Today, I went to a used bookstore and hoped to find some good academic books. What I found was a section labelled "Women's Issues" filled with books about parenting, marriage, childbirth, childhood stages, and one book that looked rather interesting about how gender was a social construct.
Apparently books on how to discipline problem children, how to help them get good grades, advice on how to care for infants, and how to keep a marriage strong are women's issues.
The sad part is that as absurd as it seems to me that parenting books are gendered in this way, it is relatively true... how many men read books about how to save their marriage or how to discipline their children? Probably comparatively few.
Ugh it's so frustrating that this sort of thing is invisible to me until it's pointed out and I'm like "of course!" Parenting is totally not merely a woman's issue, but it's a people issue. But it's become a construct that associates (heterosexual, and who knows what other dimensions) women with parenting and it's perpetuated through our social practices, so it indeed becomes an issue that mostly women have to face.
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