A Marriage Disagreement

Early in 1969, when my children were five and seven, I wrote “A Marriage Agreement” proposing that the tasks of child care and housework be divided equally between husband and wife. Like most women of my class and generation born in the United States before World War II, I had accepted, if sometimes grudgingly, traditional gender arrangements whereby the home belongs to women, the world to men. But during the previous year, when the electrifying ideas of women’s liberation had lifted me out of my marriage into the world, I had become sensitized to the issue of traditional divisions of domestic labor by reading sister-Redstocking Pat Mainardi’s satirical broadside “The Politics of Housework,” then circulating in mimeograph (su...