Men and Fatherhood

My Chapter 3 summary of "Of Boys and Men"

I’m publishing a summary of the first 3 chapters of “Of Boys and Men” in advance of my book club on Interintellect. You can join us here.

Man and Fatherhood.

This was probably one of my favorite ideas in the whole book. I am not a father, but I feel that the issues he raises affect many who are. I am happy that I know men - and was raised by one - who have directly confronted the idea that child care is something only women should do. As we saw in the last chapter, this contributes to why women get paid less than men. Reshaping fatherhood is necessary for equality at all levels.

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Reeves’ main point in Chapter 3 is that the role of mothers has expanded to include both “being a provider” and caring for children, whereas our notions of fatherhood have remained frozen in an outdated model: you’re either the breadwinner or…nothing at all? He argues that this cultural and political lag has produced a genuine crisis.

For the longest time in history, women were economically dependent on men, which made marriage a survival issue, not a romantic one. The role of “provider” gave men a clear sense of purpose. Historically, you were a “mature man” when you generated enough surplus to address the needs of yourself and those directly connected with you. With women’s mass entry into the labor market, that dependency is gone. Marriage became a social choice, not an economic necessity, and, Reeves argues, this shift happened too fast for culture and policy to absorb it.

For a lot of men (both young and older), their self-conception hasn’t kept pace. The idea of being the provider remains deeply embedded, particularly among less-educated men, who, paradoxically, are the least able to fulfill it. Culturally speaking, there is still a cultural aversion, by both men and women, to wives earning more money than their husbands. Reeves argues that this cultural principle accounts for a 29% decline in marriage rates over the last 30 years.

Men derived meaning from providing for those around them. Unlike women, who have a tendency to draw a sense of purpose from a wider range of sources, Reeves argues (through research made by the Pew Research Center) that men have rooted meaning in work and the capacity to signal worth. If that foundation collapses, they have little to replace it with (which may explain a rise in the following of the new right-wing gurus).

The husband role and father role were indistinguishable; after all, they were the same: you provided for one and the other. With the dissolution of this dynamic, a gap emerged: fatherhood now lacks the “institutional scaffolding” that once connected men to their children. Reeves says that fathers become more peripheral to family life, sometimes not even by choice, but because there’s no longer a structure that anchors them to it.

With no redefined role to step into, men sometimes step out entirely. The crisis in fatherhood and a broader masculinity crisis are linked.

The answer is not to reverse women’s gains, of course, but to reinvent fatherhood on entirely new terms: grounded in a direct relationship with children, not one mediated by a breadwinner role. If motherhood already expanded to encompass both caring and providing, fatherhood needs to make the same move. Caring needs to be, culturally speaking, an active part of what it means to be a father, not merely a supplement to it.

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Once again, we’re reading parts of the book and discussing it on April 20th on Interintellect. Join me here!