Reimagining Our Relationships Toward Rebalancing The Domestic Workload with Eve Rodsky
For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast
Jen Hatmaker
4.6 • 6.3K Ratings
🗓️ 12 July 2023
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’re back with another installment of our Being Seen and Heard series, and we think this one is going to strike a nerve with many of you out there who are looking for a better, stronger, fairer, narrative when it comes to the balance of work in your home and toward raising children. Are you the one in your relationship who is handling the lion’s share of the care and feeding of your littles PLUS taking care of their pickups and dropoffs to school, daycare, sports, bathtimes, bedtimes, wiping noses, butts PLUS managing the domestic front of grocery shopping, cleaning, organizing, handling the social calendar, vacations, PLUS working a 40 hour a week job either inside or outside the home? We see you and are asking a question that maybe you ask every day; why are women still, in a day and age where we make up 55.9 percent of the workforce and where 40 percent are the main breadwinner in the home, still responsible for so much when it comes to child rearing and domestic workload? Our guest this week has created a national conversation about greater equality on the home front with a system she created through intense research that helps couples create balance, by understanding that women are doing what she calls almost all of the “invisible labor” in the home, with at least two thirds of them having a job outside the home as well. Eve Rodsky is a Harvard Law School grad with years of training in organizational management When she had her first child (and began to see her identity at her job being stripped away because of it) and then began the dance of balancing her job with all of her duties as a mother (for which she bore the lion’s share of the domestic and child rearing responsibilities, as so many women do) she started to wonder: what would it be like if couples could reimagine their relationships as to how it relates to rebalancing the work it takes to run a home? So began her “Fair Play” system, where she sets couples up for success in relationship and parenting by helping them change the way they think and talk about their home life.
Jen and Eve discuss:
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The patriarchal history that has been around for centuries that informs why the imbalance of domestic workload still exists when so many other categories for women have been elevated
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How important it is to invite men into their full power into the home, removing barriers and stereotypes as to what men’s and women’s strengths are there
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Changing the notion that women’s time is somehow less important than men’s–and that the “invisible work” women do is toward guarding the time of men
- How the overwhelming pace of work, child rearing and home management eventually ends up making us sick and damaging our relationships, and what we can do about it
BONUS: Eve puts Jen to the test with a question from her Fair Play card deck where we dive deep into Jen’s family values–a question that is illuminating to all of us in understanding each other in relationship.
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Thank you to our sponsors!
Make Me Care About…Podcast | Jen is hosting a special podcast series produced by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Check out "Make Me Care About..." wherever you get your podcasts.
FOCL | Visit https://focl.com/ and use code FORTHELOVE at checkout for 20% off of your purchase
MeCourse: LGBTQIA+ | LGBTQIA+ Parenting e-course from Jen and special guests is available for order. Visit https://www.mecourse.org/lgbtqia-parenting for more info.
Thought-Provoking Quotes:
“Changing and inviting men into their full power in the home is the only way women are gonna be able to step out into their full power in the world.” - Eve Rodsky
“We've convinced women that their time is sand. It's infinite. Whereas we guard men's time as if it's finite like diamonds.” - Eve Rodsky
“We've become complicit in our own oppression. Because since birth we've been taught that our time is worthless. If you don't believe me, just watch what happens when women enter male professions; salaries automatically come down.” - Eve Rodsky
“As one neuroscientist said to me, you're not a better multitasker. Nobody is good at multitasking. We’ve just convinced women that they're better at wiping asses and doing dishes to pave the way for men's free time, their tenure, and their promotions. We can no longer do that.” - Eve Rodsky
“If you believe that you're supposed to hold all the cards, have a life, work full-time for pay, and be in a dual-ambition household. You're gonna get physically sick.” - Eve Rodsky
“I surveyed a thousand people to ask about their most important practice. People say some religious activity or meditation or exercise. I was not surprised that with over a thousand people surveyed, not one said communication.” - Eve Rodsky
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy - book recommendation
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed - book recommendation
The Kingdom of Prep: The Inside Story of the Rise and (Near) Fall of J. Crew - book recommendation
Guest’s Links:
Connect with Jen!
Jen’s website
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi everybody, Jen Hatmaker here, your host of the For the Love podcast. Welcome to the show. |
| 0:10.8 | We just have an absolute lit episode today. I don't know how else to say it. This episode |
| 0:18.3 | for me just evaporated. It's an hour and it was over the second it started. I could not |
| 0:24.0 | get enough. I could not listen enough. I wanted it to keep going. I had a million other questions. |
| 0:29.5 | This is such a profound conversation. I think I'm so energized because I am not been a part |
| 0:36.5 | of this conversation at length. This is to me, at least in my perspective, something that's |
| 0:43.1 | new in the zeitgeist and it's so familiar and relevant and powerful. I just, okay, all right, |
| 0:52.1 | let me back up. We're in a series right now called for the love of being seen and heard. |
| 0:59.2 | If you've been listening, we're just paying attention to voices or communities or experiences |
| 1:05.2 | or stories that are not being centered as they should be, more or less. In my almost 50 years |
| 1:13.4 | on this planet, there's been a lot of change. My mom's age group has seen even more change. |
| 1:19.7 | You guys 60 years ago, in tons of places in America, women couldn't even get alone without their |
| 1:26.4 | husband's signatures, right? Higher education was mostly men and health concerns of women were |
| 1:35.6 | grossly under-resourced and under-researched entertainment was created essentially by men for |
| 1:44.1 | men. Then if you add like I could end wood, a layer of sort of religious structures on top of |
| 1:52.9 | that, there's even more categories about the primacy of men in the world. I can tell you, |
| 2:02.9 | like with my own journey, I did the thing that I felt like was prescribed. Even in the 90s, I got |
| 2:09.3 | married really early, started having babies just right out of the gate. I had three kids in my 20s. |
| 2:16.0 | I mean, I was 27 with three kids and then I did it. I raised them. I did the cooking. I did all |
| 2:21.2 | the preschool stuff. I did all the things, like all the billion things that it's like. Then I added |
| 2:28.6 | back on a full-time career. Fortunately for me, I had enough scaffolding around me to |
| 2:42.0 | be able to grow into my own career all the way to where it is today. But there was still, I can't |
... |
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