Working fathers speak out

In Career OR fatherhood? Super Busy Dad asks whether being a good father and having a career are mutually exclusive. He talks to six dads juggling work and young children.

Keith, age 42 from Wolverhampton, strives to be a star employee and a great dad to his 2 boys:

“I’m not going to pretend it’s easy. I’ve had to make big sacrifices. But I’m lucky. My wife babysits twice a week and empties the dishwasher. She takes a real interest in the kids too”.

I love how ridiculous this all sounds when the genders are flipped.

Nancy Fraser in The Stone

As I see it, the mainstream feminism of our time has adopted an approach that cannot achieve justice even for women, let alone for anyone else. The trouble is, this feminism is focused on encouraging educated middle-class women to “lean in” and “crack the glass ceiling” – in other words, to climb the corporate ladder. By definition, then, its beneficiaries can only be women of the professional-managerial class. And absent structural changes in capitalist society, those women can only benefit by leaning on others — by offloading their own care work and housework onto low-waged, precarious workers, typically racialized and/or immigrant women. So this is not, and cannot be, a feminism for all women!

Read on.