Abstract
In their 1989 book The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung observed that movement toward gender equality in the United States had stalled in the two decades since the beginning of the gender revolution because men, governments, and businesses had not changed to accommodate the influx of mothers into the paid labor force. The result was that mothers remained largely responsible for domestic labor despite working for pay in the labor force. In All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, Darcy Lockman asks why—30 years and a generation later—US working mothers’ second shift persists.
At its core, All the Rage aims to identify the root causes of women’s disproportionate responsibility for childcare in contemporary America and determine a way to revitalize the stalled revolution in intimate partnerships. Ultimately, Lockman surmises that the problem lies with the differential socialization of men toward individualism and entitlement and of women toward collectivism and selfless “unentitlement”. Lockman’s unsurprising and worn conclusion is that gender equality ultimately rests on upending the gender order by getting men to embrace femininity.
Admittedly, the book, the genesis of which was inspired by her struggles with establishing egalitarianism in her own marriage, is a personal catharsis for Lockman, a journalist turned-psychotherapist with a PhD in clinical psychology from The University of Michigan. In addition to personal anecdotes, Lockman interviews dozens of working mothers, whose depictions of their own struggles to get their partners to take ownership of childcare provides a human face to the depth of gender research reviewed in the book’s 352 pages. Indeed, Lockman leaves few stones unturned in her quest to answer the book’s driving questions. Considering biological, anthropological, psychological, and sociological perspectives on the gendered division of labor, numerous theoretical perspectives on gender differences—gender essentialist, evolutionary psychology, psychoanalytic, and social constructionist—are considered and critiqued. If the book was not ultimately written for a lay audience (most sources are loosely cited in text and some not at all), it could serve as a primary text for a graduate course in gender studies. Though the biggest strength of All the Rage is the synthesis of decades of research on the gendered division of labor, its greatest weakness is a micro-level focus that fails to seriously engage with the institutional and organizational forces that perpetuate gender inequality. Work-family policy and the organization of work are barely mentioned.
Lockman begins the book with a discussion of the costs of gender inequality to women’s careers, to fairness, and to relationship quality and stability. Despite these costs, and couples’ desires for egalitarianism, she notes that inequality persists because below men’s and women’s conscious beliefs in equality lie subconscious biases grounded in gender essentialism. Given the target audience, Lockman proceeds to slow walk the reader to the conclusion that gender is socially constructed and therefore can be deconstructed. In Chapter 2, she debunks the naturalist fallacy of maternal instinct and clumsy uninterested fathering by pointing to within-gender difference and cross-cultural variation in parenting behaviors. In Chapter 3, she describes gender socialization processes that imbue and reinforce gender essentialism, male privilege, and the devaluation of the femininity. In Chapters 4–6, she tackles how differential gender socialization results in female responsibility for parenting. On men, Lockman writes that not only are they socialized toward independence and thus unprepared for caring roles but also their privilege means they do not feel guilty for putting their needs before others’. In contrast, women are raised to be communal, intensive mothers who forsake their own needs. Importantly, she notes, women’s devotion to motherhood enables fathers’ lack of involvement, which reinforces mothers’ roles as primary parent. Indeed, Lockman is clear that both men and women are complicit in maintaining the gender order. Mothers gatekeep and revel in their role of default parent, but fathers’ actively resist parenting responsibilities and then decry mothers’ complaints that their “help” isn’t enough. Though both sexes are called out for their roles in maintaining the status quo, Lockman concludes the book by suggesting that inequality ultimately lies with the fact that men reject femininity, and thus engaged parenting, because it is socially devalued. It is men, therefore, who must change for equality to be achieved.
How to get men to become engaged fathers is All the Rage’s unanswered question, nonetheless. The book lacks explicit prescriptions for change, relying instead on the implication that awareness will spark men’s desire to finally embrace egalitarianism—a striking contradiction to Lockman’s own observations that persistent inequality has been driven by implicit biases and men’s disincentive to embrace femininity. Given her roots as a psychologist, it is understandable that Lockman sees the problem of gender inequality as one of personal agency and enlightenment. Yet, 30 years after the Second Shift, awareness of mothers’ disproportionate responsibilities for childcare isn’t the issue. Though All the Rage provides a deeper understanding of why the problem exists, it brings us no closer to solving it.