You Deserve a Partner Not A Project: An Interview With Author Gemma Hartley

A few years ago, author Gemma Hartley wrote an article entitled “Women Aren’t Nags, We’re Just Fed Up.” In the piece that went uncommonly viral -having been viewed two billion times, yes, that’s billion with a b- she wrote for women around the world feeling frustrated due to the industrious amounts of invisible work they continuously do to run their households.

The success of this article inevitably led to her recent book Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and The Way Forward (HarperCollins, 2018). In it, she expands on the subject and once again gifts us much needed clarity and language to speak about many women’s emotions worldwide.

Continue reading for the fascinating interview we recently had with Gemma.

MF: What was different about the moment you decided to write the famous article that went viral?

GH: It wasn’t a single moment, I think it had all been building for a long time. One of the things that really informed the article was the comic about mental load “You Should’ve Asked” by French cartoonist Emma. It put some of this into perspective for me, and I had also been talking to friends about it. It had all been building in these small ways, and I think when my husband said, ‘if you want me to do that, just ask me to’ it clicked. I was…