Dearest readers, beware. Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, by Amanda Montei, is not for the faint of heart. When you decide to read this book, be brave, as the writer has been, while gazing unflinchingly into the looking glass of what it means to be a girl, woman, wife, or mother in twenty-first century America. In her “fun-house mirror of shame,” Montei reveals dark reflections of experiences with drunken sexual assault, compromised consent, and caregiver fatigue—each outlining a long history of male entitlement entrenched in patriarchal society. Deeply important is her analysis of the continued subjugation of women, policing and ownership of the female body, and the uneven labor of childrearing—all violations, she argues, women are socialized to expect. She writes that “American motherhood has always reeked of misogyny—the expectation that women give and never receive, and the belief that whatever women do give, it will never be enough, or it will be too much.” Though equality for women has improved, Montei shows us we still have a long way to go in prioritizing the needs of women, children, and families. It is not a pleasing, put-on-a-smile read, nor is that the intention behind its writing.

Additionally, the book is a masterclass on seamlessly incorporating research into personal narrative. Readers not only experience, say, her edgy LA youth or the raw reality of early motherhood, but also hear from the likes of Hannah Arendt, Adrienne Rich, and Michel Foucault (to name a few). Montei sounds the alarm on the issues women can face by striking the right balance between academic rigor and memoir. In chronicling motherhood, she corroborates the duplicitous nature of the experience. It is often a compromising both-and negotiation of a fierce love for a child and taking satisfaction in their care, but also experiencing social isolation while performing round-the-clock, tiring tasks unrecognized and undervalued as “real work.” The onus to make parenthood easier and more manageable is too often placed on the individual, especially the mother, rather than fixing the institutions that fail to provide appropriate help. She further writes that “the abandonment of mothers and parents in America has undoubtedly deepened our self-doubt, our longing for something better, and our grief for what we wish we had been able to give.” Paid maternity and paternity leave, subsidized childcare, free preschool, and universal healthcare are all examples of social programs that could help parents feel less alone and more fulfilled while caring for our youngest citizens.

With such resources, mothers may be less “touched out”—the phenomenon that refers not only to the sensory overwhelm of caregiving, especially for breastfeeding mothers, but also to feelings of anxiety, guilt, and claustrophobia. Montei expands the definition by also claiming being touched out is part of a “grander narrative of women’s subservience” that encourages women to deny their own physical and emotional needs while meeting them for children and husbands. She claims it is a “visceral, perplexing, and often automatic” reaction and explains it this way:

As a new mother, I felt completely touched out all the time by the knockabout nature of care work—the heaving, the scrambling, the rubbing, the sounds, the literal shit under my fingernails—and most strongly on days when it seemed I never stopped moving, too frenzied by the constant productivity of my body.

Work such as this leaves women deeply depleted, fatigued, and with low morale.

The writer further argues that the experience is a result of the social “betrayal” of women that turns its back on them as they undergo demands “to perform sexually in their marriages, renegotiate careers, parent in isolation and under impossible expectations, and play nice no matter what their children d[o].” What women “consent” to in relationships and motherhood, those shiny packages advertised as ultimate fulfillment, are often not the reality that lies underneath. Is it any wonder that in Western, heterosexual relationships, 70 percent of divorces are initiated by women? These imbalances and injustices can erode them at their very cores.

Montei also posits being touched out has similarities to the “burnout” experienced in the wider culture. This is valuable insight. When we recognize domestic labor as equivalent to the more traditional definition of people-oriented professions like education, human services, and health care, we begin to appreciate the work performed at home as intense and stressful with accompanying occupational hazards. This acknowledgement stands in lieu of clichéd beliefs that these duties are intrinsically natural to women who can unflaggingly perform them as if by magic.

Social psychologist Christina Maslach, creator of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and pioneer of the research on the topic, helps signal at least part of what is wrong for many women. The inventory highlights three dimensions of the burnout experience—“exhaustion,” “cynicism,” and “efficacy,” which are all exhibited in this book. According to Angela Duckworth, the MBI sixteen question measurement asks things such as “I feel used up at the end of the workday”; “I doubt the significance of my work”; or “I feel exhilarated when I accomplish something at work”; on a scale of “never” to “everyday.” Based on Montei’s writing, she would easily qualify as burned out, and rightly so.

Maslach later studied what can be done about the problem of burnout, with “fixing the job,” rather than the person, as one option. By creating a healthier workplace, she found, well-being can be promoted through things like a sustainable workload, choice and control, recognition and reward, or fairness and respect. Clearly, most people who stay at home with young children often lack these.

Yet even amid the despair, Montei writes poetic passages so beautiful they transform grief and frustration, at least for a moment. To feminist Betty Friedan’s famous question “Is this all?” the writer ultimately answers no. The author believes in the possibility of cultural change and an egalitarian reality, even if it be slow. This book is Montei’s contribution to that effort. To exhibit her eloquence, I will leave you not with my parting words, but her own:

Children are always stumbling into new worlds. It seems no accident of humanity that it happens this way: for their bodies to grow, children must learn to lose the world as they know it, not once but repeatedly. It’s a process that cannot be forced. The question before the rest of us is how we might learn to stand, as children do, in front of our own world, one that seems so hell-bent on reproducing itself, on keeping itself the way it is, and refuse to let it coalesce into something familiar, into a story we have read so many times before.