Father Involvement and the Status of Women

The direct involvement of fathers in childrearing obviously eases the worldoad and reduces the stress on mothers, especially mothers who work outside the home. Yet it also appears to benefit women in a less obvious way-it may raise their public status. Some observers have suggested that the nuclear family is an obstacle to women's advancement and that getting men out of families might actually enhance women's status.76 New evidence indicates that the opposite is closer to the truth-without male involvement in childrearing, the public status of women probably will remain low.

As the following chapter will detail, there is enormous cross-cultural variation in father-child relationships. When this variation is carefully examined, as sociologist Scott Coltrane has recently done by drawing on ethnographic description and quantitative data from ninety nonindustrial societies, it is found that "paternal proximity, affection, and responsibility for routine child care are positively associated with female participation in community decision making [and] female access to positions of authority"77 In other words, the more that fathers help out with children, the more mothers are able to be full participants in their communities.

One does not need to look to nonindustrial societies to reach this conclusion. Among advanced societies, those which have the highest level of father involvement also have the most women in positions of authority. The nation in which fathers are most involved in childrearing, by all accounts, is Sweden. Some 25 to 30 percent of all Swedish fathers take some parental leave from their places of employment to care for their children. And Sweden is the nation which gained a new world's record in 1994 by electing a parliament (Riksdag) consisting of 41 percent women. Other Scandinavian nations are not far behind, both in father involvement and in the percentage of women in public life.

What is the connection between the direct involvement of fathers in childrearing and the public status of women? Women's primary responsibility for child care necessarily constrains their ability to exercise public power. Thus, male involvement in childrearing gives women more time to participate in nonfamily activities. Yet time alone does not translate easily into public power.

The study of women' s participation in public life has focused less on father involvement as the underlying enabler than it has on the contribution of women to the economy. it is believed that women's public power is necessarily related to their economic power, their "control over the means of production." To the degree that women have control over money, it is argued, they will also have power.

But money and other economic resources apparently advance women only so far. Coltrane's study of nonindustrial societies found no consistent or statistically significant relationship between women's contribution to economic subsistence and their public status. And among industrial societies, while Swedish women have great power in public life, they do not have so much power in economic life. Virtually an Swedish women are in the labor force, for example, but they are significantly underrepresented in managerial positions in the Swedish economy.78

If it is not only their economic power that generates high public status for women, what other forces are at work? There is good reason to believe that women's climb to public power stems as much from the voluntary relinquishment of power by males as from a takeover of that power through economic means. The authority structures of virtually every society in the world have been, and mostly still are, dominated by males, yet in some societies men have been willing to share some of their power with women. What causes men to do this? The answer may lie in the way in which they were socialized in childhood. Here is what Scott Coltrane found: "Societies with father-present patterns of child socialization produce men who are less inclined to exclude women from public activities than their counterparts in father-absent societies."79

The linkage between male attitudes toward women in adulthood and the socialization of males in childhood was an early insight of Margaret Mead. In Male and Female (1949) she wrote of male exclusionary attitudes toward women in societies where men are relatively uninvolved in childrearing:

In a great number of societies men' s sureness of their sex role is tied up with their right, or ability, to practice some activity that women are not allowed to practice. Their maleness, in fact, has to be underwritten by preventing women from entering some field or performing some feat. Here may be found the relationship between maleness and pride; that is, a need for prestige that will outstrip the prestige which is accorded to any woman.80

Boys who grow up in societies where they have involved fathers and strong male role models, in contrast, do not have the same need to reject and dominate women and create exclusionary, all-male activities.81 Moreover, just as a strong sexual division of labor in childrearing generates a strong sexual division of labor in society as a whole, as Nancy Chodorow has pointed out in her book The Reproduction of Mothering, so does male-female cooperation in childrearing lead to an expectation that there will be male-female cooperation in other areas of life.82 Task sharing in the home seems to translate into task sharing in public life. It may also be the case that involved fathers sex-type their children less and thus promote in their daughters the kind of self-confidence and sense of autonomy that enables them to be stronger participants in the public sector There is some evidence to that effect.83

The association between the contribution of fathers to childrearing and the public status of women needs more study and analysis, but the evidence available leads to the conclusion that as fatherlessness grows, women's status will drop. The underlying social process involved, again, is that the relationship boys (and girls) have with their fathers when they are growing up has a significant impact on their adult behavior and consequently on larger societal issues and problems.

Concluding Remarks

Fathers are far more than just "second adults" in the home. involved fathers-especially biological fathers-bring positive benefits to their children that no other person is as likely to bring. They provide protection and economic support and male role models. They have a parenting style that is significantly different from that of mothers, and the difference is important in healthy child development. According to the evidence, fathers make important contributions to their children's intellectual competence, prosocial and compassionate behavior and psychological well-being.

Father involvement in childrearing also brings an important benefit to women: It raises their public status. Children raised by involved fathers grow up to become adults who are more respectful of women and more willing to share with women broad social power and authority.

Clearly, expectations for fathers have been changing. From their ancient roles of protector and provider, men are being asked today to raise children pretty much as women have always done. just how malleable are men in the fathering process? Are men really cut out to be "new fathers"? What did fathers actually do in the thousands of societies that existed prior to modem times? How are other societies organized to maximize paternal investments? To answer such questions we must go to the roots-to the biology of males and the male-female bond and to the evolution and anthropology of fatherhood. These are the subjects of the following chapter.

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