Michael Chabon Quotes

The thing about dads is, even when they're very good, they don't do anything like as much as most mums do.

My dad was a plumber, and my mom was on and off again, either a stay-at-home mom or working with the disabled as a visiting-nurse assistant.

Why do otherwise sane, competent, strong men, men who can wrestle bears or raid corporations, shrink away in horror at the thought of washing a dish or changing a diaper?

When my dad needed a shirt ironed, he would yell downstairs to my mother, who would drop everything and iron his shirt.

My mother was predominately a stay-at-home mom.

It is obvious that the role of the father as the central authority in the family has been considerably challenged in Western societies. Parental responsibilities, and I knowingly use the term responsibility instead of the term authority still used in the French Civil code, are nowadays shared equally between both parents.

When you've got kids, you turn into Mom, and that's it.

I would love to be a dad. There are plenty of comedians who have kids. But they're dads. Being a dad is so different from being a mom.

If a female wants to do a man's job, no one will stop her from doing it, but women have duties to perform as mothers.

As motherhood as a "private enterprise" declines and more mothers rely on the work of lower-paid specialists, the value accorded the work of mothering (not the value of children) has declined for women, making it all the harder for men to take it up.

At this moment in history, millions of 'working dads' are desiring to do what they do not feel they have the right to do: be more devoted as a dad, less devoted as a worker. This feeling is far more ubiquitous among men executives than women executives in many areas of the world because, for instance, Asia-Pacific women executives today are more than six times as likely to not have children than men executives are. The Asia-Pacific executive man is about six times as likely to be a working dad as an executive woman is to be a working mom.

The concept of 'Momism' is male nonsense. It is the refuge of a man seeking excuses for his own lack of virility. I have listened to many women in various countries, and I have never found a woman who willingly 'mothers' her husband. The very idea is repulsive to her. She wants to mother the children while they are young, but never their fathers. True, she may be forced into the role of mother by a man's weaknesses and childishness, and then she accepts the role with dignity and patience, or with anger and impatience, but always with a secret, profound sadness unexpressed and inexpressible.

All mothers are working mothers.

The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.

I know I'm talented, but I wasn't put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and look after my family.

The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.

I wonder if that's the difference between fathers and mothers. I'm friends with people who have kids that are like 5 and under, and they're still in that intense mother-bonding phase. It might just be that. Because the dads haven't changed.

I read [The Women's Room] in my 20s, and I was like, "I understand this now." And now I've become a mom and read it again and truly understand on a different level what one of the main characters goes through as a mother.

In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might find they don't both need to. ... What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else - or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon - find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. But here again, because there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition to regard a married woman's work as no work at all, and to take it as a matter of course that she should not be paid for it.

How wonderful are the women and men in the world who feed us. Especially those who feed us with no salary. The mothers—I thought. The wives.

But children, hark! Your mother would rather, When you arrived, have been your father.

Of all the rights of women, the greatest is to be a mother

Usually women are the lynchpins of the family. They carry the brunt of the work at home and of being mothers and of taking care of the children. Not always. I have a wonderful husband, who is a great father and has helped tremendously at home. And I think that men are getting in touch and I think that the role that they have is so important, to be a good father and have a good career and be a good husband. But I think that as more and more women go into the workforce, you have to have more help at home and it becomes more of a sharing of responsibilities.

Feminists have mocked full-time motherhood as silly and old fashioned. Maybe they're right. I mean, what do moms do really?