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Full-Time Dads;
The Magazine for Caregiver Fathers
Issue 14, originally appeared in print - March 1995
In Full-Time Dads #13, it was announced that issue #14 would focus, in part, on the men's movement's connections with involved fatherhood. On the page facing the announcement was a letter from Mike McCloud (see Forum, "No Nostalgia, Please") which attempts to straighten out Richard Doyle of The Men's Defense Association. Doyle had written about times fifty years ago that he thinks were better: "...fathers were respected...God was in his heaven..." (italics mine).
In the book Reinventing Fatherhood (reviewed by Chris Holme in FTD #10), I was dismayed to find that "power" (of the father) was the only term the authors could come up with to make an unnecessary distinction between male and female parenting styles. I've read Robert Bly's Iron John, and the only message I still use from the book is basically "Stick up for yourselves, men," which, as Doyle illustrates, can easily lead to a backlash against feminism, or call it, if you like, against equality and balance within the sexes.
Men today have a pretty poor image in the eyes of society. Feminism brought about the men's movement, as well as groups like the Men's Defense Association, through it's criticism of patriarchy. For men, "patriarchy" is a swear word; it can turn off the intellect faster than the most over-used cliché. The word threatens us with guilt by association, even though patriarchy doesn't mean all men.
Being a full-time dad has been, for me, revolutionary in itself. Feminism has made it second nature for us to assume that the personal is political. In fact, to be a full-time dad or an involved, caring dad without a macho mask is to be involved in an act of feminism, whether one acknowledges it or not. It might not feel radical to stay at home with the kids-it's not fast, exciting or glamorous. But speed, excitement and glamour are themselves values of patriarchy. Full-time dads and caring fathers are radical because they are participating in the balancing of the gender roles, showing that men can be nurturing, and experiencing the giving of consistent care and love to a child.
Four years ago, when I learned I was to be a father, I became interested in my family tree as never before. It is, after all, a history of children becoming parents, and of parents raising children. Over time, I've broadened and deepened that sense of engagement with the past. I've considered the question, "Who am I?" since high school, and the answer, it seems to me now, is in large part that I am a product of my parents, and also of this culture as a whole.
Since becoming a father, I have been wondering, "Where did I, and therefore we-our culture-come from?" And, contrary to what Mike McCloud says, I believe that there were some good old days, and there are still some good old days today, among cultures that have resisted patriarchy-no "methodical slaughter," lynchings or mass warfare, all of which, as McCloud noted, were daily news 50 years ago and still are.
Unfortunately, the men's movement has proven, in my limited experience of Keen and Bly, to be shallow. I've never learned anything from this movement that extended to a time before the Industrial Revolution, just a few generations ago. The movement focuses myopically on our feelings, with almost no social context other than that of our families, especially our relationship with our fathers.
For example, Bly sighs with pain at our country's failure to herald the return of the veterans of the Vietnam War, thus compounding their pain and alienation. He fails to rage against the system, as I do, that sent its fledgling adult males into the teeth of battle. As a father, I can state with certainty that my son will only go to war over my dead body. But his peers are already being trained for war. (That is how I see "Power Rangers" and war toys, etc.) In my family, we teach and practice non-violence; I am now learning to be non-violent with my voice.
Understanding where we came from leads to understanding our culture, patriarchy, and the nature upon which our manhood and fatherhood are truly based. And there is only one true history, however difficult it might be to uncover beneath the complexities of cultural perspective and the sheer erosion of evidence by the face of time.
No history has ever made so much sense to me as that of the rise of patriarchy out of the millennia of human society that was peaceful, poetic, creative intelligent, joyful and...matrifocal. Matrifocal culture (before 3000 B.C.) was not the opposite of patriarchy; it was not a culture controlled by women. Rather, it was a society of self-control, or even a society before control existed. The social concept of hierarchy had not yet been invented-no one person over another.
Leadership was granted by giving attention to those who behaved responsibly and respectfully, and that attention simply shifted elsewhere if their behavior became inappropriate. Women were respected and celebrated for their creative, life-giving powers; women contributed 75 to 85 percent of the food through gathering wild plants and setting snares. Women were also the primary contributors to the development and practice of all crafts, such as pottery, medicine and the construction of homes. Women were, in short, the pillars of the community.
A very different sort of world order, called patriarchy by some, and progress or God's will by others, arose out of the large-scale organization of agriculture and violence. When large investments were made by a distinct social group in the improvement of the local economy (for example the investment of much hard labor in the digging of irrigation systems in Mesopotamia), a division of wealth occurred. There were the haves, with their irrigated fields and grain reserves, and the have-nots, especially in times of drought. Out of situations like these arose the interest in organized violence.
The tools of war are both the weapons themselves (to which the existing knowledge of metallurgy was adopted), and strategy. Groups fighting in formation proved to be superior to more loosely organized enemies. But to fight in formation, the will of the individual must be subordinate to that of the group. Here, then, is the origin of repression, as well as of hierarchy.
Now that I've begun to experience the transmission of culture from the parent's perspective, I am amazed at how accurately cultural values are transmitted-both by intention and accident. Because of this, cultural change is like the movement of glaciers-until it "calves" suddenly and part of it drops into the ocean as a gigantic iceberg. It seems to me either foolish or dishonest to look only as far as the Industrial Revolution or even as far as, say, Rome, to begin to answer the question of identity, or meaning for the self.
My son has come to an age where he's stopped taking naps and goes to bed around seven o'clock. So I've had some time to read and follow my curiosity to new depths. If you're interested in learning more about "the good old days," when men and women both worked part-time, children weren't isolated from adult work, nor working adults from children, childcare was easily arranged and where men were not feared or suspected as potential rapists, molesters and murderers, where nurturing was assumed and strategic, premeditated violence unknown, check out these women authors: Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor (The Great Cosmic Mother) and Starhawk (Truth or Dare). Their books are heavily footnoted, and contain extensive bibliographies. William Irwin Thompson is an often-cited source, and is also recommended.
Chris Holme lives with his partner Julia and son Franklin in Vermont. He works one afternoon a week running the recycling center at the town dump. He has written several articles for Full-Time Dads.
Copyright 1994 Chris Holme
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