Chapter 9: CAN BOYS GROW INTO MOTHERS?

This article focuses on the question of boys growing into mothering. According to Sara Ruddick, as she writes in her most recent version of "Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace," men can mother and men can be mothers. She writes that to be a mother is to take upon oneself the responsibility of child care, making its work a regular and substantial part of one's working life. She again says that a mother is a person who takes on responsibility for children's lives and for whom providing child care is a significant part of his or her working life. The social worlds of mothering and fathering involve some degree of crossing borders, and while some aspects of maternal work are easily taken up by men, other activities are not. Interhousehold responsibility and community-based responsibility are social dimensions of mothering where men may encounter particular difficulties. Part of the explanation for this is that most men have not developed a regular place in social networks of the other gender. Indeed there is ample evidence to suggest that many men's difficulties in sharing in domestic labor and responsibility are rooted partly in the predominantly female networks that surround child rearing. To end on an optimistic note, however, there are possibilities for change.