The End of Men and the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin Page A

rightful owner who was whipping it back into shape.
    Spending a few days with Steven and Sarah made me realize something about my own marriage. My hunch when I got engaged was correct: Over the years my husband and I have in fact split domestic life pretty equally. We both work, we both cook, we both take care of the children. Because of this I assumed that I had shedmost of my attachment to traditional gender roles. But now I realize that I am much more deliberate and reactive than I thought. I would never not work, because that decision is loaded with feminist betrayal. I would never let my husband sit back and drink a beer while I was busy in the kitchen. And my husband would never stay home, because it would never occur to him. What I realized in Pittsburgh was that even our intimate relationships unfold in a cultural moment, and my moment was still not far enough removed from old feminist rage to divest these tiny domestic decisions of that kind of meaning.
    Steven and Sarah make decisions on a much cleaner slate. They behave almost like corporate partners at a work retreat, taking stock of trends and proceeding from there. Sarah works because she has the “more ready skill set” to succeed as a lawyer, and Steven stays home because in this modern economy “testosterone has been marginalized.” Steven feels entitled to check out on evenings and weekends, and this makes Sarah “tired and sometimes angry.” But it also means X gets the best of all possible worlds because, as Sarah read in a study, a kid with a stay-at-home dad gets more total parenting hours because he gains the father’s time and retains almost all of the mother’s, and ends up with higher test scores. Make sense?
    Steven and Sarah were both raised with the usual jumble of gender expectations. They both come from conservative Midwestern families with factory roots. Sarah considered herself evangelical in her young life, and at what she calls her “Jesus camp” she was taught that the Bible ordained a man to be the head of the household and the woman to be submissive. In graduate school she rebelled and wrote her thesis on something about the body and corset restrictions, she can’t remember exactly what. And that’s the point—these feminist constructs are distant memories. On her shelf I saw a bookwith “Womb” in the title, but it was hidden behind a notebook of recipes. The closest thing I saw to a feminist text was a
Working Mother’s Guide to Life
sitting in the bathroom, well thumbed through and marked up, with advice on, say, how to pump breast milk at a high-powered job.
    Some days Sarah comes home from work and there is poop on the walls that Steven has not bothered to clean, and then she feels like nothing has changed since time immemorial. On those days Sarah realizes one truth about their situation: Steven stays home during the day, but in fact she is in charge of both realms. By deciding to work full-time she has not actually ceded the domestic space, but only doubled her load, although neither of them ever articulates that. This is one of the many ways in which the transition to a new era is not yet complete, in which couples with breadwinner wives hang on to old ways and habits that make the current setup unworkable. The women take on new roles with gusto, while the men take them on only reluctantly.
    In fact, there is a reigning notion in the Andrews house that Steven is ultimately the one in charge, that if anything ever went wrong, Steven would stand between his family and disaster. The dynamic, as Sarah describes it, seems something like
Charlie’s Angels
, where Steven is Charlie and Sarah is doing his bidding. “I’m like the planner, and she executes,” Steven says. “Follow-through isn’t my strength.” Sarah puts it this way: “I almost get the sense of him sitting back and indulgently watching me tinker around in my universe and taking this or that over and him thinking, ‘Isn’t this cool? Isn’t she