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

7. Fathers of Fathers: Kinship and Gender

7 Fathers of Fathers Kinship and Gender I very seldom saw my parents before I got married. And now we see them a lot more often. We get together all the time. —Frank I had three older sisters. So basically, it was just me and my dad, somebody to play ball with. —Barry The men I talked to tried to achieve the package deal by assembling the elements of marriage, fatherhood, employment, and home ownership. They talked about success in achieving the package deal as an accomplishment for which they could take credit as individuals or as part of an autonomous married couple. I have, as a counterweight to their individualist ethos, stressed the importance of social situation and circumstances to understanding the pattern and variation of these men’s lives. The time and place of their coming of age, patterns of economic change, and accidents of birth have all been crucial. Achieving the package deal was not just a goal that men had for themselves, it was the goal that many others had for them. Their personal goals were in accord with the goals of the dominant culture, and their efforts to achieve their goals contributed to cultural continuity. Just as their own fathers had tried to raise their sons to be good fathers and husbands—financially successful, with good jobs, and able to buy their own homes—they directed their own efforts toward making it possible for their sons to achieve this composite goal. The approval and collaboration of other people in men’s attempts to realize the package deal are markers of the ways that the cultural system of fatherhood articulates with other systems of cultural values, especially the cultural systems of kinship and gender. 164 Fatherhood in the Kinship System Becoming fathers creates new relationships for many men, pulling them back from the relative autonomy of single adulthood into a web of social relations and kinship connections. When a couple has children, their sisters and brothers become those children’s aunts and uncles, and their parents become grandparents. Other people have a new interest in the couple and their children, and the new parents reinforce family connections . Parents become more closely integrated into kinship networks larger than their own nuclear families. Family gatherings, joint vacations, play dates among cousins, shared chauffeuring and childcare , sharing tools and collaborating in home improvement, and help from family members in finding and changing jobs were all examples of connections with kin that I observed or that were described to me. Anthropologists originally described kinship relationships in terms of reciprocal rights and responsibilities, stressing the ways in which people were defined by their social positions and the ways in which social organization was maintained by their mutual dependence. As we have come to see that kinship relations, like all human interactions, are arenas for contestation and negotiation rather than for the strict following of rules, we have tended to describe people in different kinship positions as making more or less acknowledged claims on one another. A language of claims and negotiation certainly accords better with the view of the men I interviewed. In accord with their very general valuation of self-reliance and free choice, they tended to talk about all relationships as chosen and voluntary. Faced with the tension between their valuation of self-sufficiency and their actual interconnection with and dependence on others, they adopted two rhetorical strategies. One was to insist that they wanted and chose to do things that might appear to be expected or required of them. The other was to normalize the help and material support they received, so that, for instance, the expectation that parents would leave their property to their children (rather than to their own siblings or to non-kin) was seen not as an obligation of the kinship relationship but as part of the natural order of events. Although their discussions attempted to redefine or conceal the mutual interdependence of kin with an image of individual self-sufficiency , the material manifestations of support between kin were crucial Fathers of Fathers: Kinship and Gender 165 for determining their life chances. Many men’s parents and other kin have contributed to their achieving the elements of the package deal by helping them find jobs and buy houses, by giving them advice and other kinds of help, and by endowing them with opportunities and abilities. Other men felt the lack of support...