Art & Creativity Quote by Barbara Ehrenreich

A scalpel of a sentence, sharpened on the soft underbelly of male self-congratulation. Ehrenreich takes a mundane act - changing a diaper - and exposes how quickly it gets inflated into a public performance when a man does it. The jab isn’t at fatherhood itself; it’s at the cultural math that treats basic caregiving as either women’s invisible duty or men’s heroic exception.

The line works because it’s built on a familiar pattern: the “impelled” man who can’t simply participate without narrating his participation. Ehrenreich’s phrasing (“felt impelled”) makes the compulsion sound almost physiological, a reflex produced by a media ecosystem eager for the novelty of the “new dad.” She’s skewering an economy of attention that rewards men for crossing a line women were never allowed to stop walking.

Subtext: resentment, yes, but also a demand for realism. If motherhood has historically been framed as natural and therefore undeserving of applause, fatherhood gets framed as a choice and therefore deserving of a book deal. Ehrenreich, whose work consistently interrogated class, labor, and the mythology of “personal responsibility,” is pointing at unpaid domestic labor as labor - and at how gender decides whose labor counts as story-worthy.

Contextually, it lands in the era of confessional parenting memoirs and “sensitive” masculinity branding, when domestic competence became a marketable identity for men while women’s competence remained background noise. The punchline isn’t that men shouldn’t change diapers; it’s that they should stop expecting a parade for joining the human baseline.