美国国家公共电台 NPR 'All The Rage' Isn't About Moms Having It All — It's About Moms Doing It All

 

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Happy Mother's Day. Does this scene sound familiar?

DARCY LOCKMAN: In the morning, I'm rushing around. I'm getting lunches together. I'm helping¹ the kids finish up their homework. I'm making sure everyone's wearing socks. And my husband sits there, drinking his coffee, on his phone. He doesn't do it on purpose. He doesn't even realize what's going on around him.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's Darcy Lockman. She's a clinical psychologist. And that's a story she heard from a lot of moms. She talked to them and some of their husbands for her book, "All The Rage: Mothers, Fathers And The Myth Of Equal Partnership²."

LOCKMAN: I was initially³ going to interview a hundred women for the book because that's what Betty Friedan did for "The Feminine Mystique." So I thought, oh, that's a good place to start, a hundred women. But by the time I got up into the 40s, I was just, like, you know, these interviews all sound exactly the same. It didn't matter the age of the woman, where in the country she was living, her socioeconomic status. It was just - it was so consistent.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: How did you get the husbands to open up?

LOCKMAN: When I got toward the end of my research, I tried to contact all the women that I had spoken with and just said, hey, would your husbands be willing to talk? The interesting thing about it was when I spoke⁴ to the women, they were all so enthusiastic and passionate⁵. When I talked to their husbands, they were really nice, but they were so clearly disinterested⁶ in the topic. It wasn't that they didn't know that their wives are never frustrated⁷ with them. It just didn't seem particularly important to them. And I don't mean to imply that they were cold to their wives or indifferent to their wives. It just really didn't register as such a big deal.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Like a fact of life - like, this is just the way things are.

LOCKMAN: Yes, absolutely. In fact, one of the women that I interviewed said to me, my husband sees we have an issue with this. But he considers it my problem. So he says to me, there's really nothing I can do, and it would be helpful if you weren't so bothered by this.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wow. Let me ask you this. The amount of child care that men take on was actually rising in the 1980s and '90s. But then we did see it level off. So what happened? It seemed like we were sort of making some progress in this issue.

LOCKMAN: Yeah, it's a really good question. There's some interesting research on ideas about household fairness. And one of the studies I came across that really seemed to quantify this was they looked at the time-use diaries of couples. And then they asked the couples, what are your feelings about your division of household labor⁸? And the percentage of work that men who reported the greatest feelings of fairness were doing was 35%.

So men doing 35% of the domestic work felt, of all the people in the study, that things were most fair. But the thing that was even perhaps more interesting and also disturbing was women basically agreed with them. Women who were doing 66% of their household's labor felt like they had the fairest arrangements of all the women in the study.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's extraordinary. Is some of this just because our culture is set up this way? How do you get schools, for example, to call the dads first or for parents to text the dad about carpools and playdates?

LOCKMAN: Right, it's so baked in. I had a woman who was not the primary parent in her house. Her husband worked from home. And he did a lot more care of their daughter. And she said to me, you know, the school still calls me. The e-vites all go to me. I get the message constantly that I'm the one who's supposed to be doing this. And she felt a lot of guilt⁹ because of it. And her colleagues would say to her, you know, if you were a man, you wouldn't be thinking twice about this. It would just be how it was.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And I've heard dads tell me that it's hard for them to break it and be included. I know single dads or divorced dads or gay dads or dads who take the lead parenting who find it hard to find community among parents at school.

LOCKMAN: Yes. I spoke to some stay-at-home dads, actually. And, of course, they said just that. One guy told me he didn't want to make friends with other stay-at-home dads because their attitude was often, you know, well, I'm just doing this until I have a better job or more work or something. It was almost, like, disrespectful of the role. And he didn't want to be around that.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: What about same-sex partners?

LOCKMAN: I did interview some same-sex couples for the book. And there is some research that suggests that lesbians co-parent most harmoniously¹⁰ of all gender¹¹ combinations of couples. And if you think about how girls and boys are raised - girls to be communal¹², boys to be agentic - it makes sense that two women parenting together, being that they both have this kind of lifelong social pressure to really always be thinking about other people, would get along the best during parenting. They're the most likely to be thinking about each other's needs more often than not.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: What do we need to do? Do you hear any stories about people making it work?

LOCKMAN: Yeah, I did actually. I actually wrote the book that I would have loved to have before I became a parent. My husband and I are both progressive. We totally planned to do everything split equally, even though it was more of a vague notion than a planned assumption. And it really doesn't work that way. We didn't take into account our own internalized sexism - not just his sexism, my internalized sexism, my impulse to go out of my way to spare him any inconvenience. So I think if couples really sit down and say, you know, this is how it's going to go if we're not careful, they can be careful.

And the couples I talked to who were doing this most successfully really made parity¹³ a team effort and a goal. So then they could sit down when either of them felt overburdened and say, hey, this mutual¹⁴ goal we set, I'm feeling like we're not meeting it. We have to recalibrate. One woman said to me - she was actually a sociologist¹⁵ who had gone to school to study work and family. And she knew it was going to go this way. And she said to her boyfriend, who later became her husband, look; if you want to be with me, we're going to make a spreadsheet. And we're going to decide who does what. And he said, well, let's let it be more organic.

And I don't know if they ever made the spreadsheet. But the two of them really decided¹⁶ early on that they were committed to this. He also happened to be Swedish, which she said helped. But, you know, really kind of staying on top of it seemed to be the most important thing for couples.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And so what do you think the takeaway is? What needs to happen?

LOCKMAN: I think the takeaway is more awareness¹⁷. One of the problems is that we have this idea of the modern involved father. We all know that things have improved a lot since the 1950s. And it's really easy to focus on that rather than to know - and I think most people don't know because they don't look at statistics - that fathers' participation¹⁸ leveled off at 35% around the year 2000. So we go into parenting expecting something like parity. But it doesn't manifest. So our expectations are really not being met. And that leads to a lot of anger.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Darcy Lockman, author of "All The Rage: Mothers, Fathers And The Myth Of Equal Partnership."

Thank you very much.

LOCKMAN: Thank you.

1 helping   

n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的

参考例句：

• The poor children regularly pony up for a second helping of my hamburger. 那些可怜的孩子们总是要求我把我的汉堡包再给他们一份。
• By doing this, they may at times be helping to restore competition. 这样一来, 他在某些时候,有助于竞争的加强。

2 partnership   

n.合作关系，伙伴关系

参考例句：

• The company has gone into partnership with Swiss Bank Corporation.这家公司已经和瑞士银行公司建立合作关系。
• Martin has taken him into general partnership in his company.马丁已让他成为公司的普通合伙人。

3 initially   

adv.最初，开始

参考例句：

• The ban was initially opposed by the US.这一禁令首先遭到美国的反对。
• Feathers initially developed from insect scales.羽毛最初由昆虫的翅瓣演化而来。

4 spoke   

n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说

参考例句：

• They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
• The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。

5 passionate   

adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的

参考例句：

• He is said to be the most passionate man.据说他是最有激情的人。
• He is very passionate about the project.他对那个项目非常热心。

6 disinterested   

adj.不关心的，不感兴趣的

参考例句：

• He is impartial and disinterested.他公正无私。
• He's always on the make,I have never known him do a disinterested action.他这个人一贯都是唯利是图，我从来不知道他有什么无私的行动。

7 frustrated   

adj.挫败的，失意的，泄气的v.使不成功( frustrate的过去式和过去分词 )；挫败；使受挫折；令人沮丧

参考例句：

• It's very easy to get frustrated in this job. 这个工作很容易令人懊恼。
• The bad weather frustrated all our hopes of going out. 恶劣的天气破坏了我们出行的愿望。 来自《简明英汉词典》

8 labor   

n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦

参考例句：

• We are never late in satisfying him for his labor.我们从不延误付给他劳动报酬。
• He was completely spent after two weeks of hard labor.艰苦劳动两周后，他已经疲惫不堪了。

9 guilt   

n.犯罪；内疚；过失，罪责

参考例句：

• She tried to cover up her guilt by lying.她企图用谎言掩饰自己的罪行。
• Don't lay a guilt trip on your child about schoolwork.别因为功课责备孩子而使他觉得很内疚。

10 harmoniously   

和谐地，调和地

参考例句：

• The president and Stevenson had worked harmoniously over the last eighteen months. 在过去一年半里，总统和史蒂文森一起工作是融洽的。
• China and India cannot really deal with each other harmoniously. 中国和印度这两只猛兽不可能真心实意地和谐相处。

11 gender   

n.（生理上的）性，（名词、代词等的）性

参考例句：

• French differs from English in having gender for all nouns.法语不同于英语，所有的名词都有性。
• Women are sometimes denied opportunities solely because of their gender.妇女有时仅仅因为性别而无法获得种种机会。

12 communal   

adj.公有的，公共的，公社的，公社制的

参考例句：

• There was a communal toilet on the landing for the four flats.在楼梯平台上有一处公共卫生间供4套公寓使用。
• The toilets and other communal facilities were in a shocking state.厕所及其他公共设施的状况极其糟糕。

13 parity   

n.平价，等价，比价，对等

参考例句：

• The two currencies have now reached parity.这两种货币现已达到同等价值。
• Women have yet to achieve wage or occupational parity in many fields.女性在很多领域还没能争取到薪金、职位方面的平等。

14 mutual   

adj.相互的，彼此的；共同的，共有的

参考例句：

• We must pull together for mutual interest.我们必须为相互的利益而通力合作。
• Mutual interests tied us together.相互的利害关系把我们联系在一起。

15 sociologist   

n.研究社会学的人，社会学家

参考例句：

• His mother was a sociologist,researching socialism.他的母亲是个社会学家，研究社会主义。
• Max Weber is a great and outstanding sociologist.马克斯·韦伯是一位伟大的、杰出的社会学家。

16 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

17 awareness   

n.意识，觉悟，懂事，明智

参考例句：

• There is a general awareness that smoking is harmful.人们普遍认识到吸烟有害健康。
• Environmental awareness has increased over the years.这些年来人们的环境意识增强了。

18 participation   

n.参与，参加，分享

参考例句：

• Some of the magic tricks called for audience participation.有些魔术要求有观众的参与。
• The scheme aims to encourage increased participation in sporting activities.这个方案旨在鼓励大众更多地参与体育活动。