The most important tool men use to maintain household labor inequality (paid subscriber bonus): Liberating Motherhood Rerun

This is a Liberating Motherhood Rerun. I have an archive of more than 1,000 posts I’ve published over the years. New subscribers only see these posts if they go digging through the archives. And because I’ve been doing this for so long, even older subscribers may forget about helpful pieces.

Every Saturday I re-release a random older piece, often with new updates and links. These pieces will be a mix of paid and free posts. The goal here is to offer more value with your subscription, without disrupting my regular editorial calendar. I hope you enjoy and find value from this feature!

Every week, my inbox fills with appalling letters from women in bad marriages. Their husbands don’t help with the kids, or undermine and insult them as mothers. They spend the weekend golfing away from the family, then come home and trash the house. The woman works full-time, but the husband thinks her job doesn’t count, and also expects her to do all of the child care. His free time and sleep matter, but hers don’t.

And inevitably, after telling me a terrible story of emotional abuse, the women end their letters the same: Am I overreacting? Most of them won’t even consider leaving. Instead, they want to know what script they can use to convince their husbands to do better, what evidence might get their partners to understand the realities of sexism. They truly believe that they’re just one sentence away from their partners viewing them as fully human.

They’re not. These men are not going to change. On some level, these women know this. They follow my work. They know household inequality is a type of abuse—and often, they’re experiencing many other types of abuse, too, because buying your free time with your partner’s exhaustion and suffering almost always co-occurs with other abuse. After all, men who don’t view their partners as fully human are unlikely to stop with unequal distribution of chores.

So why are they staying? It’s not that the family court system is biased (even though it is), because statistically, most of these men are more likely to abandon their children forever than to seek custody. It’s not financial dependency. Most of these women work; many of them are well-off, and even in a biased family court system, women still have some right to property. And in most cases, these men are not physically abusive, so it’s not fear for their safety, either.

Thousands of conversations with women in these situations have helped me finally understand what’s behind their persistence, behind their willingness to stay with these assholes. Men have weaponized a key aspect of girls’ socialization, and once you understand it, you’ll be better equipped to protect yourself—and to avoid indoctrinating your daughters to accept the same fate.