The Time Has Come: Why Men Must Join the Gender Equality Revolution by Michael Kaufman

Author:Michael Kaufman [Kaufman, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Feminism, Social Justice, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781640091207
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2019-01-15T08:00:00+00:00

Be the Change

In Stockholm I’m visiting a group for new and expectant dads. They’re meeting each week to explore the challenges they will face (or are facing) as fathers. They’re picking up parenting skills. They’re discussing how this is affecting their relationships. All these fathers, like almost all fathers in the Scandinavian countries, will take weeks or even months off work, receiving about 80 percent of their pay, to look after their new child.

The four dads with me that night are in their twenties or early thirties and part of the Swedish generation for whom paternity leave is as normal as smoked salmon.

One of them is Magnus, a big man with close-cropped hair and imposing strength. He paves roads for a living, but right now, with his baby seven months old, he’s working four days a week. I ask how his employer feels about this, and he replies, “They like it when we’re happy.”

But what truly astounds me is his story about visiting his hometown. “It’s in a conservative part of Sweden,” he says. “Our Bible Belt.” I immediately imagine the Tea Party except they speak Swedish. “I was home recently,” he continues, “and met up with my old friends. I told them that when my girl is nine months old, my wife’s going back to work and I’m gonna take seven months off. They thought this was really weird.”

Seven months off? Definitely would seem weird, I thought. After all, this is the conservative part of his country.

But Magnus continues. “When I said I was gonna take seven months off, they said, ‘Why don’t you just take off the normal two or three months?’”

He cannot understand why I’m laughing.

“What’s so funny?” he asks.

I explain that in the rest of the world, men taking two months’ leave (let alone seven months) is either a pipe dream or wouldn’t even occur to them. Many would be lucky to have seven days.

No one in the group can understand why I’m so astounded. Highly involved fatherhood is all that they’ve ever known.

For these men, being counted in is part of who they are and what they have always known.

Their story gives us some important clues about promoting change. On the most basic level, just as those Swedish men have been encouraged, we need to encourage fathers everywhere to make a personal commitment to take on half the care work. This means different things to different men, and different things as we go through our lives. However, it always means taking the personal risk to do some introspection. To ask ourselves uncomfortable questions about our priorities, our relationship, and our own experiences when we were children. To get feedback from our spouse and, as they grow up, from our children or the children we’re taking some responsibility for. And to develop sustainable plans.

A commitment to personal change isn’t a once-in-a-lifetime-and-then-you’re-done proposition. I’m not saying you’ve got to slog through your life constantly trying to improve yourself. But given that we’re all products of a male-dominated

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