Gender Equality and Gender Differences: Parenting, Habitus, And Embodiment (The 2008 Porter Lecture) (Report‪)‬

MY INTEREST IN GENDER EQUALITY AND gender differences in parenting began nearly 20 years ago when I first read Maternal Thinking by feminist philosopher Sara Ruddick. Pregnant with my first child and in my first year of doctoral studies at Cambridge University, I was intrigued by how Ruddick wrote about men and mothering in the form of a noun (men are mothers) and as a verb (men can and do mother). In invoking mothering as both identity and as practice, she writes: "Briefly, a mother is a person who takes on responsibility for children's lives and for whom providing child care is a significant part of her or his working life. I mean 'her or his'" (Ruddick 1995:40). This conceptualization of mothers as a group of "genderless" persons, and the practice of mothering as one that could be equally embraced by women or men, was one that stayed with me as a constant question, preoccupation, and intellectual obsession through a period of five years, in which I wrote my doctoral dissertation and gave birth to three children. One particular incident heightened my interest in the links between men and mothering. It was when my husband took our then 18-month-old daughter to a local moms-and-tots playgroup. While he was assured that all parents were welcome, it was also the case that each time he walked into the church basement with our daughter he felt like he was entering a club reserved for mothers only, and was viewed with a strange combination of suspicion, disdain, and, at times, congratulatory amazement. After a few weeks, he gave up going to the group, deciding that it was easier to care for our daughter on his own without this added stress of constant peer judgment. As I watched him trying to blend into this mothering venue, I was intrigued by how gender seemed to matter, at least in some community sites, when it comes to just who is doing the mothering.