Results of the State of Postpartum Survey
The tragic realities of how we treat women after birth
Photo by Timothy Meinberg on Unsplash
When I had my oldest child, I began joining online mommy communities. I was shocked by what I found: women telling stories of abusive, neglectful husbands who foisted the majority of all labor onto them, who abused them during or immediately after birth, who contributed absolutely nothing of value beyond a paycheck. What was most shocking to me was how dismissive people were of this behavior—laughing about it, or treating it as inevitable, just the way men are.
I knew better because my husband wasn’t that way. Initially, I dismissed this behavior as anomalous. Then I began reading feminist writers who reported similar experiences, and who also laughed them off. I realized that this is the norm. The State of Postpartum Survey proves it.
This was really difficult reading. I had to go through it in tiny blocks of time because I became so overwhelmed with rage reading how men treated their partners immediately after one of life’s most significant and vulnerable experiences. To watch someone bring forth human life, putting their mind and body on the line, risking their very life to make a family, and to then denigrate and devalue them requires a stunning level of callousness and entitlement.
That’s how we teach men to behave in this society, and the only way it will ever stop is if we correctly label it as abuse, then totally shun the men who do it.
Even your husband. Even your father. If a man in your life has engaged in this behavior, he is an abusive piece of shit. No exceptions.
Because this was such difficult reading, I’ve broken the State of Postpartum Survey up into two separate newsletters. This week’s data focuses on workload and postpartum treatment. Next week we’ll talk about postpartum mental health, and I’ll share some of the many appalling free responses survey respondents gave.
Is there specific data you want to see? Are there correlations you’d like to hear about? If so, share it in the comments and I’ll do my best to make it part of the next newsletter.
If you’re not a paid subscriber, now is a great time to become one. This data is only available to paid subscribers; free subscribers can get access in two weeks.
Finally, a note of caution: This survey is not scientific. Participants self-selected. Because the data drew upon my audience, it likely included a large sample of people who strongly reject household inequity and men who participate in it, as well as a large sample of people in unhealthy and abusive marriages who follow me for guidance. So it may both overestimate and underestimate the scope of the problem. The data collection has many shortcomings, but the truth is so do many surveys printed in peer reviewed journals. Social science research is generally very poorly conducted, and this research is no exception.
The most important data highlights
Parenting is not anything approaching equal. No matter how many hours women spend working outside of the home, and even if they are the primary or sole breadwinner, they still do significantly more parenting than their spouses—even when they are recovering from giving birth.
Women breadwinners still do significantly more household labor than their male partners, even when those partners do not work at all. In some circumstances, women breadwinners actually shoulder a greater percentage of parenting and household labor than either part-time women workers or stay-at-home moms.
Women do the overwhelming majority of household labor regardless of who works or how much, and even in the time immediately following childbirth. There is no circumstance or period during which men do, on average, more work than women—or during which their average contribution to any labor falls above 20-30%.
The majority of respondents reported experiencing emotional, sexual, or physical abuse from their partners in the 6 months following the birth of their child.