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Gender
Our experience of ourselves as male or female is something that's created and affirmed on a daily basis through our work, our families, and our relationships. Part of women's relative passion about parenting over men's has to do with the way in which mothering is more central to women's identities. While many men take pride in their children, their homes, and in their abilities as fathers, they don't experience those activities as fundamentally central to their identity and self-esteem.

Social expectations about what men and women do play out in the housework realm as well. For example, a single man who lives alone and is a slob is commonplace. Anna Quindlen's statement that most men live like "bears with furniture" is an affectionate testimony to this. People aren't surprised when single men are slobs, and few blame a messy house on a husband once men get married. A woman who lives alone and keeps her apartment like a pigsty is more likely to be viewed in a critical way by both men and women. Women do even more housework when they marry and men do even less. This gender difference also plays out in expectations of what men and women do or don't do as parents. For example, few would look at a child who went to school with peanut butter on his face and dirty clothes and think "What was this father thinking?"

Despite our culture's drift towards more involved dads, mothers are still seen as the primary caretaker of the house and child. This perspective that 'mom's in charge' means that women who aren't as involved in maintaining their homes or kids are far more likely to be censored by a society that tells her that it damned well is her job to care. In other words, women's identities are more influenced by house and children, in part, because others are more likely to judge them by those yardsticks. Interestingly, the idea that moms are to blame for a child's behavior hasn't always been the case in the United States. Before the industrial revolution, fathers were considered the authorities on raising children, and therefore received the blame or credit for how well their kids turned out. It wasn't until the nineteenth century that the blame began to shift to women as a "cult of domesticity" evolved, instructing women that their place was in the home.

While there have been important changes since then, the belief that home and parenting are women's work persists into the present, and causes many women to feel unentitled to make demands of a fair exchange for all of the work that they do with their house and kids.

As author Ann Crittenden writes in 'The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued,' the myth that men "support" women as well as children-prevents many from seeing themselves as valuable economic players and equal partners. She notes that it's hard to feel cheated of the fruits of your labor if you don't believe that what you're doing is labor.

Let's take an example. Robert earns $30 an hour as a mechanic, while his wife earns $15 an hour as a librarian at the state university. They both believe that she should do more at home because her time is not as "valuable" as his. While this is true in the marketplace, that calculus only makes sense if raising children is considered unimportant. Mothers who buy into the marketplace argument of parenting begin their negotiations from a far weaker position than those who see their contributions to their children, their marriage, and their husbands as priceless.

Who's Got the Power?
Historically, women have entered marriage with far less power than men. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, women didn't have the right to own their own property in the United States, and had no legal say in family matters, including determining how money would be spent made through their own labor. When a woman became a widow, her husband's estate was passed on to his heirs, and it was up to them to provide for her. In 1848 this began to change with the passage of the Married Women's Property Act permitting married women to hold property and to gain protection from their husband's debts if they became widowed. This act later gave them the right to share joint custody and to an equal inheritance with their children in the case of divorce. However, it wasn't until 1980 that a married woman could obtain property without her husband's consent, or use legal recourse if he mismanaged their property or shared assets.