Quality of life? Oh, not *your* life.

Chris Clarke very succinctly gets to the not-so-hidden sexism behind the nostalgia for “quality of life”.

Though it goes beyond neo-environmentalism and caretaking; scratch an argument about the good old days when life was less impersonal and hurried, and you’ll find someone bitching that women aren’t doing more of the heavy lifting. “Families don’t sit down to dinner anymore”? Mom isn’t home and expected to have a hot meal on the table for everybody, 7 days a week, 364 days a year. (Mothers’ Day is her day off. That’s why you take Mom out to brunch, or make her breakfast in bed–it’s a reverse-holiday, where everybody cooks for and waits on Mom for a single day of the year.) “Parents are overworked and don’t have time with their children”? Why the hell isn’t Mom holding down a nice part-time job for butter-and-egg money?

The only thing I hear less of is whining about ‘latchkey kids’, because it’s turned into whining about daycare. And we all know whose fault it is that the children are in daycare. Certainly not Daddy’s.