Stay-at-Home Father’s Day in the Mass Media

Stay-at-Home Father’s Day in the Mass Media (posted 15 June 2003, 4pm)

Here's a pretty old legacy post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 21 years ago, in 2003, on the World Wide Web.

If there is some Evil Genius or cabal of Illuminati out there behind the cycle of repetitive human interest stories that somehow reach every corner of the United States mass media, they’ve at least picked up one of the interesting on-going stories for today.

Because of Father’s Day, a number of outlets have chosen to dust off a standing human interest story that is, at least, a somewhat interesting and quasi-positive feature: the growing number of stay-at-home fathers.

The trend is a good one: although households with stay-at-home fathers are still a tiny minority (about 4% as well as I can estimate) of all households, they are on the rise (the 2000 Census showed an increase of 70% over the 1990 Census). Now, Right-wing polemics to one side, there is absolutely nothing wrong with households in which both parents share childrearing duties and also work outside of the house. But—as feminists have pointed out many, many times–homemaking and childrearing are important work in society, and they are only regarded as not real work—or simply not mentioned at all in discussions of labor and the economy—because they are jobs that are gender-coded female. The result of more women entering workplaces outside of homemaking and childrearing has been a number of significant shake-ups in the cultural and material underpinnings of patriarchy. One can hope that the result of more men entering into homemaking and childrearing will be the same.

Of course, worry-wort that I am, I have plenty of cavils and downsides to worry about. In particular, although an encouragingly large amount of the coverage has been purged of this disease, the old Backlash refrains still come around: CNN, for example, reported on the increasing number of men helping with childcare, etc.—as if spending all day at home cooking, cleaning, taking care of the kids, etc., were some gift that men were chivalrously pitching in to help out the little woman, rather than necessary work that, in this particular household, a man is doing a disproportionate share of in return for financial support from his wife.

Another worry: every single family portrayed in these stories, as far as I can tell (including the San Fransisco Chronicle, Cherry Hill Courier Post, the CNN television report, etc.) has been a family where one or both parents have spent their time in white-collar, upper-middle class professional jobs. Nearly all of them have been white-skinned. Needless to say, all of them have been heterosexual married couples. Just a reminder of how constrained the debate is: all of the debating, measuring, studying, hectoring, and congratulating in the world is completely irrelevant to the many, many, households that simply can’t afford for either parent to stay at home or which are headed by single mothers or which are headed by gay, lesbian, or transgendered couples.

That’s to be expected, I suppose. But if it is important to open up our social norms to include stay-at-home fathers and make them visible, it is certainly just as important—and perhaps much more so—to open them up to include the huge variety of family structures that lie outside the whitebread, heterosexist norms that are standard requirements in the mass media human interest story. And we must continue to work for material improvements (like better access to childcare and healthcare, more flexible work arrangements, etc.) that can make happy, healthy families a reality—no matter what their demographic make-up happens to be.

2 replies to Stay-at-Home Father’s Day in the Mass Media Follow replies to this article

Martin Striz /# 10pm • 21 Jun 2003

“But–as feminists have pointed out many, many times–homemaking and childrearing are important work in society, and they are only regarded as “not real work”–or simply not mentioned at all in discussions of labor and the economy–because they are jobs that are gender-coded female.”

This is just another presumption derived from a stereotypically negative view of men which presupposes that they in turn hold a negative view of women. Quite ironic.

The reason why childrearing isn’t considered “real work” or included in economic discussions is the same reason that mowing the lawn, opening a jar of pickles, or countless other activities performed by men at home aren’t: there is no exchange of capital involved. It has nothing to do with the fact that it’s a predominantly female activity. Why, then, are “real” jobs traditionally dominated by women (nurse, airline stewardess) included in economic discussions?

A little balance, please.

Follow Up

· October 2003 ·

Charles Johnson /# 5pm • 14 Oct 2003

Martin Striz takes me for my assertion that ‘But–as feminists have pointed out many, many times–homemaking and childrearing are important work in society, and they are only regarded as “not real work”–or simply not mentioned at all in discussions of labor and the economy–because they are jobs that are gender-coded female.’ He’s right to call me to task–not because what I said is wrong, exactly, but rather because what I said deals with the issue far too quickly. So let me try to bring out what I am saying in some more depth by considering it in light of Martin’s response.

Martin points out that “mowing the lawn, opening a jar of pickles, or countless other activities performed by men at home aren’t” included in economic discussions, and asserts that the reason that both these activities and stay-at-home parenting aren’t included in economic discussions is that “there is no exchange of capital involved.” Martin’s certainly right that this is the case: stay-at-home parenting doesn’t (typically, at least) involve the formal transfer of wages, so it doesn’t show up on the radar of economic policy or conventional economic indicators. So also for common household chores traditionally coded for men. But here I fear that Martin’s analysis is a bit too superficial. As feminists have long pointed out, the “opening pickle jars” reply misses very important differences. The chores that men traditionally do – mowing the lawn, moving furniture, opening jars, a bit of light carpentry – are occasional tasks which often culminate in the achievement of a clear goal. The chores that women traditionally do, on the other hand – cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry and the dishes, and childcare – are constant, time-consuming, repetitive, grinding chores. To put a finer point on it, traditionally masculine chores aren’t the sort of thing that can take 40, 50, 60 hours of work each and every week; traditionally feminine chores are. It’s obvious, economically, why opening a pickle jar or moving the furniture is usually not a matter of paid labor; it’s not nearly so obvious, economically, why the work done by “housewives” is not. My point here is that the proximate cause of leaving the work of “housewives” out of economic discussions (consider the farcical notion of a “working mother” — as if stay-at-home mothers did not work) is that there’s no exchange of wages for labor. But why isn’t there any exchange of wages for what is a sometimes rather unpleasant full-time job? That has everything to do with the fact that it’s a predominantly female activitiy–the work is traditionally done by women, and thus historically pushed into the “private” sphere, rather than as part of the “public” sphere in which we think of economic transactions as taking place.

(For a classic exposition of most of these points, see Pat Mainardi’s “The Politics of Housework” [1968], now anthologized in DEAR SISTERS: DISPATCHES FROM THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT)

Before I go, I’d also like to add a quick reply to Martin’s comment that “This is just another presumption derived from a stereotypically negative view of men which presupposes that they in turn hold a negative view of women.” But my point here was not to attribute a negative view of women to (most) men. It was to say that the mainstream talk about economics in our society–discussions in which men predominate, though women also participate–simply ignores a vast amount of VERY IMPORTANT labor that is mostly done by women, because the standpoint of those discussions is influenced by patriarchal social arrangements. That may help justify certain negative attitudes that certain men have towards women (the Right-wing fantasy of loafing “welfare queens” comes to mind), but the phenomenon I’m commenting on here isn’t a matter of thinking about women negatively. It’s more a matter of not thinking about women at all.

Follow Up

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