Media Contacts:
Dr. Barbara J. Risman, 919/515-9013 or [email protected]
Pam Smith, News Services, 919/515-3470 or [email protected]
June 23, 1998
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Meet Mr. Mom. He's as comfortable doing the weekly run to the grocery store with kids in tow as he is doing a production cost analysis. He can hug a toddler, wipe away tears and apply a bandage as well as he can negotiate a tough contract for his company.
In short, dads make fine mothers, reports Dr. Barbara J. Risman, professor of sociology at North Carolina State University. The men -- some single dads, some role-sharing parents -- say their nurturing role is rewarding, their masculinity is intact, and their children are well-adjusted.
Still, says Risman, families who are moving beyond gender-based parenting roles are struggling for acceptance in a society that clings to a more nostalgic Ozzie and Harriet family image.
She's packed her new book, Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition (Yale Press, 1998), with eye-opening findings about emerging family models -- single dads, single moms and dual-career households with role-sharing parents. The work is based on nearly two decades of her studies with U.S. families, including the first-ever research with children from egalitarian households.
She hopes the book will be a primer for a broad audience of readers trying to figure out how to balance family life with workplace responsibilities.
Risman knows that breaking the "dad as breadwinner/mom as homemaker" pattern is likely to have a downright dizzying effect on a large segment of society. She believes it's possible to re-establish an equilibrium that is based on gender equity within families. "Gender need not organize our family systems, even if it has always done so," she says.
Her research findings show that dads can redesign the gender ideas and habits they inherit. In her single-dad study, for example, she found that mothering can be learned by doing. Her subjects were "reluctant" single fathers whose wives had died or deserted the family. Risman's survey (measuring homemaking, parent-child intimacy, and affection) was administered to the single dads, and for comparison, to select groups of single mothers, traditional families, and two-worker families.
Her findings show that single fathers and single mothers are similar in parent-child relationships and time spent in household work. Over time, the individual in the primary care-giving role becomes a nurturing person, regardless of gender. "Even these men who did not choose to be single fathers were able to invent mothering that works," Risman says.
If single dads can "mother," then why aren't more men in two-parent households sharing more of the child-rearing responsibilities, Risman asks. Studies show that in most dual-paycheck, two-parent households, the division of responsibilities falls along gender lines.
Risman's research offers evidence that real, long-term solutions may rest in exploring new ways to "do family." Alternative, egalitarian models include "fair families" with working mothers and fathers who dare to cross traditional gender lines to share child rearing as well as day-to-day homemaking and property maintenance responsibilities. In such feminist families, couples have made a deliberate commitment to equality on all levels of their family relationships. Of the 15 peer marriages included in the study, many couples made career choices to accommodate their shared parenting roles.
What about the children who grow up in egalitarian households? Interviews with the 21 children, ages four to 17, in the fair family study indicated that children from egalitarian families believe that men and women are equal, or ought to be. However, they struggle to reconcile the gender equality they have come to believe in at home with the inequality they see outside their family setting. Ultimately social change will require collective action and coalitions across families, schools and friendship networks as well as within institutions, Risman says.
The good news, Risman says,"Children raised in families with attentive and loving feminist parents do just fine." They are happy, healthy and well-adjusted.
Looking back, Risman laments the fact that the hardest challenge was to identify subjects for the "fair family" study. She and her NC State colleagues advertised in public school, church, and club newsletters, community bulletin boards, and university publications. Only one in five of the families who identified themselves as "equitable" in the initial screening actually shared household labor in a 40/60 or better split, agreed they shared equally in responsibility for breadwinning and child rearing, and felt that their relationship was fair.
Risman says, "That alone tells us much about the strength of our gender roles for creating inequitable marriage." Nevertheless, the husbands and wives not included in the final cut deserve praise for at least trying to challenge the status quo. "Even if they were not entirely successful, they clearly are part of the massive social change that feminism has inspired," she says.
Gender justice and gender expectations, Risman says, are at the heart of broader social justice issues. Certainly, women today lead dramatically different lives than their mothers. But, Risman writes: "... our daughters will inherit not only a different world, but an entirely different set of expectations from their parents and teachers than did girls of my generation. .. I believe that we have come as far as we can with incremental change. To get to the next stage, to move fully toward justice for women and men, we must dare a moment of gender vertigo. My hope is that when the spinning ends, we will be in a post-gendered society that is one step closer to a just world."
Risman, who has been a member of the NC State faculty since 1984, is a professor, the director of the graduate program for Women and Gender Studies, and co-editor of the journal Contemporary Sociology. Risman also is a member of the board of directors of the Council on Contemporary Families, a prestigious national society whose goal is to promote informed discussion of family values based on the reality of family lives today in this country.
-- smith --
NOTE TO EDITORS: For review copies of Dr. Risman's book, Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition, contact Heather D'Auria, Yale University Press, (203) 432-9193, or [email protected].
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