Search results for fathers

This Course Guide is in progress and will be updated as I have time.

Disclaimer: If you’re thinking about writing a course guide.  I totally overdid it on this one!  It doesn’t have to be nearly this extensive.

Course Guide for
INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY
(last updated 5/2012)

Developed by Gwen Sharp
Nevada State College

C. Wright Mills and the Sociological Imagination

Intersection of biography and history as illustrated by:

• Year of birth and life success
• Kids’ exposure to technology
• Baby naming practices and media trends
• Other historical trends in baby names

“the capacity for astonishment is made lively again”

• The background of “Scotch” tape
• Applying the anthropological lens to “dark, mysterious Austria”

Karl Marx/Marxist analysis

• Marxist analysis of current economic crisis
• Invisibility of workers

Emile Durkheim

• The dangers of the ecological fallacy: measuring “sin” statistically

[Because the course guide has gotten to be so long, I’m putting the rest of it after the jump.]

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Deeb Kitchen sent in an essay at The Brookings Institution with a graph comparing the number of hours worked and earnings in middle-class, two-parent households (the 10% of households that are in the very middle of the income distribution).   Controlling for inflation (results are in 2009 dollars), we see that these households are earning more, for sure, but also working more.  In other words, they’re getting about as much buck for their bang as they were in 1975.

The authors of the post argue that the 26% increase in the number of hours worked is due mostly to mothers increasing their work hours.  Wages, as you can see below, have been stagnant for fathers, but gone up for mothers:

See also: more men and less women earning poverty wages and why did married mothers go to work.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Google often creatively alters its logo to honor important days on the calendar.  Today the logo references Father’s Day by turning the “l” in Google into a tie.  John McMahon did a fine job of discussing how Father’s Day cards tap into stereotypes about masculinity, but I thought this was interesting in its reference of a particular kind of work.  The tie isn’t a generic masculine symbol, but a class-specific one.

More, it ties fatherhood into the idea of being a breadwinner.  What is significant about a Dad?  The fact that he works so hard for the family.  Can you imagine a Mother’s Day symbol emphasizing her workplace instead of her time at home?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

It’s almost Father’s Day, which means it is time for the greeting card business to make tons of money. It also means it’s time for us to visually see the standard narrative about gender, masculinity, and fatherhood. Looking at mass commercial products like greeting cards is an especially useful venue: the greeting card companies, wanting to make money like good capitalists, will sell products that have the greatest widespread appeal. Thus, they will sell the most popular representations of gender, masculinity, and fatherhood.

From a brief perusal of a NYC chain store greeting card aisle, I found plenty of cards that shed light on these representations. I want to focus, though, on two: middle-aged masculinity and the different representations of daughters and sons.

There were plenty of cards like this one, that capture many of the stereotypical narratives about fatherhood, and middle-aged masculinity more broadly:

(Apologies for the poor picture quality, a nearby employee didn’t seem thrilled with my picture-taking).

Here, we see man/father as: head of the household (twice, and once as dictator – king): cooks, but only on the grill; lawn mowing expert; controller of the remote/TV watcher; and “big guy.” What’s not on there? Anything about love for children, caring, affection, equitable distribution of household duties (if part of a couple), etc.

Almost all of the love and affection, though, was saved for cards specifically marketed as ‘Dad from daughter.” Most of the cards in this picture were love-centric and labeled as such:

There were a few rare cards simply marked as ‘Dad’ that include themes of love and/or affection, such as this one:

The cards marked ‘Dad from son,’ however, mostly consisted of attempts at humor involving sports (especially golf), building things (or the lack of ability to do so), and, well, farts:

Obviously, we can’t draw too much from the greeting cards in one store, but in this store, at least, there was only one card explicitly marked for sons that primarily communicated feelings of love and affection; all of these were either marked for daughters to give or did not specify what gender should give them. Pairing this with the kinds of fatherly masculinity represented by the cards, Father’s Day cards are sold through the use of traditional gender representations.

Note: all photos licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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John McMahon is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he also participates in the Women’s Studies Certificate Program. He is interested in post-structuralism, issues relating to men and feminism, gendered practices in international relations, gender and political theory, and questions of American state identity. John blogs at Facile Gestures, where this post originally appeared.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Please enjoy these posts from Father’s Days past:

Stereotyping Men on Dad’s Day

• Feed Them Meat!
• Buy Them Non-Emasculating Cooking Supplies!

Also…

• Are You Coming on to me Daughter?
• Including Daughters in Father’s Day

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Deeb K. sent in a story from the New York Times about who does unpaid work — that is, the housework, carework, and volunteering that people do without financial compensation. Based on time-use surveys by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this chart shows how many more minutes per day women in various nations spend doing such activities compared to men:

Childcare stuck out as an area with a particularly large gap:

On child care in particular, mothers spend more than twice as much time per day as fathers do: 1 hour 40 minutes for mothers, on average, compared to 42 minutes for fathers…On average, working fathers spend only 10 minutes more per day on child care when they are not working, whereas working mothers spend nearly twice as much time (144 minutes vs. 74) when not working.

The full OECD report breaks down types of unpaid work (this is overall, including data for both men and women):

The study also found that non-working fathers spend less time on childcare than working mothers in almost every country in the study (p. 19). And mothers and fathers do different types of childcare, with dads doing more of what we might think of as the “fun stuff” (p. 20):

Source: Miranda, V. 2011. “Cooking, Caring and Volunteering: Unpaid Work around the World.” OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 116. OECD Publishing.

In the wake of two rounds of racially-charged anti-abortion campaigns: “Black Children are an Endangered Species” and “The Most Dangerous Place for an African-American is in the Womb.” These campaigns are built around the fact that pregnant black women are more likely to have abortions than pregnant white women.  The one getting attention at the moment, sent in by Laura E., is a set of billboards from That’s Abortion in the South Side of Chicago:

I’ve said this before, and it’s being said elsewhere, but I think it deserves to be said again, and strongly.

Many women have abortions because they cannot afford to raise a(nother) child.  They would bring the fetus to term if only they weren’t all-but-crushed under the burdens of under-served neighborhoods, shitty public education, a dearth of jobs that pay a living wage, a criminal justice system that strips inner cities of husbands and fathers, a lack of health care, and stingy, penalizing, and humiliating social services (when they can get them).  So telling black women that they are bad; telling them that they are killing their race alongside their babies, is twisting a knife that already penetrates deep in the black community.

Not to mention the fact that as soon as those poor women have children, they’re demonized for irresponsibly bringing babies into the world that they cannot support.  It’s called a double bind; damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  And no they cannot “wait until they’re in a better place financially” or “not have sex until they can afford to raise a child” because many, many women will never be in such a place in their entire lives.  And they can’t just “practice responsible contraception” because half of all pregnancies are unintended, at least a third among even the most well-educated and resource-rich women.  So pregnancies will and do happen, even to people who don’t want or can’t have a child.

If pro-life groups want to stop abortion, they need to stop accusing black women of moral bankruptcy and start putting those billboards up across from the Capital Building.  What black women need isn’t an ethics lesson, they need resources.  They need those very same people who tsk tsk them to stand up for them, to fight for a living wage, investments in their schools and communities, protection instead of criminalization, more available and better subsidized child care, and guaranteed parental leave benefits for all (it’s not a fantasy).  If black women had those things, then they might feel like that had a choice to keep their baby, just as they have a choice to abort their fetus.

It’s not the parents who fail to care-about-the-children in America, it’s a government and it’s citizens that allow 1 in 5 to languish in poverty.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Tim Wise answers just this question in this 2 1/2 minute clip featured on his website.  Sneak peak: His answer begins with “No. You should feel angry.”

Laurie J graciously pasted the transcript in the comments; I’ve added it after the jump.

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