The Package Deal: Marriage, Work, and Fatherhood in Men's Lives (review)

What are the meanings of fatherhood and why do fathers do what they do? In The Package Deal, Nicholas Townsend interviews men from the early 1970s graduating class of a northern California high school. His book unwraps the cultural enigma of fatherhood that you may have briefly glimpsed at your own class reunion: your old school buddies, now fathers, flashing photos of their children and dropping hints about their accomplishments with various degrees of pride. Indeed, this meticulously crafted book gets just right the voices and motives of typical American family men in a particular time and place. It locates them collectively in the trends of their epoch and simultaneously shows what is universal in their individual situations. Listening carefully to the nuances in their stories, the English-born, Berkeley-trained Townsend recognizes these men as an anthropologist's dream: a lost tribe hidden in plain sight.

In this tribe, "dominant cultural values" about gender and parenthood inform the "life script" within which each man improvises his own rendition of fatherhood, just as jazz musicians riff on standard melodies. Of this jazz metaphor Townsend writes, "improvisation is original and creative within a tradition and in the context of a range of existing exemplars." This characterization is apt, but the range of exemplars turns out to be very narrow. And in the accounts of the men quoted most often in this book it is easier to hear the old-fashioned twang of country or steady beat of rock than the modern sophistication of jazz.

Townsend's insightful reading of his respondents' seemingly mundane narratives of marriage, work, and fatherhood untangles a skein of competing and contradictory ideals that bind together the package deal, a "complex whole" composed of four "interconnected and mutually dependent" elements: employment, marriage, fatherhood, and home ownership. Success in wrapping up this increasingly unwieldy bundle is the cultural yardstick against which these American fathers measure their paternal adequacy. This deceptively simple revelation deserves widespread attention. With this book we now have a lucid and sympathetic analysis of the male side of Joan Williams's "domesticity," the institutionalized reproduction of what Goffman called the "division of being." The Package Deal complements excellent studies of contemporary working mothers, such as the recent prizewinning book by Anita Garey, who happens to be Townsend's partner. The difference between male and female spheres is summarized by the metaphors each uses. Garey finds women flexibly interweaving strands of work and motherhood. Townsend's fathers see themselves lashing together man-sized slabs of real estate and paternal responsibility that, while culturally congruent, are often poor temporal and fiscal fits.

Like the package deal, of which it is one of the four elements, fatherhood itself has four interlocking facets: emotional closeness, provision, protection, and endowment. But providing a single-family home in a safe neighborhood with good schools, appropriate peers, and opportunities for acquiring social capital requires fathers to sacrifice to work the shared flow of time with children (to say nothing of wives!) that would nourish the growth of actual emotional closeness. Townsend says, "typical contributions to emotional closeness are all symbolic or indirect — they require cultural work to be interpreted as expressions or manifestations of emotional closeness between fathers and children." Cultural work involves using available justifications to create new vocabularies of motive, interpretations that allow what fathers do to be cast as morally acceptable. For example, marriage is the means to men's emotional closeness with children. Because mothers mediate the relationship between the men and their children, men can work longer working hours to provide material expressions of paternal love. Women are "culturally appropriate" caregivers, and so even in cases where they earn comparable wages, their breadwinning power is devalued as being "for extras."

Townsend's original contribution is a comprehensive theory of paternity as an inseparable part of...