Both Michael Sherman and Art Winfield share the work at home. They didn’t tell jokes like Greg Alstons “pliers” jokes, or wait to the end of a wail of a nine-month-old who’s tumbled. They have their own styles of parenting, and it is primary parenting.
Michael Sherman and Art Winfield differ in how they arrived at their gender ideology; Michael backed in, starting with housework and moving to child rearing. Art stepped forward into it, starting with his feeling for Adam and quietly extending a principle of justice to housework. Egalitarianism also meant slightly different things to each; for Michael it was a way to “be fair to Adrienne,” for Art it was a way of “being a number-one Dad to Adam.” The results differ too: Michael is as much the primary parent to the twins as his wife, Art seems slightly more involved than his wife.
Certain motives forged in boyhood made them want to be the “New Man.” Both had grown up in a largely female world; both had reacted against “bad” fathers, and neither had grown up as a typical male. Even as a teenager. Art had been unusually good with small kids, which past a certain age among teenagers in East Oakland was unusual. Michael had never felt like a “typical boy.” He didn’t reject things masculine; he was always popular with the guys at school. But he didn’t feel the most interesting things went on in the male world or that the most interesting people were there. In truth, Michael hadn’t outgrown a traditional male identity; he’d never had one. In his high school gym class and later during basic training in the army, much of the time he felt he was acting the male role. It was as if he had grown up speaking a foreign language; he spoke it fluently and without a noticeable accent, but it remained a language not quite his own. As he put it, “I was always the guy hanging around the edge of the football field.” Different private motives animate a gender strategy, and these private motives animated theirs. So when the door of history opened, when the culture lit the way, when the demands of two-job life called out, they wanted to walk in.
In the history of American fatherhood, there have been three stages, each a response to economic change. In the first, agrarian stage, a father trained and disciplined his son for employment, and often offered him employment on the farm, while his wife brought up the girls. (For blacks, this stage began after slavery ended.) As economic life and vocational training moved out of the family in the early nineteenth century, fathers left more of the rearing of their children to their wives. According to the historian John Nash, in both these stages of history, the father was often distant and stern. Not until the early twentieth century, when increasing numbers of women began to work outside the home, did the culture rediscover the father as an active presence at home, and establish the idea that “father was friendly.” In the early 1950s, popular magazines began to offer articles with such titles as “Fathers Are Parents Too” and “Its Time Father Got Back into the Family.” Today, most families are in the third stage of economic development but in the second stage of fatherhood. Mothers are in the labor force, but most fathers have yet to embrace a notion of themselves as equally important as their wives at home.
Men like Michael Sherman and Art Winfield lead the way into that third stage of fatherhood. But theyve done it privately. They are tokens in the world of new fathers. Lacking a national social movement to support them in a public challenge to the prevailing notion of manhood, theyve acted on their own. Not until the other Michael Shermans and Art Winfields step forward, not until a critical mass of men becomes like them, will we end the painful stall in this revolution all around us.