Crabb’s theory is one about wives – that is, a partner who has intentionally given up paid work in order to take on more domestic tasks. She uses the term broadly. Wives can be married or not, male or female (though they are frequently women). Sixty per cent of Australian families have a father who works full-time and a mother who works part-time or not at all. Only three per cent have the reverse. Having a wife, argues Crabb, arms one partner with a career advantage. With one parent there to oversee the myriad tasks that can accumulate at home, the other is free to pursue his or her ambitions ‘to the absolute exclusion of all else’ – to work long hours, to network, to travel.

Crabb is less concerned with history and with theory and more interested in the way we live now. She is above all a commentator and, as such, is aware that, while the statistics matter, the real thing is to think on the patterns of existence that created them. Women still perform the majority of housework and childcare: up to forty-one hours a week if they work full-time, compared to about twenty hours done by men. What is fascinating though – and fascinating because it is so much more inscrutable – are the many reasons why.

Annabel Crabb at an author event, 2014

The breadwinner–homemaker model might seem archaic, but as feminism renews itself into successive waves, old patterns can often sink deeper. Crabb shows that we are still imperceptibly attached to gender norms, such that, even in younger generations, women take it upon themselves to do the majority of the cleaning and to adapt to being the primary caregiver, even if they work full-time. This is far more complex than simply a matter of ignorance or choice, but rather a process that can be at once conscious and involuntary, as well as constantly negotiated. Consider, for example, the strange little trade-offs and micro-bargainings that can take place in any given household on a daily basis – who does what, and why. Crabb writes sharply about the ‘asymmetry of belief’ that can occur when one partner feels certain tasks might be important whereas the other doesn’t even notice they need doing. After years of trying to get her husband to do more housework, one woman remarks, she has simply given up asking and now does it herself, if only because it is easier that way. On a micro level, these divisions can seem laughable, even miserly. On a macro level, they are the difference between having a wife and being one.

‘[I]f we are serious about equality,’ Crabb writes, ‘we should stop worrying so exclusively about women’s ease of access to the workplace and start worrying more about men’s ease of egress from it.’ Culturally, men too feel pressure to conform and often increase their work hours upon beginning a family. Interestingly, studies have shown that fathers who take leave straight after the birth of a child are more likely to be hands-on in future. After the Norwegian government introduced paternity leave on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis in 1993, not only did the number of fathers participating in the scheme jump from three per cent to ninety, but men subsequently spent an hour more a day on average with their children.

Crabb writes that The Wife Drought is not a book about rage, and it isn’t – which is not to say that there aren’t deep jolts of anger along the way. Any attempt to enact real change needs to be panoramic as well as precise. There is a limit to all of this. Crabb realises that the ‘wife drought’ theory cannot speak directly to single parents, same-sex couples, and women who do not want children; and that she must walk a difficult line between being a generalist and someone who understands the problems of being one. Still, she is keen to speak to rather than at, and takes care to give the human aspect to the statistics she draws forth, often through wry stories honed from her years as a political correspondent and as host of the ABC’s Kitchen Cabinet. Her journalistic humour is a major factor here, though the colloquialisms can be somewhat clumsy. The Wife Drought is both an attempt to laugh with the weary and to speak frankly to the circumspect.