Can getting involved in the community or being a stay-at-home dad increase a man’s opportunities?
If the US were to move beyond our current definitions of gender, I think that would provide men with a greater range of options than they have now. Boys and men would be told and encouraged to be anything they wanted, and anything would truly mean anything. When I heard that as a child, it meant that I could go into any profession I wanted, but I also knew that some jobs were really for women only.
“Being whatever I wanted” only applied to professional choices. Not having a profession wasn’t an option. A few decades after being told I could be anything I wanted, I’ve found a job that lets me study definitions of masculinity.
These days we talk about men being largely defined by their jobs. One of the ways that men consistently talk about caring for their family is through providing; they earn the money that puts food on the table and a roof over their children’s heads. For many men, that work is physically demanding and includes the risk of serious injury and death. But they willingly take this risk, in order to provide for their children, and give them things the men themselves never had .
The idea that a job is central to a man’s identity is relatively new in historical terms. What we know about America in the late 1800s is that a man’s job was an important part of who he was. Many men, perhaps most, worked for themselves – on the family farm or in the family business.
But it wasn’t their only option for defining themselves. Men had many other ways to develop a name for themselves and show that they were good, respectable men. Because communities were relatively small and everyone more-or-less knew everyone else, other things “counted” as much or more than work: being a good father and being a community leader were high on that list. And character was key.
Things started to change in the 1920s due to a variety of other historical changes: large scale immigration in the prior decades, urbanization, industrialization, mandatory education, and the beginning of the consumer economy. By the end of the 1920s, more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas, and more people worked for others than for themselves. And, of course, men held most jobs; teaching and nursing were the only female dominated fields.
Then came the Great Depression. Having a job became a lot less common (sound familiar?). But owning your own property and having a close family member who had a (functioning) farm were also much less common than they’d been a generation before. Without a job, how could a man care for his family? At that point, having a job shifted from being one component of a man’s identity to being the central component.
I hope a post-gender world will be one where a man’s identity isn’t based primarily on his job. Or whether or not he has a job, given the current economic climate. Perhaps our ancestors from the 19th century were right; there are many things that contribute to our identity as men, and no one of them is the central defining characteristic for all of us.
Maybe one step towards a post-gender world is to start prioritizing some of those other components, like being involved in your community and genuinely knowing your neighbors. In some ways, Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” is a plea for all of us to get more involved in our communities. This would expand men’s opportunities to gain status and become the “go-to” guy; after all, most of us will never own a business or become a senior manager.
Perhaps we can also start to treat “stay at home dads” as doing something important and valuable. Fifty years ago, we used to think housewives did something important. But for many Americans, if it’s not paid, it’s not valuable. If you’ve raised kids – especially very young children – you know how absurd this idea is.
Today, we have a generation of men that are making a real effort to “be there” for the kids, so they clearly think it is valuable. And as a country, we’re clear that being an absentee father is generally a bad idea. We don’t give people money to raise their own children, but perhaps we can give them something else: respect and a meaningful identity that flows from fatherhood. (And there’s no reason why that should be true for fathers but not for mothers.) This would also expand the definition of caring for one’s family beyond just providing money.
I don’t know that any of these things will move us to the “end of gender,” but they can certainly expand the options for men. Given that changes in social norms take decades and generations, I think these would make for a fine beginning.
Andrew Smiler, Ph.D., is a visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His sexuality research focuses on normative aspects of sexual development, such as age and perception of first kiss, first “serious” relationship, and first intercourse among 15-25 year olds. His masculinity research examines definitions of masculinity. He is the author of the forthcoming Challenging Casanova.