By Bill Barclay

In the late 1960s, I was teaching at a community college in upstate New York. Among the books I assigned to my students was Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique. It usually generated good discussions, perhaps the most interesting of which was the gender gap in the response to the question I would ask about expectations for the household division of labor (including childcare and home care) in their future lives. The young women turned out to be better predictors of where the future was going than the young men.

Maybe the young men were thinking about 1900, when 1 in 5 women in the U.S. – and only 1 in 20 married women – were in the wage labor force. Or the reality that their mothers were doing 6 hours of housework labor for every 1 expended by fathers. Maybe the young women were envisioning a society – like today’s U.S. – when 3 of every 5 women, both overall and those married, work for wages. And they understood that human labor time is not indefinitely expandable.

Source: To Think About on Fathers’ Day: Reproduction, Production and the Gender Division of Labor