The producer for Leslie Morgan Steiner, who blogs at the Washington Post, asked me if I’d like to be a guest blogger, which led me to follow the discussion there for a while. Although I ultimately decided that I was not a good fit for that blog, which is mostly mommies whining about their bake sales and high priced nannies, it was interesting to see what the world looks like on such sites. There was also a harrowing article about another such site, UrbanBaby.com, in New York Magazine last week, which came to me, because the author quoted me as saying that the urban baby world looks a lot like the “problem that has no name” which launched the feminist movement forty years ago.

Reading about the mommyblogs left me with the following question.

“Rachel, Rachel, I've been thinking what a fine world this would be
If the boys were all transported far beyond the northern sea” (nursery song, anon.)

I have been asking myself if the members of this online community have indeed created a world, in which the men are magically transported to another realm. And is it a fine world?

I read on Steiner’s blog of room “moms,” great room “moms,” bad room “moms,” but nowhere is there a single room dad. I read of guilty working “moms” who want to quit their jobs for more babies, but the man in the picture is not interested in changing his life. I read that “nothing compares to the bond a mom has with her kids,” from a writer struggling to come back after 19 years out of the work force, but only a single post about the bond a dad has with his kids.

Not a fine world. The women cannot bear the burden of supporting their schools, earning a middle class living and staying connected with the world of work without sharing the responsibilities of making a family with the other adult on the scene.

Like Leslie, I get a lot of letters to this website, Gettoworkmanifesto.com. Recently a writer told me that when she struggled with “balance,” her husband told her to quit her job. Meeting the needs of the children and workplace was her problem. I’d think worse of him if I didn’t read the posts in which the women just buy right into that unjust assumption that the household is their responsibility alone.

Get to work. Men are not villains, but as the great philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, “whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good.” Men will not carry their share of the household unless they have to. Instead of worrying about balance, the women should invest in school, stay at work, and refuse to have more children until the men come to the home room meeting. They will never be free as long as they are willing to create and inhabit Rachel’s world, in which the men are as distant from the task of balance as if they were on an ice floe in the Arctic.