“New Fatherhood” in Practice: Domestic and Parental Work Performed by Men in France and in the Netherlands

Abstract

Housework, a traditional topic in research on women and gender, has only recently begun to be studied from the standpoint of men. This article undertakes a comparison between France and the Netherlands, two countries that largely resemble each other from the standpoint of government intervention and the connections between work and family life, but differ in their stated political priorities regarding women and the structuring of women’s employment. This comparison allows the author to reveal trends in the division of domestic labour between the sexes that hold across the board, regardless of particular cultural differences in representations of the roles of men and women in the family. Based on national survey data on “daily timetables”, the analysis shows changes and continuity in men’s involvement in housework, first as regards the male population as a whole, and then fathers in particular. The study brings out preferences for doing housework rather than parental work among fathers in France but not in the Netherlands. These preferences are linked to a change in social representations of domestic and parental tasks that have assigned new and different values to these tasks depending on whether or not they are performed by men. “New fatherhood” appears in any case to be an image with an ideological function more than a reality in practice, at least when the objective criterion used is the amount of time spent on the daily tasks of domestic life.