Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job (8 page)

Between 1976 and 1983 Allan served as principal of the Ethical Culture School in New York City. It is one of the largest co-ed independent elementary schools in the country. His next endeavor was leading a study group of independent school educators, a college dean, and a clinical psychologist with a shared vision of (a) highlighting the importance of the early school years and (b) having professionals with different training work together across traditional professional boundaries. This study group became the National Elementary School Center (NESC), which he directed from 1984 to 1994. NESC promoted the idea that
schools serve as a locus of child advocacy
because, logically, that’s where the kids are. He also made time for freelance writing on education and parenting as well as serving as a parenting coach.

Allan has written widely in the popular and professional press based on his focus group interviews with children and youth in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, as well as his 128 face-to-face daddying interviews with fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers. One interview was with his own eighty-seven-year-old father, a highly successful businessman whom Allan admired as one of “the titans” of his childhood, yet a man who was not around very much. As a result, Allan was determined to be a nurturing and attentive father to his own children. Sometimes wondering whether he was born with an extra nurturing gene, Allan is gratified that many of the young men he associates with refer to him as “Dad.” For example, a young Native American father from the Taos Pueblo asked Allan to become his father and they informally agreed to become father and son.

Allan draws immense satisfaction from bringing attention to a fundamentally important set of social and educational issues and getting people to think differently about being a dad and more broadly about the changing role of men. Nevertheless, his modest income from this work couldn’t keep pace with the rising cost of health insurance. The solution was to take another job that offers health insurance benefits if he works an annual average of at least twenty hours per week.

Initially, Allan’s three grown daughters were shocked at his decision to do work that seemed “menial” and made no use of his professional training and experience, and they were worried that the physical challenges might be too great. But after seven and a half years as a “crew member” at a Trader Joe’s store, the job is no longer a source of contention within the family. And he has been explicit in pointing out that sometimes one makes these kinds of life decisions to pursue a higher calling. The store is so close to his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, that his commute is a mere ten-minute walk. “Walking to and from the store and doing the physical work required is like going to the gym. The work is fun, I meet very interesting customers, and I have a group of wonderful coworkers who are very different from others I’ve ever worked with. I enjoy it, and I never have to take my job home with me.” His colleagues call him “The Mayor of Trader Joe’s” and tell him, “For an old guy you’re in pretty good shape!” They can’t believe that he’s seventy-one; some have even insisted on seeing an ID to prove his age.

When I asked Allan how long he expects to continue working at his main job, REEL FATHERS, he replied that “retirement” doesn’t even enter his thoughts. “So much still needs to get done. People are beginning to pay attention to
daddying
and the work of REEL FATHERS, its mission and its programs. My work is incredibly gratifying and my schedule also enables me to make time to spend with my eight grandchildren. Why would I ever consider stopping?”

In fact, Allan thinks he might be more productive now than ever before as this combination of professional and family commitments seems finally to bring together the sum total of his life’s work and those things that are most important to him personally.
Mothering Magazine
apparently agrees: the June 2008 issue featured him as a “Living Treasure.”

While leisure time is almost nonexistent, one thing Allan remembers to do for himself is to take an annual solitary retreat in a cabin in the Eastern Sierra Mountains of California. Last year he went for a ten-day retreat and produced “Seventy Thoughts . . . and Then Some” as well as “The Adventures of Daddy Appleseed.” Both were written to share “points picked-up” with his children and his grandchildren. This year he went for eight days to work on other writings. Next year he plans a twelve-day stay to adapt some of these thoughts and points picked up for sharing more publicly. One piece of advice will be, “Don’t allow your intellect to bully your intuition.” Another will capture the essence of a George Bernard Shaw quotation from
Man and Superman
(1905) that Allan has lived by for years:

This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as I live it is my privilege—my privilege—to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I love. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me; it is a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got a hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Without reviewing the history of marriage and family, let’s hark back to the decades when my survey respondents were coming of age, finishing college or graduate school, marrying, raising families, and building their careers. For some, this was in the 1950s, for most it was in the 1960s and 1970s. It was commonly accepted then (and to some extent still is) that men defined themselves in terms of their work, gauging themselves and being gauged by their ability to be good providers. Barbara Ehrenreich put it more crudely in 1983: “God gave women uteruses and men wallets.”
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That was twenty years after Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
appeared and women were supposed to be liberated, but Ehrenreich saw that they were still to a large extent economically dependent on men. The adult male was still expected to shoulder the responsibility of supporting a wife and family. A man who took pride in his wife not having to work might feel inadequate if she did have to get a job. (I know this from my own experience. When both of our children were in elementary school and I broached the subject of getting a job, my husband’s initial reaction was negative. Couldn’t I be content to play tennis and do other things while the kids were in school? Fortunately, this line of thinking was momentary. College teaching was paying him considerably less than a decent salary, and we clearly needed the second income.)

A few years earlier, Erik Erikson’s stage theory of adult development helped to shape the seminal work of psychologist Daniel Levinson and colleagues, who described overlapping eras in a man’s development and the characteristics of each.
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Within the life cycle they found that “A man’s work is the primary base for his life in society. Through it he is ‘plugged into’ an occupational structure and a cultural, class and social matrix. Work is also of great psychological importance; it is a vehicle for the fulfillment or negation of central aspects of the self.”
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In a parallel study of female development conducted with his wife, Levinson found “gender splitting” in many forms, for example, “the Traditional Marriage Enterprise, with its distinction between the male husband/father/provisioner and the female wife/mother/homemaker; the linkage between masculinity and authority, which makes it ‘natural’ that the man be head of household, executive and leader within the occupational domain and predominant in a patriarchal social structure.”
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Although Levinson noted that the traditional patterns were already changing and eroding at the time of the second study, he felt that satisfactory new ones were not yet available to replace them.

Levinson and his fellow researchers did not study men (or women) beyond the middle years, however. Thus, they could only speculate about later and late-late adulthood, believing the senior years were often characterized by a man’s bodily decline, responsibilities reduced, recognition lessened, and authority and power diminished in both the family and work settings. They did not hesitate to declare that “there will be serious difficulties if a man holds a position of formal authority beyond age sixty-five or seventy. If he does so, he is ‘out of phase’ with his own generation and he is in conflict with the generation in middle adulthood who need to assume greater responsibilities.”
8
That opinion from thirty-five years ago still has some traction today among employers and among younger workers who think older workers are clogging up the pipeline.

Sociologists have been studying social relations in the workplace, the organization of work, and the role of the work experience in daily life, ever since a trio of classical sociological theorists—Marx, Durkheim, and Weber—developed interest in the field. As one contemporary sociologist explains, “Work is perhaps the most important way in which society impacts our social experiences and life chances.”
9
Evidence of changing attitudes toward employment comes from the Sloan Center on Aging and Work’s Generations of Talent survey.
10
Sloan researchers studied attitudes toward gender roles in work and family held by employees of diverse ages working for multinational companies located in the United States, Brazil, China, India, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. “Traditional” gender perspectives encouraged a division of labor in which a married woman raised the children while her husband worked full time. The husband’s career came first, and the wife was expected to forgo or at least delay her academic and career aspirations and opportunities. Reflecting newer thinking, Generations of Talent survey responses fell into two main areas: (1) men and women should put in the same amount of time but have different roles and responsibilities (labeled “equal time/specialized roles”), and (2) men and women should share all responsibilities, such as caring for family members and earning money (labeled “equal responsibilities”). While Sloan researchers found that education and income levels were somewhat associated with respondents’ approval or disapproval of gender parity,
gender
proved the single most important variable associated with the “equal responsibilities” perspective—both men and women favored equal responsibilities, but women did so more strongly than men. In addition, differences in gender role perspectives were not attributable to a country’s level of economic development (as determined by per capita national income). Differences were associated with national culture: participants from “the conventionally masculine societies” of China and Japan favored the “equal time/specialized roles” perspective.
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American men and women raising families today may in principle favor sharing responsibility for family care and for earning money, but their good intentions are often thwarted by practicalities beyond their control. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s
Atlantic Magazine
essay, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” makes it clear that even a high-powered woman who can afford help with child care and domestic chores will experience “unsolvable tensions between family and career” if she cannot control her schedule.
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(Critics were quick to point out that the parenting problem belongs to
both
men and women.) Companies that were allowing employees to work from home for part or all of the five-day week or considering telecommuting’s merits will be revisiting their policies now that Yahoo!’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, has summoned employees back to the office where face-to-face interactions can take place and (presumably) stimulate productivity and innovation. Stymied by family-
un
friendly workplace policies and lack of accommodations, couples with young children are reluctantly concluding that the spouse with the smaller income (usually but not necessarily the wife) should give up full-time work or leave the workforce altogether. As Stephanie Coontz recently observed on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of
The Feminine Mystique
, the gender revolution has “hit a wall.”
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At the same time, the flagging economy and the loss of millions of jobs have put men, particularly lower and middle-class men, at a distinct disadvantage. Hanna Rosin’s
The End of Men and the Rise of Women
14
describes how newly unemployed or underemployed men who define themselves by the old “macho” rules and roles are unexpectedly having to depend on the women in their lives for support, resilient women who are more readily adapting to the changing economy, getting retrained, going back to college, finding new careers. These recent socioeconomic changes make it difficult to know whether and to what degree the once-inviolable “masculinity rules” still have meaning for men in the senior years.