gender equality - even when it's not trending

And a not-to-miss interview with Elissa Strauss, author of "When You Care"

I have not written a newsletter since the election – for a few reasons, but primarily because so many people wrote reflections in the week following, I wasn’t convinced I had anything new to add. But several people have asked for my perspective. So, here goes….

Gender equity, like any other rights-based movement, is not going to be a linear process. There will be advancements, and there will be setbacks. I agree, this election did feel like a bigger set-back than most. I am just as down as everyone else. But if we look at snapshots of the United States in 1960, 1980, 2000 and 2020 – we’re for sure on a path towards greater equity. We are building on the work that brave people did in the past, and we have collectively made great achievements. And I truly believe that with dedication, 2040 will continue the trend.

“You can’t love your country only when you win.”

I loved that quote from President Biden’s press conference on November 7. Following that train of thought, I don’t think people can only care about gender equity when it is trending. Those of us who believe in gender equity need to keep believing, keep caring, keep talking, and keep pushing - during the good times, and the hard times.

I wrote this list to remind myself of my own everyday power; things we can all do, every day, regardless of who is in the White House. I will share it in case it helps you too.

• We can role model the behavior we want to see in the world.

• We can stand up for our LGBTQ+ kids, so that they know someone as their back.

• We can continue to support women’s reproductive freedom, and vote for lawmakers who represent a pro-choice agenda. (Subscribe to Jessica Valenti’s substack for weekly updates on abortion rights.)

• We can use the pronouns people want us to use, without rolling our eyes or making a joke. And when we slip up and make a mistake, we can apologize, and move on – without making a big deal about it.

• We can create equality in our homes, in order to counter the messaging our kids will inevitably face outside the home.

• We can be kind and empathetic to our friends and coworkers who are caregiving for others.

• We can support healthy boyhood, so all boys know they are loved for who they are and can grow up to be emotionally capable men.

• We can fight the physical ideals we all grew up with, and love the people in our lives no matter what shape they are.

• We can accept that gender-based violence is real, and happens more often than we care to admit. If a friend or family member is ever brave enough to share their experience as a survivor – we need to be brave enough to believe them.

• We can support everyone in our life who challenges gender norms: from our female leaders, to our male caregivers, to our transgender friends.

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I am very excited to share an interview I did with Elissa Strauss, author of When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others. I had the pleasure of meeting Elissa in 2021, and she featured my research in an article a year later. (How to Talk to Boys About Being a Boy.) When You Care is her debut book – and I am grateful that she agreed to do an interview with me.  

I think it is important that Elissa is not just talking about motherhood in her book. There are lots of motherhood books and podcasts – and that’s great. It is absolutely critical to continue those conversations that are unique to motherhood. But I am particularly drawn to parenting and caregiving conversations that include people of all genders – because I don’t think we’re going to see a true cultural shift until we see gender equality in caregiving and unpaid work.

Enjoy!

Kate: I love that you chose to write about finding yourself in caregiving. This statement 100% resonates with me. I love being a mom, and though I don’t love that my brother has physical and cognitive disabilities, I do love being a caregiver for him. I too have discovered that the best of myself tends to come out when I am taking care of someone else. I’m wondering - what has the feedback been since your book came out? Is this a theme that is also resonating with others? Do others think that care is, as you put it, “enlightening?” 

Elissa: First off, thanks for sharing these experiences. I want to hear more about what you learned about yourself through care. I feel like we all need to get into the habit of telling our care stories and not holding back. The more we talk about the full breadth and depth of what it is like to intensely care for another person, the more our culture will wake up to the reality of care, the power of care, and understand why it is so important to support those who give it. Each story gets us that much closer. I really believe it.

As for the broader the reception. I have definitely heard from many parents and caregivers who said they felt like this book made them feel truly seen, for the very first time. Somewhat surprisingly, I receive more emails from men than women along these lines.

I also have heard criticisms and concerns that by calling care powerful, and a meaningful use of our time, I am risking setting the women’s movement back. Basically this line of thinking is: care is still too burdensome because of a lack of collective investment in care, weakened community structures, and oppressive ideals about being a “good” mother or caregiver -- and women shoulder most of these burdens on their own. Therefore, we should avoid talking about the good parts of care because doing so runs the risk of making the need for more support feel less urgent. In this thinking, anything good about care carries a whiff of the sentimentalized, romanticized version of care that some conservatives promote as part of a defense of the patriarchy. Basically, they talk about how beautiful it is…for women…and then don’t step up themselves. 

I’m very sensitive to this critique, but I don’t agree. I think we spent so long living in a world in which care has been presented as either a fairy tale or nightmare and neither are accurate. Care is rich, messy, hard, transcendent, filled with the kind of productive friction that brings us deep insights. Also, care is the glue that holds humans together. It isn’t the side dish, it is the main dish, of the human project.

I think in order to get the culture change we need to build a world that respects parents and caregivers, and supports them and has curiosity about them, we need to shine the light on the big picture of care. I want everyone, men and women, to see care as productive and an opportunity for growth. And important enough to merit true support. I want us to see care as BIG, and to get there we have to talk about the good parts of it.

Kate: The Darwin chapter was my favorite of your book. Even for someone who writes and researches on this topic, this was completely new for me. I think it is fascinating because the predominant narrative has been that most people who achieve greatness do so because they do not focus on family, and devote so much time to their work. But it seems Darwin was the opposite. It seems he achieved greatness because he was also a caregiver. I wonder – when did you learn about Darwin’s past, and what inspired you include him in your book? 

Elissa: I’m glad you loved that chapter! I love it, too. In fact, I had wanted to start the book with the chapter, but not everyone agreed. :) 

So my big question for myself when I started this book was: why, really, don’t we value parenting and caregiving? Of course the patriarchy is a big one, as is the current stage of capitalism. Things done by women, and things not considered “productive” by the market aren’t ascribed much value.

But what, I wondered, was underneath all of that? So I tried to start at the very beginning and dig into evolutionary history. And what I found surprised me, and apparently you! First off, like many, I associated Charles Darwin with the “survival of the fittest.” And if this was a scientific theory you learned in the 1980s and 1990s, like I did, it was colored through a certain neoliberal, competition is good, greed is good, lens. The big takeaway was, don’t hate on competition because without it humans wouldn’t, big picture. survive.

This is true. But you know what else is true? Humans also wouldn’t have survived without care. Even more, so many of the most wonderful parts of us, our ability to cooperate, to have theory of mind and imagine what others are thinking, to empathize etc. are rooted in the parental instinct, as Darwin would call it. So much good comes from our capacity and capability to care, including the survival of our species.

Darwin himself was an active and devoted father, and just like seemingly a pretty good and nice guy, which was a lovely discovery because so many “great men” from history have a lot of yuck in their past. (This doesn’t mean he didn’t live in, and perpetuate the patriarchy. That too.) As I write about in my book, Darwin lost his favorite daughter and the longing and grief he felt led him to some really big ideas about how important the caring instinct was, and is, for human evolution. For the whole story about Darwin and his touching love and grief, check out chapter five of my book. 

Kate: I like that you don’t just talk about child care in your book. Parenting was a big part of your material – but you also intentionally talked about all kinds of caregiving; paid and unpaid. While researching, did you have any “aha” moments about caregiving other than parenting? I ask because kids eventually grow up – caregiving for children is finite. But caring for someone with a terminal illness, or a person with a cognitive disability – that is not often finite. Are there any lessons to be learned that are unique to care, outside of parenting? 

Elissa: I’m honestly glad you appreciated that part because it felt like a risk to me. I know that parenting and other types of caregiving are very different in nature, and as a parent I wasn’t coming to the subject with a deeper understanding of the other types. That said, I feel like other types of care are so routinely left out of, well, everything. From daily conversations, books, movies, TV shows, and so on and so on. People assume it isn’t something we want to hear about. I did! I wanted this for myself, first and foremost. Also, while they are different in so many ways, there is enough connective tissue there to make the consideration of both types at once meaningful. For me at least.

I think non-parenting care stories really showed me how deep care brings us into the true vulnerability and fragility of life. Vulnerability has become a buzzword and to some good effect. I think the popular psychology version of vulnerability --which generally means admitting weakness, confusion, etc. --- has done good things for the way we perceive ourselves and others. But the vulnerability we witness through caregiving is truly a whole other, and in my opinion, much more profound experience. We live in a deeply illness-, disability- and death-phobic culture. We live in a culture that believes we, if we just try harder, can and should be always perfecting ourselves. Non-parent caregiving experiences really puncture that myth. It requires so much humility, so much grace. I think parents can get through parenting without going to the bottom of the pool, so to speak, of human dependency. Other types of caregivers have no choice.

Lastly, speaking to these caregivers made it clear to me that we need to be asking them their care stories more and convincing them that we want to hear them. We also need to be advocating for them way harder, because right now it is just way too common to be forced to sacrifice financial security and sanity in order to care well for a loved one. Caring well, without losing all your money or your mind, should be a right. I think parents should be better allies for this group, and many policies, like paid leave, would help us all.

Kate: I made some changes in how I parent after researching and writing Equal Partners. For example, I started Noticing Time with my kids – which we still do, and it is 100% a product of my research. I’m wondering - are you parenting your boys differently after writing When You Care? How so? 

Elissa: Writing and researching this book, seeing how big the work of care is, how it is philosophical, psychological and spiritually demanding, along with practically demanding, really helped rid me of moooost of my mom guilt. I just 100% reject the idea that this should be seamless, easy and that there is something wrong with me for needing a break, or not always being able to give my kids the care they need. 

When we really see care in all its fullness and its might, we realize it is not a lap around a pond and there is something wrong with us for being tired, confused, scared, etc. Instead, we realize this is Mt. Everest and sometimes we need to replenish and mentally reorient. This isn’t just the oxygen max thing either. This isn’t just something we need to do in moments of extreme distress. 

This is something we need to do to maintain a sense of self because if we don’t have a self that we just can’t care well for others. Care is a relationship between two selves. It’s a two way current. 

One more quick one. We try so hard to make sure our kids understand that time caring for them or others is not less valuable for us than time doing anything else. Care is seen as highly productive in this house. Something human life depends on. It’s not invisible.

Kate: There’s so much publicity that follows a book launch, and I know that you have been super busy in the last six months. But I learned in my own experience that people often ask the same question over and over. So, I’d love for you to write your last question and then answer it. What is the question you want to answer, but no one has asked you yet? And then – please answer it!

Elissa: My question would be, “what do you hope parents and caregivers who read your book walk away feeling?”

In a way it is so simple.  I want them to know they matter, they are living through something deeply meaningful and utterly fascinating, and it is absolute crap that the world doesn’t treat them as such. I wrote this book to both ask “why” we don’t give care the curiosity it deserves, and also to begin the work of looking at what it would look like if we actually cared about care. 

I guess more than anything I hope this book is received as an act of care for everything who spends a good part of their lives doing this way too invisible work.

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Happy Thanksgiving!