Do Men Mother?

"Andrea Doucet takes a familiar question and explores it in a forthright, original, and compassionate way. Through careful qualitative research with a diverse group of men, she illuminates contemporary fathering and makes a serious and strong contribution to our theoretical understandings of fathering and mothering." -- Sara Ruddick, Eugene Lang College, New School for Social Research "Andrea Doucet's carefully researched book provides a fascinating answer to the question, "Do men mother?" Fathers do, but in their own unique way, and this compelling book speaks to how we must find new ways of encouraging male nurturance." -- Ann Crittenden, author of 'The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued'

The second edition of Andrea Doucet’s Do Men Mother? builds upon the award winning first edition to further illuminate fathers' candid reflections on caring and the intricate social worlds that men and women inhabit as they ‘love and let go’ of their children.

The first edition of Do Men Mother? (2006) was awarded the John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award from the Canadian Sociological Association and remains one of the most widely cited books on primary caregiving fathers and stay-at-home fathers. This second edition of Do Men Mother? builds on interviews conducted between 2000 and 2004 with 101 fathers and 14 mother/father couples, and follow-up interviews with six of the mother/father couples about a decade later. It charts how fathers and mothers navigate and negotiate parental and breadwinning responsibilities and calls attention to the generative changes that occur for men when they share responsibilities for their children’s care. Working closely with Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking (1989), Doucet advocates for a wider maternal lens that focuses on entanglements between dependence/independence/inter-dependence and argues that fathers’ stories expand how we think about mothering and caregiving

In this expanded second edition, with a new Preface and two new chapters, Doucet takes on three revisiting projects: returning to interview several research participants; re-entering scholarly fields of work, care, and parenting in shifting neoliberal contexts; and rethinking her approach to knowledge making, concepts, and narratives. Bringing together what she calls "diffractive" readings of feminist philosopher Lorraine Code’s ecological approach to knowledge making and historical sociologist Margaret Somers’ genealogical and relational approach to concepts and her non-representational approach to narratives, Doucet lays out an innovative ecological and non-representational approach to knowledge making, concepts, and narratives about care work and paid work. This book calls for greater attention not only to what we claim to know, but also to how we come to know, write about, and intervene in shifting practices, concepts, and narratives of work and care, the politics of care, and growing crises of care.