Involved Fatherhood: Source of New Gender Conflicts?

This paper, based on interviews with 36 couples, focuses on fathers who take parental leave or reduce their working time in favor of participating in family work. Although being a minority, looking at these fathers helps to understand the complex dynamics of changing gender relations in the private sphere.

Involved fatherhood does not only contribute to more gender equality, it is also a potential source of new gender conflicts. The hegemonic cultural construction of masculinity is still job centered. Our data do not only show that involved fatherhood must be accomplished against the hegemonic pattern, but that, for involved fatherhood becoming an unquestioned routine, the father’s uncommon attitude to occupational career must be shared and supported by the mother. Otherwise the man’s abstinence from career ambitions is a permanent source of conflict.

Another potential source of conflict is who is entitled to define the standards of good domestic work. Fathers who are engaged in family work find themselves often in an ambivalent situation. Our data show that, on the one side, mothers appreciate father’s engagement, but, on the other side, tend to defend the household as their domain. Often the father gets into a position of his wife’s “junior partner”. If men refuse to be the junior partner a new kind of gender conflict arises. Closing the gap between “culture and conduct of fatherhood” (LaRossa) proves to be complicated in different respects. It even can evoke new conflicts.