Play by your own rules

In 1969 a feminist activist and author by the name of Alix Kates Shulman published “A Marriage Agreement,” a lengthy contract she had drawn up with her husband dividing childcare and household tasks perfectly evenly. One numbered, minutia-crammed entry after another, the document spelled out who was responsible for what: Stripping the marital bed was Kates Shulman’s job. Her husband was charged with remaking it.

A radical treatise in its day, the contract was published in Ms., Look, New York, and several other glossies. Popular lore has it that Mr. Shulman was engaged in an extramarital affair even as he signed the contract, and that Ms. Kates Shulman wasn’t totally broken up to learn of it. Whether this is true I can’t say, just that sometimes the universe actually does deliver the exact learning experience its inhabitants require.

As a document, the agreement is joyless enough to make life in a kibbutz sound romantic, too priggish even to be mistaken for satire. And yet in the four decades since, not much has changed in terms of the basic inequity at the heart of the modern domestic bargain: Whether they work outside the home or not, married, heterosexual women do at least twice as much housework as their husbands. (Gay and lesbian couples, recent research has found, divide childcare and housework much more equally. Maybe this is one of those values some folks don’t want modeled for the kids? Just a thought.)

I flashed on that dismal contract a year and a half ago, when I read a story in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about Marc and Amy Vachon, a Massachusetts couple who split every domestic duty 50-50. They agreed on this before they had kids, before their marriage in fact, and value equality so much they consider it first in virtually all decisions, including biggies like the choice of a career.

The Vachons seemed like dedicated, loving parents and spouses, but they also sounded like a matched pair of grinds. While the article was peppered with words like “richer” and “fulfilled,” the details were anything but; underlying all of that misty egalitarianism was enough fine print dictating household and time management to make Kates Shulman’s manifesto seem like a sonnet by comparison. I imagined them forming a grim bucket brigade to the laundry room each weekend.

And so I was surprised how much I liked their new book, Equally Shared Parenting. Far from the color-coded chore charts and endless family meetings I had envisioned, it turns out the Vachons spend a lot of time enjoying one another and not much contemplating the trade-offs that accompany the lynchpin of their lifestyle, which is two flexible, less-than-full-time jobs. They refer to this as “bending both careers half as much.”

They do the obvious: Spend less than they make, divide chores according to aptitude, and plan, plan, plan. Amy does not “manage” or critique Marc’s domestic contributions and Marc doesn’t “babysit.” But that’s not the heart of the arrangement. I daresay what makes it work is their joint dedication to making the world fit in around their family, vs. trying to stretch their time and budgets far enough to meet all of the obligations the modern family is pushed to take on. (See the “Society” chapter for practical tips.)By my read, they stick with it not so much because it’s fair, or virtuous as because they are happy. They don’t just spend their time tackling equal chore lists, they spend it doing things they as a family truly value.

While the atom-level scrutiny the Vachons give their lifestyle may seem over the top, those of us inclined to go with the 21st-century flow will find a cautionary tale in Glass Ceilings and 100-Hour Couples. This slim volume by two Macalester professors, while not exactly earth-shattering in its scholarship, does a nice job of parsing the so-called “opt-out” phenomenon. You know, that seemingly circular debate about whether professional women are stampeding back home because raising kids is so much more fulfilling than the corner office, or whether the workplace is nasty to women who, clutching paychecks too puny to pay for decent childcare, decide to make the best of it.

Which argument is closest to the capital-T truth? I told you it was a circular debate, and if you’ve missed out on it so far, Glass Ceilings is a nice primer. Professors of economics and anthropology, respectively, Karine Moe and Dianna Shandy do an admirable job of describing the way the modern workplace and the cultural trappings that support it fail mothers. Faced with bad childcare options, lesser paychecks, mommy-track discrimination, crushing commutes, and the aforementioned second shift once they do get home, some women really do opt out. Not in the numbers the headlines would have you believe; too few can afford such a choice. And not because the women’s movement got it all wrong, as some popular iconoclasts insist.

Really, it’s that work doesn’t work for the American family anymore, no more than dividing domestic duties according to gender. We’ve known for some time that it doesn’t work for many women, but it doesn’t work for plenty of men, either.

The Vachons decided to give up trying to win this rigged game and reaped unexpected rewards. In their heart of hearts, they might believe in equality for equality’s sake, but in practice their partnership has created a comfortable life raft that floats above much of the crush and chaos that ignite those nasty domestic conflagrations in the first place.

It’s fitting, then, that the last chapter of the Vachons’ book is entitled “The Joy of Ownership.” As in, it’s your life, the only one you’re getting, so step up and own it.

Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.

Trending Stories