things equal, and everyone suffers from trying to establish equality. People can only give what they are good at giving. And people can’t stop needing what they need. It’s what they need."

38 comments:

BarrySanders20 said...

A marriage is a partnership. Partners never bring equal talents, so the partnership benefits if each partner focuses on that which each is good. If raising kids is part of the agreement, then someone better make that the primary task.

Communicate and get a little balance, help each other, and find out what the other one's role is like.

There is no single right way to make it work. Pretending that anyone can have exactly what they want, when they want it, without having adverse effect on others, is folly. That's what Trunk's grandmother was saying when she called her parents crazy.

rhhardin said...

Telling women that they should enjoy what men enjoy has not been the road to happiness.

The telling itself comes from the nagging instinct, a woman's activity.

rhhardin said...

Proud to have been in that war - why?

Men in wars don't like to talk about it.

rhhardin said...

Going through a series of romantic comedy DVDs, looking for the occasional bit of great dialogue and trying to avoid weddings, diseases and tears, I notice that the women-in-the-workplace ones tend to have anti-insights.

rehajm said...

everyone suffers from trying to establish equality.

Stands on it's own.

tim in vermont said...

Ridiculous. Evolution never happened. We were designed perfectly equal in every way by a loving God 6K years ago when men screwed it up.

virgil xenophon said...

What should be (and is) intuitively obvious to the average Joe is totally lost on most "intellectuals." Calling George Orwell..

Phil 314 said...

The linked article was depressing. She seems caught between the "over liberated" life of her mom and some warped view of the '50's June Cleaver stay at home mom.

I think she does see the value of a present and loving parent. That's a good start.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

I hope I'm not the only one who believes that Ms. Trunk is mentally ill and ought not to be taken seriously.

tim in vermont said...

OK, I would be very interested in any evidence of "mental illness" in the piece.

MadisonMan said...

Ms. Trunk should know that you cannot take your life and generalize it to the rest of the world.

I do know Stay-at-Home Dads who did marvelous jobs (at least, that is what appearances from the outside tell me). I also know families where both work, or one works full- and one works half-time. Different things work for different families, and who am I to judge?

In other words, things today are a lot different than they were when the author was growing up.

SomeoneHasToSayIt said...

Many seem to think they are discovering some new insight, as if Ayn Rand never wrote a word.

Bob In WI said...

I don't know about mental illness but everything Trunk writes is an epic, whiny ramble, always about herself and often how she isn't to blame for her present situation. And she always puts other people down, in this case her family, to try to elevate herself. I'm glad Ms. Althouse separated the wheat from the chaff here and quoted the one sentence worth anything in that horrible post.

tim in vermont said...

I didn't say she didn't suffer from a character disorder. I just don't know why we should ignore her experience, "her truth," if feminists will.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

Some think Ayn Rand had insight, as if Nietzsche never wrote a word.

chickelit said...

Real equality means "halving it all."

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

I'm very against being a stay at home dad. I did it, and there were huge consequences. Men raising children while women work is not an accepted role. If you do it you will have a lot of trouble, especially if anything goes wrong. Men who stay home are regarded as strange or lazy.

So, don't do it. Let other dads be the gender role pioneers.

tim in vermont said...

Men raising children while women work is not an accepted role.

Well, it is probably not a great resume enhancer on Match.com if your marriage falls apart and you find yourself in your 50s without a career, unless she left you pretty well off after the divorce.

Jupiter said...

"By the same token, women acting like men, and marriages being 50/50 is the road to self-destruction. But I relish the opportunities Feminism gave me, like saying no to full-time work, and I’m proud that I was a child soldier in that war."

It rather sounds as if she suffered in the war, but I don't see how that makes her a soldier. Collateral damage, maybe.

And Feminism gave her the opportunity to say no to full-time work?

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

Tim-

Yeah, that's true. Half of marriages collapse, and if you are a man who raised the kids... what are you going to do?

Add to this that the societal norm for divorce is the wife taking the kids and getting child support. How's that going to work out if the dad stayed home? What's he going to do?

So... I think it would be great if things were different, but they aren't. Don't stay home with the kids if you are a man.

Renee said...

Being a stay at home mom for too long, I'm also free daycare for single working parents on a snow day, or an extra pick up after school/sports if a parent is finish a college degree.

Best thing in the world for two working parents are grandparents close by.

Birches said...

Ewww. That article was depressing. Her parents are awful people.

Birches said...

I fought for women to be bold enough to have a big career and then give it up for kids and be brave enough to suffer the shame of not earning their own money in a world that values money above everything else.

This is true.

rhhardin said...

Explain how a gyroscope works to your girlfriend, if you think the sexes are equal in their interests.

SomeoneHasToSayIt said...

John Lynch said...
Some think Ayn Rand had insight, as if Nietzsche never wrote a word.


That's embarrassingly ignorant. Clearly, you have not read Rand, so commenting like that is quite foolish.

Where'd you get that nonsense, some hack Progressive blog?

Renee said...

@birches

Yeah, Dear God poor kids.

My parents worked, but a different time by the 80s. They had short commutes and licensed home day care.

SeanF said...

John Lynch: Half of marriages collapse...

Don't perpetuate that myth. It's not true.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

SHTSI

I got that from reading everything Rand ever published. I had a phase.

Alan Bloom had it right in one phrase- she's "sub-Nietzschean."

Rand isn't some amazing philosopher who said things no one had said before. She said things many people (Nietzsche being the most obvious) had said before. And she kept saying the same things, over and over and over... everything she writes is the same. The smallest bit is the same as the largest. It's like fractals.

She's more accessible, especially for a 20th century audience, but it isn't some great addition to philosophy. The pretensions about Ayn Rand are the turn off. If she's seen as a political writer and a critic of socialism that's fine. Beyond that... come on. She's not a prophet.

It isn't possible to criticize Rand without being one of the bad guys. I get what she was saying. It's not hard to understand. But it's not something terribly original nor is it very well executed.

Zach said...

Reading the article, her problem isn't that her mother worked. It's that both parents despised having a family and would put up with terrible situations in order to avoid family duties. (Obviously, we're taking Trunk's word for all of this, but let's take her descriptions at face value.)

There are at least two physically abusive babysitters in the story. Both parents are getting home around 9, and at least one of them is going out drinking with coworkers before that. Neither one goes to the trouble of ensuring that their daughter has a winter coat or a new dress for school, although they could readily afford it.

People with so few nurturing instincts shouldn't have kids.

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

People in my proximity have all kinds of arrangements. In one, the wife both earns more (by building her own business) and takes care of the kids more, for example. Her being an owner allowed this. In another, the wife earns just as much as the husband and they both took care of the kids (now in college).
In yet another, the husband earns all the money and still does a huge portion of housework/childcare.

None of these can be generalized because everyone's earning situation and personality are different. (Edit: Fixed my white space).

Bob R said...

A long time ago (maybe before there were comments on this blog) I emailed Althouse about a post I don't remember, saying that I felt that "equal" referring to men and women was a poor choice of words. As I remember it, she felt that it was an important principle to maintain. (It was a long time ago, and I have no confidence that I am quoting accurately, so please take that into account.)

I still feel that way, but I am more resigned to imprecise language. I'd prefer something like equity or fairness, but years as a college professor have taught me that people have no fucking idea what the word "fair" means. Life sucks.

But the Packers are doing pretty well.

tim maguire said...

Every stay at home parent takes a huge risk that they will be destitute if the marriage breaks up, but I don't see why that should be the woman any more than the man.

rcocean said...

So 21st Century Women decides to stay at home and take care of kids.

Interesting.

Of course, the opposite would be just as fascinating.

rcocean said...

I wonder how many women would prefer reading this article to one explaining why GB's prevent defense collapsed today.

99%?

RecChief said...

I've been married, happily, to the same woman for 20 years. She's a stay at home mom. She has more "power" than Stalin had divisions. Except we talk things over, tackling problems together, each acknowledging our own strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps the focus on "power" is why feminists seem to me so unhappy all the time.

RonF said...

The error here is that these people think "equal" = "identical". They're not.