Kristen Hanley Cardozo, Harvest Edition

Having kids is a major negative factor for women's happiness and health. But it's also generally expected, even in households where both parents work, that women will do the bulk of child rearing as well as domestic chores.

Individual people and partnerships can and do defy these statistics, but even largely egalitarian marriages take place in a culture that places different expectations on men and women.

A small example that has long stuck with me: once my husband was at the market with our baby. I was not there. While he was pushing our son in the shopping cart, a lady came up to him and said, to the baby, "Oh, look, your mommy forgot to wash your face."

There was no evidence of a mommy anywhere, just a baby with a slightly messy face and a man pushing that baby in a shopping cart. But it was still absent mommy's fault, because even though my husband and I both did those tasks, they were seen as my duties by people around us.

So a baby with a messy face is a dereliction of duty on my part. My husband taking the baby shopping with him was construed as a favor to me rather than just doing his job.

When was the last time you saw people praise a woman for spending time in public with her kids? How many times have you seen people be hypercritical of a woman parenting in public?

And doing the memory work of a family, which is also societally tagged as feminine, is a lot of work in itself, but not one socially recognized as work.

You can have a great heterosexual marriage and you still exist in a society in which hetero marriage primarily benefits men while societally insisting that it's what women want and what men resist.

And even though men and women both spend more time with their kids than people did in the sixties, women spend around twice as much time with kids as men do.

This is true even in households in which women are the breadwinners. In fact, men do FEWER chores when women earn more than them. https://riviste.unige.it/aboutgender/article/view/176 …

There's tons of this stuff and it's not particularly hard to find. Marriage, whether it is about property rights, lineage, or love, tends to be patriarchal in a patriarchal society. Anyway, I'm done for now.

I get why people were replying to the initial tweet in this thread with asks for back up when I first posted it, but it's mildly disconcerting when people are replying to it now asking for clarification. Not only are you not looking it up, you aren't even looking at it.

"What do you mean by that? In what way is marriage bad for women?" My man, I did the labor for you and you can't even bother to look at the receipts I brought you. All you had to do was passively consume and you didn't even do it.

Subtweeting my mentions like a grownass adult