Not Oprah’s Book Club: Getting to 50/50

My childhood friend Mollie sent me not one, but two copies of her former professor’s book, when she noticed that I was thinking and writing a lot about work/family balance issues (thanks Mollie!). Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples Can Have it All by Sharing it All by Joanna Strober and Sharon Meers is a deeply-researched, very practical guide to getting real about some of the most critical unfinished business of contemporary feminism.
Unlike Linda Hirshman’s Get to Work, which leaves many readers feeling judged and misunderstood, or Leslie Bennett’s The Feminine Mistake, which leaves many readers thinking doomsday thoughts, Strober and Meers approach the subject with healthy doses of both realism and optimism. They are women who have been through it, and lived to tell the tale. (Both are heterosexual, and so their own life examples are from this perspective. Unfortunately they didn’t do much to look at non-hetero couples or non-marrying types).
After reviewing all the research that proves that dual working families are actually healthier, happier, and more economically viable, they go on to talk about some of the roadblocks to making it work and their suggestions for getting past those roadblocks.
One of the insights that really struck a personal chord was that women have to truly let go of the notion that they are inherently more fit to parent, that they can simply do it better, by virtue of being women.

This essentialism has seeped into my own thinking, I realized upon further reflection, and wouldn’t serve my future partner or kids. Even language is an issue, they explain: the shift from my baby to our baby in one’s mind can actually change the dynamic of shared parenting.
They advocate lots of interesting ways to have a shared parenting plan–from low tech like a white board in the kitchen that everyone writes things that need to get done on to high tech like a shared Outlook calendar. But doesn’t all this “planning” get tiresome? Isn’t there all this writing on how peer marriages end up un-eroticized? They’ve got an answer for that too:

Working couples need to problem solve more than ‘traditional’ couples with one breadwinner simply because daily planning tends to be more complex. But the ongoing negotiation and interacting is its own kind of intimacy–common ground, common interests, common life.

I’m not sure about all that in the real messy, emotional struggle that is egalitarian partnership, but I know one thing. Reading this book makes one feel like nothing has to be perfect and everything is actually possible. It touches on both the psychological blocks that have been keeping women from the work/family balance that they crave (guilt, perfectionism, not asking for needs, essentializing their own maternal gifts) and the practical ones (negotiating, working smarter for less hours, giving up some responsibilities). Definitely one to add to the “how the hell does anyone make it all work?” bookshelf.