Package Deal: Marriage, Work And Fatherhood In Men'S Lives

2. Package Deals and Scripts

2 Package Deals and Scripts I just always kind of imagined myself grown up, being married, having two kids. Ever since I can remember. I never thought I wouldn’t want kids. Never even gave that consideration, that I would just be married and not have kids, it was just all part of the package. —Phil To be a father is to reconcile competing ideals, demands, and responsibilities: time spent with children against money earned, the kind of house you live in against the length of your commute, your responsibility as a husband against your responsibility as a father, and within yourself the reconciliation of being simultaneously your father’s son and your own son’s father. To be an adequate father is to put together a “package deal” of work, marriage, home, and children.1 Not every father is married or works outside the home, but every father constructs, for himself and for others, a story about his life that takes into account the four elements of the package deal. For the men I talked to, plans and projects were directed toward a composite goal, their decisions about one element took into account their situation with regard to the other elements, and their judgments of their own success were multidimensional. The idea that fatherhood is a part of a composite goal or package deal is not as obvious or trivial as it may at first appear, and it needs to be restated and acknowledged in our everyday thinking, in academic research, and in policy. Too frequently , discussions of fatherhood separate paternity from the rest of men’s lives and treat decisions about children, marriage, and work as if they were independent. Although human goals may always be composite , the particular composition of the package deal of successful fatherhood expressed by the men from Meadowview High School and the particular approved way of living that it embodied was specific to a place and time. That the composition of the package is widely understood and hegemonic should not conceal the fact that in practice it is neither inevitable nor universally achieved. 30 The dominant vision of successful fatherhood as embodied in the package deal can oppress and exclude men in the United States in three ways. First, even when the men are successful this dominant cultural image traps many of them in lives of “quiet desperation.” We hear this desperation in men’s comments about their sense of being caught in the “rat race,” of hurrying all the time to keep place, and of not measuring up to their own expectations even when they appear to be doing the right thing. Second, the dominant cultural image portrays men as failures when they cannot meet the expectations of the package deal (Dudley 1994; Newman 1988; Rubin 1994; Sennett and Cobb 1972; Wilson 1996). Third, the dominant cultural vision is actively deployed as a tool of exclusion. Exclusion from one or more elements of the package deal is a way to exclude men from full fatherhood, full masculinity, and full personhood. In a precursor to his famous “I have a dream” speech, given in Detroit in 1963, Martin Luther King addressed the issues faced by African Americans in the North. Even in the absence of the legal segregation of the South, he identified three key areas of exclusion: in jobs, in housing, and in schools. In terms of the package deal, African American men were being excluded from three key elements: employment, home ownership, and the ability to endow their children with opportunities . These exclusions extend to gay men when they are denied contact with children or when they are denied the culturally approved definitions of closeness by not being allowed to marry. That the package deal comes so naturally to mind as an image when we think about men’s attitudes indicates its cultural fit. Ralph Colson, who had risen through the ranks to supervise safety procedures for a large manufacturing plant, was a calm, soft-spoken man who was described with respect and admiration by everyone who remembered him from high school. His account of his marriage, the birth of his first child, his career development, and buying his house illustrate how these elements of the package deal (marriage, children, employment, and home ownership) were integrated in his thoughts and actions: So I was gonna start in July. So my wife and I planned our wedding. I told her we’d get married as soon as I got hired by the...