Helen McCabe, today launched Annabel Crabb’s ‘game changing’ book, The Wife Drought: Why women need wives and men need lives.
The book reveals that 76 per cent of full-time working fathers have a spouse working part-time or not at all, compared to only 15 per cent of women.
“We’ve been having the conversations about work-life balance, and child-care options, and maternity and paternity leave, and glass ceilings and the rest, but The Wife Drought is the first time anyone in Australia has pulled it all together, and come up with a compelling case for immediate and substantial change,” said McCabe at the Friends Room in the NSW State Library this afternoon.
When Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced his cabinet, with only one woman in it, Annabel Crabb wrote a column arguing why the ‘spousal drought’ was partly to blame. And the feedback she received from women all over the country prompted her to write the novel.
“There’s a reason there aren’t more women in politics and it’s because they don’t get the spouses that the men get,” Crabb said this afternoon.
“When I look around me and the women in politics and media I always notice that the incredibly smart women that I meet – and I’ve met so many of the over the course of my media career – some of them just don’t get there in the end to the highly demanding roles.
“It’s only half the story of course. I think there’s a whole story here about what happens to men at work that we don’t pay a lot of attention to.”
The Wife Drought tackles these arguments around raising a family while juggling a career, for both genders. And according to McCabe, it should not only be women heading to the book store to pick up a copy. But men too.
Describing it as a “major work” and “modern feminist text”, McCabe claims the book is “jammed full of important ideas and fresh thinking about the issues challenging modern Australian families”.
