Fathering

Lost Fathers

In “Lost Fathers: The Politics of Fatherlessness in America,” Cynthia R. Daniels examines the roles Black fathers play in the sponsorship of marital fatherhood as the solution for children’s well being.  Daniels maintains that fatherlessness in America is identified as a Black trait and seen as a Black problem.  She points out that unwed White mothers are seen as a cultural or racial defect and they are shamed.  Black unwed mothers, on the other hand, are defined as a major social problem and the are blamed rather than shamed.  “Black fatherlessness,” Daniels says, “is understood as a symptom of rebellious Black mothering, a symptom that dooms Black people to ruin” (Daniels 148).  But according to Daniels the high occurrence of fatherlessness in the Black community is partly the result of different notions of child rearing.  Black women have a distinct idea of motherhood that consists of sharing the responsibilities of child rearing with other women in the community.  Furthermore, “many presumably ‘absent’ Black fathers actually play a important role in child rearing” (Daniels 153).  Therefore the condemnation many Black fathers have received comes not from his under involvement with his children, but rather from his marital and economic status. 

            However, society continues to associate fatherlessness with the Black community because it is an easy explanation for Black people’s problems.  “Curing” fatherlessness, therefore, would an easy fix to their problem.  Daniels criticizes such policies as welfare and child support laws who maintain that goal.  She insists that “racial inequality—not fatherlessness—is the leading cause of Black children’s deprivation” (Daniels 157) and that “we cannot begin to judge Black fathers until we address the institutional forces that keep marriage a patriarchal system, devalue the work of child rearing, and deprive families of the social resources necessary to raise healthy children” (Daniels 158).

            At one point in this reading, Daniels tells us where the belief about the degenerate Black family as being the cause of Black people’s poverty comes from.  That information made me realize how much that belief, as ashamed as I am to admit it, has been ingrained in my own belief system.  Daniels made me realize that such a complex problem as poverty cannot be explained by such a simple situation as an “absent” father.  Further I believe he successfully conveyed the problem of broad cultural definitions of such personal things as family and parenthood.

Having It All: The Mother and Mr. Mom

In her book “Having it all: The Mother and Mr. Mom,” Francine Deutsch examines alternating-shift couple.  This group is comprised of blue-collar families in which the husbands and the wives work different shifts so as to share the responsibilities of caring for their children.  Deutsch identified two reasons for why these couples choose to alternate shifts.  The first was the issue of money.  since alternating shifters tend to have lower incomes, the shifts are necessary to the families’ economic wellbeing.  The second reason was the belief that family is the only group that should be taking care of children.  Deutsch identified a fear among these working-class couples that day care would stifle their ability to influence their kids with their own values.

Deutsch found that when middle-class families rejected day care, the mothers usually stayed home in order to ensure child care.  When working-class families rejected day care, however, the solution was for the father to forgo work time for the family.  This difference did not arise because working-class parents are revolting againt gender identities.  Rather, Deutsch that these blue-collar men still feel compelled to embody their traditional gender roles.  They still consider the domestic work they have taken on as women’s work, but they have accepted the work out of economic necessity.  The women from families also have not consciously separated themselves from their gender identities.  In fact Deutsch tells us that among these alternating-shifts families, the women are still seen as the primary caregivers. 

I thought it was really interesting that these alternating-shifts families established their family pattern according to traditional gender identities.  However, these very patterns ended up defying such identities.  I think the egalitarianism of these couples is truly impressive and I believe that families across all social classes would be better off adopting such a system.

 No Man’s Land

In her book “No Man’s Land,” Kathleen Gerson discusses the ongoing revolution taking place in the lives of modern day men.  In 1960, Gerson explains that ““the reigning ideology defined mature manhood almost exclusively in terms of achieving economic success and providing for wives and children” (Gerson 4).  However, since then, there has been a decline of men as the primary breadwinners.  Gerson explains that this decline has led to ambiguity about men’s identity and their proper place in society. In studying this phenomenon, Gerson focused on the differences among men, rather than the differences between men and women.  This is a necessary distinction, for according to Gerson the meaning of gender is undergoing a change and to understand this change requires an understanding of men’s perception.  Thus, she began her exploration by interviewing138 men chosen from alumni lists of a private university in New York and from a labor council’s lists of workers in order to chronicle the change and to better understand men’s behavior.  These men were between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-five and varied in their social background, though they were mostly non-Hispanic white.  In conducting the interviews, Gerson found that the difference contrasted less between the groups of middle-class and working-class men than within the groups, which contradicts reigning belief.

Gerson’s identifies several trends that comprise the change.  “Staled revolution,” she says is one that is comprised of men who refuse to partake in domestic work.  “Male rebels” is the trend of men choosing autonomy over marriage.  “Estranged dads,” Gerson states, are men who have families, but are absent from them.  Then there is the nurturing father, who is one who has accepted increased involvement in the domestic sphere.  These trends, Gerson argues, cannot be explained by either “masculine personality” or “cultural masculinity.”  The former implies that men have set psychological orientations that define them; this is inconsistent with the vast disparity found among the psychology of individual men.  Gerson explains that the latter explanation is a ““the cultural tradition that idealizes male flight from commitment is as old as American culture itself” (Gerson 263) and so it cannot account for the recent changes of patterns in men’s lives.  Further, Gerson maintains that this cultural tradition does not establish a definite behavioral outline.  Rather, Gerson outlines three social shifts that have largely contributed to the revolution: (1) the decline in men’s economic privilege, (2) the increasing attachment of women to employment, and (3) the growing presence of alternative options to marriage.  Gerson insists that neither the past nor “culture is…static, consistent, or determining” (Gerson 265) and so the roles that future men will play in society and their families is mostly indefinable.