Title
Halving It All : How Equally Shared Parenting Works / Francine M. Deutsch.
ISBN
9780674272040
Published
Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, [2000]
Copyright
©2000
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (336 p.)
Item Number
10.4159/9780674272040 doi
Dewey Decimal Classification
649/.1 OCoLC
Summary
The best way to have it all--both a full family life and a career--is to halve it all. That's the message of Francine Deutsch's refreshing and humane book, based on extensive interviews with a wide range of couples. Deutsch casts a skeptical eye on the grim story of inequality that has been told since women found themselves working a second shift at home. She brings good news: equality based on shared parenting is possible, and it is emerging all around us. Some white-collar fathers achieve as well as talk about equality, and some blue-collar parents work alternate shifts to ensure that one parent can always be with the children. Using vivid "ations from her interviews, Deutsch tells the story of couples who share parenting equally, and some who don't. The differences between the groups are not in politics, education, or class, but in the way they negotiate the large and small issues--from whose paid job is "important" to who applies the sunscreen. With the majority of mothers in the workforce, parents today have to find ways of sharing the work at home. Rigid ideas of "good mothers" and "good fathers," Deutsch argues, can be transformed into a more flexible reality: the good parent.Halving It All takes the discussion beyond shrill ideological arguments about working mothers and absent fathers. Deutsch shows how, with the best of intentions, people perpetuate inequalities and injustices on the home front, but also, and more important, how they can devise more equal arrangements, out of explicit principles, or simply out of fairness and love.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 18. Sep 2023)
Frontmatter
Contents
1. Why Not Equality?
2. Creating Equality at Home
3. Creating Inequality at Home
4. Fighting over Practice and Principle
5. Friends and Foes
6. Babies, Breastfeeding, Bonding, and Biology
7. Career Detours
8. Why Couples Don't Practice What They Preach
9. The Mother and Mr. Mom
10. Constructing Identities as Parents and Professionals
11. Equality Works
How I Did the Study
Notes
References
Acknowledgments
Index
