I was recently asked by the New York Times to participate in a debate about women and work in Europe, especially in Germany. In the end, the question that appeared  on their Opinion page is not the one I was asked to address (“How can we get men to do more at home?”), although I would have loved to address that more centrally. (Maybe next time!).

Nevertheless, I did address the larger question of gender equality and how men’s parental leave is a critical part of this issue.

Below is the first part of my response; for the full piece, click here.

The quest for greater gender equality in paid work and care work requires multiple strategies that involve both women and men. The International Herald Tribune article about women in the German work force dealt mainly with the issue of women and work. Yet, the challenges that men face, both as workers and as caregivers, must also be addressed.

One way of addressing this is to look to countries like Sweden, Norway and Canada for lessons on how parental leave policies have been used to encourage changing gender relations around paid work and care work. These are policies that recognize and build on the constant interplay between gender equality and gender differences.

In Sweden and Norway, there has been a significant shift away from the “male breadwinner/ female caregiver model” of work and family. This occurred partly through respecting a long-standing practice of long maternity leaves for women combined with affordable, accessible and high-quality child care; to this, they added parental leave policies designed to encourage men to be involved in early child care. One of the rationales for the latter was that getting fathers into the home would help to disrupt a deeply rooted pattern and social norm of women as primary care-giving experts and men as main breadwinners.

Click here to read more and to join in the debate!

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Twenty-one years ago, my life was very focused on equally shared parenting.

I was a new doctoral student interviewing British couples who were trying to share housework and childcare (although such couples were notoriously difficult to find back then). And I was a new mother sharing parenting and housework with my husband. While we did not know it at the time, we were in fact practicing what Marc and Amy Vachon describe in their book as “Equally Shared Parenting” (ESP):

“Equally shared parenting is the purposeful practice of two parents sharing equally in the four domains of childrearing, breadwinning, housework and time for self.”

We were both students living in a small student apartment at Cambridge University. With our families back in Canada, we had no family support in England; with my scholarship as our only income, we had little money for extra childcare help. We had no car, no TV, no Internet access. We just split our days between work and childcare, housework (not much), and leisure. While breastfeeding introduced some differences in our days, my husband took on other routine domestic tasks. When our daughter started half-time daycare at the age of two, we alternated the dropping off and picking up, and we had mommy days and daddy days.

That was a long time ago.

In the last twenty one years, I have continued to research and write about the lives of couples who challenge traditional gender norms in paid work and care work (e.g. stay-at-home dads, single fathers, breadwinning mothers, fathers who take parental leave, and gay fathers). And my husband and I have raised three daughters (now 21 and 17-year-old twins) and have gone from equal breadwinners to me being the primary breadwinner. I would describe our journey as shared parenting but not equally shared parenting.

To learn more about my thoughts on the book Equally Shared Parenting by Marc and Amy Vachon, click here to read my recent guest post at PhDinparenting

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The following is an excerpt from a guest post I wrote for PhDinParenting.com. Click here to read the full post.

I’ve been interviewing mothers and fathers on changing motherhood and fatherhood for twenty years. Some of their voices remain lodged in the back of my mind.

One voice that I keep hearing is that of a British mother named Monica. I met her, and her husband Joshua, in 1993 in a small village outside Cambridge when I was writing my doctoral dissertation on (heterosexual) couples attempting to ‘equally share’ housework and childcare.

Monica and Joshua were both managers in the British government. Since she had the upper level job with a demanding travel schedule, Joshua took on the daily running of the household. Monica called home every night. But she was upset when she was unsure about what her two daughters were doing on any particular night:

“I hate it when I don’t actually know what they’re doing. Like I rang home yesterday evening and I’d got the nights wrong and I was thinking Emma would be going to guides and she wasn’t. It was choir. And I hate that feeling. Because I’m their mother! And I ought to know.”

Across two decades, four countries, and three generations, most of my scholarly work has focused on couples who challenge traditional gender norms. Most of these stories are from two-parent families where women are primary breadwinners while men are stay-at-home dads or (shared) primary caregivers.

My long-term research has, in turn, been inspired by the late feminist philosopher Sara Ruddick and her provocative statement that “men could mother.” I explored that statement in my book Do Men Mother?

I am still exploring this issue in my forthcoming book on breadwinning mothers (and caregiving fathers). I’ve also thought about this constantly over the past twenty years as a breadwinning mother (of three) with a fully involved husband.

Am I still the mother? Or am I part of an interchangeable parenting pair? Can parenting be gender-neutral? Should that be the goal of feminist research on families?

What I have heard from hundreds of couples across time is that even in households where traditional gender roles are challenged or reversed, there is a mixed set of answers.

To find out the answers, click here to visit PhDinParenting.com to read the full post.

Want another take on this topic? Read Tara Gentile’s response to my post: I’m Still the Mom: Birthing a Child & a Business

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On March 31, 2011, I delivered the 42nd Annual Sorokin lecture at the University of Saskatchewan.

Pitrim Sorokin (1889-1968) was a Russian émigré who became a world-renowned sociologist and the founder of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. He published over 30 books and attracted the attention of Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer, Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy as well as an eclectic mix of followers and critics, including political activists, military and peace proponents, and even ‘new age’ communities. According to the archive of his work that is lodged at the University of Saskatchewan, he is considered one of the leading thinkers of the 20th century.

It was an honor for me to share a poster that included both our names.

As I was speaking about breadwinning mothers and caregiving dads in my Sorokin lecture, I was interested to read in his memoir that after the death of his mother when he was three years old, Pitrim Sorokin and his two brothers were raised by his father. As he wrote in his memoir, this arrangement led to a life that alternated between happiness and despair.

“Of my father I had and still have two different images. In his sober stretch (lasting for weeks and even months) he was a wonderful man, loving and helping his sons in any way he could… Unfortunately the stretches of soberness alternated with those of drunkenness… In his drunken state he was a pitiful figure; he could not care for us nor help us; he was depressed, irritable, and, once in a while, somewhat violent in his treatment of us”.

His story moved me. Without saying it explicitly, Sorokin pointed to the challenges faced by his father, a single dad raising three boys at the beginning of the 19th century in Russia.

That story also brought me back to another story about a single father raising three; it was the story that initiated my research on primary caregiving fathers. I wrote about this in my book Do Men Mother and in a journal article in Qualitative Sociology.

This is a shortened version of that story. It is actually the long answer to the question: What instigated my interest in fathering?

*****************

When I began a study of primary caregiving fathers in 2000, the motivation for undertaking this research seemed clear to me. My interest was explicit and often articulated since many of the fathers that I interviewed asked me how it was that I—as a woman, as a mother—came to be interested in studying men’s lives.

I told a simple story. The initial impulse came out of my own first experiences of parenting and my observations of my husband as he took on the primary care of our eldest daughter at varied points in her early years. His recounting of the excruciatingly painful details of sitting sidelined in a ‘moms and tots’ group in Cambridge, England over several cold winter months awakened my curiosity in the lives of fathers who challenge conventional gender norms.

As my research progressed, however, I became increasingly aware of, what Avery Gordon calls, autobiographical ‘ghosts’ in my research.

Throughout the process of interviewing over 100 fathers and especially while deep into the process of analyzing those narratives, I entered the stage of physical and emotional exhaustion that most qualitative researchers come to know well.

It was here that the words of fathers filled my waking and sleeping hours and rolled through my conscious and unconscious mind. Their faces and their fathering stories mixed inextricably with the ghosts of fathers I had known throughout my life, particularly in the 17 years when I was growing up in a small town on the north shore of New Brunswick.

After months of analyzing interview transcripts, I awoke one night from a dream and suddenly remembered a long-forgotten memory.

I remembered my childhood home, a large wooden house on the Baie de Chaleur, a small bay that empties into the Atlantic Ocean. It was also the house in which both my grandfather and father grew up.

It sat on Main Street in the working-class, Catholic side of town, just down the street from the pulp and paper mill where my father worked long shifts as a laborer for most of his working life.

And then there was the house across the street.

As a child, I would often look out from the verandah of my house, and constantly observe what my mother called ‘the comings and goings’ of that other house. It was an up and down duplex and it belonged to Ozzie Aubie, a lobster fisherman*.

In the upstairs apartment of that duplex was a family of six: a single mother Penny Melanson, and her five daughters. The story was that her husband had just packed up and left one day, leaving Penny to scrape together a living for her daughters. The people in the town talked. More specifically, my grandmother, my mother, and my aunts talked. Penny was pitied for not having a man to provide a family wage.

Yet, as they sat on our front verandah drinking coffee, smoking Du Maurier cigarettes, and looking across the street to Penny’s house, this is what I remember them saying: “Penny was a good mother. Her children were lacking nothing”.

Meanwhile, in the downstairs apartment of this duplex was a family of four—Ozzie Aubie and his three sons, Billy, Johnny, and Harry. Other than the infamous story of Pierre Trudeau taking on custody of his three sons, we had never seen a family living in a house without a mother.

Again, my grandmother, my mother, and my aunts talked. “Where was their mother? How could she leave? Those poor Aubie boys. How would they ever turn out without a mother to raise them?”

Indeed, everything that went wrong with Billy, who was in my grade at school, was blamed on the stain of being a mother-less boy. In Grade Two when he called me names, in Grade Three when he chased me home from school lifting up my skirt, in Grade Four when he threw my newly knitted winter hat so high into our maple tree that it could never be recovered—each of these incidents was met with the same lamenting sigh and response from my mother and my aunts. “Well, what do you expect? He has no mother.”

I grew up with the mystery of Billy’s missing mother and the wonder of how it was that the town embraced Penny Melanson’s fatherless family living upstairs. And yet, they harshly judged the motherless family of Ozzie Aubie that lived downstairs.

From my nighttime dream of Ozzie Aubie and his three sons, I realized that these autobiographical ‘ghosts’ had partly led me to deep personal and academic curiosity in the lives of fathers who are primary caregivers.

And even more specifically, this story brought me into a long research journey focused partly on the relationship between a primary caregiving father and the community within which he lives, works, cares, and is judged.

*All names and identifying details of the two families in the “house across the street” have been changed.

*Image: “What is Guiding Me” courtesy of Christine Martell www.christinemartell.com

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I belong to one of the couple types that Hanna Rosin described in her recent piece on breadwinner wives in Slate magazine—the one where the “woman is a born workaholic and the man lives a slower pace”. Although it is more complex than those labels, I have nevertheless lived a version of that story for about twenty years.

I’m a professor, researcher and author; my husband is a naturopathic doctor / acupuncturist whose work schedule goes up and down depending on the economy. We have raised three children together (one is now 20, and the twins are 16 years old).

I have also spent twenty years researching and writing about the changing stories of breadwinning mothers and primary caregiving fathers.

Read the full story here.

*Image: “Mom and Dad (Flying a Kite)” courtesy of one of my daughters (at age 5)

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Did you expect to be the primary breadwinner?

Karen didn’t.

She fell into it by accident. It’s not the life she expected. And even through struggles, she’s learning to make the most of it.

I met Karen in the fall of 2010 when we were both part of a national news story on breadwinning wives, written by Shannon Proudfoot.
Karen describes herself as an “Accidental Alpha”. She writes:

I never wanted to be either Ward or June Cleaver – I always had a different, more equal, more progressive vision of “married with kids.” But lately I’m feeling more like Ward – like I’m perilously close to being that distant from my kids.”

Read her story here.

Karen’s story typifies one of the six central ‘narratives’ I have discovered in my research on breadwinning mothers. It’s well summed up in one line that many women have said to me – with either sadness, desperation, worry, or acceptance:

“I never expected to be here”.

Interestingly, those are the exact same words that I have heard countless times from stay-at-home dads across one full decade.

“I never expected to be here”.

What about you? Did you expect to be here? What have you (and your partner) done to make what was unexpected into something that works (or not)?

Click the comments button below to read what others have said and share your own answer!

*Image: “Holding Aligned Choices” courtesy of Christine Martell www.christinemartell.com

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Are men being kicked out of playgrounds? Are dads facing playground or playgroup discrimination? These questions, and some answers, were floating on the blogosphere and twitterverse over the last few weeks.

Read the full post here at Girl With Pen.

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