Hello, everyone, and welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell, laughing in the face of motherhood.

This is Margaret.

And this is Amy. I am very excited to say that today we are talking to Alison Daminger.

She is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Deminger's research is focused on how and why gender shapes family

dynamics, particularly the division of work and power in couples. Allison is also the mother to a four-month-old

and a brand-new book that we're going to be talking about today. What's on her mind, the mental workload

of family life. Welcome, Allison. Thank you so much, Amy and Morgan. It's such a pleasure to be here. And yes, when you put it that way, I have had two babies this year. Double babies. Book baby, real baby. So I found your work when I was researching my own book, happy to help. And I put it in the book. I talk about you in the book because I think that

you were one of the very first people to define and study cognitive labor. People call it a lot of

different things. I think everybody listening is familiar with what it is now, but not so much then. So

tell us how you started to think about cognitive labor and realized it was something that you wanted to

study. Yeah, so that's a really great point. I started this research back in 2017, so about eight years ago.

And at the time, there wasn't a lot of discussion. Right. These days, I feel like the mental load is

everywhere. That's the topic and every other. So for media posts, I'm served. But at the time,

we were really both as

scholars and as members of the public, talking mostly about physical chores. Who's cooking,

who's cleaning, who's changing diapers, who was, you know, waking up with the baby in the

middle of the night. P.S. It's women, but go ahead. Well, yes, and that was what the research that I was

studying in my first year graduate classes

pretty clearly showed that women are spending much more time. My mom's generation was spending

much more time. My generation was spending much more time. And around when I was reading all of this,

I was doing some pilot interviews for a project that never got off the ground. But I was

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