If men have increased their family time, it’s not because they were marching to the beat of a male drum and bugle corps. Indeed, many men resisted for decades. It’s been women, and especially those working mothers inspired by feminist ideals of workplace equality, who have been imploring, cajoling, insisting, yelling, and otherwise pleading with them to do their share. The dual-career, dual-caregiver family form —the family form that is becoming the norm in American society—is, let’s be clear, a feminist invention. So it’s a bit ironic, and a lot disingenuous, for these same men who have stepped up and become more active fathers to now declare they are doing so in opposition to feminism. Theirs is the other half of gender equality in the public sphere, and this massive cultural transformation, this blending of the public and the private, is partly the result of a relentless campaign by feminist women.
Instead of thanking women—and especially those feminist-inspired working mothers—for enabling and insisting that we spend more time in our families, the fathers’ rights movement spends a lot of time attacking those same feminist women. They take their grief and confusion at the dissolution of their families and transform it into rage at their ex-wives, their ex-wives’ lawyers, family-court judges—and, of course, the feminist women who seem to inspire them all.
They are often right to be angry at the system, which can hurt them, but their rage at women feels misplaced. Instead of pretending that feminists are the enemy, these involved and engaged fathers should be allying themselves with feminist women in supporting egalitarian parenting after divorce as during the marriage and an equal and equitable split of family assets. We should assume that both ex-husband and ex-wife are fully capable of supporting themselves in the workplace, so that alimony could be used only to supplement the ex-wives’ income to compensate for the gender wage gap. We should also assume that both parents have been equally invested and equally responsible for their children’s welfare and, with some demonstrable evidence that such is the case, all other things being equal, that both parents should share custody, which is, after all, not about possessing property, but raising human beings.
Let me go a step further. What are the forces that have prevented men from becoming the fathers that they say they want to be? They are a combination of an unyielding workplace and an ideology of masculinity that promotes robotic stoicism over nurturing, competition over patience, aggression over justice. That is, it’s institutional inflexibility, giving guys the message that the “unencumbered worker” is really the best sort of worker (here they would find common cause with women who are also stymied by this). The set of attitudes and traits that is most closely associated with masculinity—robotic stoicism, competition, aggression—are those that contradict most with the qualities needed to be a good parent: patience, nurturing, emotional resilience. In that sense, men who seek to be really involved fathers have to choose between fatherhood and masculinity—at least in the traditional sense of masculinity. It’s a false choice, of course, and the groups that have launched the most persuasive critique of traditional notions of masculinity have been black men, gay men, and feminist women.
Fathers’ rights arguments actually do little to advance the cause of fathers; indeed, they detract from the movement’s credibility—and lead the movement of involved and injured dads right into the waiting arms of the men’s rights movement—rather than into a more credible alliance with those men of color who are promoting fathers’ responsibility; gay men, who seek to become and are proving to be quite adept at fatherhood themselves; and feminist women.