Kitabı oku: «Of Boys and Men», sayfa 3

In some ways, it makes most sense to look at women at the top of the ladder, since they have the widest choices and the greatest economic power. Take women who leave Harvard with a professional or postgraduate degree, arguably members of the most elite educational group in the world. Fifteen years after graduating, only half of these women are working full time. What happened? “After facing down so many obstacles, after gaining countless freedoms, the obstruction that had always been there became crystal clear,” writes Claudia Goldin, who has studied this group in detail.¹²⁵ “The barrier is the time bind. Children require time; careers require time.” or take University of Chicago MBAs. Straight out of the business school, women earned about 12% less than their male classmates, a gap largely explained by the kind of jobs chosen. Thirteen years later, the difference had widened dramatically, to about 38%.¹²⁶ But one subgroup of the female MBAs had not fallen further behind. By now you don’t need me to tell you which: the ones without children.

For most women, having a child is the economic equivalent of being hit by a meteorite. For most men, it barely makes a dent. The question arises as to whether these different roles are freely chosen or not. I will dig into this question more later. For now, I will say that the mothers of young children seem to want more time at home. In the Chicago MBA study just cited, the women most likely to reduce their working hours were those with the highest-earning husbands. But even if there is a real preference being expressed here, two points need to be added. First, the labor market price paid for this choice doesn’t need to be as high as it is. Second, once children are older, there is a good case for fathers doing more on the home front.

THE $2 TRILLION WOMAN

We have women to thank, and especially mothers to thank, for fueling economic growth for at least a generation. In 2019, women accounted for 47% of all workers.¹²⁷ The U.S. economy is $2 trillion larger than it would have been had women’s economic participation remained at 1970s levels, according to a 2015 report from the Council of Economic Advisers. For families on modest or low incomes, the rise of women’s work and wages has also blunted some of the pain of men’s economic decline. As the Council concluded, “Essentially all of the income gains that middle-class American families have experienced since 1970 are due to the rise in women’s earnings.”¹²⁸

The biggest change in employment has been among married women with children. In 1970, most mothers were not in paid work—today, almost three out of four are.¹²⁹ Even among the mothers of preschoolers, paid work is now the norm rather than the exception. Women account for around half the managerial positions in the U.S. economy.¹³⁰ Many previously male-dominated professions, including medicine and financial management, are rapidly tilting female, especially among younger professionals. The proportion of women lawyers has increased tenfold, from 4% in 1980 to 43% in 2020.¹³¹ The shift has taken place not just in economic activities but in economic aspirations and expectations. In 1968, only 33% of young women in their teens and early 20s said they expected to be in paid work at the age of 35. By 1980, the share was 80%.¹³² (The question has now been dropped from the survey.) The idea that women will pursue professional and economic goals has gone from novelty to commonplace. When was the last time you heard the term career woman?

“The 200,000 year period in which men have been top dog is truly coming to an end,” wrote Hanna Rosin in The End of Men. “The global economy is becoming a place where women are more successful than men.”¹³³ Wait, what? Women becoming more successful than men? No wonder Rosin got so much heat when her book was published. “Feminists don’t like the argument,” Rosin observed later, “because they say it makes it seem as though women have totally won and there isn’t anything more to worry about.”¹³⁴ This is not Rosin’s view, however—and it is not mine either. There is plenty to worry about in terms of women’s opportunities, including in the higher reaches of the economy. Just one in five C-suite company directors is a woman, and just forty-one of the Fortune 500 firms have a female CEO.¹³⁵ That is certainly better than the number in 1995, which was zero. But it is still shockingly low. The share of venture capital money going to female founders is 3%.¹³⁶ So yes, there is more work to do for women, especially at the apex of the economy. But lower down the economic ladder, it is often the men who are struggling.

Over the last few decades, girls and women have shot past men in school and on college campuses. On the economic front, many men—though not the elite ones—have also lost ground, as women have surged ahead. This has had important consequences for broader culture, especially in terms of family life. The economic rise of women has dramatically altered the terms of trade between the sexes. Many men are struggling to adjust.

CHAPTER 3
DISLOCATED DADS

Fathers Have Lost Their Traditional Role in the Family

In June 1955, Adlai Stevenson, former Illinois governor and two-time presidential candidate, addressed the all-female graduating class at Smith College. on a warm Massachusetts afternoon, he told them that as future wives, they had an important role to play in ensuring that their husband was “truly purposeful, to keep him whole.”¹³⁷ At the time, this seemed an innocuous enough statement, even from the leading progressive of the day. (Stevenson was a favorite of Eleanor Roosevelt, among others.) Sixteen years later, the commencement speech was given by a woman who had been a Smith junior when Stevenson spoke. It was markedly different, labeling God as a “she,” highlighting the political significance of the female orgasm, and most importantly, describing marriage as an institution designed for “the subjugation of women.”¹³⁸ Her name was Gloria Steinem.

For Steinem, as for most feminists of her generation, marriage was a relationship of crippling dependency. Her message to the young women on the lawn at Smith was to make their own way in the world and to be able to pay their own bills. “Dependence represents a lack of alternatives,” wrote Margaret Mead, a few years after Steinem’s speech. “A woman equipped to earn her own living need never feel trapped. . . . Independence begins with economic independence.”¹³⁹

The women’s movement is about liberation. (That is why it was called women’s lib.) Above all, this meant economic independence from men. This goal has been largely accomplished in advanced economies, turning marriage into a social choice rather than an economic necessity. Until the 1970s, the typical female college graduate had become a wife within a year of graduation.¹⁴⁰ Among today’s Smith graduates, only about half are married by their mid-30s.¹⁴¹ A husband may be nice, but he is no longer necessary. Steinem was right about the importance of breaking the economic chains. But—and this is obviously much harder to say—Stevenson was right too. A man who knows he must provide for a wife and children has a clear sense of how to be “purposeful” and “whole.”

In this chapter, I argue that the role of mothers has been expanded to include breadwinning as well as caring, but the role of fathers has not been expanded to include caring as well as breadwinning. Specifically I argue the following: (1) the male role has long been culturally defined as that of a provider, and based on the economic dependence of mothers on men; (2) this traditional role has been dismantled by the securing of economic independence by women; (3) culture and policy are stuck on an obsolete model of fatherhood, lagging way behind economic reality; and (4) this is resulting in a “dad deficit,” with men increasingly unable to fulfill the traditional breadwinner role but yet to step into a new one.

The economic reliance of women on men held women down, but it also propped men up. Now the props have gone, and many men are falling.

DADS AS PROVIDERS

Concluding a sweeping survey of a number of cultures from the Mediterranean basin to Tahiti to South Asia, published in Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity, David Gilmore writes, “To be a man in most of the societies we have looked at, one must impregnate women, protect dependents from danger, and provision kith and kin. . . . We might call this quasi-global personage something like ‘Man-the-Impregnator-Protector-Provider.’”¹⁴² Gilmore argues that this Ubiquitous Male should be seen as nurturing, just in a different way than the typical female. Men are expected to put others before themselves in a variety of ways, including by giving up resources to the group, as well as risking injury or even death in its defense. one of the central ideas here is that of a surplus. Mature men generate more resources than they need for their own survival, and these are shared with the clan, tribe, or family. “The idea of the provider is a major element in the construction of a masculine identity,” writes sociologist David Morgan. “It is a moral as well as an economic category.”¹⁴³

For at least the last few thousand years, men could essentially describe their role in four words: “providing for my family.” For much of this period, the family was an extended one. But in recent centuries, especially in the West, it has evolved into a more narrowly defined social institution, often labeled the nuclear family: father, mother, and children. As a result, the roles of father and husband became so tightly bound together as to be virtually indistinguishable. A good husband and father was one who provided for his family, which consisted of himself, his wife or partner, and their children. This provider role successfully connected men to familial and social life, as the British sociologist Geoff Dench describes in Transforming Men: Changing Patterns of Dependency and Dominance in Gender Relations: “What it does is formally to incorporate men into the interpersonal support structures, the chains of dependency, which lie at the core of any human society.”¹⁴⁴

Dench is right as a matter of history. But the question going forward is how to maintain “chains of dependency” between fathers and children, in a world where the ones between men and women have been successfully broken. The traditional family model provided a “‘package deal’ in which a father’s relationship with his child is contingent on his relationship with the mother,” write Laura Tach and coauthors.¹⁴⁵ The traditional family was an effective social institution because it made both men and women necessary. But it also rested on a sharp division of labor. While mothers had a direct, primary caring relationship with their children, fathers had an indirect, secondary, providing one. I am not suggesting that this was all there was to it, of course. My own father fulfilled the traditional provider role, but he was much more besides—swimming coach, driving instructor, moving man, chauffeur, academic adviser, you name it. But his bedrock duty was that of all the fathers of his generation: breadwinner.

The traditional contract between caring mothers and providing fathers was expressed through marriage. A breadwinner–carer marriage is part of what Gilmore described as a “special moral system . . . required to ensure a voluntary acceptance of appropriate behavior in men.”¹⁴⁶ This is one reason conservatives tend to worry most about declining marriage rates. For them, the dependency relationship between husbands and wives is precisely what makes marriage work, including as a mechanism for harnessing male energy to positive social ends. Feminists by contrast see marriage as an oppressive institution, “the citadel of the enemy,” according to John Stuart Mill and a mechanism for “locking women up” in Gloria Steinem’s assessment.¹⁴⁷ This critique is sustained by many contemporary feminist writers.¹⁴⁸

The point on which both sides agree is that marriage bound women to men, but also men to women, and thereby to children. Where they differ is on whether this was a good thing. Conservatives are right that as a social institution, marriage “worked” in the past. Feminists are right that it did so by curtailing women’s autonomy. The question is what we do now and, especially, what we do with the men. Certainly, the answer is not to try to roll back the gains of the women’s movement, as Dench and other conservatives suggest. A reinvention of fatherhood based on a more direct relationship to children is the answer, and I set out some ideas on this in chapter 12.

It is important to note, however, that life has not always been rosy for men in traditional families. There is a certain desolation to a life that is designed for you. The postwar angst of the “Organization Man” in his gray flannel suit, shuttling between a suburb and an office five days a week, hints at this potential hollowness. Witness the quiet desperation of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, who has to “suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation” and who can only fulfill his role as breadwinner, in the end, by taking his own life.¹⁴⁹ Men’s freedom has often been stifled by patriarchy too, with tightly prescribed roles and oppressive expectations.

BICYCLES IN A WORLD OF FISH

Irina Dunn’s statement that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” later popularized by Gloria Steinem, was a memorable rallying cry of the women’s movement, an evocative description of a world where women do not need men.¹⁵⁰ “Being able to support oneself allows one to choose a marriage out of love and not just economic dependence,” Steinem said in 2004.¹⁵¹

Women are now the main breadwinner in 41% of U.S. households.¹⁵² Some of those are single mothers, but by no means all; three in ten wives now out-earn their husbands, twice as many as in 1981.¹⁵³ Most mothers now work full time, and in almost half of families where both parents work full time, mothers earn as much or more than fathers.¹⁵⁴ Mothers have also received growing support from the welfare system, allowing even those with low or no earnings to be freer of the need for a breadwinning husband. As the British politician and scholar David Willetts writes in his book The Pinch, “A welfare system that was originally designed to compensate men for loss of earnings is slowly and messily redesigned to compensate women for the loss of men.”¹⁵⁵

A more positive way to make the same point is that governments increasingly see their role as supporting women raising children, in part so that they are not trapped in a dependent relationship with a man. At the same time, there has been a liberalization of divorce law, with the rise of “no fault” or “unilateral” divorces that allow either party to end a marriage on any grounds. These laws remain the subject of heated debate, but they are clearly here to stay.¹⁵⁶

Marriage and motherhood are no longer virtually synonymous. About 40% of births in the U.S. now take place outside marriage, up from just 11% in 1970.¹⁵⁷ A particularly striking trend is the decline in “shotgun” marriages. Half a century ago, pregnancies outside marriage were common, but the couple went to the registry office or church before the maternity ward. No longer. In fact, the decline in shotgun marriages is the biggest single cause of the rise in nonmarital births to first-time mothers since 1960, according to research from the Joint Economic Committee. The greatest change has occurred at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. In 1977, 26 percent of pregnancies among women with low levels of education resulted in a marriage before the birth. By 2007 the figure was just 2%.¹⁵⁸

Social norms about maternal employment have shifted so fast that the term working mother already sounds antiquated. According to the General Social Survey, three quarters (74%) of U.S. adults now agree that working mothers can establish as “warm and secure” a relationship with their children as a stay-at-home mother, compared to 48% in 1977.¹⁵⁹

From a feminist perspective, these are marvelous developments. But what do they mean for men? The old script, mostly centered on bread-winning, has been torn up. In an influential 1980 essay, “Why Men Resist,” William Goode observed that “the underlying shift is toward the decreasing marginal utility of males.”¹⁶⁰ True. But, ouch.

Many men are left feeling dislocated. Their fathers and grandfathers had a pretty clear path to follow: work, wife, kids. But what now? What is a bicycle for, in a world of fish? Half a century may seem like a long time to an individual, especially if they are young. But in terms of cultural history, it is the blink of an eye. The transformation of the economic relationship between men and women has been so rapid that our culture has not yet caught up.

CULTURE LAGS ECONOMICS

While the role of mothers has been modernized almost beyond recognition, fatherhood remains stuck in the past. “We have a cultural lag,” says Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin, “where our views of masculinity have not caught up to the changes in the job market.”¹⁶¹ The economic numbers have changed. The social norms have not. Four out of five American adults (81%) with a high school education or less still believe that “for a man to be a good husband or partner, being able to support a family financially is very important” (compared to 62% of those with a bachelor’s degree).¹⁶²

So the very men who are least able to be traditional breadwinners are the most likely to be judged by their breadwinning potential. What this means is that men who fare poorly in the labor market are also likely to suffer in the marriage market, especially in the working class.¹⁶³

Husbands without jobs are at much higher risk of seeing their marriages end today than in the past, according to work from Alexandra Killewald. “expectations of wives’ homemaking may have eroded,” she concludes, “but the husband breadwinner norm persists.”¹⁶⁴ Marianne Bertrand and her coauthors show that marriage markets have been hit hard by the social expectation that a man will not just earn, but will earn more than his wife. “Our estimates imply that aversion to having the wife earn more than the husband explains 29 percent of the decline in marriage rates over the last thirty years,” they write.¹⁶⁵ (It is worth noting that the aversion was found among both men and women.) In other words, as women have earned more, relative to men, they have become less likely to marry. Sociologist Steve Ruggles estimates that 40% of the drop in marriage among Americans aged 25 to 29 from 1960 to 2013 can be explained by the fall in male earnings relative to men of the previous generation.¹⁶⁶ Notably, this dampening effect on marriage was strongest among those with less education.

The old models of marriage and family, based on the economic dependency of women on men, have been largely deconstructed. This is good news, for all the reasons Steinem gave. But even great blessings can be mixed. The traditional way worked well for children by encouraging the creation of fairly stable families. And it was mostly functional for men. As the sole or at least main provider, a man would be joined to a female carer, usually through marriage, in order to raise children. “The family may be a myth,” writes Dench, “but it is a myth that works to make many men tolerably useful.”

Dench worried that without the traditional provider role, men would “struggle to get full acceptance and risk anomie and short-termism.”¹⁶⁷ Given the difficulties of many men today, this fear cannot be dismissed as scaremongering. The success of the women’s movement has not caused the precariousness of male social identity, but it has exposed it. The question is where we go from here.

Conservatives urge a restoration of traditional marriage. David Blankenhorn, author of the influential 1996 book Fatherless America, argues that fatherhood has rested securely on two foundations, “coresidency with children and a parental alliance with their mother.”¹⁶⁸ That is true as a matter of history. But the “co-residency” was something women used to have little choice about. Now they do. Blankenhorn argued that in order to tie fathers back to children, they needed to be bound back into marriage. But given the seismic cultural changes of recent decades, this is an unrealistic prescription. Rather than looking in the rear-view mirror, we need to establish a new basis for fatherhood, one that embraces the huge progress we have made toward gender equality.

For many couples, marriage now serves primarily as a “capstone” to a series of educational, social, and economic achievements, as Andrew Cherlin puts it.¹⁶⁹ Fewer than one in five American adults think that marriage is essential to living a fulfilling life, and of those who are married, just one in seven say that financial reasons were a major factor in the decision to tie the knot.¹⁷⁰

But having lost their status as breadwinners and resident fathers, many men find themselves a little lost. The economists Ariel Binder and John Bound, after a painstaking study of falling labor market attachment among less-educated men, conclude that “the prospect of forming and providing for a new family constitutes an important male labor supply incentive.”¹⁷¹ Men who are not providers, or at least do not see themselves as such, work less. After an in-depth study of working class men in New Jersey, published as The Dignity of Working Men in 2000, Michèle Lamont concluded that “being hardworking is a mode of expressing manliness.” Work signaled the fulfillment of the central male role of “providing for and protecting the family” and was part of the “disciplined self” that constitutes mature masculinity.¹⁷²

In 1858 and 1859, a light-hearted poem appeared in newspapers across the U.S., from Virginia and North Carolina to California.¹⁷³ It was titled “What Is A Bachelor Like?”

Why a pump without a handle,

A mouldy tallow candle,

A goose that’s lost its fellows,

A noseless pair of bellows,

A horse without a saddle,

A boat without a paddle;

A mule—a fool,

A two-legged stool!

A pest—a jest!

Dreary—weary—

Contrary—unchary—

A fish without a tail,

A ship without a sail . . .

Economically independent women can now flourish whether they are wives or not. Wifeless men, by contrast, are often a mess. Compared to married men, their health is worse, their employment rates are lower, and their social networks are weaker.¹⁷⁴ Drug-related deaths among never-married men more than doubled in a decade from 2010.¹⁷⁵ Divorce, now twice as likely to be initiated by wives as husbands, is psychologically harder on men than women.¹⁷⁶ one of the great revelations of feminism may turn out to be that men need women more than women need men. Wives were economically dependent on their husbands, but men were emotionally dependent on their wives. For all their jokes about the ball and chain, many men seem to know this. In a 2016 poll, more men than women ranked being married, either now or in the future, as “very important to me” (58 v. 47%).¹⁷⁷ Men do not want to be ships without sails.

In 2017, the Pew Research Center asked Americans a difficult question: What is the meaning of life? Specifically, they asked respondents an open-ended question, “What about your life do you currently find meaningful, fulfilling, or satisfying? What keeps you going, and why?” one of their most striking discoveries was that women find more meaning in their lives, and from more sources, than men. Women and men are equally likely to say that their job or career provides “a great deal of meaning and fulfillment” (33% and 34%).¹⁷⁸ But in almost every other domain, there was a marked gender gap: 43% of women across all age groups mentioned children or grandchildren as a source of current meaning, for example, compared to just 24% of men.

Someone with multiple sources of meaning and identity would be seen by a psychologist as having high “self-complexity.” Being a complex self has costs. You may have to spend time and energy transitioning between different aspects of your identity, for instance. The term code-switching is often used for this in the context of race. Women may have to shift between being a mother and a worker, for example, with each identity being “activated” or “deactivated” as circumstances require. They may feel torn between the two. But the benefits are generally bigger. If there is a setback in one domain, according to psychologist Janet Hyde, “women activate the other identity, thereby restoring a positive sense of self, which supports the benefits of self-complexity.”¹⁷⁹ If you have a bad day as a mom, you can make up for it by nailing it at work, or vice versa. or at least, that is the theory.

Right now, men have a narrower range of sources of meaning and identity, which makes them particularly vulnerable if any one of the sources is damaged. Men seem to take a bigger dent in their happiness, for example, if they lose their job.¹⁸⁰ As well as being good for children, a stronger role for fathers would provide many men with a powerful extra source of meaning and purpose in their lives.

A DAD DEFICIT

“Too many fathers . . . are . . . missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes,” said Barack obama, on Father’s Day in 2008. “And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”¹⁸¹ This was a blunt, brave message coming from a presidential candidate, especially to a Black audience. Obama was criticized for not paying enough attention to the structural barriers facing men, especially Black men. But it is important not to lose sight of his central message, which was a much more positive one. Fathers matter. They are not dispensable. They are, he said, “teachers and coaches. They are mentors and role models.”

Obama was also right to point out that many children grow up without a strong relationship with their father. Within 6 years of their parents separating, one in three children never see their father, and a similar proportion see him once a month or less.¹⁸² As these statistics show, the main reason for the dad deficit is the growing likelihood that fathers are not living with the mothers of their children. Missing from their children’s home, they end up missing from their lives. This is particularly true for the most disadvantaged. Among fathers who did not complete high school, 40% live apart from their children, compared to just 7% of fathers who graduated from college.¹⁸³ In 2020, one in five children (21%) were living with a mother only, almost twice as many as in 1968 (11%).¹⁸⁴

Attitudes toward unmarried parenthood have become much more relaxed. Eighty-two percent of women aged 25–34 say that “it is okay for an unmarried female to have and raise a child,” and 74% of their male peers agree.¹⁸⁵ Most children in the U.S. will not spend their whole childhood with both biological parents.¹⁸⁶ The liberalization of social norms and practices with regard to marriage and childbearing are in many ways a positive development. But it is vitally important that fathers are not benched as a result. Women have expanded their role, and the range of choices that they can make. Too many men are stuck with the narrow provider role, which is now badly obsolete, not only in theory but also in practice.

The result is that the separation of men from women too often means the separation of fathers from children. This is bad for men, bad for women, and bad for children. Just as women have largely broken free of the old, narrow model of motherhood, so men need to escape the confines of the breadwinner model of fatherhood. Fathers matter to children even if—perhaps especially if—they are not married to their mother. The social institution of fatherhood urgently needs an update, to become more focused on direct relationships with children. Along with the obvious challenges there is a big opportunity here too, for an expansion in men’s roles.

The stakes here are high. Fatherhood is a fundamental social institution, one that shapes mature masculinity more than any other. “A man who is integrated into a community through a role in a family, spanning generations into the past and future, will be more consistently and durably tied to the social order than a man responding chiefly to a charismatic leader, a demagogue, or a grandiose ideology of patriotism.” That’s George Gilder writing in 1973.¹⁸⁷ Gilder was an arch conservative, for sure. But given recent political history, it is hard to say that he was wrong.