Thank you for your most recent newsletter about sex and domesticity, to which you invited comments and thoughts. I have thought about this topic a lot over the past few years. My husband and I are both professionals, educated at London and Cambridge universities respectively (he - a secondary school teacher with a PhD, me, a civil servant currently working in a middle management role, running a select committee at the House of Commons).

When our first child was born in 2008, we decided that after my maternity leave, we would both work part-time, and both be at home with the baby two days a week each. This arrangement has continued now that we have a second child (born May 2011). I therefore see my husband doing all the household chores and a great deal of child care. I have never felt this demeans him, or makes him less attractive. In fact I think it strengthens our relationship. Neither do either of us feel any guilt. I think we both feel that our paid work and our parenting work bring different frustrations, challenges, rewards and stimulation. Because we have both achieved a balance between those two roles, neither the paid work nor the parenting seems more important - they are just different, and equally important.

Child care and household management have traditionally been seen as less important work than paid work, with a much lower status, arguably because they have traditionally been carried out by women. But personally I think there is nothing more important than bringing up my children and I am proud that my husband, far from feeling that it is below him, was prepared to be such a big part of our children’s lives. He brings a wealth of talent to parenting which I don’t. We both also have the different fulfilment of our paid work, which we both greatly value. In my current (paid) post, I job-share - he joked the other day that we are in some ways job-share parents! I honestly don’t know why in all of the other couples I know with children, it is always the woman who has gone part-time, or given up work, or compressed her hours. In some cases the woman earns more, so it can’t always be a financial thing.

My theoretical conclusion is that it is because child-care is still seen as lower status, women’s work, and therefore even in educated couples, where the woman has a serious career, the man is still reluctant to participate in childcare. I think the whole arrangement is helped by us having employers who are able to offer us work at part-time hours which is at the same level we would be expecting if we were full-time. So I don’t feel sidelined to the “mummy track”, and whilst I am at work I am able to do fulfilling, interesting stuff. Perhaps a public sector thing? I’m not sure.

Finally, I recommend a book called “Wifework” by Susan Maushart to you. It suggests that domestic chores like cooking and cleaning are actually only a small part of the “wifework” which a wife does. Most wives do a whole lot more work from putting all the work into sustaining the relationship (booking a romantic weekend away, arranging cinema dates and booking babysitters, initiating difficult conversations), to the intangible household management which takes up a huge amount of brain space and time (planning everything to do with Christmas, remembering everyone’s birthdays, being on top of children’s school admin) and a whole bunch more. True equality will be reached when men step up all this too. It’s a very interesting read (if rather polemical) and very thought-provoking, even if you don’t agree with everything she says. (For some reason it doesn’t seem to be on Amazon, but it’s still available elsewhere). I hope this doesn’t sound hugely smug, but I thought that as you’d specially invited comments, I’d send you mine!

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