Aftershock Hits Males in the 1980s

The 1970s were an era when women--their hopes raised by a newly revived women’s movement--rebelled against, wrote books about, and came to terms with, their mothers. The 1980s have seen many men publicly undergoing similar struggles with their fathers.

In the questions it raised and the unmet hopes it continues to hold before us, the women’s movement is still the major social earthquake of our time. The changes among men are a mere aftershock--but a significant and interesting one nonetheless, and worth reflecting on this Father’s Day.

I spent most of the last few years writing a book, “Half the Way Home,” about my somewhat troubled relationship with my father. He was 50 years old when I was born, a reserved, formal man who was usually profoundly ill at ease in expressing his feelings. I wrote that there was always an awkwardness in the air between us, as if we were strangers who had met at a party and the host had disappeared somewhere before introducing us. I loved stamp collecting, listening to shortwave radio and reading; he thought these too solitary and frivolous and wanted me to mix with other children more. Physically robust and fearless, he didn’t know quite what to do with a timid, sickly child.

Later, there were other problems: A powerful businessman, he had a hard time adjusting to an only child who became a peace activist and progressive journalist. Eventually, in the few years before his death, we did reach a kind of peace with each other. Once I had children, his love for them seemed to displace all his anxious disapproval of me.

I knew of a few other contemporary writers--Aram Saroyan and Michael Arlen, for example--who had written about difficult or distant fathers. Nonetheless, like all authors of first books, I was convinced my story was unique. It was with mixed feelings then that I began to read a flood of letters from readers after the book first appeared some months ago. All writers like fan mail, but most people who wrote me spent only a paragraph or two on why they liked the book, and then went on for pages about the problems they had had with their fathers. Some even skipped that first paragraph.

I had more mixed feelings when one of the reviews my book received was in something called Men’s Studies Newsletter. I had hoped I was writing literature. I hadn’t even known there was such a thing as “men’s studies.”

Why is there so much in the air right now about sons and fathers? One aspect of it troubles me. It is as if after a decade or more of listening to women’s demands for justice, men are saying: “We had a hard time too; our fathers were cold and distant; we had to bottle up our emotions; we were oppressed in a different way, but just as much as you were.” I wince when I hear this tone, for it can so easily evade the recognition that, politically and economically, men still run the world.

Potentially, I think, something healthy can come out of all this. If white men were not off running the world so much, and shared that job more equally with women and minorities, they would have more time at home with their children, from infancy onward. I’ll know that millennium has arrived when I’m no longer in a tiny minority of men among parents at the playground or at the fourth-grade class meeting. When those patterns finally change, I think, then we’ll have fewer sons recapturing in books the fathers they were unable to get close to in life.

One good thing that came out of the ‘70s was that women realized they had a right to much that had previously seemed for men only: assertiveness, unlimited job opportunities, a sense of entitlement to the best that life has to offer. One good thing that could come out of the ‘80s is a parallel recognition that men can share what had previously been thought of as the exclusive preserve of women: more open expression of one’s feelings, closeness to small children, easier warmth and intimacy in friendships, and a central role as a parent.

It may take us several generations to achieve all these things. But the change will be worth it.

Until that point, however, there is a long way to go. Psychiatrist friends tell me that for a male patient the death of a father is almost always far more traumatic than the death of a mother. Even though that mother was likely to have been the parent who spent the most time with the child. Certainly that was my experience; at my father’s death I discovered tears I didn’t know I had. Why is this so? In death, I think, we usually weep for what was unspoken in life. As men and women change in the generations ahead, I do not hope that tears will vanish, but only that we may weep to mourn the close times gone and not for the love of fathers and sons that was never fully expressed.

Copyright Adam Hochschild 1987