Family Men

Abstract

In addition to work and all-male associations, the home or the family is an area where masculinity is constructed.¹ Like the concept of masculinity, ‘home’ and ‘family’ are social constructions that make sense only in terms of historically and culturally specific shared understandings. Nevertheless, boys and men ‘come from’ and ‘have’ families. In Western tradition, boys are generally expected to reject their mothers and leave their families in order to achieve manhood, but to become respectable men they are also expected to return to family life after a time to create and lead families of their own. Yet modern Western notions of masculinity, according to the social scientists Michele Adams and Scott Coltrane, have ‘much less to do with everyday life in domestic settings than they do with accomplishments in extra-familial arenas such as business, sports, or politics’.² The ideal of separate spheres that emerged during the Victorian age advocated that men and women were part of diverse social worlds: men inhabited the public sphere and women the private sphere. Adams and Coltrane assert that throughout the twentieth century the putatively separate public and private spheres continued to reflect and reproduce gender differences and perpetuate gender equality. They claim that the ideal of separate spheres explains modern Western men’s difficulties in ‘being in’ their families and their resistance to being closely connected with the domestic.