Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First - Hardcover

Levine, Suzanne Braun

3.44

9 ratings by Goodreads

9780151003822: Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151003823 ISBN 13: 9780151003822

Publisher: Harcourt, 2000

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The "triple crown" for today's father includes success at work, intimacy with family, and time for friends. Not unlike the false promise of "having it all" that women faced in the 1970s, this goal is nearly impossible to achieve. The pain of "never getting it right" can be felt across the nation. Others have described the malaise, but until now, no one has described this revolution or pointed to the light at the end of the tunnel. Journalist and feminist Suzanne Braun Levine, a founding editor of Ms. magazine, has interviewed scores of men and learned about the difficulties fathers face in parenting. Since men don't tend to use each other as sounding boards, Levine does it for them. Taking a lesson from the women's movement, she puts her finger on what makes it so hard for men to put family first. Readers will turn to Father Courage to discover what men are experiencing. At home, their parenting learning curve is steep, and moms don't want to give up the role of the General. The workplace is much less family-friendly to men, and the 24/7 life of corporate America takes its toll. Levine shows that fathers and mothers aren't crazy, but stressed, and she offers solutions that range from the commonsense to the revolutionary. This is a brilliant and bracing new look at what is right-and wrong-in American family life.

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Review:

Suzanne Braun Levine, a founding editor of Ms. magazine, gives voice to a largely unsung revolution--uplifting the nurturing role of men--in her wisely written first book, Father Courage. Observing, for instance, the trend of more and more fathers walking their children to school with a "profusion of pink and yellow and red cartoon-character backpacks slung over their shoulders," Levine notes that fatherhood is changing. And so begins her quest to investigate the often-contradictory challenges and motivations that grip and sometimes baffle today's fathers.

Using batteries of interviews with fathers from various walks of life, Levine shows how men--in the struggle to succeed at work and in parenthood--are reinventing what it means to be a father. Readers meet fathers who explore new ways of child rearing, split time with their wives to cover household chores, and cope with sacrifice when it comes to careers. Father Courage is both about and for these fathers, "who are discovering the pleasures of a dynamic relationship with their families" and who are "beginning to suspect that there are more men like themselves, although most are too busy putting one foot in front of the other to speak up."

Drawing from social science, anthropology, media, psychology, and many other sources, Father Courage wades into the currents of modern society, not only to recast our understanding of fatherhood, but to remind us that changes in fatherhood also alter motherhood and the very fabric of family life. This connection, deeply feminist at its core, explains why a woman would be invested in championing the rights of fathers. Levine even offers fathers a rallying cry: "Pick up your power," she says. "Use it to turn around the very institutions that are bestowing it on you." Why? Because as Gloria Steinem once put it, "You will never have a true democracy without democratic families to nurture it." --Byron Ricks

About the Author:

Suzanne Braun Levine, a founding editor of Ms. magazine and editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Regularly quoted in the press, she has made numerous television appearances and has produced the Peabody Award-winning television special, She's Nobody's Baby: A History of American Women in the Twentieth Century. She lives in New York City.

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