Darcy Lockman > Quotes

“Joan Williams at the Center for WorkLife Law said "My strongest advice to young women: Don't just try to find a man who's supportive of women. That's a threshold. But consider, what is his attitude toward himself and ambition? That's what determines your future. If he's ambitious and feels entitled to that ambition, you're going to end up embattled, marginalized, and divorced.”
― Darcy Lockman, All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership

“Men are not socialized to feel guilty for having freedom or for not being there for other people.”
― Darcy Lockman, All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership

“I became my own worst enemy, conflicted about my right to ask, self-conscious about my rising anger, and too often stuck with the choice between fighting or just taking care of it, whatever it was, on my own.”
― Darcy Lockman, All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership

“It is a truism that motherhood makes many women feminist.”
― Darcy Lockman, All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership

“Social psychologists have their own name for the mental load. They call it mnemonic work. Studies have established that couples intuitively, rather than consciously and explicitly, divide the work of planning and remembering. And just as intuitively, it mostly falls on wives.”
― Darcy Lockman

“The mental load means always having to remember. Remember that you have to add cotton buds to the shopping list, remember that today’s the deadline to order your vegetable delivery for the week, remember that we should have paid the caretaker for last month’s work by now. That the baby grew another 3 cm and can’t fit into his trousers anymore, that he needs to get his booster shot, or that your partner doesn’t have a clean shirt left. . . . So while most heterosexual men say that they do their fair share of household chores . . . their partners have a rather different perspective: ‘He always puts on the washing machine but never hangs the washing out to dry.’ ‘The sheets could be standing stiff before he thought to change them.’ ‘He’s never cooked a single meal for the baby.”
― Darcy Lockman, All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership

“Men don’t get it. They are often times oblivious to others’ needs and only think of themselves.”
― Darcy Lockman, All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership