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

5. Employment as Fatherhood

5 Employment as Fatherhood Everybody has a purpose in life. It’s the same basic, mundane thing: You get up, you go to work, you come home. Your purpose is to provide for your family. Obviously, when you have children, you have more of an incentive for that, to get up and go to work. —Skip Everybody wants better for their children. I want to provide that. I don’t care the cost. . . . I’ll work whatever I have to work, two jobs, whatever it takes to make sure they come out [OK]. —Paul In the United States, one thing that almost all men do is “work.” For men in the United States, participation in the labor force dominates their lives and their identities. Men’s labor force participation is long term, consistent, full time, and almost universal. In every year since 1960, more than 95 percent of married men aged twenty-five to fortyfive have been in the labor force.1 Men spend many hours daily at work or in work-related activity. Work and money are dominant topics of men’s conversations. Men’s prestige, their value to others, and their self-worth are measured by their identity as workers and their earnings from their work (Gini 2001; Goode 1982; Pleck 1995). Men who do not have jobs are frequently branded as unworthy, morally inferior, and failures as men. In his study of African American working men, Mitchell Duneier emphasizes their sense of their own respectability and righteousness— the way that they as individuals and as a group embody a set of moral values that guide and judge their actions (1992: 173–74). Work is important to these men’s sense of their own value, just as unemployment is central to the cultural devaluation of black men. Duneier points out that dominant cultural images of black men overemphasize unemployment and criminal activity and, whether in liberal sympathy or conservative blaming, disproportionately attribute to them membership in the “underclass .” In fact, the overwhelming majority of African American men 117 are employed, and there is great diversity of education and income among African Americans (Rose 2000). Lillian Rubin documented working-class attitudes toward family and work and demonstrated the central importance of employment in working-class men’s lives (1976) and the devastating effects of unemployment on their personal sense of self and on their families (1994). The overwhelming importance of work to men’s self-worth and to others ’ judgments of their moral worth is general across class and racial– ethnic categories (Dudley 1994; Furstenberg 1995; Lamont 2000; Newman 1988; Sennett and Cobb 1972; Wilson 1996; Zussman 1987). For the men I talked to, work and employment were essential to their sense of accomplishment and worth: Work was what they did and work defined who they were. Many, like William Hughes, learned to respect work through the example of their fathers. William’s father had worked two manual jobs when his children were young. After high school, William had lived at home and attended community college. According to William, “If I’d had ambitions to go anywhere, my father would have paid for me. He would have mortgaged his soul to support me if I had the grades, shown the initiative.” But William had been more interested in partying, and he told me how his father had confronted him about his grades: He said, “If you can’t get a job or hold a job, you’re out on your own. I’m not supporting you anymore. I don’t care if you have to go live in the car. The time has come.” And there was no arguing about it. I knew he was serious about it. And about a week later, I had a job working full time. Managed to show up on time and everything. William worked his way up from the loading dock to a management position. Like many other men, he took his mother for granted, and concluded that he and his siblings had learned to work and be successful from his father: “My mother, she was Mom and things were OK, but I think that most of us turned out the way we did—strong work ethic and real feeling of responsibility for ourselves—because of him.” To get where he was, William told me, he had spent many evenings and Saturdays at work. But, like so many of the men I talked to, he presented his work for pay as his way...