Father Courage:
What Happens When Men Put Family First
reviewed by J. Steven Svoboda
Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First. By Suzanne
Braun Levine. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2000. 264 pp.
This book surveys and interviews fathers aiming for the "triple
crown" of success at work, intimacy with family, and time for friends.
While conveying the sensible message that hard choices have to be made
and while one may be able to have anything, one can't have everything,
the book itself proves somewhat mixed.
The author presents a number of first-hand stories about the pitfalls
and payoffs of twenty-first century fatherhood. While at times the
book's through-line is hampered by her explicitly feminist viewpoint,
this bias is happily tempered by some healthy doses of common sense and
an imperfectly executed desire for fairness. Before I could even get out
of the preface and into the body of the book, I had to get by some
cursory allusions to how men allegedly "have so much going for them in
the status quo."
The tiresome mantra repeated over and over in the early pages about
how women frequently roll their eyes when asked about their husbands'
contributions to childraising itself had me rolling my eyes before I was
fifty pages into Father Courage. It seemingly never crosses Levine's
radar screens that the women passing these ostensibly Solomonic
judgments on their husbands' skills might themselves be biased and
loaded down with their own baggage. The author can't seem to stop
herself from tossing in her own condescending allusions to those guys,
who just never seem to "get it" despite the number of times saintly
women explain "it."
Mercifully, things quickly get a lot better and a lot more
interesting too. Amidst excerpts from her interviews with fathers,
Levine delves into some perplexing issues. She explores how to avoid
having women's knowledge about household matters rule by default when
there is never enough time to develop alternate approaches or even to
train Dad about what works.
Levine laudably laments the building of parenting advice on the Mommy
model, analogizing the dilemma with some cogency to the issues raised
when women first entered the professional workplace in droves. She
acknowledges the unfortunate fact that men are still suspect if they
take advantage of paternity leave, while women can be relatively open in
the workplace about their dual commitment to job and family. (I
appreciated her mentioning additional stresses created by the new 24/7
nature of the electronic workplace and addons to each workday such as
international calls and increased travel.)
And yet, inexplicably, Levine gives air time to women's complaints
that men do not shoulder half the "housework" but fails to factor into
her discussion the differential workplace demands on men. Irritatingly,
she also fails to adequately incorporate into her definition of chores
the many projects that men tend to take on involving maintenance,
outside work, dangerous work, etc. I found uncompelling her suggestion
that even domestic help does not help that much and the burden still
falls dramatically harder on women. She does offer a justification--to
my mind, a wholly inadequate one--for not doing so; she claims that
women's traditional work is what no one wants to do and requires regular
attention, while men do the intermittent tasks that everyone allegedly
prefers.
"Triumphing over a leaky faucet or sitting high up on a lawn mower
for an hour of pleasant privacy amidst fresh scents of new-mown grass
with a clear goal in sight is the antithesis of picking up dirty socks,
sopping up baby spills, and emptying the dishwasher, in varying
combinations, a zillion times a day." Talk about unfairly stacking the
deck! Sorry, Suzanne, but this man actually prefers unloading a
dishwasher to fixing a leaky faucet, and I haven't been committed to the
insane asylum yet!
The book improves greatly in the middle section. Levine delves into a
detailed examination of such issues as the lack of infrastructure for
men outside of work and discomfort around fathers with young children.
She intersperses her general discussions with excerpts from a number of
engaging interviews she conducted with fathers grappling with the
issues. Options developed by some of the men in concert with their wives
include sharing one job, not moving up the ladder as much as they would
if they weren't parents, creative scheduling, alternating the role of
full-time worker every six months or year, or doing day/night shifts so
that one parent can be home whenever the kids are awake.
Obviously these strategies won't work for everyone, but an exposure
to them helps inspire creativity. What may be good for children, Levine
notes, may not be good for a marriage, as a few of the arrangements she
examines don't give the couple any substantial awake time together
during the work week.
Levine returns again and again to the theme of "the dreaded tape"
which most mothers supposedly have running in their heads all the time,
a background hum of tasks which need to be taken care of to ensure that
everyone's needs are accomodated. Men may help, Levine writes, but they
rarely take on women's nearly universal burden of taskmastering and
retaining in their memory all that needs doing. While according to the
author, mothers almost universally run "the dreaded tape" practically
every minute they are awake, the male counterpart is the "grinding
gears" that men feel when they try to engage in several tasks at once.
Men tend to compartmentalize, and, she claims, always have the option to
opt out of the rigors of parenting duty. She suggests that virtually all
men take advantage of this possibility to some extent.
While initially I was highly resistant to her rap, she does score
some points and eventually I had to admit there are some lessons in what
she says, even some insights I have tried to start applying in my own,
so far childless partnership. Women and men do have some basic
differences in their operating system, and her summary is quite useful.
I greatly enjoyed the ongoing exposure throughout the book to repeat
characters whom we "met" in interviews earlier in the book. Levine adds
deft little characterizations of them to remind us of who they are.
Levine provides an empathetic exploration of the difficulties men
experience in accepting a newborn baby's common preference for its
mother, and a similarly sensitive exposition of how any nurturing
instincts we might have are systematically driven out of us as we grow.
Her interviews nicely complement and elucidate her theoretical analysis.
She tells a nice story about a man who knew when to break the rules and
allowed his five-year-old girl to hit him repeatedly to take out her
frustration when he was caught in traffic and quite late to pick her up.
We are also treated to an engaging tale of a gruff lumber mill worker
who becomes a primary parent after his wife is forced to move to another
state for work and--surprise!--he does a dashing good job of it.
Even better is the saga of the man who stubbornly insisted on staying
with his newborn through the battery of tests they ran on the baby. And
it gets "better," as the man relates: "Another thing that bugged me in
the hospital. They kept saying, 'Mother's name?' Her name is Stella.
'Child's name?' Aaron. And I was like 'Don't you have another question?'
'No, that'll be all.' I said, 'What about father's name?' And the woman
actually said, 'How do we know you're the father?'" That's the sort of
"ouch" that the author seemingly wants to root out almost as desperately
as some of us do.
In the end, as Levine notes, one generation cannot fully transform a
culture, though those currently in their twenties and early thirties are
giving it a solid attempt. And feedback between the generations can
help; the author adds some insightful analysis at a couple of points in
the book about grandfathers. Often grandfathers express with their
grandsons emotions they could never give to their sons, but attentive
sons can take in those feelings nevertheless, with compassion for the
barriers that made transmission of them impossible for their fathers. By
being loving grandfathers to their grandsons, these men in the autumn of
their lives may show their sons how to be better fathers than they
themselves were able to be.
Throughout most of her book, Levine acknowledges the tough choices
that have to be made between fiercely competing priorities as individual
men struggle to achieve their own version of the "triple crown," and the
various types of programming that make rational decisions almost
impossible. Unfortunately, she ends on a sour note, striking a pose of
camaraderie and supposedly shared reminiscence over feminist struggle
that rang false in my ears. Seemingly grasping for an upbeat ending, she
abandons the complexities that distinguished the bulk of the book and
reaches for an unrealistically rosy vision of smoothly reconciled
conflicts between work and personal life. She apparently forgets that
her purported subject is men, who due to both societal and personal
factors, can't blend the two as easily as women can!
We thus should hardly be surprised by her subsequent, inadvertent
revelation that she neither likes nor understands either the
pro-feminist nor the men's rights branches of the men's movement. All
this notwithstanding, any reader with a trace of Levine's ability to
transcend one's inevitably limited point of view will find much of value
in this occasionally irritating but mostly sensitive, engaging, and
fresh look at fathers struggling to live balanced, family-centered
lives.
Levine laudably laments the building of parenting advice on the Mommy
model, analogizing the dilemma with some cogency to the issues raised
when women first entered the professional workplace in droves. She
acknowledges the unfortunate fact that men are still suspect if they
take advantage of paternity leave, while women can be relatively open in
the workplace about their dual commitment to job and family. (I
appreciated her mentioning additional stresses created by the new 24/7
nature of the electronic workplace and addons to each workday such as
international calls and increased travel.)
And yet, inexplicably, Levine gives air time to women's complaints
that men do not shoulder half the "housework" but fails to factor into
her discussion the differential workplace demands on men. Irritatingly,
she also fails to adequately incorporate into her definition of chores
the many projects that men tend to take on involving maintenance,
outside work, dangerous work, etc. I found uncompelling her suggestion
that even domestic help does not help that much and the burden still
falls dramatically harder on women. She does offer a justification--to
my mind, a wholly inadequate one--for not doing so; she claims that
women's traditional work is what no one wants to do and requires regular
attention, while men do the intermittent tasks that everyone allegedly
prefers.
"Triumphing over a leaky faucet or sitting high up on a lawn mower
for an hour of pleasant privacy amidst fresh scents of new-mown grass
with a clear goal in sight is the antithesis of picking up dirty socks,
sopping up baby spills, and emptying the dishwasher, in varying
combinations, a zillion times a day." Talk about unfairly stacking the
deck! Sorry, Suzanne, but this man actually prefers unloading a
dishwasher to fixing a leaky faucet, and I haven't been committed to the
insane asylum yet!
The book improves greatly in the middle section. Levine delves into a
detailed examination of such issues as the lack of infrastructure for
men outside of work and discomfort around fathers with young children.
She intersperses her general discussions with excerpts from a number of
engaging interviews she conducted with fathers grappling with the
issues. Options developed by some of the men in concert with their wives
include sharing one job, not moving up the ladder as much as they would
if they weren't parents, creative scheduling, alternating the role of
full-time worker every six months or year, or doing day/night shifts so
that one parent can be home whenever the kids are awake.
Obviously these strategies won't work for everyone, but an exposure
to them helps inspire creativity. What may be good for children, Levine
notes, may not be good for a marriage, as a few of the arrangements she
examines don't give the couple any substantial awake time together
during the work week.
Levine returns again and again to the theme of "the dreaded tape"
which most mothers supposedly have running in their heads all the time,
a background hum of tasks which need to be taken care of to ensure that
everyone's needs are accomodated. Men may help, Levine writes, but they
rarely take on women's nearly universal burden of taskmastering and
retaining in their memory all that needs doing. While according to the
author, mothers almost universally run "the dreaded tape" practically
every minute they are awake, the male counterpart is the "grinding
gears" that men feel when they try to engage in several tasks at once.
Men tend to compartmentalize, and, she claims, always have the option to
opt out of the rigors of parenting duty. She suggests that virtually all
men take advantage of this possibility to some extent.
While initially I was highly resistant to her rap, she does score
some points and eventually I had to admit there are some lessons in what
she says, even some insights I have tried to start applying in my own,
so far childless partnership. Women and men do have some basic
differences in their operating system, and her summary is quite useful.
I greatly enjoyed the ongoing exposure throughout the book to repeat
characters whom we "met" in interviews earlier in the book. Levine adds
deft little characterizations of them to remind us of who they are.
Levine provides an empathetic exploration of the difficulties men
experience in accepting a newborn baby's common preference for its
mother, and a similarly sensitive exposition of how any nurturing
instincts we might have are systematically driven out of us as we grow.
Her interviews nicely complement and elucidate her theoretical analysis.
She tells a nice story about a man who knew when to break the rules and
allowed his five-year-old girl to hit him repeatedly to take out her
frustration when he was caught in traffic and quite late to pick her up.
We are also treated to an engaging tale of a gruff lumber mill worker
who becomes a primary parent after his wife is forced to move to another
state for work and--surprise!--he does a dashing good job of it.
Even better is the saga of the man who stubbornly insisted on staying
with his newborn through the battery of tests they ran on the baby. And
it gets "better," as the man relates: "Another thing that bugged me in
the hospital. They kept saying, 'Mother's name?' Her name is Stella.
'Child's name?' Aaron. And I was like 'Don't you have another question?'
'No, that'll be all.' I said, 'What about father's name?' And the woman
actually said, 'How do we know you're the father?'" That's the sort of
"ouch" that the author seemingly wants to root out almost as desperately
as some of us do.
In the end, as Levine notes, one generation cannot fully transform a
culture, though those currently in their twenties and early thirties are
giving it a solid attempt. And feedback between the generations can
help; the author adds some insightful analysis at a couple of points in
the book about grandfathers. Often grandfathers express with their
grandsons emotions they could never give to their sons, but attentive
sons can take in those feelings nevertheless, with compassion for the
barriers that made transmission of them impossible for their fathers. By
being loving grandfathers to their grandsons, these men in the autumn of
their lives may show their sons how to be better fathers than they
themselves were able to be.
Throughout most of her book, Levine acknowledges the tough choices
that have to be made between fiercely competing priorities as individual
men struggle to achieve their own version of the "triple crown," and the
various types of programming that make rational decisions almost
impossible. Unfortunately, she ends on a sour note, striking a pose of
camaraderie and supposedly shared reminiscence over feminist struggle
that rang false in my ears. Seemingly grasping for an upbeat ending, she
abandons the complexities that distinguished the bulk of the book and
reaches for an unrealistically rosy vision of smoothly reconciled
conflicts between work and personal life. She apparently forgets that
her purported subject is men, who due to both societal and personal
factors, can't blend the two as easily as women can!
We thus should hardly be surprised by her subsequent, inadvertent
revelation that she neither likes nor understands either the
pro-feminist nor the men's rights branches of the men's movement. All
this notwithstanding, any reader with a trace of Levine's ability to
transcend one's inevitably limited point of view will find much of value
in this occasionally irritating but mostly sensitive, engaging, and
fresh look at fathers struggling to live balanced, family-centered
lives.
J. Steven Svoboda is a performance artist, poet, and a human rights
lawyer who is Executive Director of Attorneys for the Rights of the
Child, which he founded in 1997.
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