MOTHERS... FATHERS... GENDER ROLES: Eve replies to John Jakala

I think the easiest way to see the point I was trying (probably clumsily) to make is just to spend a lot of time talking with people who grew up in intentionally fatherless or motherless households. (= households where a mother or father was absent not due to death, but to choices made by the parents.)

Elizabeth Marquardt has been writing powerful, eloquent pieces about children's need for the mother and father who created them; I'll add, though, that children's needs are gendered. They talk in gendered terms when they're talking about what they missed out on.

For obvious reasons, I know more about fatherless households, so I'll stick with those: Sons say they never learned what it meant to be a man. (And they often try to find other, destructive roads to masculinity--like gang membership.) Daughters say they never learned what to look for in a man. Sons have a hard time learning how men fit into a family, why and how men are needed in the family. Daughters have a hard time learning how much they can ask of men--they often set their standards way too low and get taken advantage of. ...I think it would be bizarre if for some reason similarly powerful emotional effects were not felt in intentionally motherless households, although, like I said, I know a lot less about that because it's less common.

So this is not at all about whether Johnny likes knitting and ballet, or whether Suzie wears combat boots. It's about how we learn what men and women are, how they relate to each other, and what their places are in the family.
posted by Eve at 9:43 AM | link

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