Trophy Husbands” & “Opt-Out” Moms

2008

Am. UJ Gender Soc. Pol'y & L., 2000

Tabitha Walrond "was charged with recklessly causing Tyler's death by failing to nourish him adequately and failing to obtain prompt medical attention."2 This recent court case in the Bronx underscores the contradiction embedded in the myths of independence, autonomy, and ...

This article investigates the experiences of stay-at-home fathers in the private sphere. In this study, stay-at-home fathers’ mixed experiences in the at-home community depict a process of initial isolation and eventual inclusion with stay-at-home mothers. While existing research on stay-at-home fathers often focuses more on gender as its unit of analysis, I make the case that sexuality is as central as gender in both the identity work of stay-at-home fathers and the social organization of the at-home community. Specifically, stay-at-home fathers employed strategies de-emphasizing both their gender and sexuality to achieve inclusion in the community. Finally, this study contributes to the literature on hybrid masculinities by suggesting that stay-at-home fatherhood offers an important case study about the degree of resistance to hegemonic masculinity in the 21st century.

2012

Asian Population Studies, 2012

Gender bias at work often coerces breastfeeding working mothers to choose between their baby or their job. The forced choice between private and work life irreconcilably separates motherhood from a woman’s career, giving rise to the Mommy Wage Gap and the Maternal Wall. Consequently, the separation of work and family life has negative impacts on both the mother and her child. These negative impacts also bear on public health and the economy on a large scale. The more unaccommodating workplaces are, the stricter the separation between work and family life and the more permanent the choice a working mother has to make. Such unaccommodating workplaces thus force breastfeeding working mothers to either wean their children too early or to opt-out. Thus, increasing work-time flexibility for working parents, and especially breastfeeding mothers, would allow working mothers to breastfeed their children for the recommended period of at least six months after birth. The current federal labor ...

Gender bias at work often coerces breastfeeding working mothers to choose between their baby or their job. The forced choice between private and work life irreconcilably separates motherhood from a woman’s career, giving rise to the Mommy Wage Gap and the Maternal Wall. Consequently, the separation of work and family life has negative impacts on both the mother and her child. These negative impacts also bear on public health and the economy on a large scale. The more unaccommodating workplaces are, the stricter the separation between work and family life and the more permanent the choice a working mother has to make. Such unaccommodating workplaces thus force breastfeeding working mothers to either wean their children too early or to opt-out. Thus, increasing work-time flexibility for working parents, and especially breastfeeding mothers, would allow working mothers to breastfeed their children for the recommended period of at least six months after birth. The current federal labor laws, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), are insufficient in protecting breastfeeding-working mothers from the gender bias and aggravated work-life conflict. If more working mothers were able to breastfeed their babies for the recommended six months, the government could save public health care costs and use these savings for reinvestments to fuel economic recovery. By allowing working breastfeeding mothers to bring the private and public spheres closer together, and to thereby attain greater work-life life, businesses and companies will be empowered to increase efficiency, productivity, and eventually profitability. This paper evaluates some strategies to increase profitability by providing greater work-time flexibility.

Home and work are two different worlds for working women and are often in conflict. Married working women are faced with problems in performing different roles, such as being a wife, a mother, a housekeeper, and an employee. The major problem a married woman faces is the tension or conflict arising from her multiple roles. The study aimed to determine: 1) how the working wives (the participants) roles were described in terms of their basic orientations towards gender role in the family; 2) how pregnancy, parenthood, success in their career affect their relationship with their husbands; 3)who, between them and their husbands, do most of the housework and child care; 4) how working wives dual role affect their life; and 5) measures to be adopted to help working wives solve dual role conflict. Thus, this study focused only on the dual role conflict that arises between the wife and the husband.

The authors analyze American Time Use Survey data to examine patterns in domestic work among at-home and breadwinner parents to gauge how time availability, relative earnings, and gender shape time use in couples with extreme differences in earnings and work hours. They find that involvement in female-typed housework is an important driver of overall housework time. It is counternormative housework behavior by at-home fathers that shapes conclusions about how time availability, relative resources, and gender influence parents' housework. Although time availability appears to shape child care in comparable ways across parents, mothers are more engaged in child care than similarly situated fathers. Overall, comparisons point to the importance of distinguishing among gender-normative housework tasks and accounting for differences in engagement on work and nonwork days. The results provide a basis for assessing the social significance of growing numbers of parents in work–family roles that are not gender normative.

University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 2005

Personal Relationships, 2010

Increasingly, husbands have been expected to share equally in the task of childrearing, especially when their wives are employed. This study examined reactions to these changes in a sample of 78 dual-earner couples with 8-month-old infants. When wives felt that their husbands were skillful caregivers, greater husbands' contribution to caregiving was associated with lower self-competence among wives. In contrast, wives' caregiving behavior was unrelated to their husbands' self-competence. None of these effects emerged for the self-liking component of self-esteem. Thus, despite increasingly egalitarian sex roles, employed mothers (but not their husbands) seem to be trapped between their desire for help with childrearing and the threat to their personal competence posed by failure to meet socially constructed ideals of motherhood.

Although feminist scholars have been criticizing the breadwinner-caregiver model of family division of labor for decades and women are earning a substantial portion of families' income ) change in family care has been slow. Families are a cultural system that may serve to constrain parents' behaviors by gender. Although most women are employed, they are also responsible for a bulk of the housework, an examination of men's behavior can reveal how changes can occur in the breadwinner-caregiver model. Drawing on the socialcognitive theory (Bussey and Bandura 1999), it was hypothesized that when men and women in emerging adulthood remember their parents sharing childcare and paid labor more equitably, they would also be planning for a future where men were involved in childcare. Participants were 586 college students from Southern, Midwestern, and Northeastern regions of the United States. They responded to surveys measuring parental division of labor during childhood, along with their own plans for their future families, and feelings of competence for such tasks. Interestingly, men who remembered their fathers caring for them reported feeling more competence in childcare tasks themselves. Results indicated that college men and women are able to construct family roles that do not adhere to the breadwinner-caregiver model when their parents modeled a less traditional division of labor in their childhoods.