Abstract
In Making Sense of Fatherhood, Miller explores how choices and constraints operate alongside ideas of involved fathering to facilitate, restrict, or deny opportunities for parenting among men in England. Specifically, Miller focuses on how men make sense of the transition and personal change that is involved in taking on the role of fatherhood through her longitudinal use of narrative construction. Miller interviews seventeen men as they anticipate and then become fathers for the first time and compares the findings with her earlier text Making Sense of Motherhood (2005) in order to understand how fathers do gender through comparative analysis.
A primary strength of Miller’s analysis is that she examines how social structures operate in the lives of men that facilitate or block involvement their in their fatherhood, rather than explain instances of an unequal division of labor in the domestic sphere as solely the result of individual choices made by selfish or lazy fathers. Miller observes that when parents are on paternity and maternity leaves, both mothers and fathers work together to learn practices of caring and parenting responsibilities are nearly equally shared. After paternity leave ends, however, paid work and financial contributions take on an increased importance in performing the role of a father. After returning to full-time employment, fathers have less time to be involved and become less attuned and less practiced in meeting their children’s needs compared to mothers, because the men are only able to provide activity-based care largely on the weekend.
Miller successfully explains how parental leave and participation in full-time work facilitate and block men’s participation in caregiving, respectively, while simultaneously acknowledging power differences that give fathers more leeway than mothers in choosing their level of involvement in providing everyday care for their children. Miller observes that it is more acceptable for fathers than mothers to acknowledge that caring for children is often hard work and can be repetitive and unrewarding at times. Some of the fathers in Miller’s study believe that mothers should instinctively know how to care for children but also acknowledged that mothers are better caregivers because they have more practice. As a result, fathers may continue to demonstrate a lack of expertise and can move more easily and less guiltily in and out of paid work and the home compared to mothers. In contrast to mothers, fathers are not expected to be naturally competent at caregiving and their relationships to their children do not put them at risk for losing themselves in their parenting roles. In fact, Miller argues that fathers must actively claim their identities as fathers even though others take for granted that women with children embody a maternal role.
Miller aptly recognizes that gendered choices operate in diverse and uneven ways for fathers. Men can work hard to demonstrate their parental identities or may reject or deny it with relatively little social sanction. The men in Miller’s study recognize that providing care work in performing the role of fatherhood per se does not yield the same level of social recognition as providing financial contributions for their families. Miller observes that the men express regret and sadness at not being as directly involved in care work as they imagined they would be after paternity leave ended but never the guilt that mothers often experienced. Even though men usually have more power to choose their level of involvement in caregiving, Miller observes that the men lacked access to mother-centered caregiving support networks and one father found that his wife’s desire to become a stay-at-home mother was given priority over his desire to become a stay-at-home father.
Miller concludes by suggesting that the fathers in her study are doing gender differently, but provides weak support for her claim the research participants’ actions fail to undo gender. According to Miller, the research participants’ interest and involvement in caregiving does not indicate that they are undoing gender because legacies of gendered caring arrangements continue to be relevant and fathers display elements of masculine discourse by still having more power to choose particular avenues for caregiving compared to mothers. “Their often sensitive and loving accounts of new fathering experiences were located in ways that emphasised change, but also appealed to recognisable strands of essentialist masculine discourse emphasizing strength and control and their power to choose particular pathways through work and caring” (Miller 2011, 177–78). Miller uses the experiences of women as the standard in demonstrating power differences, but in doing so forgets that mothers are oppressed when they are not allowed the ability to exercise control in defining their identities vis-à-vis their roles as mothers. Throughout the book, Miller demonstrates that the fathers suggest they perform many of the same tasks as mothers, but perform their care work in a more masculinized way. Perhaps Miller could have avoided insinuating that undoing gender means that men should also be oppressed by fatherhood in a similar way that women may be oppressed in their roles as mothers. Miller could have provided stronger support for her claim that the research participants are doing gender differently (but not undoing gender) by emphasizing the ways in which men redefine carework that is usually associated with mothers in masculine ways. Overall, I believe the book is a substantial contribution to scholarship on fathering because Miller explains how men experience structural constraints that both block and facilitate their participation in fatherhood, while vigilantly acknowledging power differences between men and women.