The package deal: marriage, work, and fatherhood in men's lives

Abstract

Townsend, N. W. (2002). The Package Deal: Marriage, Work and Fatherhood in Men's Lives. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. 248 pp. ISBN 1-56639-958-0. Price $19.95 (paperback). In The Package Deal, Nicholas Townsend uses qualitative interviews with 39 men in Southern California to further our knowledge about the meanings that men attach to fatherhood. Townsend argues that the dominant culture imparts its definition of masculinity (and, in particular, what it means to be a good father) in terms of a that simultaneously incorporates marriage, work, fatherhood, and home ownership. Each piece influences the others in ways that are at once complementary and contradictory, and he contends that the meanings that men assign to their statuses as fathers cannot be fully understood without looking at the elements of the package as a cohesive whole, rather than as individual pieces. In the first two chapters, Townsend describes his sample and explains the importance of scripts, as well as the difficulties inherent in creating a coherent narrative out of life events that are complicated and contradictory. The men all graduated from the same high school in the 1970s but had a variety of educational backgrounds (some immediately moving into the job market after graduation, whereas others pursued higher education), occupations, and income levels at the time they were interviewed. Of the 39 men, 6 were Hispanic, 3 were Asian American, 30 were White, and all were heterosexual. These men were described as experiencing numerous conflicts in their attempts to consolidate the elements of the package deal into a cohesive whole, but they ultimately succeeded in creating narratives that to them seemed to be logical and consistent. In chapter 3, Townsend then finishes setting the stage by describing what he sees as being the four facets of fatherhood (emotional closeness, provision, protection, and endowment) and then laying out a general model of how each element of the package deal influences men's views of themselves as fathers. The next three chapters explain in detail the ways in which marriage, work, and home ownership influence men's perceptions of themselves as fathers. Marriage is described as providing men with an environment (i.e., one associated with women) that facilitates their involvement with their children. Women are positioned as mediating men's involvement with their children, and men are described as floundering as fathers outside of the marital context (e.g., following divorce). Townsend next explains how work serves as a surrogate for fathers' emotional closeness with their children because fathers saw their employment as a form of involvement. By providing not only for their children's current financial needs but also for future opportunities, such as higher education, the fathers saw themselves as demonstrating their emotional investment in their children. …