Jobless, but working

Many men will lose their jobs in the recession. They shouldn't be afraid to embrace fatherhood instead

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Nick Clegg triggered plenty of criticism when he suggested that men who lose their jobs should "reinvent" themselves as stay-at-home dads. "'A new flexibility in which men and women are supported in reinventing themselves will be vital in helping many thousands of families through this recession," he wrote. For these words, Clegg has been accused of emasculating British industrial workers.

Perhaps the Lib Dem leader has a political tin ear, but he's absolutely correct: economic downturns can open up new possibilities for men, and this recession is likely to have a huge impact on gender relations.

It's true in the UK, where the number of house husbands has skyrocketed in recent years, and it's true here in the United States. During the Great Depression, unemployment would utterly destroy men, because their entire identities were based on their jobs and their ability to support families. At the same time, however, widespread unemployment had the effect of allowing more caring and cooperative conceptions of fatherhood to gain a hearing.

According to a study by historian Ralph LaRossa and colleagues, more books and magazine articles in the Great Depression promoted the idea of the "New Father" than at any other time before or since. "Measuring virality and manliness in ways that were independent of whether one had a job [served] to counterbalance the emasculating effects of the Depression," writes LaRossa.

And as more men were tossed out of work in America, more women found jobs. The number of married women working outside the home almost tripled from 1900 to the middle of the Depression; women zoomed from being less than 3% of clerical workers at the end of the 19th century to more than half in the Depression. Incomes rose accordingly.

Women's employment and incomes continued to grow throughout the 1940s and, yes, even the 1950s – and expanded throughout the 1970s and 1980s, when men's economic prospects started to dim. It's no accident that the hero of the 1983 film Mr Mom, which marked the film debut of the stay-at-home dad, was a laid-off car worker named Jack. Had Mr Mom been made in the 1930s, it would have been a tear-jerking melodrama: Jack would have sunk into alcoholism and domestic violence while his wife endured the humiliation of employment.

But a lot had changed in America in the decades between the Great
Depression and Mr Mom. Ultimately, Jack masters househusbandry while his wife becomes a successful ad executive. When their identities as breadwinners are destroyed by economic instability, argues Mr Mom, men should do exactly what Clegg suggests, and reinvent themselves as
caregivers. Moreover, the film suggests that men ought to support their wives' career aspirations, a startling departure from the past.

In the face of today's financial disasters, women are economically stronger than ever and men's identities are much more diverse. Since 1965, according to several empirical studies, men's time with children has tripled. Since 1995, it has doubled. So has the number of stay-at-home dads. Researchers find that even low income and chronically unemployed men are finding meaning and satisfaction in taking care of kids – whereas in the past, they would consciously reject those roles. As motherhood has shifted to include careers, the definition of fatherhood has shifted from pure breadwinning to one that encompasses both breadwinning and caregiving.

None of us can wave a magic wand and bring our jobs and a healthy economy back; for many of us, life is about to become very hard. But the
history of the American family teaches us that we can grow stronger in the places where we have been broken. The key, research reveals, is for mothers and fathers to cultivate loving relationships with each other, and to prize time with children. That can be hard to do when you don't know how you're going to pay the mortgage, and yet we are even worse off when we lose each other as well as the house.

When journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates (author of the remarkable memoir The Beautiful Struggle) was laid off from Time magazine in 2007, he became a stay-at-home dad. "You know, getting laid off is always a difficult thing, but it gave me back time with my son," Ta-Nehisi told me in an interview for my forthcoming book, The Daddy Shift. "That's absolutely huge. I guess not making much money would trouble me, if I felt I wasn't a very good father. If you are a man who thinks that what you bring to a relationship is economic power and that's it, then I guess that would trouble you."

Parents on both sides of the Atlantic can learn something from Ta-Nehisi. Couples that can support each other and focus on care survive recessions; couples that don't – who allow stress and despair to take over their family lives – break apart. The role reversals American families are experiencing can be a source of strength, and an evolutionary adaptation to a global economy that is intrinsically unstable and technology-based. When the right values are in place, families can survive economic downturns intact, and sometimes even thrive.

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