Father Figures and Cultural Diversity in France

Introduction: Fathers and the Families

Numerous specific points set France apart from the European countries in terms of family, education, employment, and social protection. Historically, the French Civil Code of 1804 is considered as a model for the equilibrium of a patriarchal family: the husband holds the paternal power and the marital power and is the lord and head of the community. France is a particularly interesting case study for a decline in patriarchy (Therborn 2004, 100). Furthermore, France occupies today a very paradoxical position among European countries. The French welfare state can be described as family-friendly. The “French fertility paradox” is the combination of a highest fertility rate among European Union countries (the same as in Ireland), with a high level of economic activity for mothers. ¹ Finally, a recent survey ² that collects the opinion of the population points another paradox [Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (INSEE 2015)]:

On one hand, France is in line with countries that have a traditional conception of the family (Baltic States, Eastern and Southern European countries). France, with over 80 percent of respondents in agreement, is one of the countries which considers that “a child needs a father and a mother to be happy.”

In this context, what about fathers? In order to reflect on fathers today, we need to consider the transformations that have taken place in the family as a social institution. The proliferation of family configurations since the 1970s (e.g., single-parent families, blended families, and same-sex families) and the progress in assisted reproduction methods have opened up a debate on “what makes a family” in France today. In 2011, these were the facts:

55% of children are born outside marriage (and 65% of firstborns), whereas this figure was only 6% in 1970;

The predominant family standard in France is nevertheless still the dual earner family with two or three children. This situation very much outweighs all other situations: large families, stay-at-home mothers, and single-parent families, not to mention same-sex families, mixed nationality families, or families of foreign origin.

The outlook changes fundamentally, depending on whether one considers the current difficulties surrounding families and education of children as the result of a general decline in authority in the society and in the father as the patriarchal paterfamilias, or alternatively as the effect of new plural family formations (Hurstel 2008). How the idea of an “end to patriarchalisation” (Castells 1997, 192) with an egalitarian sharing of household tasks can be supported? Today in France what are the figures of fathers’ involvement?

After setting out the issues and the data that served as a basis for our analysis, we identify three different forms of fatherhood: (1) neopatriarchy, with the strong impact of certain traditional father figures; (2) absent or failing fathers through the eyes of sociologists, mothers, and early childcare professionals; and (3) new forms of involved fatherhood with tensions and ambiguities.

The Issues at Stake: Practical Fatherhood and Symbolic Fatherhood

The authors who observe change in family models point the move from the male breadwinner model to dual earner families. Barrère-Maurisson (2007) defines the three ages of male/female relationships in the public policies in relation to the labor market. In the 1960/1970s, family policies took their inspiration from pronatalist ideas that focused on large families and young children. The family was the main object of social policies that aim at preserving the family institution. It was the age of “familialism.” The fathers were male breadwinners and most mothers stayed at home. In the 1980s, the development of feminine employment in the tertiary sector and the individualization of women stimulated a demand by couples for the expansion of public day-care facilities and other social services. The demand was actively supported both by the women’s movement, which strongly emphasized issues of equality in the labor market, and by the main trade unions. These factors gave a strong impetus to changes in family policies, which began to incorporate the model of the “working mother.” Social norms and public policies promote today the employment of women. Some authors use the term “state feminism” to reflect the essential role of public policies in the definition of social citizenship of women (Revillard 2006). It was the age of “feminism.” Since the end of 1990s, with the flexibility of both family and labor market, the child becomes the target of policy and family law. In 1997, the government announced a “new family policy,” inspired by notions of social justice and gender equality. Hence, mothers are encouraged to work and to stay in employment. The idea of a modern family based on gender equality and powerful government policies is called “parentalism.”

To fully understand fatherhood, we must “set out the relationship of men and women to childcare as constituting historically and culturally determined forms of parenthood” (Côté 2009, 63). For this reason, we are interested in distinguishing two dimensions of the distribution of roles between parents, a distribution that concerns much more than merely material questions:

The distribution of roles and material tasks: who actually does what in the family? This is what we call practical fatherhood that highlights the way in which fathers care for and are concerned about their children. This practical fatherhood (like practical motherhood) is also influenced by all concrete behaviors legitimately expected of a father by society or by the family. Social ideals and collective images intervene in practical fatherhood. They underlie and motivate behavior and conduct to assign a label of “good” or “bad” father, “traditional” father, or “new” father.

Materials and Methods

Our basic materials consisted of interviews conducted with mothers, fathers, parental couples, professionals, and early childhood establishments in the context of the research project described below (see Box 1). The (relatively low) participation in the survey by fathers differed according to the nature of the parental couple. Fathers were not often present at interviews with heterosexual couples: of the forty-five interviews, the father was present in only a quarter of cases (twelve interviews) but in over half of the interviews (twenty-six interviews), the mothers spoke about the role of the father in their family. In contrast, of the twelve interviews with homosexual couples (three same-sex male couples and nine same-sex female couples), both members of the couple were present in ten cases.

The diversity of parental situations posed different problems for the professionals: the absence of the father for one-parent families and same-sex female families, the need for transparency for blended families and same-sex families, and knowing to what extent cultural differences are acceptable for mixed families or families of foreign origin.

Part 1—Impacts and Tensions around Neopatriarchal Fatherhood

Historically, marriage is the basis of the family institution: “The authority of the husband and father, and also the wife’s obligation to be faithful, were the guarantors of the proper functioning of the institution of marriage. […] It was considered that the cohesion of the family required the exercising of an authority which could only devolve to the husband” (Dekeuwer-Défossez 2003, 176).

In the twentieth century, the power of the father and of the couple in the family was gradually questioned and paternal power disappeared, to be replaced by parental authority ³ ; women also gained the right to control their own reproduction with laws on abortion and contraception. We should also add the way in which the state gradually took over the father’s authority in protecting children and single mothers (Verjus 2013, 17). Two dimensions of the traditional model currently exist in some families, although this is no longer the patriarchal model of the nineteenth century: a strong symbolic representation of fatherhood which still holds the authority and a strong specialization in the parental roles, with fathers providing the household with economic resources, and mothers dealing with household tasks and childcare, the result being that a small amount of time is invested by fathers in household tasks and caring for the children.

Authority in the Family

The large families in our sample, irrespective of their social class, are all in agreement over the question of challenging the authority of the figure considered today to be dominant, that of the enfant-roi (child-king). One stay-at-home mother with six children told us: “There is a real loss of authority but also a real loss of any point of reference for everyone.” The same is true for this mother of a large, working-class blended family: “Both my husband and I know what we want and what we don’t want for our children. We give them a lot, but it’s true that we are very ‘old-style’, very strict.” However, authority is not specifically related to the father figure. It is a general principle for educating children. We need to look at families of African origin to find authority that has devolved specifically to the father: “(The children) know who is dad and who is mom. […] We moms are too affectionate, whereas dad, he’s the authority figure. […] That’s how it is; it doesn’t change from generation to generation” (mother of African origin, large blended family, both parents working).

In some immigrant families from West Africa, the patriarchal model of authority represented by the father carries significant weight through filial transmission: “The model I have, it’s my father. He was very authoritarian but we could feel that it was authority to keep us on the right path” (father of African origin, born in France, both parents working). Nevertheless, living conditions in France and the standard of the nuclear family mean that some fathers have no choice but to look after their children, whereas they would not have done so had they stayed in Africa, where there is still an extended family: “Over there, there are grandmothers who look after everything; Here, there’s the husband and the wife and that’s all. Here the husband has to look after the baby” (mother, immigrant family recently arrived from Africa).

Parental Roles

Fathers are first and foremost providers of economic resources. They contribute little to household tasks and childcare, but they take on specific paternal functions, for example, weekend activities, DIY. This specific function sharing may concern symbolic roles like religious education, especially in Muslim families: “With six children, there’s just me to do everything for them. Getting the children dressed, everything, it’s only me. […] Bringing them up in the faith, yes, it’s mainly their father who talks to them a lot about religion: ‘You mustn’t do that. You must be good; you must respect your elders’” (stay-at-home mother of large immigrant family of African origin).

Regarding the sharing of household tasks, the following dialogue is enlightening as to the specialization in the family and the accompanying role assignments. The father only acknowledges his occasional participation in the ironing (prime example of a feminine household task) at the same time as he mentions an activity labeled as purely masculine, football and rugby matches: “Father: Me, I do DIY and she does the rest! Mother: There you are! You can’t say that I have a great deal of help with the household tasks. Father: I sometimes do a bit of ironing while I’m watching the rugby or the football” (large middle-class family, both parents work). Or this father who gives the mother her assigned role: “Mother: It’s complicated, it’s a mad rush on Friday evenings. Father: But that’s your job, you’re the mother!” (Large blended family, working class).

Many mothers of large families from a well-off social background gave up their professional activity, often highly qualified, as their children were born and because their husband was able to sustain the family financially. A stay-at-home mother with four children, whose husband, a doctor, had the opportunity to open his own private practice, gave up her work after the birth of her third child. After studying law, she was a practicing corporate lawyer and had started to study for a master’s in law which she then gave up: “He (my husband) said to me one day: ‘If you want, I’ll give up work’, but I said to him, ‘If you give up work, we can’t eat’. So we’ll avoid any arguments, you go to work and I’ll stay at home…” Another stay-at-home mother with six children, whose husband is head of a company: “I’m lucky that I have a husband who works and who is able to provide us with a certain standard of living, and that’s really nice.”

Several of these mothers justify their presence in the home because they made “the choice of family” and thus avoid having their children looked after outside the home. This was notably the priority of several Catholic women from well-off backgrounds who had given up their careers when their second or third child was born. These mothers state that the primary reason for giving up their professional life was in the interests of the child: “My children come first. […] I can’t see myself getting home at 6:30, not picking up my children from school and putting them in summer camp for half of the holidays” (well-off stay-at-home mother of large family). “We made a real choice to have a large family ⁴ . So we have the children we wanted and we had to take care of them” (well-off stay-at-home mother of large family).

However, this is a difficult choice for some mothers. It is experienced as a tugging between giving up a job and the joy of getting to know one’s children. A young mother of three children is now at home but was a general practitioner until she had her second child. Her husband is a surgeon, they are practicing Catholics, and she said this: “We lose our independence being at home […] but at the same time, we win as far as the children are concerned.” The conflict between a career and staying home is also sometimes something to be ashamed of in light of current social norms which place no value on the status of a stay-at-home mother: “I find it impossible to say to people, ‘I’m a stay-at-home mom’. I say to everyone, ‘I’m on parental leave’” (stay-at-home mother of four children, corporate lawyer until her third child, father is a doctor, Catholics). The decision to stay at home is not always taken completely freely; social norms are also the norms of the family environment. A mother of a Catholic family of four children who had given up her job after her third child described the family pressure that motivated her choice: “For my parents, my life was totally inconceivable, because I was not looking after my children. What was inconceivable that I had made this professional choice.”

We can see that religious practice ⁵ (Catholic or Muslim in our sample) is an important factor to be considered in the persistence of this neopatriarchal model: “It makes sense for us (Catholics) to have a father, a mother, to have marriage” (mother of five children, practicing Catholic, both parents are teachers, upper middle class). This form of “familialism,” still active, may appear to be in decline or undergoing a transformation for several reasons. The desire of some mothers to get out of the house is all the stronger when they have previously had a career; this is an important factor when challenging specialization in parental roles. Moreover, the increase in the numbers of couples separating and the growth in numbers of unemployed fathers mean that they lose their status of main family resource provider and this may tip the configuration toward an exclusively maternal authority figure.

Part 2—Issue of the Absent or Failing Father

The issue of the absence of the father, from a social, material, or psychological point of view, preoccupies sociologists and professionals alike. The image of the failing father and the consequences of his decline for families are largely analyzed in the context of sociological or psychological research and give rise to considerable discussion. Gauchet (2004) associates the weakening position of the father in the family with an “anthropological mutation,” characterized by a transformation of the social and psychological conditions in which the children are born and brought up. According to Gauchet, the modern-day family has been deinstitutionalized and has now become strictly private. Released from its obligation to perpetuate society, it now limits its ambition to an individual development project. This disinvolvement in the local community has a direct negative effect on the father figure, the traditional guarantor of the role of the family in society. “The head of the family, the paternal law-giver, the strong father figure shouldered responsibility for the family unit in relation to global society” (Gauchet 2004, 98). The emancipation of women and sexuality has caused the “final collapse of the patriarchal principle.” Gauchet concludes that this has resulted in “the liquidation of the paternal principle.” In contrast, he describes the arrival of a “matriarchy in the psychological sense,” with women today both expressing the desire for a child and being the authority in the family. “It is no exaggeration to say that the trend is towards a type of family where mothers are also fathers, while the actual father has only a residual existence. At best he is a prop for the maternal hub, with no distinct psychological or symbolic function” (Gauchet 2007, 17). For Gauchet, the decline in paternal authority since the 1970s and the abandonment of “his investiture as representative of the global community within the domestic group” have contributed to enshrining the mother as all-powerful in the family and for the children, for whom she has become the “total parent.” Thus, Gauchet links the decline of the family and its own goal of private fulfillment to the decline of the father figure in favor of the mothers, who have become the only justifications and the only driving forces behind these modern-day families focusing on the desire for a child “for oneself.”

Hurstel (2008) complements Gauchet’s approach when she considers that the functions of the father have been extremely weakened, not so much in the way the father assumes his social role as in his function of symbolic third party. She defines three historical ruptures in the construction of the father figure, of a legal, biological, and social nature, which account for the confusion among fathers today:

The first relates to the end of the father’s legal domination as head of the family. This movement has gradually become established in a series of stages since the French Revolution, when the first laws restricting paternal power were passed (Knibiehler 1997, 145/147). It was in this context from the twentieth century that the figure of the absent, failing, or incestuous father appeared. The definitive demise of the paterfamilias was enshrined in the Law of 1970 where joint parental authority replaced paternal power in France. ⁶ For Hurstel (2008), giving both parents equal legal status resulted in the assimilation of the paternal and maternal roles. The family roles appear interchangeable; modern fathers are obliged to invent a new way of being a father, outside the traditional scope of the paterfamilias.

The majority of studies on the family are in agreement in recognizing that one of the important consequences of demarriage is the weakening of paternal status and father/child relationship after the separation. The report by Théry and Leroyer (2014) reveals the very strong tension between two opposing views concerning the status of the stepparent: either strengthen the stepparent role to make up for the absence of the father from the children’s lives or avoid creating a parent substitute who would compete with the father/child bonds and weaken them still further. In particular, the authors point out the fears of associations defending the rights of fathers who are opposed to the creation of a stepparent status, in order to protect the “real” parent (the one who gave him life) over the person who is sharing the child’s everyday life. From her psychoanalytical point of view, Hurstel (2008) is concerned about the elimination of the symbolic father function in blended families, a function now carried out neither by the stepfather, who has no legitimacy over the child, nor by an intermittent biological father, who sees his children only one weekend in two when they tend to focus on having fun. She is critical that there is a risk, with this double negation of the fatherhood function, that the “third party” function played by the father between the mother and the child will disappear. We note that the vast majority of people whom we met during our survey—both early childhood professionals and parents—borrowed this notion of “third party separator” from the vocabulary of psychology and considered it as a necessary precondition for equilibrium in filial relations.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the place of the father has been considerably shaken and raises serious concerns in professional social intervention circles, clinical psychologists, and social science researchers alike. Martial (2013) shows how absent fatherhood was seen as a social problem and a subject of public intervention with the rise in separations in the 1970s. The subject of failing fathers has crystallized around the question of frequently unpaid child support. ⁸ The criticism leveled at absent fathers falls into two types: they do not fulfill their role of breadwinner and they abandon their educational role, leaving the practical and psychological responsibility for the children to the mothers. Martial stresses that in the 1990s and in 2004, studies on the effects of paternal disengagement from children’s well-being, good development, and social integration reached a consensus: the postdivorce family “needs a father.” Fatherhood was therefore identified as a subject of legislative and political intervention in itself.

In the face of tremendous expressions of regret over the symbolic and practical decline in the father figure, there is nevertheless one notable exception in Karsz (2014, 37) who tackles “the legend of the absent father, a pejorative and moralistic formula that assigns all blame for family and social functioning to paternal behavior.” For Karsz (2014, 37), we should “abandon the reference to the Father, this imaginary being, whose absence can often be overcome by the retrospective idealization of what he would have been, would have said and done if he had never existed.”

Echoing the analyses and concerns expressed in the social sciences, early childhood professionals often make a fairly grim diagnosis of today’s families, largely motivated by identifying the problem of the “missing father.” Over the last twenty years, the number of single-parent families has increased considerably, drawing the attention of public policies. This new family configuration is usually marked by situations of social precarity. The share of single-parent families among all families with minor children is increasing (affecting 21 percent of families or an increase of more than four points in ten years). One-third of single-parent families, or more than 1.8 million people, have income below the poverty line (60 percent of median income) compared with 11 percent of those living in a couple (Observatoire des inégalités 2016). Notions such as support for parenthood and parental work are emerging in political discourse. According to some, public policies supporting parenthood are a way of “re-arming” parents (Chauvière 2004) against the changing relations between parents and children. The attention of birth and early childhood professionals is particularly drawn to situations of absent fathers, even in cases where the couple have not separated. The belief that children today lack a male presence in their education and in their everyday lives is shared extensively by early childhood professionals, even by nonpsychologists. Nevertheless, working with the mothers in this way can be tricky and comes up against two types of resistance: resistance from many of the fathers, who do not want to be involved with institutions after the breakup, and resistance from mothers who often prefer to organize themselves on their own and may see these incentives toward co-parenthood as an unwelcome intrusion.

This analysis by the professionals has to be linked to what the families themselves say. Many mothers separated or not, say that it is only they who represent authority in the family, as the father is not often present. In extreme cases, it is the mother who deals with everything, on her own. Some societies within the French population have always been built on this matriarchal model (Mulot 2000): Caribbean societies where slavery prevented the construction of a family norm on the model of that of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie: “That’s rooted in our society, the mother, as we say back home, she’s the ‘poteau-mitan’, the central pillar” (mother of a blended family of Caribbean origin, working class). Apart from this geographical tradition, many mothers claim this role. The testimonies corroborate Gauchet’s analysis of these new mothers or “total parents”: “I’m the head of the family, and I’m the mother, I’m the father, I’m everything. […] I’m responsible for everyone. […] I organize myself all by myself and I am there for everyone. […] We don’t need a man to mess things up!” (Unemployed single mother with four children).

In their testimony, some mothers put forward explanations for the reasons why the fathers are absent. For one of these women, her husband, who was unemployed when the baby was born, was afraid of being trapped in the role of “stay-at-home father.” In this case, the rejection of the demeaning social image of the man in the home and the fear of social activity being reduced to caring for the household caused the father to flee: “When S. was born, he (the father) did look after him a little, but he didn’t want it to be too much. He didn’t want to be a stay-at-home father, even though he wasn’t working and I was” (mother of single-parent family, the father left when the baby was three months old).

While the failing father figure dominates academic literature and public debate and is encroaching on the professional narrative and that of the families themselves, it coexists with other contemporary father figures, who are trying to invent new types of relationship with children and are trying new ways of being involved in a family. We shall see that alongside the traditional or absent father, there is a wide range of paternal roles offering symbolic and/or concrete, varied and unusual types of involvement.

Part 3—Many Involved Father Figures, Tensions, and Ambiguities

As stressed by Neyrand (2014), the process of family “democratization,” which was established from the 1960s onward, is riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies. Thus although we may see new figures emerging of fathers’ involvement in their children’s everyday life, these types of paternal commitment are not without their tensions, both within the family and in relation to the social environment, as evidenced by some half-affectionate, half-mocking terms like papa poule (doting father). The father’s commitment may result in a greater presence with the child, without challenging any sexual differentiation in the roles, or it may lead to a relative lack of differentiation in parental functions or to real innovations in the way that family life functions. Sociological studies on fathers’ commitment, especially that of separated and divorced fathers, show that gender models persist, including in the context of greater father involvement (Doucet 2006). However, they also show the sometimes contemptuous reactions with which fathers are confronted when they encroach on mainly female social spaces with their young children (Arrendell 1995). And finally, they highlight the overlapping of professional situation and the meaning of fathers’ commitment: for example, parental work can become more worthwhile than a degrading professional status (Allard et al. 2005). Through these different dimensions, our survey reveals a large variety of figures which we illustrate each time with one or more examples.

Balancing Parental Roles: Differentiations, Innovations, Tensions

According to INSEE’s Time Use Surveys, the distribution of domestic educational tasks is more evenly balanced, on average, in middle-class couples, especially when they have only one or two children. When both parents are employed in a socially valued profession and share the same values, they are likely to cooperate closely in the education of their children, and paternal involvement is inseparable from an egalitarian equilibrium within the couple. This is the case for Pierre and Caroline. At the time of the survey, Pierre is thirty-six, he is a sustainable development consultant and Caroline, thirty-four, is an actress, having worked previously as a lawyer. Their elder daughter is four and a half and their younger daughter is six months old. Caroline stated repeatedly, “I’m lucky to have a husband who looks after his children really well.” She added that they discovered and learned their role as parents together, equally. In large families, and all the more so with practicing Catholics, the father’s commitment can be considerable in terms of presence, while still maintaining the traditional sharing of parental roles. This is the case for this couple, parents of four children, aged six, four, two, and eleven months. The mother is thirty-three and is at home on parental leave, while the father is a doctor in general practice. The mother acknowledges both her husband’s involvement and the differentiation in their roles: “I think that we really each have our own…father–mother specific roles. We don’t have the same relationship with them, I think, even in terms of tenderness and the way we see things. My husband, he’ll have fun fighting with them, rolling around for a quarter of an hour in the garden. Me, never in my life! Besides that, and unlike many families who perhaps correspond more to the Catholic code, my husband is very present in helping in the house and with the children.”

There are other configurations that demonstrate an undeniable creativity in inventing roles. In the following example, the family shows both a desire to democratize family life, to construct a mixed-race education that borrows from both the French and Congolese models, and a strong involvement on the part of the father who has no hesitation in taking on roles which are usually qualified as maternal. Originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the father is a security guard, while the mother has worked since the age of eighteen at McDonalds. The couple has four children whom they choose to involve as much as possible in family decisions. The mother speaks with tenderness and gratitude about her husband’s paternal involvement: “My husband, he is very…very ‘papa gâteau’ (he spoils them). Me, I call him ‘papa-maman’. You’d really think he was a mom (laughs)…[…] My husband, he’s a real ‘papa poule’! (doting father).” The father assumes fully the attention he pays to his children, while recognizing that he also has real authority over them. Concerning the education, he considers it necessary to observe a certain degree of complementarity between French and African notions. The children are not only baptized but also circumcised. Despite the cost, the couple decided to travel to Africa with the children so that they could discover their roots. This educational practice is accompanied by a more global idea about the future of interbreeding: “Me, I’ve always said, ‘Peace will come with the blending of races’.”

The reversal of roles or at least the involvement of the father in childcare activities may arouse some mixed reactions on the part of the family and social network, especially in certain circles where they are attached to traditional values. In the case of this family of four children (eight, seven, five, and two years old), the mother arrived in France from Morocco at the time of her marriage and the father works for Renault. The mother acknowledges that her husband participated actively in childcare from the very beginning, which has given rise to astonishment, and even incomprehension: “There were people who saw him changing the baby, and then giving him his bottle, washing him, and they said: ‘Well, we’ve never seen a father like that, he’s obsessed, he’ll be doing the housework next!’.”

Sometimes it is the mother herself who considers that she finds it hard to hand over her entire role to the father. Like this young woman aged thirty, a medical secretary looking for a job, mother of two children (a girl aged five and a boy aged two). She lives in her mother’s small house with her two children but the father, of Caribbean origin, is very much present. She admitted that “Sometimes, I find it difficult to let go, to leave room for the dad. I want to do everything: the father’s role, the mother’s role, all the roles, in fact! Since I’m not working, I’ve said to myself that I’ll have to manage my time. I have to do everything.”

Conversely, we may encounter situations where the father is fully involved in the childcare, but nevertheless maintains a dominant position within the family, ultimately leaving little room for the mother. This is the case with this Kosovan father who arrived in France in 1999 and was naturalized the same year; he is married to an Albanian woman who does not have a job and who has difficulty speaking French. It is clearly the father who maintains most of the relationships with professionals (doctors, childcare workers, etc.). This does not prevent him joining in with the everyday care of the children (meals, bedtime, bath time, etc.).

Gay Fatherhood and Criticism of the Matriarchy

Despite their differences, the three couples of gay fathers that we encountered during the survey are all well endowed with cultural capital, and all have the same awareness of their commitment to fatherhood: “Of course, we didn’t make a kid on the back seat of a car after drinking three beers. It was all carefully thought out” (biological father of a little girl aged three, doctor, same-sex couple, Paris).

They all say that they suffer from a widespread denial of fathering skills in society: “In France, not having a father, it’s not too serious, the mom will be able to get by, but if there’s no mom, my God, what a catastrophe! The father won’t be able to manage and there’s no hope for the kid. I’m exaggerating the caricature so firmly planted in the subconscious of French family beliefs, but not by much” (biological father in same-sex couple, two boys of three and five years, Paris). According to them, this denial is due both to the attitude of some women, firmly attached to their monopoly of ancestral knowledge, and of some men too, jealously guarding their power like a strutting rooster: “There are some women who have this attitude. They were the guardians of a secret, a history, a skill. Their attitude consists in saying to themselves that their husbands are not capable. Imagine other men, married to each other, absolutely out of the question! There’s that and there are castrated men too: reproduction was the last power they wielded as a rooster over the gay man. The fact that the gay man has become a parent, then somewhere in the balance, we’re on the same level, now everyone is a rooster!” (father, same-sex couple, one adopted child).

The hetero-standardized model of parenthood is seen as the joint action of overanxious mothers and exaggeratedly distant fathers. Thus, the involved fatherhood of these gay couples results in a clear criticism of the matriarchy, a matriarchy that manifests itself in practice, but also in the legal institutional system, accused of arbitrating systematically in favor of women.

The Educational Commitment of the Stepfather

In several examples of blended families that we met in the course of the survey, the stepfather is described by the mother as a much more reliable figure of involved fatherhood compared to the biological father. For example, this mother, a child minder, has five children from a first marriage and one seven-month-old baby with her new instructor husband. She considers her ex-husband to be very stubborn and believes that she suffered from an unfairly balanced division of tasks. In contrast, the second husband demonstrates his educational commitment alongside his wife, including toward his stepchildren: “I have a second husband who provides for me. […]. In the evening, since I work sometimes until 8:30 pm, looking after the children that I take in, he deals with the homework. We really share the tasks. […] When he senses that I’m starting to panic because I have too much to do, he’s there for me.”

Conclusion: Toward a New Fatherhood?

What will be the place of fathers in tomorrow’s French society? After several decades of change in the Western family, we now observe the coexistence of several processes which as they come into collision may make the course of history difficult to predict. Our survey has shown that three phenomena are superimposed one on top of the other, as a result of the overlapping of the three ages of male/female relationships in the public policies: familialism, feminism, and parentalism.

First, we note the persistence of a neopatriarchal model in some specific segments of society, in particular large families who practice their religion actively, whether Catholic or Muslim, for example: in these cases, a confirmed symbolic fatherhood coincides with a practical fatherhood which is limited to a traditional assignment of roles. However, this model declines in other levels of society, under the combined effect of mass unemployment, a rise in female professional activity, and an increase in marital separations: deprived of his role of resource provider and/or living away from the family home, the absent father no longer takes on a role, either symbolic or practical. The family support professionals are becoming alarmed about this situation, blaming the unhappiness, or indiscipline of the children on the absence of the fathers. Lastly, we also see emerging a whole range of father involvement figures: one which is widespread among the intellectual middle classes, where tasks are shared equally and with little differentiation within the home; one where the father shakes up or even overturns gender roles, whether in a gay or heterosexual couple, even when it sometimes means being called a papa poule or devoted father; one where stepfathers are committed fully to their educational role. However, these forms of exercising fatherhood have not yet acquired a symbolic representation to match the commitment they demonstrate. Despite the emergence of struggles for recognition, the instituting process, of which symbolization is a major component, is only just beginning.