were essential for children’s proper gender socialization. Among the first was Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytic theory of gender development posited that boys needed to identify with fathers to adequately separate from mothers.11 This idea that fathers were important as “sex role models” was dominant from the 1940s to the 1960s when experts warned that boys could become overly identified with mothers who had become primarily responsible for childcare.12 Assuming that insecure forms of masculinity result when boys spend too little time with fathers, these theories set the stage for a highly racialized discourse of “father absence” that attributed social problems to missing Black fathers during the mid-twentieth century.
Also during this midcentury period, American women, including mothers of young children, entered the labor market in record numbers. This challenged the dominant idea of the single-earner, man-headed household, which had never been a reality for most families of color.13 It also undercut many assumptions embedded in U.S. welfare policy. The 1965 publication of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary of the Department of Labor, ignited further controversy about the consequences of “family breakdown” and the “tangle of pathology” in African American communities.14 Attempting to draw attention to race-based job discrimination, the report blamed African American men’s economic subjugation on centuries of exploitation, fathers’ marginal position in Black families, and an emasculating “matriarchal structure” born of slavery.
This narrative linking father absence and welfare dependency and attributing disproportionately higher poverty, crime, and dropout rates among men of color to missing fathers has been part of U.S. political discourse ever since. Just as Moynihan’s point about racism in the labor market was lost in favor of a focus on the pathologies of Black parenting, so too has contemporary inequality been characterized primarily as a result of “broken families.” This narrow and oversimplified focus on family structure as the root cause of poverty has obscured how inequality stratifies access to opportunity across lines of race, class, and gender, despite family form.
Rising rates of divorce, cohabitation, and single parenthood in the 1960s accelerated in tandem with growing costs of public aid, prompting calls for greater enforcement of private child support. Congress instituted the first major federal child support policy with bipartisan backing in 1974. Lawmakers wanted to ensure that welfare cash aid was going only to “deserving” families and not children who could receive support from fathers who lived elsewhere.15 During the 1980s, legislators started to speak of “deadbeat dads” to describe neglectful noncustodial fathers.
“Deadbeat dad” is an example of what sociologist Patricia Hill Collins called a controlling image, a gendered depiction of people of color that makes poverty appear to be a result of bad personal choices.16 Controlling images are cultural shorthands for interpreting, constructing, and stigmatizing marginalized social groups, and they inform policies designed to address social problems presumably caused by those groups. Although rhetorically race neutral, characterizations of deadbeat parents were racialized in the popular imagination, reinforcing the belief that negligent Black fathers were promiscuous, predatory, and violent, and therefore to blame for the social ills of communities of color. Increasingly punitive child support policies, including those that criminalized unpaid support, reflected the growing belief that poor non-married families of color were undeserving of public aid and that fathers who did not pay were deliberately avoiding their paternal responsibilities.17
These policies presaged the passage of the responsible fatherhood provisions of welfare reform in 1996. Noting that the “promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children,” the law cited that less than half of fathers with a child support order fully comply and that the majority of children receiving welfare benefits “now live in homes in which no father is present.”18 It listed numerous negative effects of being born “out-of-wedlock” and growing up in a “father-absent” home, including lower educational aspirations and higher rates of poverty, abuse, neglect, and school expulsion. The policy also mandated that mothers receiving cash aid establish biological paternity and that states use this information to enforce child support obligations, in part to recoup government costs of cash aid to custodial parents.
The controlling image of the deadbeat dad also played a role in the gendered implications of welfare reform.19 A major reform goal was to counteract a perceived crisis of masculinity that prevented men from assuming their roles as family breadwinners.20 One commentator on this purported crisis was sociologist David Popenoe, who argued that by the turn of the twentieth century, masculinity was less about self-control and family obligation—the “family protector-provider” model—and more about competition, assertiveness, and virility. Commitments to women and children, once thought to be “a central, natural, and unproblematic aspect of being a man,” must now be encouraged and institutionalized through law, Popenoe claimed.21 Many within the emergent responsible fatherhood movement advocated for programs that would harness qualities associated with troubled masculinities seen as threats to family stability.22
As this movement gained momentum during the 1990s, political and academic discourses about the importance of fathering focused more intensely on masculine role modeling. David Blankenhorn, founder of the Institute of American Values, argued that many major social problems result from living in a society that views fatherhood as superfluous. Without a male parent in the home, he noted, boys look to less positive role models for the meaning of their maleness. When sons must prove their manliness without the help of fathers, they purportedly overcompensate by turning to hyper or protest forms of masculinity. Drawing a direct connection between crime, misogyny, and father absence, Blankenhorn explained: “If we want to learn the identity of the rapist, the hater of women, the occupant of jail cells, we do not look first to boys with traditionally masculine fathers. We look first to boys with no fathers.”23 Involved fathers are presumably necessary to prevent what Maggie Gallagher, president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, termed “father hunger.” This refers to “longing for a man, not just a woman, who will care for you, protect you, and show you how to survive in the world . . . [and present] an image of maleness that is not at odds with love.”24 The importance of fathers, and by extension responsible fatherhood policies, these authors reasoned, is grounded in men’s abilities to set limits, exercise masculine authority, and teach sons and daughters that they are worthy of male love.25 Many child development experts have made similar arguments that fathers uniquely contribute to children’s well-being through qualities such as masculine play styles and self-confidence.26 Unstated in this discourse are the highly questionable assumptions that any father in the home is a positive influence, that all fathers demonstrate a similar masculine parenting style, and that children in homes without fathers lack positive role models of masculinity.
Around the time of 1990s welfare reform, sociologist Anna Gavanas found that two major wings had emerged within the responsible fatherhood movement: one focused on promoting marriage as the ideal context for involved fathering and another concerned with marginalized fathers’ unemployment as a barrier to marriage and paternal involvement. The “pro-marriage” wing has drawn more on essentialist ideas of gender, while the “fragile family” arm has emphasized the impacts of racism and poverty on men’s marriageability and abilities to fulfill paternal responsibilities. Dominant messages in both have strong religious undercurrents, especially calls to promote married two-parent families that include both mothers and fathers.27 Together the two wings have articulated a shared narrative of fathers’ importance to families that highlights the unique and essential contributions of men as parents.28 As sociologist Philip Cohen has argued, claims that mothers and fathers play distinct and complementary parenting roles and must raise their children to replicate them are at the heart of struggles to preserve the gender binary on which patriarchy fundamentally rests.29 The ideology of gender complementarity in parenting is a strong common thread that connects many of the most controversial family policy issues over the past few decades, including opposition
