Hat tip to Hadley.
The Faily Heil, a newspaper best known for its 1930s support of British fascist Oswald Mosley and its unceasing efforts to classify everything as either a cause of or cure of cancer, has offered us all an article about househusbands. Is there lulz? Of COURSE there is lulz.
First of all, the Daily Mail keeps referring to the househusband in question as being a good “mother.” Daily Mail, I hate to break it to you, but the word for a man who takes care of children? IS FATHER. You do not magically start identifying as a lady the day you change your first diaper. If so, transition for trans women would be way easier.
Also, you say the following sentence:
Like Richard and James, he feels much of his masculinity and power in the relationship was lost when he gave up his job to become a househusband.
And back it up with the following quote:
“But once I gave up my career, I lost prestige both in society and in the eyes of my wife. It was as if I had no value.”
I don’t think it’s him that thinks he’s less masculine, dude.
Hey, guess what? Large numbers of people look down upon househusbands! They think they’re less masculine for taking care of the kids instead of going out to hunt with a spear the wild, elusive paycheck! Even people who think that they’re above all that kyriarchal shit may still fall victim to the kyriarchal shit, because everyone gets bits of kyriarchal shit inside their heads. (Ask me about my internalized ableism sometime.)
I get the feeling the Daily Mail’s solution is “men shouldn’t be househusbands,” when the actual solution is to get people to start valuing househusbands more.
Part of that, of course, is valuing work that’s done inside the home equally to work that’s done outside the home. Being a stay-at-home parent is work. Taking care of children is work; cleaning is work; cooking is work. Oftentimes it is hard, thankless work. But a lot of people have a hard time conceptualizing that something is work if you don’t get a paycheck for it.
And of course this intersects with a lot of crappy gender norms. Women are expected to do this work, so even if it isn’t exactly Real Work, it’s at least the work that women are supposed to do. They get little credit for their labor (and often, although less and less so, end up working a second shift), but at least they aren’t shamed for it. Men, of course, according to the Success Myth, are supposed to be rich and powerful and generally awesome. If they choose to give it all up and take a job that quite often involves poo and small screaming snotty things, and they’re not getting paid for it… Well. They’re just failing at being men, clearly.
I slightly dislike the phrase “paragons of sensitive modern manhood.” The point is not to replace the gender system with a different gender system where men are socially pressured to stay home and women go to work. The point is to create a system in which men can stay home if they like and that makes sense for their lifestyles, or go to work if they like that that makes sense for their lifestyles, and no one gives them shit for it one way or the other. Guess what? People are DIFFERENT. Their preferred lifestyles are DIFFERENT. You cannot decide what lifestyles people like based on their gender!
I also wonder how many of the divorces are basically standard stay-at-home-parent/midlife crisis divorces, and the Daily Mail is just putting a gender lens on it because things that do not fit the norm disturb and frighten it and it wishes to make them go away.
In response to the separate spheres discussion: Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most people lived in family farms or home based businesses. The family was the basic unit of production and everyone in the family contributed to their income. I’m getting this from the book “Marriage, A History” in case you wondered. http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-History-How-Love-Conquered/dp/014303667X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1335107581&sr=8-2 So, the breadwinner/homemaker model is definitely not the only or the best way of arranging things. You hear conservatives going on and on about families and family values. What they mean by that is a return to the system where the man is in charge and the… Read more »
Thanks Doug S! @Figleaf: Not even apes have instinctive parental skills, apparently. Orphan apes have no clue what to do with a baby if they become parents themselves. This have been a problem in zoos, where the first apes were usually babies taken to the zoo after hunters had killed all the grown-ups in their pack (do you say “pack” about apes?). When these babies grew up and had babies of their own, they’d be clueless, so eventually the zoo-keepers would end up caring for the ape babies. Once these babies grew up and became parents, it was the same… Read more »
Also: Men Can’t Keep House.
Did someone say TV Tropes?
I think you’re looking for BumblingDad and Parenting the Husband.
A) It’s true: some women feel uncomfortable when men “encroach” on their “turf.” What’s usually unsaid, of course, is that the majority of women who squirm are… not feminists. At least in my nearly 17 years as a stay-at-home dad. Most feminists, even very low-key, non-radical feminists are pretty supportive. B) It’s true: some women feel as uncomfortable when men encroach on their turf in the “domestic” sphere as men once felt when women encroached in the “breadwinner” sphere. C) The solution is not to preserve the two-sphere model of gender but to get the fuck over it. D) As… Read more »
@reificator (April 20, 2012 at 1:43 pm)
I think there’s a strong element of careerism in this as well, and not just contempt for a “subordinate” position. I feel that for middle to upper-middle class professionals there is social pressure to prioritise one’s career over anything other than perhaps immediate family, and a large chunk of modern feminism has inadvertently bought into careerist ideology by measuring female advancement through workplace achievement (among other things). Ironically this can be at odds with other progressive causes. Nancy Fraser has done some interesting work in this area.
@daelyte: Famous Swedish feminist Nina Björk wrote, a couple of years ago, an article where she claimed that we work too much and spend too little time with family as a general rule. Then the Christian Democrats (conservatives) tried to claim her as one of theirs, thinkin she finally switched from left-wing to conservative… But the point she was trying to make was that BOTH men and women, in an ideal world, would work less on average and spend more time with their families. Not that we should go back to living like we did in the fifties, which is… Read more »
@reificator: “The 1870 Census found that women were 15% of the work force in the United States.” Which would mean most women were not in the work force at that time. From 1890-1930, women in the workforce were typically young and unmarried. “By that time, married women could work for their own wages and sign labor contracts, so it’s not surprising that they were an increasing part of the workforce, especially among working-class families.” As women increased their participation in the workforce, were men able to cut back their work hours? It seems not. “As L noted, homesteading families usually… Read more »
@daelyte:
The 1870 Census found that women were 15% of the work force in the United States. By that time, married women could work for their own wages and sign labor contracts, so it’s not surprising that they were an increasing part of the workforce, especially among working-class families. As L noted, homesteading families usually required the labor of the entire family to establish themselves and thrive.
@Juniper:
It’s tricky for doctors, especially women, to start families, since a long education, including residency, gets in the way. Best of luck to you and your SO.
A seemingly easy fix for this would be to, as others have said, to simply value all the work that must be done AND stop basing a person’s value on WHAT they do. debaser: …women make fun of my (supposed lack of) parenting ability. Agreed. For some off reason some women simply don’t like the idea of men doing “their” work. A few years ago I used to work with a guy that was married who when the kids got sick or had a function he would more often be the one to take off to go (and I was… Read more »
@L: “You really don’t see that happening with subsistence farmers or nomadic peoples.” “Women also perform all domestic tasks including food preparation and collecting firewood and water. They are responsible for child rearing and usually for food provision. Nomadic women also dismantle and rebuild their houses when the herd is moved to new pastures. Weaving mats and cloth for domestic use in clothing, furnishing and making tents is often the duty of women, who may exchange some of their woven goods for cash.” Source: http://www.fao.org/ag/AGP/AGPC/doc/litnw2st.htm “In all of the countries, women are almost exclusively responsible for domestic tasks, including food… Read more »
@daelyte: Depends on how you define “homemaker”– as far as I can tell, for the vast majority of human history, for the vast majority of rural dwellers, EVERYONE in the family worked. So, more homesteading rather than homemaking I guess. But I think they’re mostly right– one spouse working while the other stays home and basically cooks and cleans is a pretty recent invention. You really don’t see that happening with subsistence farmers or nomadic peoples.
@reification:
“The breadwinner-homemaker family model is an artifact of a brief moment in Western history where a sole wage-earner could support an entire household. Of course, those days are gone, and the service industry will probably follow manufacturing some time soon.”
Citation needed.
IMO it’s the other way around. The only brief moments when both parents had to work were during in the early part of the 20th century, and now, due to economic oppression. Prior to that the breadwinner-homemaker family model was around for millenia, in cases where either parent worked outside the homestead at all.
Ugh. Argh! Ugh.
“I would never want my husband to be a stay-at-home dad, because then I would think he was whipped”—fellow student who’s mostly a nice person. Furthermore, fellow student who’s going to spend most of her reproductive years in residency, and who’s going to need to come up with some kind of mom-doesn’t-stay-at-home childcare solution if she has children.
“Yeah, I would feel like he was weak”—other fellow student, who is an intermittently nice person.
It takes a truly heroic man to choose the “daddy track”, whether it’s full-time stay-at-home, work-from-home, reduced hours, or some other option.
It’s not just the social conservatives who are down on stay-at-home dads, though. Progressives and feminists tend to view anyone who would give up a career to raise children and tend the home as being slightly off in the head. There’s an idealization of relationships as being formed among equals, and for one partner to be placed in a ‘subordinate’ position, even by choice, prompts some cognitive dissonance. So people will make fun of Ann Romney for being a home-maker and slag people like Richard Dean for being financially reliant on someone else. It’s not just a gender role thing.… Read more »
Debaser: Yes. Coincidence. This was the next one on my Post List; I have posts planned several weeks in advance, barring major news stories.
My dad stayed at home with us for the majority of my childhood. (He did work retail jobs every so often after my grandmother came to live with us and could do the adult in the house thing, but it didn’t last very long. And he was a substitute teacher for a bit until my youngest sister was born and he was needed full time again.) My mom is a scary, important lawyer and he has some ongoing health issues that increasingly make an eight-hour day impossible. This never bothered me or any of my siblings, but I do remember… Read more »
My husband was a “househusband” for a while… actually, he was between jobs, and I had the opportunity to make up for the money he didn’t earn any longer by working lots of extra at my job. So I worked a lot of extra, and he took care of everything around the house for us, and had a hot meal ready for me when I finally got home at night. We did this for like half a year or so, then he got a job. I don’t remember anybody giving us any grief over it, but that might have been… Read more »
I’ve posted on this topic a lot…being a stay at home dad myself. So instead of just repeating everything that’s been said I’ll say that this is two times in a row that I came down hard on Ozy and the next day Ozy makes a good post about fathers. Coincidence?
But in addition to that, from my experiences, monkey is correct. Disdain from women IS about men encroaching on their turf. See, where men might make fun of me doing housework, women make fun of my (supposed lack of) parenting ability. The amount it which they sting is vast.
But a lot of people have a hard time conceptualizing that something is work if you don’t get a paycheck for it. I recently left a private forum full of very smart and talented creators and cartoonists because it wound up devolving into a paycheck cult. God forbid anyone does anything in this world because they find it fulfilling, or because some alternative sort of “payment” for their labors is better given the situation. They definitely had this bitter and paranoid breadwinner thing going on, even though some of them were stay-at-home dads.(They were also sexist and classist, but that’s… Read more »
Mark: it’s not really a disdain for feminine men that the women in the article are displaying; it’s a resentment towards husbands invading “their” turf. The Salon article suggests that women want men to “help” but only on terms defined by the women.
The Daily Mail published incredibly sexist, racist, homophobic, Islamaphobic etcetc stuff on a daily basis. I find it inexplicable how successful this newspaper is.
@ monkey: I think that actually may be more of an issue than one might think. It may be a way of keeping them at the top of some foodchain rather than none at all. I believe I have coomented on this before, but in the hierarchy of gender in our culture, straight men come first, then straight women, then bi women, gay men and then trans. Although based on mere observation, bi women may actually be a tad higher than even straight women in the eyes of the ruling class. This is why I believe that when men cross… Read more »
Well, John Lennon had a household of paid servants. Just sayin’.
Ages ago I read an article about how some women were at first open to their husbands having a role in raising children, but objected to men having too big a role:
http://www.salon.com/2000/06/12/gatekeeping/singleton/?mobile.html
This is why I admire John Lennon so much. He stayed at home, took care of the kids and the house, and he didn’t give a shit about what anyone thought. Of course he got a lot of flak and it bothered him, but he didn’t give in to the pressure. And Yoko going out there and dealing with the business that had to be dealt with – they were an amazing pair. Regardless of what I think of them otherwise, I admire them for doing whatever the hell they wanted to do, and not giving in to the pressure.… Read more »