Why you need a labour contract as a stay-at-home mom
Answering objections to my viral TikTok video with half a million views
With my personal account, I made a viral TikTok with over 488,000 views, 56,500 likes, 16,600 bookmarks and over 2400 comments.
The title: “Get a labour contract before becoming or continuing as a stay-at-home mom.”
I thought it might go viral. (If I had been surer, I might have drawn some eyebrows on and let my hair down or something.)
It went exactly how you’d expect: most women loving it, with about 3–5% of women expressing patriarchal values and emotions; mostly men voraciously hating it, with about 4% of men in support.
You might be tempted to think it’s just money talk people don’t like. After all, what is the middle-class white person’s Polite Company Mantra? “Never talk about sex, religion, or money”?
But we need to add mothers to the list. As Elizabeth Gilbert said to me recently… (okay, and to thousands of other people at a Vancouver venue)… she could stand on a stage and say, “Motherhood,” and have half the audience outraged and half would clap.
Everyone had a mother, so everyone has opinions about mothers. Deeply emotional, illogical, adamant opinions they do not hold back. People feel entitled to judge mothers and comment on mothers like they do on no other topic except anything else having to do with the worth of women. Mothers and sex workers get the worst of it. Mothers who are sex workers? I dare you to wade those waters. BIPOC mothers…? They get their own racist controlling images I won’t repeat here.
I made a video about mothers and money. Let’s just say I’m glad I don’t live in Florida. Do these come in bullet-proof?
There isn’t enough space to address allllll of the objections or questions there on TikTok. The maximum length of a video is 10 minutes. So, I’m going to start by laying out my argument, then I will address objections, then I will explain how to do a calculation, and then I’ll offer options for how that calculation could be used in a relationship of two parents.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
“This is the same thing as alimony or spousal support. And there are calculators for that.”
“Not all moms are good moms. Some moms don’t even do anything.”
Why stay-at-home moms need labour contracts
Firstly, we have to start with the idea that women are humans who are entitled to complete autonomy and happiness.
Stay with me here! Ha.
Not everyone agrees, of course. But even when people do, they often require reminding that this is the foundational logic underpinning all our feminist work.
In order to have autonomy and happiness, women need to be able to support themselves financially. If they become reliant on someone else, they are at great risk of not having full autonomy over their lives. This puts them at risk of abuse or feeling trapped, which actually hurts the relationship.
Next, consider that most women self-report as straight. The colonial family model is a nuclear family model with a husband and wife and kids. I could write a whole essay here just on this, but the TL;DR version is: The nuclear family is an ideal family structure for supporting capitalism and male dominance. And no, it’s not the natural way of things— it’s barely historical.
Our North American culture’s traditional family model is built off of a 1950’s family model that was a teeny blip in time. It was an anomaly and only for white people. White middle-class women stayed home raising kids. And if you were Mormon, like me, you know that the entire Mormon church culture is based on this model because the church leaders today were raising their families in the 50s.
Women have fought for every bit of access to equality, gaining rights to work anywhere they want: the army, firefighting, policing, trades, medicine, law, you name it. Even though some studies show women often outperform men in male-dominated fields:
And when women enter fields previously dominated by men, and they enter in large numbers, the pay drops.
“Women just choose lower-paying work!” No, they do not. If you are saying this, you must not know what sociology is and how sociologists collect data and how incredibly easy this is to measure and prove. For example, “[J]anitors (usually men) earn 22 percent more than maids and housecleaners (usually women).”
Go follow those two links and read the first one entirely if you want to understand the wage gap between men and women. Anyone who says the wage cap is a myth is either too unaware to know how to tell when misogynists are peddling nonsense, or they’re the nonsense-peddling misogynist with an agenda.
Having all that established, let’s move on.
Men and women get married or shack up, and then along comes Baby.
More often than not, the husband makes more money than the wife. And they have to decide if one of them is going to be primarily responsible for keeping the baby alive, or if they will outsource that job.
Their options:
Daycare
Nanny
Mom stays home
Dad stays home
Free help from family
Mutual aid cooperative
Many people don’t have #5 as an option. Almost no one has #6 as an option.
Dad staying home gets eliminated quickly if he makes a lot more money.
Nannies are quite expensive unless you find someone to exploit. According to Care.com’s 10th annual survey, published June 13, 2023, here are…
…the top 5 most expensive states to hire a nanny for one infant:
Washington D.C. $885/week ($3540/month)
Massachusetts $864 ($3456/month)
California $849 ($3396/month)
Washington $838 ($3352/month)
Connecticut $799 ($3196/month)
And the average national cost is $736/week or $2944/month.
The least expensive rate was $579/week or $2316/month in Mississippi.
Note that this is for one baby, not two children, and these are not mothering hours, these are business hours.
To find someone more affordable, you’re going to have to take advantage of someone’s desperate need for work, someone who is sending money home to family in another country where that American dollar goes farther there than it does here. Often, they leave their own children behind to raise American or Canadian children. It’s a tragedy. It’s repulsive. I highly recommend reading, Women’s Work: A Personal Reckoning with Labor, Motherhood, and Privilege by Megan K. Stack.
You can also find young women to nanny for little money because they’re travelling, they’re grateful for the experience, and also because they’re only doing this for a very short time. In this case, the family might churn through nannies. That’s not ideal for the children’s attachment needs.
So, for all of these reasons of complication, cost, and energy expenditure, many people want to find a daycare.
But even daycares can be costly, especially with two kids, and I’m not even referring to the income loss or job security loss from kids catching so many colds and flus at daycare, causing moms to have to miss work to stay home with them. You’d think employers would accept this as the necessary cost of doing business (employees have children and someone needs to care for them when they’re sick and they’re not allowed to keep them in daycare when sick), but they don’t. Employers fire people for having children who are sick too often and need parental care. Or they treat their employees poorly, hoping they’ll quit. Or they fail to promote them or give them rewarding work, so the job barely helps the mom’s career prospects going forward, not easily leading to advancement.
And then! Their salaries are often not much more than what daycare costs! Here is a list of average daycare costs in the US.
Let’s look at Colorado:
Full-time infant care in Colorado costs $15,325 annually on average.
The cost for 4–5-year olds is $15,000/year.
These are costs for only one child.
Minimum wage workers earn nearly $25,000 annually.
Faced with the high costs, the low wages, and having to miss the most precious, tender years of their children’s lives, families often opt for the moms to stay home.
As we can see, stay-at-home moms are not all privileged! Let the myth die! The most recent reputable survey I could find by Pew Research found that 34% of stay-at-home moms were living in poverty. We can presume another percentage didn’t quite qualify as living in poverty, but are also low income.
Why? Because their income-earning potential is too low. Either they put their kids in daycare, suffering the employment penalty for having sick kids so often, and their low-income salary doesn’t leave much left over once they pay for child care, or they stay home because they can’t afford child care or access it, and in staying home they’re unable to earn any income because parenting is already a full-time job.
Care.com says:
For the 10th year in a row, child care costs have continued to rise. Today, families are spending, on average, 27% of their household income on child care expenses. And 59% of parents surveyed tell us they are planning to spend more than $18,000 per child on child care in 2023. It’s no surprise that 50% of parents are more concerned about the cost of child care than they were at this time last year.
As well,
44% quit their job to look after their infant
65% say they would return back to their career if childcare becomes affordable
59% struggle to pay for childcare
35% said childcare costs prevent them from expanding their family
79% wish employers were more supportive of working parents
None of this would be as pressing an issue if women’s wages matched men’s.
And the only reason—THE ONLY REASON—women’s wages don’t match men’s wages is because of sexism.
Women were prevented from accessing careers at all for hundreds of years. Check out this historical timeline of some women’s rights to money. If they couldn’t access careers and money, they couldn’t hand it down to their daughters, or hire their daughters. They were restricted from asserting their skill and talents, which is how men get the idea that women “don’t” or “can’t” do certain work very well, because they dind’t see them do it, but of course they didn’t see them do it because they werene’t allowed to do it.
Women aren’t hired into as many high-earning positions.
Women ask for salary increases as much as men do, but are less likely to get them.
Women will stifle their ambitions in school and at work in order to remain as attractive to men, even speaking up less in university classes compared to women students already partnered, and stating less ambitious career goals when their answers will be made public to the class.
Women were forced to be the ones to look after kids in the pandemic— over 400,000 more American women than men left the workforce!
Women will sacrifice pay to have more flexibility in order to raise families. This can partly be explained by workplaces being inflexible towards families in the first place, not having daycares on-site, not allowing work-from-home, not allowing women to take a full year off and return to their positions.
Women will sacrifice pay to have more flexible work conditions to stay home more, in part because workplaces can be exhausting male-dominated spaces where women’s appearances are scrutinized and commented upon, and because a “professional” appearance takes more time for women and they want to steal back the time from their commutes.
Men don’t share their salary information with women.
Companies force people to sign NDAs about their salaries, so women don’t even know what they could or should be making enough to negotiate for higher salaries.
Women’s salaries drop when more women enter a given field (as cited earlier).
Girls are socialized to be perfect, where boys are socialized to be brave. As long as boys or men are being brave, they are lauded and excuses are made for them. The founder of Girls Who Code found that girls will often appear to not know how to code because their screens will be blank but when teachers Control + Z their screens, they see work that was very close to correct. She said boys are more likely to show their work. Girls won’t unless it’s perfect. We literally feel like we have to be perfect before we’re worthy because we’re taught this.
Women are socialized into feminine fields of work and when they want to pursue work in male-dominated fields like trades work, politics, or the army, they experience sexual assault, sexual harassment, and bullying, pushing many to leave. A great/terrible example of sexism in a field: a study on GitHub pull request acceptance by gender found that, “Women’s acceptance rates dominate over men’s for every programming language in the top 10, to various degrees,” …until their gender is revealed to be female. And then it drops.
I could go on with so many more examples and links and studies.
A defense lawyer for misogyny would respond to this pile of evidence by isolating each example and implanting even just a shred of doubt with alternative explanations. The explanations won’t be likely, and will probably be riddled with logical fallacies. But misogynists are usually too unintelligent to recognize logical fallacies, or they’re trying to manipulate vulnerable people who they expect will not know how to recognize a logical fallacy. And anyway, they act like each piece of evidence is presented in voir dire—a trial within a trial, wherein the judge is supposed to rule on a question isolated from its surrounding context.
To all of this, Occam’s Razor screams:
It’s sexism! Women make less money because of sexism.
This means women are pressured and manipulated and socially designed to be the parent who stays home to raise a child… because of sexism.
Once moms are at home raising kids, they lose out on job experience. They lose out on promotions they would have gotten if they had just stayed working, which means their pensions will be lower than if they had stayed working.
They also have trouble getting hired back into their fields. One commenter on my viral TikTok video said that a job recruiter told her it was easier to find placements for convicts than stay-at-home moms. Stay-at-home moms have been found to be half as likely to get job interviews as moms who were laid off.
Forbes reports,
Stanford Sociology professor Shelley Correll completed a study with colleagues in which they sent résumés and cover letters to real employers advertising job openings. The employers were a whopping 2.1 times more likely to give a callback to a woman who was not a parent than to an equally qualified mother. These studies suggest that signaling motherhood on a résumé may backfire.
This means that once women have children, they are more dependent on their male partners for income… because of sexism.
This means women are less free… because of sexism.
This means women are more vulnerable… because of sexism.
This means men feel safe slacking off in marriages, slacking off as dads, and abusing their wives, confident their wives won’t leave them because they won’t be able to afford to raise the kids on their own… because of sexism.
And that is why:
stay-at-home mothers
need
to
be
paid
wages
for
their
work.
Some mothers abandon paid work to raise their kids. Frequently, this is not by choice, but by sexist design. (Statistics here would be good but I am not being paid for this article and I do not have time. That there are any mothers for whom this is true is morally relevant.)
Then, do you know whose career benefits from having kids?
Michelle Budig, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts found that, “on average, men’s earnings increased more than 6 percent when they had children (if they lived with them), while women’s decreased 4 percent for each child they had. Her study was based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1979 to 2006, which tracked people’s labor market activities over time. Childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns, while married mothers earn 76 cents, widening the gap.” (Source.)
Why would dads make more money than childless men? Because they’re seen as being more stable. They are more likely to stick with a job because they need to provide for their families. And their extra hours worked? More likely to result in bonuses! You can read more here at The Motherhood Penalty vs. The Fatherhood Bonus, care of NYT.
So, dads are benefitting directly from the oppression experienced by stay-at-home mothers.
It’s not merely the case that stay-at-home mothers are experiencing oppression. (Working-outside-the-home mothers too, but that’s another article.)
And it’s not merely the case that mothers are experiencing oppression because of sexism.
To add insult to injury, fathers benefit from the oppression experienced by stay-at-home mothers perpetuated by patriarchal men, some of which will include these same fathers.
It gets worse from here. Mothers experience weaponized incompetence from their husbands who feign inability to do basic tasks so that they won’t be asked again. Mothers experience their husbands as creating as much extra work as an additional child. Men don’t shoulder the mental load. They aren’t aware of the mental load. They don’t know how to appreciate invisible labour. They don’t share in kin-keeping tasks. They spend an inordinate amount of time on expensive and time-consuming hobbies instead of spending time with their kids. They sometimes don't even know their wives’ middle names, their parents’ names, their wives’ birthdays, their childrens’ birthdays!
And don’t take it from me or even from other women! Take it from these men confessing to all of these things.
Ultimately, the government should be paying for the majority of child care because the government needs us to have children. Everyone needs mothers to have children. If this doesn’t happen, our entire economy will fall apart and when we’re old, we won’t have enough people to take care of us and our environment.
When population declines, countries have two ways of addressing this: fascism or incentivization.
Right now, the US is choosing fascism. The Republican party is not oppressing women’s reproductive rights because they’re all driven by their Christian consciences. The party leaders and representatives are pandering to Christians’ beliefs for voting purposes, but their concerns are around population decline. To support the population, they need more citizens, but they don’t want to fund social programs, and they don’t want immigrants who will change the political landscape of the country. So, they’re trying to force women into having babies by limiting access to birth control, sex education in schools, and criminalizing abortion.
This further aids their agenda because when people can’t afford children, crime and poor health increase. The carceral industrial complex and health care are massive industries.
Whereas other countries have treated population concerns with incentivization. They pay mothers to have kids. They make everything easier and more beautiful.
Read only the intro and the first chapter of Birth Strike by Jenny Brown and you will be convinced of everything I’ve just said.
However, all of that said, it is going to take a long time for the government to pay wages for mom work. It’s going to be a while before they even make daycare more affordable.
In the meantime, dads are benefitting directly from moms’ loss of income. Dads need to transfer those gained wages, and their wages in general, to moms if those moms are staying at home to raise the kids, or doing any unequal degree of labour.
And if they don’t like that proposal, the solution isn’t to rail at me, or their wives, or women in general. It’s to become active feminists and petition the government for:
equal wages for equal work
pay transparency laws
family-friendly work policies
paternal leave
labour wages for stay-at-home moms
The end. That is the end of my argument.
In summary, and in general, using sociological studies,
Women make less than men because of sexism.
Women can’t afford child care because there aren’t enough quality child care resources and that drives the cost up.
Women can’t afford child care because they don’t make enough money in their jobs.
Or, women can’t self-justify the time away from their kids with jobs that barely cover the cost of child care, so they stay home to raise the kids.
Meanwhile, men benefit career-wise by having kids.
Men make more money because of sexism.
Therefore the children they share together are a net financial gain for men, in terms of career offers and promotions, and a net loss for women.
The men therefore have no moral right to pocket that gain and push the risk and cost onto women. They need to transfer the gain to women.
If they don’t like this, then they should be motivated to petition the government, their employers, and the culture at large to recognize this social injustice and provide child care to families so that it doesn’t fall so unequally onto women, subjugating them for the rest of their lives through compounded consequences.
Addressing your objections
Of the thousands of comments I received, here were the objections:
“Try to take that to a lawyer and they will laugh at you.”
Well, that would be rude.
You would never (or should never) take a job without an employment contract. I’ve put this forward using employment contract logic because I’m making a feminist argument and it’s logical to say that this is labour that is being done instead of other labour you would have been doing under contract, and that this labour should be protected and waged.
But legally, it wouldn’t be an employment contract, it would be a prenup or a postnup.
As for how a family law lawyer would react, I think that depends on where you live. In Canada, I know you can’t put anything immoral or illegal in a prenup, and that includes clauses about infidelity. I doubt this would be considered as either immoral or illegal (BUT I DON’T KNOW BECAUSE I’M NOT A LAWYER AND THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE.) Spousal support is explicitly included in prenups. That will necessitate including the couple’s logic and values underpinning their agreement. And that’s essentially what this is.
If you try to insert this labour contract into a post-nuptial agreement, I imagine it gets more vulnerable to a claim by the husband later that he was under duress.
I AM NOT A LAWYER AND AM NOT GIVING LEGAL ADVICE FROM AN INFORMED PLACE.
But here’s what I would do:
I would find myself a badass feminist lawyer.
I would ask for a pre-nup or a post-nup with a spousal support agreement encompassing the owed wages I calculated for myself.
I would include the logic behind them.
I would ask my lawyer what would help protect me from a future argument in a divorce proceeding that my husband made this agreement under duress.
For sure she will say that he needs to get his own lawyer, so I’d at least ensure that. Maybe it would include updating the agreement yearly.
THEN: I would not make life decisions expecting this contract to be fulfilled like a Disney witch’s prophecy. I wouldn't make any decision thinking I will be guaranteed or even likely to get X amount of money later.
People get out of contracts all the time. I had a separation agreement with my ex-husband and he didn’t stick to our custody terms. Presumably, because the lawyer he proposed we use as a collaborative divorce lawyer kept the terms so vague that they were hard for me to enforce. Or, maybe because the judge just didn’t care. Judges make terrible rulings all the time and people can’t afford the money or time to appeal them.
You cannot ever feel too safe with any contract, especially if you’re a woman. You cannot trust that you’ll be divorcing the same man you’re married to now. This is a married man. A married man is very different from a divorcing man. Their memories are different! Their values are different! Their sentiments towards you are different! And they differ more over time, especially once a new woman comes into the picture and especially if she’s invested in driving you two further apart, or especially if he starts spending a lot of time with other divorced men. They incite each other with poor logic and misinformation that riles them up and even if their poor logic and misinformation is corrected later, it’s too late because now they already feel the way they do and so they’ll look for some other justification to keep feeling that way.
“If I’m going to pay her a wage, she needs to pay her share of expenses from that amount. What about all the vacations and nails and shopping and benefits I pay for?”
I bet if you offered a salary instead of letting her go shopping, she would take that instead. There will always be individuals who lack foresight or financial planning skills. But most women would probably prefer a monthly salary with money put into a retirement fund, especially once they’re educated on why they need it.
I am disgusted by how many men left versions of this comment, smugly. They genuinely thought that the work of a mother was worth so little that if they calculated it, they’d have already paid that work out by “letting” their wives live in the house. I’m sure some of the men were trolls but I’m telling you, some of them really fought me on this, arguing that nannies can be “pretty cheap.”
Hardly any men could afford to pay a stay-at-home mom what they’re worth based on the moms’ work and the value they generate. Their husbands will always be in their debt. As we will see when we get to the calculations.
“This is the same thing as alimony or spousal support. And there are calculators for that.”
It’s not the same. I know this because of the emotional reaction in the comments to my TikTok video, many of which I chose to delete. If I had made a video about alimony, I wouldn’t have received comments saying, “This is insane!” “This woman is crazy!” “Women have gone off the deep end!” “They’re your kids!” “You’re so narcissistic to think anyone should pay you to look after your kids!” “It’s your DUTY!” “Never get married, kings!”
The very idea of referring to mother work as “labour” is what upsets people. And that’s the point.
Our culture views motherhood as the primary assignment of womanhood, our duty of service. It’s not a coincidence that so much energy and money is spent working on us to create a desire for motherhood, to position motherhood as peak love, as the pinnacle pleasurable life experience, even as expectations on motherhood mount to impossible proportions and community support dwindles.
It’s not a coincidence that most resources spent on supporting motherhood merely support the image of motherhood. Governments, churches, and men who seek to control women know that all they need to do is get women pregnant past a certain stage and then most of them will never leave their children and will prioritize their children’s needs over their own needs. All they need to do to subjugate women is get women to opt into motherhood voluntarily. It doesn’t matter how hard motherhood gets. It doesn’t matter how many resources they strip from mothers. Mothers won’t abandon their children. Most will always want to care for their children. Even if they aren’t very capable, even if being primary caregivers isn’t what’s best for their children, many mothers will persist in trying.
So, anyone who wants to subjugate women only needs to create a shiny narrative about motherhood and keep that narrative intact. “Motherhood is holy.” “Motherhood is the highest calling.” “Mothering is the most important job you’ll ever do.” “Mothers are heroes.” “Mothers are angels.” “Mothers make the world go ‘round.” “Motherhood is a privilege.”
They only need to keep the story attractive enough for women to opt in. From there, they can subjugate women further by creating and maintaining conditions of struggle and poverty.
By introducing a “labour contract,” we interrupt this propaganda campaign. It’s not that the above messaging isn’t true. Motherhood is sacred and heroic and beautiful and joyful and can be a privilege. But it’s also extremely laborious, and the degree of pleasure experienced is limited proportionally by the degree of labour experienced. And the degree of labour is directly proportional to how a mother is resourced.
In order to get us to do more work, the work is reframed as “mothering.”
But doing the laundry isn’t “mothering.” That’s a scam.
Have you noticed that we don’t refer to “fathering” unless we’re saying that a man fathered a child? You never hear someone say, “Stop fathering me!” If you can say that, you’ve already been fathered.
“Mothering” is the verb that represents a continuous stream of unending nurturing and love. Which is fine. I define “mothering” as “feminine parenting work.” There’s nothing wrong with that— so long as washing everyone’s underwear isn’t conflated with “mothering,” even if it is done in love. Because mothers bursting with loving feelings about their families might also mow the lawn and fix the car engine as an act of love but that’s not what is referenced in our wider culture when people talk of “mothering” and we all know it.
Home care tasks are not mothering. The reason that laundry, cleaning, and cooking are allotted to women, pawned off as “mothering” is that they must be done daily. When kids are young, they need to be done continuously. The home care tasks allotted to men tend to be more occasional. Weird!
And it’s not simply because the dads work full-time outside the home, so they shouldn’t be expected to also do laundry every day and cook and clean. If working outside the home is what “fathering” should include, then the counterpart to this work is mothering. Mothering children—especially according to present-day expectations—can take the entire day.
Mothering work includes:
breastfeeding (This is estimated to take 1800 hours a year. A full-time 40-hour week job with a 30-minute break for lunch plus two 15-minute breaks is 35 hours per week. With only two weeks of vacation in a year, this amounts to 1750 hours. *100 mic drops*)
putting children down for naps (Depending on the child, this often requires bouncing, soothing, laying down with them until they fall asleep. If you have other young children, they will interrupt your efforts to put the baby down and then you have to start all over again.)
helping children understand and moderate their emotions
breaking up conflict between siblings
teaching children how to play and/or playing with them so they don’t destroy the house
teaching children about the world and how to do formative tasks
protecting children from injury
comforting children
setting and maintaining boundaries even through their temper tantrums (which don’t stop and only get more consequential as they get older)
ensuring the children get enough active play
ensuring children get enough socialization
documenting the children’s lives
taking the children to lessons or developmental activities
This isn’t even a comprehensive list, and already this can easily eat up 8 hours each day. It doesn’t include children with special needs like intellectual talents, autism, developmental delays, disabilities, severe allergies or health problems. And it doesn’t stop when the kids go to bed. We often have to get up in the night to help someone who is ill or who has had a bad dream or who just can’t sleep.
This is the mothering work mothers most want to be doing. This is the work that creates healthy attachments and low trauma. This is the work that produces happy, well-functioning adults. This is the work that everyone in our culture wants mothers to be doing well.
But then there’s all this cooking, cleaning, and laundry that needs doing.
And when dads aren’t contributing when they get home or on the weekend, that means moms try to do this when they should be mothering their kids. And that gives the impression that, 1. it can all get done by mothers in the workday, and 2. that this work is the work of mothering.
This conflation between mothering and housework is designed into this culture by men’s failure to contribute and by their weaponized incompetence when they act like they just don’t know how to do a task as well as their wives, and when they force their wives to be the family managers, doling out responsibilities that are mystifyingly invisible to men, creating what’s known as the “mental load.”
(A quick sidebar: Men who would read this and become inflamed with anger towards me because “#notallmen” are very likely men who aren’t doing enough. The men who are doing enough are very likely feminist men making a concerted effort because some woman has already schooled them. Or, there are naturally domestic men who know they’re outliers.
If you know that you’re the exception, you’re not likely to get upset because you know I’m speaking about a social problem, not directly about you.
How do I know that most men aren’t doing enough? 1. Because women talk. And 2. because this has been studied. Most famously, in the 500 Family Study and by the work of Arlie Russell Hochschild, who coined “the second shift” 35 years ago to describe the phenomenon of working women coming home to work a second shift that their husbands didn’t work. And that disparity has narrowed, thankfully, but it still exists. The pandemic undid a lot of previous gains.
But also, this was a study of “working women”— women whose work outside the home is more conspicuous to their husbands than stay-at-home mothering! When men view their wives’ work as stay-at-home moms as easy, as a luxury, as a privilege, as cushy, do you think they do as much housework as the husbands of “working” moms? No.)
When we complain about motherhood work, this is the shit we’re complaining about.
We don’t resent comforting and protecting and loving our children. We resent being unable to do more of this because we are forced to do an unequal amount of ceaseless housework. We resent that when the children need the best of us, we’re so exhausted from cosplaying Sisyphus. And we know we’re going to get blamed for it because the systemic causes are too difficult for the children to see. All they see is that they need mom and she isn’t there. They don’t see anything systemic.
And so…
…this brings us to why it’s important to create a labour contract and to call it such even if it’s not legally an employment contract.
Because it identifies the true mothering work as labour. It is the labour work that mothers are doing that took them out of the workforce where they were doing other labour. It is the work that mothers are doing that is equal to the work the dads do at their jobs, that justifies them splitting the housework evenly when their respective work hours are done.
The housework that they do is extra labour and if they’re going to be asked to do it in their workdays, integrating it into their mothering work, this needs to be identified as extra because men just don’t see it and it ends up being a major cause of divorces.
When you change language, you change how people think. When you change how people think, you change culture.
But that’s not all!
If you haven’t already heard, alimony isn’t popular. Men’s rights groups turn rabid at the mention of alimony almost as fast as the mention of child support. Alimony is meant to address structural inequalities, but I agree that it’s an outdated concept when it’s applied without logic, without moral justification. Everything I’ve been writing about <gestures> here </gestures> is the moral justification. But men will still fight it.
And judges will hear them out. Sure, there are calculators, but they’re inexact, producing ranges. Judges might want to hear the details of the marriage relationship to inform a ruling, but they generally don’t have a lot of time or patience to hear all the nuances.
Both moms and dads report feeling like courts favour the opposite sex.
A contract helps by creating a history of the work done in a relationship and the sentiments held during the relationship. Spouses become wildly revisionist.
You know what a judge might believe? The word of a man written in a notarized document. A document updated and notarized every (good) year of their marriage, wherein he agrees on the labour that was done, the highlights, the hardships, the amount he believes it’s worth.
He can try to explain to a judge how he just pretended to be okay with that five times, eight times, whatever, but what are the chances a judge will believe that over him pretending this one time, now that he is angry and bitter about the divorce with money on the line?
TO BE CLEAR: THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. I AM NOT A LAWYER. And even if I was, family law varies from state to state and province to province, as everyone probably already knows.
But, contracts can be informal and still have meaning. Even if they aren’t legally binding, they can still be useful tools in a relationship, keeping record of a moment in time when you both felt a certain way and shared certain intentions.
After all, we’re making verbal contracts all the time and we call them up throughout our relationships every time we said, “You promised” or “You said you would.” It’s the same principle here except you don’t need to rely on anyone’s memory.
“This is creating a transactional marriage! Relationships can’t be transactional! It’s never 50/50! What a surefire way to send a marriage to the grave! This will lead to divorce!”
Oh my. Imagine conflating mothering with marriage.
This is what kills a marriage: treating your spouse like all they are to you is a parent for your kids. You don’t parent your children for your spouse, you parent your children for your children. If your spouse wasn’t there, you would still have to parent your children.
Marriage should be a give-and-take fluid dance where each partner gives to the other as much as they can, after they’ve met their own needs as much as they can, but both in proportional amounts. You go through periods where one of you is more poorly off than the other and so the other picks up the slack. They nurture you back to good health or good spirits, and later you’ll have reason to do the same. You give without keeping score— but you try to have a sense of reciprocity. When one person feels like they’re giving too much, they pull back and meet their own needs instead.
If couples don’t articulate their expectations, their needs, their abilities, their desires, and make strategic plans; if they expect everything to fall into place because of love; if they communicate through the power of mind-reading, suggestion, manipulation, passive-aggression… that sounds like a recipe for divorce to me.
This SAHM labour contract idea is the opposite of that.
Sure, this will go badly for some people, but it’s the same people for whom everything will go badly. You bring who you are everywhere.
If you know what the contractual outcome will be, won’t you be more motivated to work at the marriage? Won’t you be more afraid to have an affair or to take your partner for granted?
I can’t find the study right now, but I remember reading, probably in the work of Robert Cialdini, that if people sign a contract, even an informal one, they’re more likely to keep their agreement. Perhaps this is the reasoning behind the little blue card I signed at age 14 at a Baptist youth retreat, pledging my virginity to God, my country, and my future spouse. (This example would better support my argument if I had kept my word but I’m sure this works on other people.)
“It’s a woman’s duty to have children. That’s what you’re here for. It’s why you have the bodies you do. You’re simply fulfilling the measure of your creation.”
Cool story. Then the transverse would be that it’s a man’s duty to be a soldier because that’s why you have muscles: to protect us.
Would it be right and fair for men to have to volunteer to be soldiers and fight in wars only in exchange for shelter and food? Or for shelter, food, and a college education? Mothers don’t even get that! If you’re a stay-at-home mom, you can’t register for college courses for free!
Imagine if women argued that men should have to serve for free because that’s their job as men. “But it’s deadly! Men are sacrificing their lives!” Oh, it’s not that deadly. Plenty of men make it home. Did they die because they were not as good at being soldiers, maybe? Did they take care of their health enough?
Oof, that’s a bad look, isn’t it? That argument? But people say this about the high rates of death to pregnant and labouring women, especially Black women in the US.
Imagine if women argued that soldiers enjoy the experience of war because they build strong communities with each other. It gives their lives discipline and purpose. They often go back for additional tours of duty when they don’t have to—that’s proof that they like it! Why should we pay for something they want to do, that they didn’t have to sign up for, and that gives them so much purpose? The travel, the family culture, the strong sense of belonging, the honour of it all—that’s the reward!
This is almost identical to what mothers hear.
And yet, mothering produces more value than soldiering. We only need soldiers because men create wars to make themselves feel as powerful and necessary as women. If women are going to create life, men are going to destroy it. Women are necessary and valuable because men can’t create life without us. But we only need a few men to keep the species going. So, men’s flex is violence. By creating violence, they create an economy of need. We end up needing men to protect us from the other men. It’s a scam. It’s circular logic. We only need men because of violence but men create the violence so we’ll need them.
(It’s mindblowing how men hear this as man-hating when the implied logic is that men will always be wanted by women, even when they’re not needed. It’s better to be wanted than needed. Only small fragile egos would rather be needed than wanted. To be wanted is to be chosen. If men want to be valued, they should work harder at being want-able, not needed.)
Without mothers, you wouldn't have soldiers. If mothers stopped producing people, the world would end. Mothers sacrifice their lives, their health, their ambitions, their time, their peace, their relaxation. And the US government, and other governments, wants them to do it for free because they “they like it, they choose it, it’s an honour, it’s privilege” for us to live and die for the world to keep spinning.
Cool story, bro.
“Men will just murder their wives in even greater numbers.”
I had this thought, too. And I suppose it’s possible that men would agree to such a contract with no objections, no simmering resentment under the surface, playing along, no signs whatsoever that they’re planning all the while to kill their wives if they ever want to leave and enforce the contract. But these would have to be sociopaths who would likely do this anyway, contract or no contract. Take any amount of money or status from them, and this kind of man would do this.
For the most patriarchal of men, money equals self-worth. They are one and the same. And most women know that men are actually pretty damn emotional. So, unless they’re the most convincing of sociopaths, they will react emotionally to this suggestion. And a woman should take the no the first time. Or at least the second time. If you have to give him an ultimatum and if he accepts the ultimatum begrudgingly, this is not going to go well.
But also… one stay-at-home mom commented on my video to say that her pre-up includes the following terms (this is her casual summarizing, of course):
if they divorce, her husband pays for everything until she gets a good job to support herself
then he pays her 30% of his monthly income as spousal support until she dies
if he cheats, she gets the house and he gives her 50% monthly for 5 years, then 30% monthly until she dies
if she dies suspiciously, he has to pay this amount in a trust that goes to her son.
This is an American contract. I don’t know which state. I don’t know if this is unusual or muscular. But it is rather inspiring!
If men balk at this, and aren’t open to being persuaded, I would get out of that relationship.
“If he makes her stay at home, then he should have to pay her but if she does it because she just wants to, then it’s enough that he pays all the bills.”
Incorrect, sir. You are not a victim to your wife’s whims. You are not a passenger, you’re a co-pilot. If you don’t want the consequences of a wife who is a stay-at-home mom, do not marry someone who wants to be a stay-at-home mom. You should have talked about this before you had kids. If you didn’t have time to talk about this before you had kids because she got pregnant by accident, then you shouldn’t have made your conception materials deposit in that location.
Every single father who enthusiastically consented to sex is at least 50% responsible for that pregnancy, every single time. (I am not implying anything else about when fathers are responsible or not responsible. I am saying this is the one statistic of which I am certain.) I don’t even care if she missed a birth control pill. I don’t care if she lied about birth control. These are possibilities you have to take into consideration, just as women have to consider at all times that men are liars who might kill them. There are so many ways to have satisfying sex and if you were 0% comfortable with the risk, you would have made sure there was a 0% chance she would get pregnant.
Then, once she’s pregnant, if you don’t like the idea of her being a stay-at-home mom, you can say so and get a prenup. You take every measure to make sure there is a record of you urging her to go back to work. If she doesn’t make much at her job to make it worth it, then you encourage her to go to school. You make sure she has childcare to go to school. You do everything you can to encourage and support her in working. You consistently and sincerely work to overcome her objections. If she has reasons she feels like she has to stay home or should, you don’t get to walk into a divorce courtroom and say that you voiced your opinion once or twice and then your family’s structure and life is entirely out of your hands. The law presumes you are a grown man, not a little boy.
Imagine you didn’t want to pay child support. What efforts would you take to reduce your payments or avoid them? Imagine you were having an affair and wanted to hide it. Imagine you wanted to start your own business. That’s the same kind of effort you need to put into making sure your wife has a career that makes her happy, and that rewards her financially.
If she stayed home, it’s because you let her. You supported that decision by not working against it.
Similarly,
“She shouldn’t get paid for being a stay-at-home mom if she’s happy doing that. I don’t like my job and I’d love to stay at home!”
If you don’t like your job, you can go see a career counsellor or a strategist and get some consultation on what else you might be happy doing and how to make it happen. People switch careers all the time. If you want a different career, but you don’t even explore it, you don’t see a therapist about it, you don’t see a financial planner, you don’t read a book about it, you don’t ask around to find people who made career switches, you don’t play with the idea at all… you’re a victim in your own mind. How can you be so sure that you know everything about something you’ve never even tried to do?
If you explore the option and it’s really not possible because you don’t have any privilege to leverage, and you’re genuinely stuck for now, then at least understand this:
People get paid for their work not because they hate it but because it produces value for someone else who, if they did not pay the person creating the value, would be exploiting them.
People get money because they did work that made money. And they did that when they could have been busy having sex, or eating cake, or doing anything else. And I bet hardly any sexual people enjoy their work more than they enjoy having sex.
The idea that people who like their work shouldn’t be paid as much is #oppressorvibes. Some people make braver choices. Some people are happier living with less income. Some people are better at making the best of what they have. Some people are happy no matter what they’re doing.
Some people are just luckier. It’s not fair, but it’s not social injustice, either.
“Not all moms are good moms. Some moms don’t even do anything.”
A woman left this comment.
Sorry, love, but that’s just capitalism talking, causing you to compete with comparisons, looking at surface-level information and missing all of the relevant context.
There are only:
traumatized moms without adequate access to healing modalities and support
under-resourced and overburdened moms
moms with undiagnosed health problems
isolated moms
abused and shamed moms
brain-injured moms
moms with untreated psychological conditions
If a mom would be different if conditions were different, if that thing had never happened to her, if she had more help, if her health were improved… she is not a “bad mom.” She is a mom situated within a bad system.
I don’t want to hear the retort, “No, some moms are just evil!” Yes, very rarely, some people are so incredibly damaged that they do very evil things. But, 1. I count this as “brain-injured”. 2. They should have their kids taken away, in which case they wouldn’t receive wages for labour, would they?
You know what improves a lot of conditions? Money. Valuing people.
Because people get into slumps like this in their places of employment when they feel under-utilized, under-appreciated, underpaid, isolated, and under-motivated because they lack a mandate or a purpose. The solution isn’t to fire them or judge them as worthless. The problem is always systemic, and the responsibility for solving it falls to the people with the most power.
The woman who left the judgemental comment on my TikTok video described a mom who takes their kids to school, then comes back and sleeps all afternoon, and then doesn’t do much in the evening. Who hears that and thinks it’s more likely that this mom is choosing laziness versus being someone who is depressed or dealing with a health condition? How motivated must you be to jump to the worst and laziest conclusions? And why so motivated?
So many health conditions produce chronic fatigue! She could have cancer! Or any number of auto-immune disorders. Depression, c-PTSD, autism, long Covid, anemia, a thyroid condition, ADHD, heart disease, uterine fibroids—all likely candidates for chronic fatigue. Or, she could simply feel abandoned in her marriage. Afraid of the future. Terrified of climate change. Anxious about her children’s needs and lack of resources to meet them.
There are so many credible reasons why a mom would be so low energy that I can’t imagine immediately judging her. That says so much about the person doing the judging.
That about wraps up the objections I received on my video. Feel free to use them when you encounter these objections in the wild! :)
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