This book is the first to apply sophisticated ideas about negotiation to women's predicament. In Kidding Ourselves, women struggling to make their family lives more fair and sane - along with scholars and activists - will learn practical skills as well as a whole new way of thinking: how BATNAs (best alternatives to a negotiated agreement), commitment mechanisms, and focal points shape the intimate details of their family lives.

The author shows that negotiation takes place every day, in every family in the world. It may be spoken or unspoken or even unconscious.

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Kidding Ourselves proposes concrete steps for individual women and for all of us collectively to take to bring about a future in which the traditional sexual division of labor has melted away. When will that happen? When half the primary parents are men and half are women.

Visionary and provocative, but firmly grounded in the best social science research and filled with examples from nontraditional families, literature, and movies, the book describes in detail exactly how we can bring about that transformation.