"It's almost like I have a job, but I don't get paid": fathers at home reconfiguring work, care, and masculinity

Fathering, Fall, 2004 by Andrea Doucet

Rooted in a qualitative research project with 70 stay-at-home fathers in Canada, this paper explores the ways that work and family interact for fathers who "trade cash for care." While fathers are at home, they also remain connected to traditionally masculine sources of identity such as paid work and they take on unpaid masculine self-provisioning work at home and community work that builds on traditional male interests. They thus carve out complex sets of relations between home, paid and unpaid work, community work, and their own sense of masculinity. Narratives from stay-at-home fathers speak volumes about the ways in which the long shadow of hegemonic masculinity hangs over them while also pointing to hints of resistance and change as fathers begin to critique concepts of "male time" and market capitalism approaches to work and care. The paper concludes by pointing to several theoretical contributions to research on fatherhood and masculinities as well as to policy implications that arise from this study on the social valuing of unpaid work.

Keywords: stay-at-home fathers, home-work balances, masculinities and femininities

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   It's funny. There were lots of pros and cons about being home....
   One of the things I missed was that you lose a sense of stature, a
   sense of common ground between myself and other men, a sense
   of being able to say--'Hey, I'm a man too." I think a lot of that
   revolved around not having employment. Not working and being
   at home. For me not working was the bigger issue than being at
   home.... I liked the domestic stuff, cooking and all that. I like
   that stuff a lot. But I missed work.... As a man you have no status
   at all if you don't work (Adam).

Adam, a 42-year-old man living in rural Ontario, was a stay-at-home father of three children for a decade. He is one of 70 fathers in the study, as well as part of a larger study of Canadian fathers who self-define as primary caregivers of their children. Adam's children are older now (17, 15, and 11), and he works full-time as an economist for the government, yet he still remembers the difficulties he faced when he was not employed outside of the home. He began his interview by saying that although he "liked the domestic stuff, cooking and all that," it was "not working" that posed such difficulties for him "as a man." In speaking about his typical weekly and daily routine when his first two children, Jeffrey and Bryn, were pre-kindergarten age, he immediately let me know that he also fixed cars while he cared for his young son and daughter:

   Jeffrey and I, those first two years, were joined at the hip. And
   then Bryn and I were joined at the hip for the next while. We did a
   lot of stuff whereby they would come along with me to do things.
   Jeffrey would hang around when I was doing things. Like we had
   a series of old cars. He would hang around while I fixed the cars.

While Adam made a link between caring and repairing cars, all of the fathers' narratives were peppered with references to varied configurations of paid and unpaid work. It was clear that while fathers were at home, they were also carving out complex sets of relations between home, paid and unpaid work, community work, and their own sense of masculinity. In seeking to explore the ways that work and family interact for stay-at-home fathers, this paper argues that they reconstruct the meanings of both, while also demonstrating complex intersections between work, home, community, and masculinity.

The paper makes three key arguments, all of which pull together these intricate connections. First, fathers retain very close links to paid work even when they have temporarily or permanently left a career to care for children. While there are three dominant patterns that characterize fathers' home-work balances, all of the fathers fall under the weight of community scrutiny for being primary caregivers and not primary breadwinners, thus confirming research that has argued that mothers' and fathers' "moral" responsibilities as carers and earners remain differently framed and experienced (Berk, 1985; Finch & Mason, 1993; McMahon, 1995). Second, where fathers have given up a formal investment in the full-time labor force, many replace employment with "self-provisioning" work (Gershuny & Pahl, 1979; Pahl, 1984; Wallace, 2002; Wallace & Pahl, 1985) that allows them to contribute economically to the household economy as well as to display masculine practices, both to themselves and their wider community. That is, although stay-at-home fathers "trade cash for care" (Hobson & Morgan, 2002, p. 1), they also remain connected to traditionally masculine sources of identity such as paid work as well as self-provisioning at home and in the community as public displays of masculinity. Their narratives speak volumes about the ways in which the long shadow of hegemonic masculinity hangs over them. Third and finally, this paper argues that stay-at-home fathers' narratives of emergent and generative practices of caring represent a slow process of critical resistance as they begin to critique concepts of "male time" (Daly, 1996; Davies, 1990, 1994) and market capitalism approaches to work and care (Crittenden, 2001; Folbre, 2001; Williams, 2000).