Mama Needs a Minute! - with author Mary Catherine Starr

Breaking Down Patriarchy

Amy McPhie Allebest

Society & Culture, Education, History

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Amy is joined by Mary Catherine Starr, author of Mama Needs a Minute!, to discuss how even with the best intentions parents can easily fall into patriarchal and unequal gender roles, how to take a closer look at our relationships and households, and how comics can help us cope with the overwhelm of motherhood.

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Mary Catherine Starr is a mother-of-two and a graphic designer, illustrator, yoga teacher, author, and the artist behind the viral Instagram account @momlife_comics. Mary Catherine's work focuses on the challenges of marriage, motherhood, double standards, and inequality in both the household and the workplace. She is passionate about speaking up for women and bringing awareness to the mental load and the invisible labor of motherhood. Her first book, a comic memoir entitled Mama Needs a Minute!, came out in March, 2025. Mary Catherine lives in Massachusetts with her husband, her children, and her son’s large collection of plastic dinosaurs.

Learn more about Mary Catherine Starr at marycatherinestarr.com.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee All Best.
0:04.5	When I was first researching how patriarchy started in human civilization, I was enthralled by the book The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerta Lerner.
0:14.2	Lerner wrote about how patriarchy started during the agricultural revolution between 10 and 12,000 years ago, and she hypothesized that
0:23.2	as part of this process, women began to take over more and more of the domestic labor,
0:29.3	leaving men with more leisure time than women. Lerner wrote,
0:33.6	The allocation of leisure time is uneven. Men benefit more from it than women due to the fact that the food preparation and child-rearing
0:42.5	activities of women continue unrelieved.
0:45.9	Thus, men presumably could employ their new leisure time to develop craft skills,
0:51.4	initiate rituals to enhance their power and influence, and manage surpluses.
0:57.2	Then learner continues, I do not wish to suggest either determinism or conscious manipulation
1:03.7	here. Quite the contrary. Things developed in certain ways, which then had certain consequences
1:10.5	which neither men nor women intended.
1:14.1	I've tried to show how it might have come to pass that women agreed to a sexual division of labor,
1:19.7	which would eventually disadvantage them without having been able to foresee the later consequences.
1:31.5	That passage really impacted me when I read it.
1:37.4	I mean, no one really knows how it went for our ancestors in the Neolithic age, but that description sounded so reasonable to me. In fact, I've seen many people accidentally fall into a gendered division of labor that disadvantaged women.
1:47.7	In fact, that's even happened in my own marriage.
1:51.0	This is an incredibly common problem.
1:53.9	And no one describes this problem better than Mary Catherine Starr, the creator of Mom Life Comics,
2:00.0	and the author of a new, delightful and
2:03.1	informative comic book, Mama Needs a Minute. And I am so excited to discuss these issues with
2:09.7	Mary Catherine Star today. Welcome, Mary Catherine. I'm so excited about this conversation.
	...

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