Installment 14. If Men Have All the Power How Come Women Make the Rules?
Share this compelling intro to the Men's Movement with your skeptical friends.
Equal Options for Men in Marriage and Parenting
Afraid? Yes, but not of commitment
The median age of first marriage for men in the US has climbed to 27, the oldest it has ever been. Researchers who surveyed a pilot sample of 60 bachelors between the ages of 25 and 33 found that young men are often leery of marriage because they worry about marrying the wrong person, about having to make unreasonable compromises, about the pressures of being a husband and about huge financial loss if the marriage ends in divorce. A common remark from the men was that a woman in divorce will “take you for all you’ve got.” The researchers urged further study.
— derived from the Washington Times, June 26, 2002
It is statistically true that married men are more successful than unmarried men. But are they more successful because they’re married or are they married because they’re more successful?
Men’s slang expression for marriage—being “hitched”—did not arise from nowhere.
If marriage is as much for fathers as it is for mothers, why is it called Matrimony?
The same folly that tells us a woman’s place is in the home tells us our place
is anywhere but in the home; the tragedy for us is that home is where the
heart is.We are fathers, not babysitters.
Shouldn’t She Know Better?
“I want to thank my husband who is home babysitting.”
— Congresswoman Susan Molinari, May 28, 1997, on announcing her resignation from Congress to take a job with CBS
We kept women out of the male domain by using laws and rules to bar them. But those kinds of barriers are obvious and easy to tear down. Women keep us out of the female domain—where our children are—just by festooning it with lace and pink ribbons. And women can say, “Come in if you want; we’re not stopping you.”
And when we go in, we can ignore the pink lace and frilly stuff, and develop our own style of parenting, just as women abandoned the severe, mannish suit for their careers in industry and asserted a female style of doing business.
“We don’t talk about it very much, but there are a lot of power and control issues in any relationship. I think that some women want control of the kitchen and nursery, and they do, on an unconscious level, shoo men away. What I hear that keeps men from being involved is that women impose their personal standards. Men tell me, ‘I dress the child and she says, “Oh, she’s too hot,” or I dress the child and, “Oh, he’s too cold.”’ The natural reaction of any human being is to say, ‘Well, if I don’t do it to your satisfaction, then you do it!’… I think it’s necessary [for women] to keep their lips buttoned sometimes and not impose their particular standards… Men and women have different styles; both are good, and kids need both.”
— Gayle Kimball, Ph.D., author of The 50-50 Marriage in Good Will Toward Men by Jack Kammer
“I know in my case, we really don’t mean it when we say we want an equal partner,” [Suzanne Braun Levine, a founding editor of Ms. magazine and former editor of the Columbia Journalism Review] said. “We want a competent executive assistant… We subtly discourage our husbands from learning by doing it. We throw up our hands and say, ‘Let me do it.’ That’s very demoralizing.”
— quoted by Judy Mann, Washington Post, September 1, 2000
“Women… may complain that men don’t do enough with their children but the truth is that mothers often don’t allow fathers to have much input. They’ll see a father fumbling as he tries to make the formula for the baby’s bottle. Instead of letting him get on with it, they get bossy and possessive, and say: ‘Give the bottle to me; I can do it quicker myself.’”
— best-selling British author Shirley Conran, Sunday Times (London), October 1, 2000
Just as some men were upset by the idea that women could be competent doctors and astronauts, some women don’t like the fact that we can be perfectly adequate, independent parents.
A Little Test to Give to Women
“Imagine that you are home on a Saturday afternoon, sitting quietly in your living room with your favorite magazine, content to hear your child happily riding her tricycle outside. Then you hear the child take a tumble. She is not seriously hurt, but her cries grow louder as she runs into the house for comfort for her injured knee. Your heart goes out to her as she comes racing toward you. You close your magazine and put it aside to make room for her on your lap. With arms outstretched, she runs right past you crying, ‘Daddy!’
How does that make you feel?”
“It is easier for men to take on the nurturing of children than for women to give up some of it. The greatest emotional challenge for women is to allow men to nurture children in their own manner.”
— Joan Peters, author, When Mothers Work, 1997
Men said that women don’t belong in industry because they lack the “business instinct.” Now women are saying that we don’t belong with children because we lack the “nurturing instinct.”
Isn’t he beautiful?
When their babies are born, new fathers often experience “engrossment,” much like the feelings that women experience immediately after birth:
Fathers prefer to look at their own baby and perceive the newborn as attractive and beautiful.
Fathers like to touch, pick up, move, hold, and play with the baby.
Fathers remember the unique features and characteristics of their baby and feel they can distinguish their own baby from others.
Fathers perceive their baby as perfect even if it has unsightly imperfections.
Fathers feel extreme elation over their new baby.
Fathers feel an increased sense of self-esteem because of the new baby.
— derived from “A Perspective on Father-Infant Interactions” by Oliver H. McKagen, Radford University
Natural Fathers
The male Emperor Penguin stands straight up for hours upon hours with his and his mate’s fertilized egg safely perched between his feet and huge rolls of his belly’s warm fat to protect his incubating baby from freezing 100 mph Antarctic winds.
The male African Sand Grouse ranges far and wide—sometimes as far as 50 miles—to find water for his kids. He soaks himself in the water, heads home and lets the kids suck the water from the feathers on his breast.
The male Sea Horse has a pouch in which he carries his and his mate’s fertilized eggs. The eggs attach to his body and get their food through his blood vessels. In about two weeks, when the babies are ready to come out of his pouch, he gives birth.
The male Giant Water Bug protects his eggs from fish by carrying them on his back until they hatch.
The male Egyptian Mouth Breeder is a fish who hatches eggs in his mouth. After his babies are born they’ll swim right back into his mouth when they’re scared.
— derived from an unpublished manuscript by writer Kay Haugaard and from the Washington Post, June 15, 2001
Fathers should be more involved!
(But not more than mothers want.)
Only about one mother in four thinks that fathers should play a fifty-fifty role in raising the children.
Mothers want fathers to help more with children, but not to overshadow their role as primary parent.
Two out of three mothers seem threatened by a father’s equal participation in child rearing.
Mothers themselves may be subtly putting a damper on men’s involvement with their children because they are so possessive of their role as primary nurturer.
— derived from The Motherhood Report by Louis Genevie, Ph.D. and Eva Margolies, 1987
“The research seems to show that mothers can be real gatekeepers… that the level of contact a father has with the kids has more to do with the mother’s characteristics than with the father’s.”
— Richard Weissbourd, instructor on childhood issues
at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1995
“The early women’s movement could have been explained in simple terms as ‘women can do what men can do.’ Now we need to proceed to the next step by realizing men can do what women can do.”
— Gloria Steinem on NPR “Weekend Edition,” February 9, 1992
“When you have to work late and need someone to look after your kids until you can get home, where do you turn? You call another mother and she bails you out. When that mother discovers she needs to be out of town on the day it’s her turn to drive the preschool carpool, does she ask her husband to fill in? No. She calls you, and you gladly switch with her.”
— “The Motherhood: An Unbreakable Union” by Olivette Orme, The Wall Street Journal, May 9, 1997
Who gets to stay with the kids?
Phil Donahue was on the TV in the waiting room of an auto shop where I was getting an oil change. The topic was “Men who stay home with their kids.” When the mechanic came to tell me my car was ready, he stopped to watch the show. “What do you think of that?” I asked, fully expecting him to say something about child rearing not being “real man’s work.” “I’d love to do that,” he answered, “but my wife took that job. She didn’t even ask. She just took it.”
“No developing society that needs men to leave home and do ‘their thing’ for the society ever allows young men in to handle or touch their newborns. There’s always a taboo against it. For they know that, if they did, the new fathers would become so hooked that they would never get out and do ‘their thing’ properly.”
— Margaret Mead quoted in Maternal-Infant Bonding by Klaus and Kennell, Moseby Press, St. Louis 1976
Imagine how we would answer if there was more social support
and acceptance for fathers staying home.
Among 18-to-24-years-olds, 48% of men and 66% of women said that if they had the opportunity, they might be interested in staying at home and raising children.
— derived from Time magazine’s Fall 1990 Special Issue on Women
Among 18-to-24-year-olds, 21% of men and 31% of women said they would choose to stay home full-time and care for their families if they could.
— derived from the Whirlpool Foundation Study by the Families and Work Institute, May 1995
Ask high school girls what combinations and sequences of work and parenting they can realistically imagine for themselves. Then put the same question to the boys. And then ask yourself how far we have come in our efforts to achieve equal opportunity between the sexes.
Women staying home with the kids is not just about breastfeeding. Children don’t normally nurse beyond the age of two and, besides, the pattern is the same for women, including adoptive mothers, who don’t breastfeed at all.
If women can pump their breasts to leave milk at daycare centers with strangers is there any reason they couldn’t do it to leave milk at home with fathers?
“[T]oday’s working stiff really enjoys no more meaningful options than did his father, the pathetic guy in the gray flannel suit who was pilloried as a professional hamster and an emotional cripple.”
— Kyle Pruett, M.D., a psychiatrist at the Yale Child Studies Center, author of The Nurturing Father, quoted in Time magazine’s Fall 1990 Special Issue on Women
“Traditional work patterns lock women into second rate careers and lock men out of family life, risking damage to the mental health of both sexes. There’s even more prejudice against men than there is against women if they attempt to build careers around family responsibilities.”
— Dr. Carolyn Quadrio, psychiatrist and author of a study on part-time work, 1996, Australian Associated Press, April 17, 1996
Which would you rather have: a heartfelt Fathers Day card every year, or a slim chance of being in the history books after you’re dead?
Sure women’s work is devalued. It’s devalued by women to make it unattractive to men. It’s devalued by men because, in sour grapes fashion, we try to convince ourselves that we don’t want it.
Interview with a Womenfirster: Phyllis Schlafly
Jack Kammer: What if I was the kind of man, like a lot of men who have confided to me, who is sick to death of the corporate world and in a heartbeat would stay home to take care of their kids because they love them so much and they know the business world is a crock?
Phyllis Schlafly:… That’s their problem. As I look around the world about me, I just don’t find there are many [women] who really want the so-called non-traditional relationships.
— radio interview, WCVT-FM (now WTMD), Towson University, Maryland, January 5, 1989
Does every man want to stay home with his kids, even part-time, even temporarily? Certainly not. But every man should have as much opportunity to include those options in his life as women do, just as women demand the right to pursue business careers equally with men.
“There isn’t any job that’s going to bring the fulfillment that marriage and children and family bring… They offer many rewards… Careers are no substitute for children and grandchildren… In America it’s wonderful to be a woman.”
— Phyllis Schlafly, speaking at a women’s college in Virginia, October 14, 1997