fatherhood

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, father roles in child care were very well defined. It was the father’s responsibility to be the moral guidepost through their development. According to Pleck, the father was supposed to impress upon the child what God and the world around them expected of them. This entailed educating their children in the ways of religion and guiding them to their occupation, or “true calling.” (352) This role changed form in the 20th century to a more traditional view. Pleck describes this father as the “distant breadwinner.” This placed more of a burden on the mother, and also in turn changed the very face of education. Following the work of Horace Mann, females were introduced as elementary school teachers. (354) While fathers still set the tone for moral guiding, it was done at a distance. As a result, Alexis de Tocqueville described fathers in this time period as losing much of their “authority”. Moving forward to post WWII, fathers retained the distant breadwinner image, but also became a sex role model. Pleck attributed this to the unease of the time period surrounding mothers and the Feminine Mystique, which described rampant homosexuality as a result of mother-son relationships.(356) The distant breadwinner view of fathers is still very prevalent in today’s American society. Fathers are expected to be distant and passive. However, it is my personal observation that this will not last. As more and more women are educated (in greater numbers than men), the social constraints surrounding women and childcare will dissolve. This will force more and more men to take a more hand on, dare I say, feminine approach to fatherhood.

This flows nicely into Francine Deutsch’s discussion of division of labor. The first point she delves into is the idea of alternating shifts among blue collar couples with children. This system involves the two partners taking alternate paid working shifts so the “off” time can be spent doing unpaid childcare and housework. This saves an immense amount of money in childcare costs and gives time for bother parents to be with children. IN this situation, which is more common among lower class couples due to the inherent is fast that shift work (construction, bell boy etc) is more prevalent among this class, the housework can be more evenly divided among the partners. This runs contrary to the dominant culture that despite progress in women’s rights, still assigns most, if not all of the housework to the women in a relationship. Although I appreciate the better work balance in these alternating shifts, I do not believe I could ever do this with a family (should I choose to have one). Perhaps it is how I grew up, but I enjoyed the time when both parents (who worked) were home at the end of the day. I don’t know how I would have felt about splitting my time with them.

Finally, Dorothy Roberts describes the situation with black american families, which are for the majority, led by women and not men. She describes this as the absent black father. There are many societal forces that she describes that may have an impact in the relative absence (or more appropriately, the discouragement of black father’s participation more than absence) of black fathers in black families. Some believe that female headed black families are resisting the traditional patriarchy that dominates our society. High rates of poverty among black populations can lead to higher rates of incarceration. Institutionalized racism limits blacks and can cause higher unemployment and lead to increased absence from the home.
What is unfair about this generalization that black fathers are absent is how “absent” is defined. According to Roberts, to be deemed fatherless, a child must only have parents who are unmarried. This places a lot of emphasis on marriage statistics, while ignoring much of the participation that black fathers may engage in. In addition, our white dominated society “pretend that black children are born into poverty because their fathers are not around, not because their fathers are jobless.” (158)