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Downsizing masculinity is the effect on the hegemonic male identity when the man has lost his job or role as provider for his family due to loss of a stable wage. The ability to provide for both children and wife is an important aspect of fatherhood.
Nicholas Townsend’s research suggests four aspects of fatherhood, those being emotional closeness, endowment, protection, and provision. Because the children only see their mother in the context of the home, they associate her with being knowledgeable on domestic topics. Contrarily, the father when holding a successful full time job is seen as worldly. The providing male must go outside of the home to acquire his financial resources for the family. This absence from the home allows him access to worldly knowledge that the mother and children do not have. Consequently, the children seek the wisdom of the father on science, economics and political affairs.
They further explain the consequences, “In particular, for men, the loss of a good factory job often means facing not only the prospect of socioeconomic downward mobility, but also an explicit or implicit rethinking of one’s identity as a man and one’s role as a father and husband.”
While the dominant man in the family may occasionally engage in some light housework and carry some of the responsibilities that are regarded as feminine, the main male domain remains in labor and breadwinner. This patriarchal reliance on the male as the wage earner in the family creates a tension and when the father loses his ability to provide for the family the mother, or even the children, must take initiative to find work to ensure stability and survival of the family. When the family must face the challenge of unemployment, several of the distinct culturally accepted gender and familial roles are breached in order for survival. As the mother may have to go out of her domestic domain to find work, the father takes on several responsibilities that previously had only been carried out by the woman. When the man must pick up the slack and cross over to the more domestic tasks, not only does the father start to question his identity as a man but also the children are confronted with trying to understand how their unemployed father is transforming.
The male masculine identity is not one of static nature; there is not a definitive archetype that summarizes the masculine identity (Broughton & Walton 2). As seen in the transformation of the father as he adapts from being a stable, successful employee (therefore a successful father) to the challenges of unemployment, his identity as a man and father too must adapt.
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