MMO: In mainstream feminist thought, the conventional wisdom is that mothers and fathers are essentially interchangeable -- that is, biologically-based sex differences do not determine men's capacity to become proficient and sensitive caregivers, or women's ability to perform brilliantly in the public sphere. But in the course of your study, you found that socially inscribed gender norms continue to be an important factor in how mothers' and fathers' define and divide domestic roles and responsibilities. What were the main conceptual and practical strategies primary caregiver fathers used to make sense of child care and household work as a masculine practice?
Andrea Doucet: I should start by saying that masculinity is sometimes an aspect of men's care giving and sometimes it isn't. I argue in my book that what scholars have termed "hegemonic masculinity" carries a large shadow over the lives of men who put care giving at the center of their everyday lives. Traditionally, hegemonic masculinity has been defined as the most desired or stereotypical form of masculinity, usually aligned with traditional masculine qualities of autonomy, strength, economic success, and control. Perhaps most centrally, it has been defined as the opposite of "femininity." Just as young boys don't want to be called "sissies," men do not want to equate their care work as "women's work." And this comes to bear on how men define themselves, not only as fathers but as fathers in relation to a society that still largely assumes that care work is women's work.
So what seemed very clear to me from most fathers' accounts in my study was that they were quite adamant to distinguish themselves as men, as heterosexual, and as fathers -- not as mothers. In one focus group with fathers, for example, one stay-at-home father kept interjecting, half jokingly: "Well we're still men, aren't we?" In another interview, one father made several pointed references to how he often worked out at a gym and enjoyed "seeing the women in lycra."
These men's words resonate with what theorists of work have underlined about men working in non-traditional or female dominated occupations (such as nursing or elementary school teaching) and how they must actively work to expel the idea that they might be gay, un-masculine, or not men. This then leads to men finding ways of reinforcing their masculinity -- such as engaging in sports or physical labor so as to maintain masculine affiliations and to exhibit public displays of masculinity. What was also occurring was that the men in my study were attempting to carve out their own paternal and masculine identities within spaces traditionally considered maternal and feminine. These processes of masculine reconstruction, and distancing from the feminine, occurred in at least a couple of ways.
First, the overwhelming majority of fathers spoke about their efforts to impart a more "masculine quality" to their family care through promoting their children's physical and outdoor activities, independence, risk taking, and the fun and playful aspects of care. Second, given that domestic space, the home, is metaphorically configured as a maternal space with feminine connotations of comfort and care, many fathers more readily identified with the house, as something to build and rebuild. Thus many stay-at-home fathers spoke about work they were doing on the house, landscaping, carpentry, woodworking or repairing cars.
While having said all of the above about bringing masculinity into care work, it is also important to mention that for the highly involved fathers interviewed for my study, I also picked up on what I have referred to as a slow revisioning of masculinity. One notable way in which this occurs is that many fathers admitted that they had become a different kind of father as a result of being highly involved with their children. Fathers referred to how they had found the "soft father" within them and even at times "the mother in me." One father phrased it so beautifully when he spoke about how he had lost the traditional masculine qualities of autonomy and independence with his children and that he got "lost in the nurturing." I think that what my work ultimately reveals is that while primary caregiving fathers seek to distance themselves from what are considered traditionally feminine practices and identities, they are also, in practice, radically revisioning masculine care to include perspectives that are more aligned with women's social positioning and more feminine defined ways of being and seeing.
MMO: Work-life research indicates more married fathers are spending more time with children than ever before. Perhaps the more pressing question in the minds of married mothers is: Do men do housework?
Andrea Doucet: Isn't that the million-dollar question! Unfortunately, it doesn't have a simple answer. We know from time-use studies that fathers in most countries are increasing their contributions to housework. We also know that much of this increase is accounted for by childcare-related activities, and less in routine housework. It is also important to note that housework is a very large and amorphous category of work, which includes subjective elements, overlaps with leisure and personal preferences and which varies enormously within households depending on number of children, size of home, and size of income. What I can say from my interviews with over 100 fathers and with 14 heterosexual couples is that fathers did not speak much about housework and, in their individual interviews it was nearly impossible to get a clear picture of what was being done and how often. Nevertheless, I can say a few things:
First, the way that I got people to talk about housework was through something I call the "Household Portrait Technique" which is really a game that I devised to encourage couples to visualize and talk together about who-does-what and why in their households. I used this technique/game/data collection method with the 14 couples that I interviewed. The couple would go through the little pieces of paper that were, in turn, set up around color-coded categories of housework and childcare as well as kin work, household maintenance work, budgeting, and overall domestic responsibilities. Then they put these little colored papers, each indicating a task, in columns that were marked as: Mainly Man; Mainly Man with Woman Helping; Shared Equally; Mainly Woman with Man Helping; Mainly Woman. It was actually quite a good way to get men and women to talk together about what are still very taken-for-granted and invisible areas of work and activity.
This interview technique prompted a lot of discussion, disagreement and cajoling at times ("give me that piece of paper" or "I do that more than you do"). An example might help to illuminate this point. While Theo told me, in his individual interview, that he did all of the laundry his wife Paulina laughed when she heard this and insisted that it was shared "Excuse me, but we share the laundry dear." Theo, in fact, agreed with her after they had discussed the different aspects of doing laundry, (doing it, folding it, putting it away) and how it did count that she did it on the weekend whereas he did it more during the week. Meanwhile Martin told me that as far as the housework was concerned "I basically do it all" whereas in their joint interview, it was clear that Denise also did her fair share of housework.
A second point that I want to make about housework is that it seemed to be a sensitive issue within some households. For example, one father recalled when the house was continually untidy over the year that he stayed at home and how his wife would get up in the middle of the night and vacuum, partly as a coping mechanism, partly as a bit of a protest.
Finally, it is important to note there were some gendered variation in household standards. There were certainly some fathers who were, as one father Kyle put it, "fanatical about cleaning" and there were a few fathers who, as confirmed in the couple interviews, had higher standards than their wives or partners. Yet overall, there was a strong sense that housework was a secondary concern for most fathers. Many fathers noted that playing with the kids or homework always takes priority over housework. As many family researchers have noted, these differing standards in domestic labor can cause tension in a relationship. It can also lead to women taking on more of the work and possible resentment coming from this.
I did also find that in households with stay-at-home fathers, and full-time working mothers, many of the women started out with higher standards of housework but these become modified, not only with the arrival of children, but with their return to paid work. In a few cases where income was available, housecleaning services were used to alleviate conflict over housework standards.
As for specific findings on men and housework, I can say that while there was great diversity between households, in the majority of households men still took on traditional masculine tasks of household maintenance, construction, plumbing and electrical and issues dealing with the car. Women did more of the laundry -- especially folding it and putting it away -- and men did more of the cooking during the week while women took on more weekend cooking. Women did more of the reading to children, homework help, creative play and board games while men did more physical play, outdoors activities and sports. With the exception of one father of three Gary, who "loved buying greeting cards," the card and gift-buying fell mainly to women, because women generally seem to place greater value on birthdays and anniversaries. In one household, for example, Denise reminded Martin that his mother's birthday was coming up because, as she said: "I think I have a better memory than he does for those things." Women almost exclusively bought children's clothes while men purchased more of the shoes and boots. Women did more of the vocal or expressed worry while some men were adamant that they did indeed worry, but more quietly.
A final note on men and housework is that I did find was that most men seem to be less focused on housekeeping and more on household maintenance and renovations. Moreover, they put playing with children and getting outdoors with the children ahead of household chores. I think this is related to several issues: differing social expectations about men, women and domestic space; men's resolve to differentiate their parenting from that of women; their intent to instill an active and physical approach to caregiving; and men's desire to enact their parenting in what felt like a more "masculine" style.
MMO: Many of the stay-at-home and single fathers you interviewed mentioned the public perception of lone, adult males as a potential threat to children, especially to girls. Fathers reported being "checked out" when they visited their children's schoolyard, for example, and some of the men you interviewed admitted that they, too, would have reservations about trustworthiness of a dad they didn't know well. What were some of the other ways the having male bodies shaped the caregiving experiences of the fathers you studied?
Andrea Doucet: The male body was the unexpected surprise in my research. What I try to do in my book is to make visible the embodied quality of mothering and fathering and to bring this parental embodiment into scholarly and public understandings of mothering and fathering. In a nutshell, I argue that there are contexts -- times and spaces -- when embodiment does matter a great deal and there are other contexts where it's negligible or inconsequential. Yet, what continually surprised me in this work most was the weight of embodiment within the narratives I gathered from over 100 fathers and from 14 mothers. While this impact of bodies waxes and wanes through men's (and women's) narratives and through the flow of parental time, it nevertheless emerged as one of the stronger themes in my work, even though I certainly did not ask anybody to speak about it directly, nor did I start out with embodiment as an area of inquiry. Specifically, this weight of embodiment figures in many ways, three of which I will mention here.
First, both fathers give greater symbolic and practical significance to the role that mothers play with children. Both fathers and mothers point to the influence of female embodiment -- pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, post-recovery- as well as to the metaphoric example of a mother's hug ("longer', "tighter," "deeper") as having greater emotional weight in the care of children.
Second, fathers' embodiment also comes to figure in the ways in which men emphasize physical activities, being outdoors, playing, and doing sports with their children -- all drawing on a notion of masculine embodiment as strong, physical and muscle-bound.
Third, many of the fathers, particularly fathers at home 5-10 years ago, drew attention to how they had to move cautiously as embodied actors in female-dominated community playgroups and in settings where they are placed closely to pre-teen and teen girls (such as in supervising girls sleepovers). The story of the girls' sleepover was one that came to figure as a negative instance of the father-daughter narrative and where men had to be careful around girls because of how the male body might be misread.
I should, however, add a point that feminist scholars of embodiment have emphasized, which is that while the body does have a biological and material base, it is nevertheless modified and variably enacted within different social contexts. It is a point that I also emphasize throughout my book. Quite simply, sometimes bodies do not matter. When a father is attending to children -- by cuddling, feeding, reading, bathing, or talking to them -- gendered embodiment can be largely negligible. But there are also times when embodiment can come to matter a great deal, both for the men in these situations as well as for those who are observing them. As detailed in varied parts of "Do Men Mother?," there is at times a "social gaze" cast upon men's embodied movements with children, particularly as they move in female-dominated community spaces.
MMO: In popular discussions about women's increased participation in the paid work force, common metaphors evoke images of invasion or infiltration -- women "seize opportunities" to "move into" the workforce; they "demand" an end to sex discrimination, and "fight" for equal pay. Conversely, I was struck by the passive metaphors applied to men taking on a greater share of caregiving and household labor, particularly the framework that mothers need to "move aside" to make space for fathers to practice caregiving on their own terms. Obviously, this is a culturally and relationally complicated issue. But based on anecdotal accounts, one of mothers' frequent complaints is that fathers fail to initiate or "notice" when carework and housework needs to be done. The accompanying narrative is that women's standards are different, too high, and inflexible. Why is it that we continue to talk about mothers as the "gatekeepers" of the relational and family workload, instead of talking about father as individuals with the capacity and responsibility to open the gate, and walk through it?
Andrea Doucet: As you rightly point out, it is indeed a culturally and relationally complicated issue. It would be great if fathers could just open the gate and walk in. And indeed some fathers do this. But the gate is not always open and the gate into parenting, especially early parenting, is very much controlled by women. It is not 'control' in an overt sense but in a symbolic, embodied, and normative sense. What I heard in the more than 100 interviews I conducted with a wide diversity of fathers -- immigrant fathers, poor fathers, wealthy fathers, all who assumed primary caregiving in their children's lives for at least one year, and some for many years -- was that the 'default' mode for fathers was that mothers would be the primary caregivers. Men would support and assist mothers. But mothers would be in the driving seat.
In "Do Men Mother" I argue that the processes by which men come to be primary caregivers start with the deeply marked gender division between vastly different expectations for mothers and fathers. In my work, I came to describe parenting as a mother-led dance. I also describe it as a relational set of practices and activities. What I argue is that fathers rely profoundly on mothers to define their own fathering. The early period defines this so much because women take on many of the responsibilities.
It is when mothers forgo some or all of their mothering, or overtly challenge assumptions that are socially, culturally, and ideologically engrained and prescribed that fathers find themselves in a place where they are opening that gate and entering. It is as though fathers look across this metaphorical gender divide to what women are doing and then co-construct their own actions in relation, sometimes in reaction, to those maternal decisions and movements. Many of the fathers make it a point of saying that they did not grow up expecting to be a primary care giving father. Many women, on the other hand, begin thinking about being a mother or having children, or the decision not to have children, from a young age. A related point is that when girls start their menstrual cycles, they have to start planning around their child-bearing capacities. "When do I have to bring tampons to school? Where do I put them?" Then, as young women, they might be thinking, "At what age will I have my children? How long will I stay at home with them? How many will I have?" Young men don't think about those things nearly as much. So women take on this kind of reproductive planning earlier and this gets reinforced through the largely female-dominated social networks or early parenting. Although this is slowly changing, it is generally the case that fathers don't have those kinds of networks. Several of the fathers in my study referred to these maternal settings as "estrogen-filled worlds”.
There are several other points that are important to add here about gatekeeping. First, I think men open the gate when the children get older or when they see areas where they immediately feel competent and able. What facilitates this? Not only women moving over, but women not being present. Moreover, men more easily enter into areas where they feel a particular background, competence, and skill that their female partners may not have (the most common example mentioned by fathers was sporting and physical activities). What I did find was that in households or parenting arrangements where women were not present or were more marginally involved, such as in sole custody households and in gay father households, that men took on these responsibilities full-tilt.
A second point is maternal gate keeping is mostly talked about in relation to household life. The research conducted thus far on this concept has focused on its occurrence within households between a woman and a man. My work shows how it is enacted by couples within households, but it also occurs within communities, between mothers and other fathers. Perhaps the best illustrations of this are the example of how a when a woman, in the words of one father, Archie, "came to check me out" because he was reading to the kids in the schoolyard, or when another father felt excluded in the mothers' group because a woman felt uncomfortable breastfeeding in front of him. It could well be that the times and spaces where maternal gatekeeping occurs in communities are those in which male embodiment is viewed as intrusive or threatening, either to women or to children.
Finally, I want to add that this is an area that still needs a lot of discussion. Several interesting questions about gatekeeping emerge from my work on fathers as primary caregivers. The first is on the relationship between women who gatekeep and the length and experience of maternity leave or parental leave taken by women and/or men. For example, is maternal gatekeeping more likely in households where women take long maternity leaves? Conversely, does it occur less in households where men take some parental leave? Second, do men take on paternal gatekeeping within domestic and community life, and if so, where and when? Finally, is there any relation between women's sense of responsibility as expressed through a need to protect children and the extreme gender-differentiated experiences of women and men in relation to issues of violence and sexual abuse? Could it be that there is a symbolic relationship between women's maternal gatekeeping and a larger societal fear that hovers around the history of male violence? Such thoughts began to enter my analysis after I reflected on the words of one father, Alexander, speaking about the loss of his close relationship with his step-daughter: "There is a historical sexual ambiguity operating between men and girls. We know that history -- you know, sexual abuse."
I think this is a fertile area for lots more debate and discussion, as well as scholarly research.
MMO: You conclude that "Do men mother?" is the wrong question, and suggest instead that men are in the process of redefining what fathering means. You also suggest we should pay more attention to the places where difference creates disadvantages, and where difference is simply difference. In addition to the problem of male embodiment, what are some of the disadvantages men face as primary caregivers?
Andrea Doucet: Some of the disadvantages men face is that their caregiving are the invisible and unappreciated aspects of their care work. One of the things I have sought to do in my work is to bring attention to what it is that men actually do when they care for children. Working around and through the question of men and mothering for about five years, and speaking to over 100 fathers and a small group of mothers, I arrived at the view that studying fathers' caregiving through the question of men and mothering both limits our views of fathers caring and, further, that the question itself is flawed. Listening to men's stories through the question "do they mother?" or even "can they mother?" implies that we are looking at fathering and their experiences of caring for children through a maternal lens. When that happens, other ways of nurturing are pushed into the shadows and obscured.
For example, a maternal lens misses the ways in which fathers promote children's independence and risk-taking, while their fun and playfulness, physicality and outdoors approach to caring of young children are viewed only as second-best, or invisible, ways of caring. Similarly, a maternal lens overlooks the creative ways that fathers are beginning to form parallel community networks, to those that have traditionally existed by and for mothers; many of these networks are set up around their children's sports. As I argue in my book, studying men's practices through female-centered understandings is not dissimilar to scholarship which was strongly critiqued by feminist scholars -- that of studying women's lives through male centered concepts and lenses.
I also think we need to be careful about how and where we talk about men's disadvantage in childrearing. It goes without saying that many fathers' rights groups are already doing a very good job documenting men's disadvantage. As a feminist, there are tensions in researching and writing about fathering. (I have spoken and written about this in several places and I know that others have as well).
Like many fathering researchers, I have made the plea in my book that we need to understand men on their own terms, and not through female-centered approaches. Nevertheless, I also argue that there is a difference between this call and the argument by feminist scholars that male lenses should not be used to study women. Quite simply, the structural backdrop that accompanies these questions is different, asymmetrical and indeed, unequal. Fathers' stories of resistance and change, promise and potential, as narrated throughout my book, must be framed against structural relations between women and men. Women's opportunities in paid work, in education, in politics have certainly widened and increased gradually throughout the last half century. Nevertheless, women continue to face disadvantages particularly in the realms of paid work and politics where their representation at the highest levels in both of these spheres has remained sparse in all countries.
It's also important to recognize that arguing for men's greater involvement in childcare is to encourage men's entry into what is arguably the primary domain where women hold power and responsibility. Quite simply, there are differential costs to this call for greater participation of the other gender. Active fathers, as individuals, may lose some power and authority in the workplace when they trade "cash for care" but men, as a gender, still benefit from what sociologist Robert Connell calls the ever-present "patriarchal dividend." The same is not true for women. While men may come to appreciate, as detailed throughout my book, the joys and rewards of caring, it is still women, as Ann Crittenden beautifully details, who overwhelmingly pay the social and economic price for care in society.
MMO: In your postscript, you specifically note that you don't want your research to be taken as a blanket endorsement of involved fatherhood at any cost -- "not as part of a larger political, ideological struggle between woman and men," but as a contribution to the ongoing scholarship on the benefits of involved fathering to men, children, families and communities. Within that context, what did the study tell you about the benefits of involved fathering to men?
Andrea Doucet: There are so many scholars who have written about the benefits of involved fathering to men. Such writings come from across the political and ideological spectrum, from fathers' rights advocates to feminist researchers to fathering researcher s who emphasize issues of generativity for involved fathers. In Canada, one of the best sites for reviewing some of the most up to date research is the Fathers Involvement Research Alliance, which is led by Dr. Kerry Daly at the University of Guelph.
One of the unique findings that I can highlight here from my own research relates to the political implications that can be drawn from research on men and caring and to the potential role that men could play in the social recognition and valuing of unpaid work. As I highlight in "Do Men Mother?", many fathers come to recognize the value and the skill involved in caring work. They speak about how parenting is the "hardest" or "most difficult" job they have ever done. They slowly come to appreciate how vitally important, yet socially devalued, caring work is. They're adding their voices to the chorus of generations of women who have argued for the valuing of unpaid work. As one Aboriginal stay-at-home father expressed it: "This Mr. Mom business -- here I am complaining about it and women have been putting up with for a hundred years now." Looking ahead to when they will return to paid work, stay-at-home fathers also begin to question what social commentators have referred to as "male stream" concepts of work. These fathers adopt perspectives traditionally espoused by women on the need for work-family balance.
I also think that fathers taking on more of the caring work represents a reversing of a trend which many authors have repeatedly pointed to over the past two decades. This is an increasing pattern whereby middle class families with ample economic resources rely on other lesser-paid women. Paying others to perform domestic services such as childcare and housework is ultimately a passing on of women's traditional domain from one group of women to another and effectively hardens the boundaries that exist around gender and caring. The end result is that work and homemaking remain as devalued "women's work" -- and an ever-broadening lower tier of women are paid meager wages to perform a "modified housewife" role, while other women do work which is considered more socially "valuable." We've seen this theme recur in many of the popular "nanny" books that are now on bookshelves.
Ultimately, I argue that the fathers described in my book can be viewed as responding to Dorothy Dinnerstein's lament a quarter century ago in her classic "The Mermaid and the Minotaur" (1977), where she elaborated on the many societal and psychologicalimbalances that occur in a society when one gender does the metaphoric "rocking of the cradle" while the other gender"rules the world."
Thank you, Judith and Mothers Movement Online, for taking the time to ask and receive my responses to these very important and provocative questions. I am always open to discussing, debating, and conversing about these issues of men and caregiving. Thank you for including a discussion of "Do Men Mother?" on your wonderful and important site.
mmo : june 2007 |