“Facilitating wife” and “feckless manchild”: Working mothers’ talk about divisions of care on Mumsnet

Discussions on parenting forums present a common way to share experiences in today's society, especially for women. In particular, mothering forums are well-known as a source of emotional support, advice, solace and social capital for female parents and mothers-to-be (cf. Madge & O’Connor, 2006; Moravec, 2011). Yet, these spaces can also be sites of conflict and dissent where mothering practices and identities are contested and renegotiated.

The discussion forum hosted by Britain's largest parenting site, Mumsnet, arguably provides a space to challenge prevalent social norms such as enduring ideologies of “good” and “intensive mothering” (Mackenzie, 2018), suggesting that such problematic ideals can be partially rejected and to some extent re-worked into alternatives like the “good-enough” mother (Pedersen, 2016). A large body of literature has also noted that online forums, in particular Mumsnet, function as outlets for the sharing of parenting and pregnancy-related experiences that cannot be articulated in “real life” (e.g., Jaworska, 2018; Pedersen & Smithson, 2013), in part due to the liberating role affordances such as anonymity can play in these virtual environments (e.g., Schoenebeck, 2013). These indicate the potential of mothering forums to voice dissonances with contemporary hegemonic ideas of parenting. In this way, most studies on Mumsnet have engaged critically with the imperative of intensive mothering, yet much less is known about how working women on Mumsnet make sense of a culturally marginalised yet consequential gendered discourse that positions women as “wife” alongside their roles as “good” mother and “ideal” worker (Christopher, 2012; Kuperberg & Stone, 2008; Orgad, 2019).

Arguing that women's experiences of domestic inequality cannot be entirely accounted for by the prominent conflict of motherhood versus career, this article mobilises the notion of affective dissonance, as developed by Hemmings (2012, p. 150), to map out how the relationships that women form in the Mumsnet space may enable them to “feel differently”, allowing them to articulate and share dissonant views and feelings like disappointment, anger and frustration in relation to their co-existing home roles of mother and wife and associated divisions of care. Hemmings (2012) argues that dissonance must be felt in order to register gaps “between an embodied sense of self and the self we are expected to be in social terms, between the experience of ourselves over time and the experience of possibilities and limits to how we may act or be” (p. 149). This incongruence between experience or sense of self and social expectations can generate an orientation towards social change – the possibility to imagine alternative, more equal domestic arrangements.

While many studies have documented social shifts in relation to caregiving and household responsibilities, less consideration has been given to how women discursively negotiate divisions of care in a digital context, and what kind of positions are culturally available and taken up by women during this process online (Mackenzie, 2018; Orgad, 2019). The Mumsnet discussion forum is a particularly interesting site for considering working mothers’ positioning within discourses of care due to its high number of professional working mothers (Pedersen & Smithson, 2013) and increasing reputation as a space where dissonant views can be articulated and mundane concerns may become politicised (Pedersen & Burnett, 2022).

In this paper, I consider how the marginalised discourse of wifehood is drawn upon in postings on Mumsnet to account for divisions of care, alongside the imperative of child-centric intensive mothering. The study explores how posters’ positioning in the role of wife produces a number of affective dissonances, and analyses how users address these dissonances by constructing their partners in ways that may adjust this gender-power imbalance discursively. It therefore considers some taken-for-granted and often invisible, oppressive aspects of domesticity and is concerned with developing a more nuanced understanding of how women make sense of divisions of care and ensuing domestic inequalities.

“Good” mother versus “ideal” worker, but what about the “wife”?

In a sociocultural context that emphasises economic productivity through waged labour while retaining “good mothering” as an important aspect of normative femininity, working mothers today still face “cultural contradictions” (Hays, 1996). Although women have increasingly been recruited into the paid workforce, many studies have identified “intensive mothering” as the prevalent cultural ideology mothers in Western countries are held accountable to (Douglas & Michaels, 2005; Hays, 1996; Sevón, 2012). The script of “intensive mothering”, coined by Hays (1996), stresses the need for mothers to be child-centred, unselfish and willing to devote time, labour and emotions to their children, but there are also hegemonic sociocultural scripts surrounding paid work. Many workplaces continue to be modelled on the “ideal” male full-time worker norm that presupposes a putatively ungendered subject with few (if any) family responsibilities (Christopher, 2012). At the same time, mothers value the benefits that accrue to themselves and their children through employment and feel rewarded and valued at work (Christopher, 2012) – sometimes even more than at home, where a second shift of household labour and a “third shift” of emotional work awaits them (Hochschild, 1997; Hochschild & Machung 1989).

The heightened visibility of motherhood in the UK media and public sphere (e.g., Thomson et al., 2011; Tyler, 2011), as well as in other parts of the West (e.g., Douglas & Michaels, 2005), complicates this argument in important ways. As research on the depiction of heterosexually partnered stay-at-home mothers in the US (Douglas & Michaels, 2005; Kuperberg & Stone, 2008) and more recently in the UK (Orgad, 2019) has suggested, the cultural ascendance of motherhood masks women's other domestic role: that of wife. Whilst this is of significance for some women who “opt out” of the workforce, these culturally marginalised discourses – or the discursive absence of women's position of the wife, and associated work in the domestic sphere – also play a crucial role for the many women who attempt to remain in or return to the labour market after having children. Moreover, these ambivalences surrounding working women's partially invisible conflicting roles are to some extent obscured by cultural messages promising women that they can “have it all” if they “lean in” (Sandberg, 2013; for a critical discussion see Rottenberg, 2018). This article argues for an extension of the cultural tensions between “good” mother and “ideal” worker to include the role of the “wife” in order to better understand the nuances of domestic inequality between the mother/wife and father/husband role.

Facets and consequences of domestic inequality

There is ample evidence to suggest that domestic inequality – the gendered division of labour in the home – does not only pertain to women's larger contribution to parental care work accompanying the role of “good” mother but also extends to aspects of work that are attributed to the role of wife, such as household chores and the organisation of family life more broadly (Bianchi et al., 2012; Lyonette & Crompton, 2015). Mothers in heterosexual relationships in the UK still carry out twice as much domestic labour as their partners (Office for National Statistics, 2016).

Marked out as a structural barrier to gender equality, domestic inequality impacts on women's employment. In particular, the transition to parenthood as a major life course event is associated with a reversion towards a more traditional separation of public work and private-domestic sphere in heteronormative families (Bianchi et al., 2012). The arising consequences of this ideology of domesticity for women's opportunities to participate in the political and professional sphere are colloquially referred to as “motherhood penalties” and include career stagnation and associated aspects like lower-paid part-time jobs and a reduced earning potential for women with children (e.g., Corinaldi, 2019). The equality-gains women have made by joining the workforce then do not translate into an equitable division of caring and working (Miller, 2012).

It appears that within this sociocultural context the complexities surrounding the domestic lives of working mothers in heteronormative relationships are best understood in tandem with contemporary fathering culture and male caregiving practices.

Shifting masculine priorities?

Research suggests that shifts surrounding masculine subjectivities and gender role attitudes have occurred since women's increased labour market participation (Gatrell & Dermott, 2018). Yet, these shifts are uneven and pertain more to the expectations surrounding men's involvement as fathers (e.g., Marzano et al., 2009; Wall & Arnold, 2007) than to their contribution to household labour (Bianchi et al., 2012). In other words, a traditional sphere separation appears to apply more to housework than to parenting.

Overall, in contrast to domestic labour, childcare seems to be somewhat less gendered (Lyonette & Crompton, 2015). However, there is evidence to suggest that both men's household contribution and parenting activities remain gendered in particular ways and leave women with the bulk of unpaid work deemed unrewarding. While many men nurture relationships with their children, research indicates that they “cherry pick” when it comes to domestic chores (Gatrell & Dermott, 2018, p. 5). This may be because childcare tasks are perceived as more enjoyable, meaningful and rewarding than the “drudgery” of housework (Gatrell & Dermott, 2018, p. 5). In relation to paternal care, findings from Craig’s (2006) time-use study highlight that fathers’ caring may not be synonymous with fathers’ sharing. That is, the childcare activities fathers’ mostly engage in are more pleasant and “the more fun ones” (Craig, 2006, p. 275), for instance playing, reading or recreational activities, compared to mothers’ activities. Further evidence for men's cherry picking comes from research on gendered differences in household contributions and tasks. Men's contributions to non-routine housework, perceived as traditionally masculine (e.g., DIY, “fixing” more generally, outside work), have increased, while contributions to mundane domestic work (e.g., cleaning, cooking) have plateaued (Bianchi et al., 2012). In this paper it is argued that the gendered division of care work, parenting and household labour needs to be researched in tandem (Bianchi et al., 2012).

This empirical study explores the ways in which working mothers in the digital space of Mumsnet make sense of divisions of care through their (at least) twofold, co-existing home roles of wife and mother. Taking a discursive approach, it focuses on the set of multiple domestic roles posters occupy and associated workloads, and, through the identification of a complementary construction that positions their male partners as “feckless manchildren”, considers how posters attempt to discursively address their overburdening.

Mumsnet, methods and approach

“[M]otherhood”, Collins (1994, p. 45) observes, “cannot be analyzed in isolation from its context”; it occurs at a particular time and place, and within intersecting axes of race, social class, sexuality and (dis)ability. In particular, the online parenting sphere is dominated by the voices of white, Western women (Thomson et al., 2011). Indeed, Mumsnet's population is said to be culturally and economically privileged, with a female British demographic that is, by the majority, heterosexually partnered, white, well-educated and in employment: a cohort of predominantly established mothers who are aged between 30 and 40 and have an above-average household income (Pedersen & Smithson, 2013). As pointed out by Jaworska (2018, p. 32) in regard to Mumsnet users’ critical engagement with intensive mothering discourses, challenging such hegemonic formations is “less risky” from a position of social privilege. In this research it is argued that users’ positioning may give them a greater scope for the articulation of dissenting and norm-transgressing views, which might not be found in this way in other on- or offline spaces.

Online forums allow access to naturalistic data on social phenomena that are particularly useful for discursive psychological approaches interested in the construction of self and others and the subject positions that are being made available in digital contexts (Jowett, 2015). The current analysis is based on postings over a one-year period (August 2017 to August 2018) on a number of sub-fora hosted by the parenting website Mumsnet, which were collected for a larger project exploring work-caring discourses in the UK context. As such, an analysis of Mumsnet users’ negotiations of divisions of care through the constructions of the “facilitating wife” and “manchild” constituted a sub-study. Modelled on the approach to data collection on and through Mumsnet by several scholars (Mackenzie, 2018; Pedersen & Burnett, 2021), a purposive sampling strategy was employed to identify and select 14 threads for this sub-study. A purposive sampling approach was appropriate as its emergent and inductive design builds on the researcher's expertise, ability to focus on information-rich cases and knowledge about specific subject content circulating on the site (Etikan et al., 2016), rather than relying on the kind of “snapshot” that can be derived from using archival searches. For example, the extensive thread chosen for the analysis of women's positioning in the role of “facilitating wife” allows for a nuanced understanding of how Mumsnet users are positioned, and position themselves, in this particular subject position.

Ethical considerations relating to the use of user-generated online data in this study were informed by ethical guidelines (British Psychological Society, 2021), and as such the larger project of which this research is part received ethical approval from the researcher's institution. Following the approach of other researchers who have previously conducted research on online forums, Mumsnet's open-access forum was regarded as a public space and forum contributions as being in the public domain, thus usable for research purposes (e.g., Pedersen, 2016; Pedersen & Burnett, 2022). It should be noted that users’ postings are readily searchable by and accessible to any internet user. However, posters’ identities are not disclosed because the site allows posters to use a pseudonymous name of their own choosing. I chose to remove usernames to further preserve the anonymity of those posters whose contributions are used, and because pseudonyms can be a vital element of posters’ digital personae (Boyd, 2014).

My analysis is informed by a feminist poststructuralist perspective that is concerned to understand “how the social or cultural ‘gets inside’, and transforms and reshapes our relationships to ourselves and others” (Gill, 2008, p. 433; see also Wetherell, 1998). This perspective aligns with a critical discursive psychological approach as advocated by Edley (2001) and Wetherell (1998). Critical discursive psychology, as a synthesised approach, marries insights from discursive psychology (Potter & Wetherell, 1987) and Foucauldian discourse analysis (e.g., Arribas-Ayllon & Walkerdine, 2017). Guiding this is a view of subjects as being both the products and producers of discourse, thus enabling the speaking subjects to position themselves in discourses, whilst also being positioned by wider discourses (Edley, 2001). The analysis focused chiefly on identifying subject positions (Davies & Harré, 1990). Subject positions are fluid rather than fixed locations in talk and, as such, positioning is understood as a dynamic discursive activity both facilitated and restrained by culturally available discourses (Davies & Harré, 1990; Edley, 2001). Focusing on who is being hailed or implied by particular discourses, the concept of subject positions considers the ways in which discourses constitute subjectivities, and how available positions are being negotiated, taken up or resisted by individuals (Edley, 2001).

Below I present a detailed discursive analysis of some Mumsnet users’ positioning in the culturally marginalised role of “wife” and associated repertoires. Furthermore, drawing on Hemming's (2012) notion of affective dissonance, I examine incongruences and frictions between posters’ sense of self and the social expectations they orient to in relation to the position of the “wife”, which I propose is bound up with their sense-making of domestic inequality. Ultimately, I explore how posters’ attempt to manage and address such dissonances through invoking their partners as “feckless manchildren”.

Unequal (domestic) lives: The “facilitating wife”

Posting women on Mumsnet talk about their home set-ups in diverse ways. However, several patterns emerge within and across the narratives women share in discussions of their domestic lives. The entanglement of male privileges across the private-domestic and the public work sphere, and their own collusion in enabling such privilege, is a recurrent consideration. In particular, the theme of male “facilitation” captures distinctively this contradiction between recognising injustice in relation to their own lives and reflecting upon how this unequal status quo is maintained through their positioning as “facilitating wife” which intersects with their mothering position.

There is consistency among posting users that the “facilitation” of male partners is effectively about “wives … who manage the household and make lunch for their DHs [dear husbands] and do all the childcare and prop men up”. The consequence of this support is described as creating “an absolute imbalance in life but also in the workplace, with men given much more freedom to dedicate to work and devoid of many domestic responsibilities that burden women”. Although the three slightly more extensive extracts below are taken from responses to just one thread, ¹ they are presented here to set the scene of how posters construct their own and their male partners’ domestic and professional lives as markedly different.

Extract 1

We have 2DC [dear children] and both work FT [full-time]. At first we shared pickup/drop offs roughly 60:40 (me:DH [dear husband]). DH does shopping and cooking. I do all the mental load and a lot of the childcare and all the night wakeups. …

However, over the years DH has been promoted several times and now can hardly do any drop offs or pick ups. I on the other hand was so overloaded with work, waking up with DC at night plus my recurring migraines and all the mental load that I burnt out.

I lost all ambition and interest in my career. I side-stepped into an easier job which could lead to promotion but I don’t want to put the energy into it. I want to see more of my DC. I want to spend less time in the office.

So it’s logical for our family that DH continues to shine and advance and I facilitate that.

However this thread has made me question – if things hadn’t been so uneven at the start with DC (me doing the nights for 6 years!) and if I too like DH had had time to exercise instead of being too exhausted and never a moment to myself … maybe I wouldn’t have lost interest in my job?

Extract 2

I felt inadequate, bewildered why I can’t manage, after all I am a reasonably bright woman with a Masters degree. … Crunch point came when I realised I was burnt out. … There would have been no conflict if I had a wife and if I could essentially live a man’s life: work, relax, spend time with the kids. Sounds ideal. My downfall was the ‘household/family load’, this is what dragged me down, not my job. Having to effectively do a second job after hours. AND spend a meaningful time with the children.

Extract 3

So H [Husband] worked about 55–60 h a week. All paid. Very well paid. … I worked about 120 h a week, of which 35 were paid. Of course I didn’t think of it all as work, I thought of it as being a mother and spending time with my children. But it didnt [sic] make me any less exhausted. But as all we women know, I was The Lucky One, who was able to have it all by having kids and a career.

As established mothers, the largest group of mothers using Mumsnet (Pedersen & Smithson, 2013), the women in these extracts juxtapose their present professional and family situation with the life trajectories they hoped to follow prior to motherhood. The hunch that there “would have been no conflict if I had a wife and if I could essentially live a man's life” indicates the complex gendered terrain against which the responder in Extract 2 constructs her experience. The notional script “if I had a wife”, in other words, someone who would take on the primary responsibility for childcare and household labour, signifies the deep-seated social mechanisms of assigning domestic labour to women as part of a positioning as “wife”. According to the status quo invoked here, women and men's home and work lives are precisely not interchangeable but fundamentally disparate. Similarly evoking an alternative scenario, the account provided in Extract 1 denotes how a more equal domestic and parenting arrangement would have potentially enabled her to sustain an interest in pursuing her career ambitions: “if things hadn’t been so uneven at the start with DC [dear children] … maybe I wouldn’t have lost interest in my job?” In contrast, the male partners’ domestic and vocational lives, as they emerge in the women's accounts, are described as largely unaffected by the transition to parenthood. As such, their lives are constructed around leisurely themes and unhindered engagement in paid work: they were able to “work, relax, spend time with the kids” (Extract 2), had “time to exercise” (Extract 1) and progress their careers.

The conflicting domains of paid work and childcare, akin to scripts of the “ideal” worker and the “good” mother, have been widely discussed as root cause of difficulties for working mothers (Hochschild & Machung 1989). In the first parts of Extract 1 and 2, the posters recall feeling “burnt out” and “overloaded with work”, indicating an adverse relationship between multiple workloads and health status. Across the extracts, however, it becomes clear that neither societal scripts of motherhood and associated gendered expectations to parent intensively (Hays, 1996) nor expectations surrounding the “ideal” worker (Christopher, 2012) are constructed as the sole source of stress and exhaustion for these working mothers. Rather, what posters construct as “household/family load” and “mental load” alludes to the totality of gendered, unpaid work taking place in the home that accompanies both their roles as “facilitating wife” and mother. This suggests that cultural discourses surrounding women's roles as worker and mother may not entirely account for and reflect the complexities surrounding women's diverse domestic responsibilities and roles.

Pedersen's (2016) research has shown that Mumsnet users may prefer the idea of the “good-enough” mother over the good-mother ideal, resisting to some extent the cultural imperative to provide intensive maternal care. This is evidenced across the extracts. Most explicitly articulated as a societal expectation of “good” parenting she felt imposed on her, the poster in Extract 2 articulates dissatisfaction with the pressure she experienced as “Having to … spend meaningful time with the children”, as part of what she calls the “household/family load”, and in addition to her paid work responsibilities. While this can be understood as an attempt to contest the ideal of the “good” mother, by locating mothering activities in relation to paid work and further labour in the home, the mothering position is presented as embedded in a wider set of roles the poster occupies.

As noted earlier, unequal gender relations in the private sphere may impact on women's employment considerations and career success. Research has shown that female parents rather than fathers are expected to, at least implicitly, adapt their work patterns and work flexibly or part-time to accommodate caring responsibilities (Miller, 2012). Indeed, the contributors’ draw on elements of this work-care discourse when constructing accounts of “side-step[ping] into an easier job” (Extract 1), not pursuing promotions and changing their working hours to part-time or exiting the workforce altogether for as long as caring demands were high, as the contributors in continuing posts explain. What is interesting here is that they also seemingly facilitated their partners’ careers in making these changes in relation to their employment (see also Orgad, 2019). Indeed, the posters’ accounts draw attention to their partners’ ability to devote time to and focus on career progression precisely because they continue to be unencumbered by domestic responsibilities: “over the years DH [dear husband] has been promoted several times” and “continues to shine and advance” (Extract 1); “H [Husband] worked about 55–60 h a week. All paid. Very well paid” (Extract 3).

A powerful affective dissonance appears in the accounts above, which – voiced retrospectively – reverberates as incongruity between a hoped-for trajectory where ideas of maternal femininities could be reconciled with identities as committed workers and the lived experience of the “household/family load” that the contributor in Extract 2 refers to as her “downfall”, led the poster in Extract 1 to take up an “easier job”, and makes the poster in Extract 3 feel so “exhausted” that she quit working during the onset of parenting, which may be the most challenging time for parents (Sevón, 2012). This dissonance between their actual and an ideal domestic and paid work situation is framed by a range of contradictory cultural themes, pointing clearly to a non-fulfilment of the “have it all” narrative: The posters in these extracts would have liked to develop their career rather than downscale, but they would also like to care for and spend time with their children, pitting normative ideas of worker identities and expectations to participate in waged work against cultural narratives of intensive motherhood. However, besides this prominent conflict of motherhood versus career, they also admit to “facilitating” their male partners by taking on the majority of the domestic burden and changing their employment situation, whilst desiring a more equal arrangement. This hints at how a discourse of shared parenting (Sevón, 2012) frames these accounts; at the same time, posting women invoke the position of the “facilitating wife” to account for their unequal set-ups.

My critical reading of the extracts then suggests that the posters take up a mothering role alongside another home role constructed as “facilitating wife”. Thus, motherhood emerges as only part of the entwined domestic position of mother/wife posters occupy, and to some degree critique. Whilst the position of the “facilitating wife” who takes on the bulk of domestic responsibility then is a role that they have in some ways adopted, some posting women on Mumsnet can be seen as developing and articulating a language and a consequent awareness of the way in which their positioning may incur and reinforce domestic inequality.

Managing dissonances: Constructing the “feckless manchild” partner

I turn now to the most common construction of male partners in the data corpus, which positions men as “feckless manchildren”. While the long-hour overwork culture plays a role in raising working mothers’ stress levels (Hochschild, 1997), in posting women's talk of domestic matters on Mumsnet's forum the “manchild” construction presents a response and discursive strategy (Edley & Wetherell, 1999) to articulate and manage dissonances with the role of “wife” and associated unevenly distributed domestic workloads. Complementing the “wife” position, this construct emerges chiefly across two reciprocal domains: domesticity, specifically household labour, and leisure.

As stated previously, research indicates that shifts in masculine subjectivities may pertain more to men's involvement as fathers than to an increase in male household contributions. Hunter et al. (2020, p. 4) note in this context that “caring and hegemonic masculinities often appear to sit alongside one another, rather than the former superseding the latter”. This bifurcated formation resonates across many forum discussions, and accordingly many accounts construct their partners as “good father[s]” who are “great with the children”, consonant to some extent with a version of a caring masculinity (Elliott, 2016), yet do not “pull [their] weight” in terms of household labour. However, opening posters’ dissonance regarding their partners being a “good” father in contrast to their scant housework contributions are frequently challenged by other posters. Responding posters thus often argue that a man is precisely not a “good” father if he is allowing his female partner or wife to suffer by not contributing equally to housework, ² as the following extract from a responding post illustrates:

Extract 4

If he sees your distress, exhaustion, frustration and still does not engage – he is NOT a nice kind husband and is actually a horrible Dad as no good father would treat the mother of his children so badly.

Indeed, the naming of this complexity of domestic inequality mostly works cathartically to call out unfair situations in the home where posters position themselves as bearing the brunt of the labour. Showing the severity and familiarity of such concerns within forum discussions on Mumsnet, the following two extracts are from initiating posts where the posters are looking for advice on the possibilities of betterment of “manchild” behaviour.

Extract 5

Usual story, I’m drowning in responsibility while husband merrily gets on with his hobbies, works a pretty low stress job and regularly “forgets” to put the bins out. I know it’s as much my fault as his that I’ve let him get away with it, but is there any hope he can grow up and take responsibility like an actual adult?

Extract 6

So I’ve been with him for 5 years total … we are pregnant with our first child and I honestly have never been so stressed in my life. He has always been a “manchild” but I guess I thought he would grow up a little bit when he started getting so much responsibility …

By manchild I mean I do EVERYTHING! I cook, clean and work …

In these extracts, the posters delineate a clear relation between their own high domestic load and their partners’ failure to contribute equally. The poster in Extract 5 invokes her positioning in the role of “facilitating wife” by indicating that she recognises her own doing in enabling her partner's irresponsible “manchild” behaviour. There is however a palpable tension between the partial blame the poster takes as “wife” and the construction of an equal contribution to household labour as “adult” responsibility. Framing an equal sharing as a matter of taking “adult” responsibility effectively locates fair sharing beyond the normative gender binary, strongly implying contributors’ expectation of domestic equality. This anti-essentialist “adult” responsibility is not met by the “manchild” partners constructed in the extracts above, thus requiring the posters to compensate for their partners’ skirting: “By manchild I mean I do EVERYTHING!” (Extract 6). By constructing a partner as inadequately indolent and childlike, posters discursively address this dissonance between the experience of unevenly distributed home labour, intimately connected to the position of wife, and the domestic equality expectation implied in (unmet) “adult” responsibility.

The second, interrelated domain the “manchild” construction is frequently associated with is leisure. This is constituted from an implicitly assumed physical and emotional availability of women to take on the bulk of unpaid work in the home, leaving little time for the leisurely pursuit of activities besides the home and workplace. “Leisure time equality” has been conceptualised by Fraser (1994, p. 598) as one of the key normative principles she suggests as essential to the complex of gender equality. There is indeed evidence for a “gender gap in leisure” that is widely seen in relation to the division of labour at home and thought to be important for women's quality of life (e.g., Yerkes et al., 2020). This is also discussed in the wider literature on the “manchild” in the media. A prime example of this is the cinematic construction of heterosexual masculinity in films such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), where the so-called “beta male's” escape from domestic duties through seeking refuge in leisure and an infinite male adolescence resonates with the portrayal of the “manchild” in Mumsnet discussions (e.g., Greven, 2013).

With this in mind, I turn now to examine aspects of recreation that appear pertinent to the “manchild” construction. In particular, the “manchild” invoked in numerous posts is said to engage excessively in hobbies such as sport and gaming as hedonistic leisure activities that promote avoidance and escapism. This male indulgence in pleasure seeking, and the associated eschewing of domestic responsibility, is exemplified in the following extract from an initiating post:

Extract 7

Monday: Sport 1

Tuesday: Sport 2

Thursday: Sport 3

Saturday/Sunday alternate or both according to schedule: Sport 3

Presenting her partner's free-time schedule, the opening poster in Extract 7 asks for “thoughts” on the forum as her male partner suggests she is “massively unreasonable/needy” for questioning his input to homemaking and childcare, which puts her in a position to justify the quest for her partner's greater contribution to home life. In emphasising her partner's pursuit of his sporting hobbies, the account portrays an extreme case of gender difference in leisure time through male pulling back from household tasks, given that the poster positions herself as taking the major domestic responsibility. This construction shows the “manchild” partner as neither a “beta male” who ultimately follows a pattern of progressive development towards maturing into a responsible, child-raising adult (Greven, 2013), nor as the “new man/father” investing time and emotions in his family (Marzano et al., 2009). In this way, the poster is positioned as the weary but admirable wife who compensates for her partner's flaws. Likewise offering an agentic position for the poster by pointing out the sacrifice involved in her presumed “around the clock” availability, the following extract provides a vivid illustration of male “time entitlement”:

Extract 8

I told him [husband] I would like to go to an event on Thursday night which a friend is hosting and it’s local. He kind of huffed and puffed and said he’ll see what he can do to get home for 7. What he will do now is not confirm until the day. This makes it hard to plan anything and why I don’t go out in the evenings hardly at all … there is an imbalance there for sure because he goes all over the place at the drop of a hat and never has to wonder whether I’ll be home.

The “imbalance” constructed here around the husband's detachment from family life makes reference to both paid work and leisure which are signified as more pertinent to the partner's time considerations than unpaid work and family commitments, prioritising breadwinning over home responsibilities. Implicit here is the male focus on paid work as enacting a traditional form of masculinity that runs counter to ideas of involved fathering (Wall & Arnold, 2007).

The “myth of male incompetence” (Tichenor, 2005) has been discussed in the literature as a strategy to excuse male partners’ insufficient domestic contributions, mollifying women's frustrations. Contrastingly, in Mumsnet discussions, the “myth of male incompetence” is sometimes reworked into “strategic incompetence”. Attesting “manchildren” an enactment of a version of (postfeminist) knowing sexism (Gill, 2007), the corollary notion of “strategic incompetence” lays bare that some posting women construct men as knowing that they should be picking up the slack, yet frequently choosing to not do so in an egalitarian fashion, which is perceived as inexcusable and unacceptable. In the following series of extracts the posters cite and simultaneously reject gender essentialism (Gill, 2007), again invoking the idea that contributing to domesticity is part of “adult” responsibility, rather than associated with a “natural” sexual difference. This I suggest renders inequalities discursively illegitimate.

Extract 9

why can’t you expect the same from a man as a woman? Of course another functioning adult can [do] their fair share, he’s choosing not to!

Extract 10

men pretend not to know how to do stuff as they know women will whip in and do it if they act useless for long enough. … Imo [in my opinion] the majority are doing it on purpose.

Extract 11

Closing his eyes to the obvious ways he can help is yet another classic example of learned helplessness.

Here the construction of the manchild is identified by means of attributing cognizance of his “wrongdoing”. Particularly notable is the charade character whereby the “manchild” acts helpless and regressive, which is called out and framed ironically as “learned helplessness”. This refusal of equal involvement whilst attempting to uphold (patriarchal) privileges through “act[ing] useless” differentiates the version of masculinity performed here from some contemporary masculine scripts that presume a greater participation in and contribution to family life. The “manchild” construction as it emerges in Mumsnet users’ accounts then accomplishes important discursive work by encapsulating a contradiction between “false” immaturity/infantilism and at least a partial continuation of traditional masculine scripts. As such, the invocation of male partners as abject “manchildren” may offer a critique of such scripts and associated privileges, thus holding partners discursively accountable for stepping up their domestic game.

Discussion

The comprehensive aim of this paper is to suggest an extension of the cultural tensions between “good” mother and “ideal” worker to include the culturally marginalised position of the “wife”, against the background of highly visible discourses of motherhood and a cultural emphasis on involved fathering. Arguing that women's experiences of domestic inequality cannot be entirely accounted for by the prominent conflict of motherhood versus career, I have suggested that researching women's meaning-making surrounding the gendered discourses that position women as “wife” may offer a more nuanced understanding of how women make sense of divisions of care and ensuing domestic inequalities, drawing attention to some taken-for-granted and often invisible, oppressive aspects of domesticity.

The British parenting website Mumsnet, this paper argues, is a space where the marginalised discourse of the wife is drawn upon to account to some degree for experiences of domestic inequality. Through a detailed discursive analysis of postings on the Mumsnet forum I identified two complementary constructions through which posting women predominantly framed divisions of care. Focusing on the theme of male “facilitation” in the first part, I explored how women's positioning in the role of “wife” produced a number of affective dissonances in posters’ accounts. Specifically, posters’ framed divisions of care in terms of dissonances with an unequal professional and domestic life situation that was constructed to an extent as an outcome of their positioning as “facilitating wife”. Recognising this as injustice, the examined accounts also captured a palpable dissonance between an ideal trajectory where maternal/domestic and worker identities could be reconciled, and the actual domestic and paid work arrangements where posting women viewed themselves as enabling their partners’ careers to the detriment of their own vocational achievement and their mental wellbeing – a clear-cut renunciation of the “have it all” narrative.

While the analysis focused on posts by heterosexually partnered women, some of the implications of supporting their husbands’ careers rather than advancing their own are apparent in posts by women who identify as single mothers. I could not develop a discussion of this issue within the scope of this paper. However, future explorations of work-caring discourses on Mumsnet could investigate in more detail the professional consequences single mothers face, such as their reduced earning potential, as a result of having facilitated their ex-partners’ career trajectories.

In the second section, I analysed how the discursive construction of male partners as feckless “manchildren” presents a discursive device to manage dissonances with women's positioning as “facilitating wives” and associated unevenly distributed domestic workloads. Emerging chiefly across two interrelated domains, the “manchild's” excessive engagement in leisure (and paid work) was set against a lacking domestic contribution. Crucially, I would not like to propose that the abject “manchild” construction is the only or uniform way women on Mumsnet talk about their male partners, and perhaps it comes as no surprise to find such a construction in a space that is associated with feminism and characterised by the refusal of a traditional feminine posting style (Pedersen & Smithson, 2013). Rather, I have suggested that constructing their partners as irresponsible “manchildren” may relieve some of the tensions arising from dissonances with the position of the “wife” and related overburdening. The “manchild” construction and the corollary notion of “strategic incompetence” may then allow women to position themselves as the sensible and “grown-up” person in the partnership, potentially redressing gender-power relations. This aligns to an extent with Roper and Capdevila's (2020) findings regarding stepmothers’ work at repairing their troubled identities through construction of their partners as “needy”. Indeed, in this research the invocation of male partners as absurdly immature and incapable points to the ways in which this construction may enable women to exert some power by discursively emphasising their partners’ child-like need of perpetual support with domestic aspects of life.

Further to this, “manchild” can lend itself to work through some of the complexities and problems of some contemporary masculine/fathering scripts that centralise men's roles as fathers, yet do not frame insufficient male household contributions as an issue, as often broached in discussions on Mumsnet. My findings suggest that posting women construct their partners’ domestic contributions and caregiving practices as interwoven, against a backdrop of contrasting discourses of involved fathering (Wall & Arnold, 2007) and presumptions that fathers’ points of focus lie in the “fun” aspects of parenting (Craig, 2006). Rather than singling out fathers’ involvement in childcare as the exclusive site for changing gender relations, my analysis of the “manchild” hints at the need to conceive household contributions and fathering practices as complex sets of relations vital for an evolving understanding of masculinities and the realisation of more equal domestic arrangements.

Regarding the localised nature of the findings, the question of whether the constructions of “facilitating wife” and “manchild” are available for meaning-making around divisions of care outside the Mumsnet space remains open. Yet, some facets of the findings are already established in the literature. Especially the adaptation of women's paid work patterns to meet caring responsibilities has already been noted in research on work-family balance (e.g., Miller, 2012). However, how working mothers’ decisions to make such employment-related changes may to a certain extent be shaped by wifehood has thus far only been considered in relation to mothers who exit the workforce completely (Orgad, 2019). My analysis extends this argument in important ways by showing that the wife/mother-husband/father relation is equally pertinent to the lives of mothers who remain in employment after having children, like the majority of Mumsnet users. Furthermore, an important dimension in the analysis was the complexity, and unequal distribution, of women's workloads related to the role of wife, which speaks to the array of studies providing evidence for a persistent gender gap in unpaid labour, particularly with regards to the “drudgery” of routine domestic tasks (e.g., Bianchi et al., 2012). The analysis has touched on the negative implications of this work overload for women's wellbeing, and how this plays out in terms of women's mental and physical health may present an important topic for psychology and feminism.