When Couples Become Parents: The Creation of Gender in the Transition to Parenthood - by Bonnie Fox

When Couples Become Parents: The Creation of Gender in the Transition to Parenthood. Bonnie Fox. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2009. 334 pp. ISBN 0802091849. $35.00 paper. Couples in crisis, increasing gender differentiation, inconsistent and deficient social policies- these are just some of the reasons the transition to parenthood has interested scholars for decades. In When Couples Become Parents, Bonnie Fox brings these aspects together for an in-depth examination of the lives of new parents. Fox takes die concept of social reproduction (Lasiert & Brenner, 1989) as her theoretical starting point and builds the book around the assumption mat examining people's material and social resources is essential to understanding their experiences. Her largely structural approach provides an important counterbalance to much of die recent research on the transition to parenthood, which has focused more on ideological factors. Although the title of die book contends that it will describe "the creation of gender in the transition to parenthood," Fox's conclusions are actually more complex. She writes, "The stories of diese couples should also undermine any assumption that parenthood inevitably reproduces gender differences, divisions, or inequalities in the lives of heterosexual couples" (p. 291). Her attention to the diversity of responses and patterns of her sample of largely homogenous couples to the challenges inherent in the transition to parenthood is one of the book's greatest strengths. Fox dealt with the multiple moving pieces intrinsic to her topic by conducting longitudinal, in-depm interviews with bom male and female partners in 40 heterosexual Canadian couples over die course of a year. By interviewing new mothers and fathers separately, she was able to identify the distinctive narratives that a single relationship often contains (Bernard, 1972) and to capture how each individual constructed his or her new parental identity through interaction with his or her partner. She puts to good use the diversity of socioeconomic class among her couples in her analysis, where she is careful to examine the impact of each couple's constellation of resources on their initial parental experiences (Garey, 1999). The Canadian context is also an important element of this research, as she demonstrates how the couples are affected in significant ways by the amount of job leave and other family benefits available to each parent. The research, conducted in the 1990s, provides a useful point of comparison for both current Canadian policies (which are more generous) and U.S. policies (which are much less so), although how these would compare is not directly addressed. Fox's use of me concept of economy of care is one of the book's contributions. Building on Hochschild's (1989) concept of the economy of gratitude, Fox does a superb job of tracing the changing amount and types of care that men and women provide for each other throughout this transitional period. Her use of the concept helps make sense of the different reactions of new fathers to their wives' intense focus on me new baby. She finds that those couples who initially had a "traditional" economy of care, in which the woman does more to care for the husband dian he does for her, had more problems dian other couples during the first year. These husbands tend to view the time that the woman spent caring for the baby as taking away from (or displacing) the attention that usually went to them. In contrast, among those couples who had relationships characterized by reciprocity of care, the time the woman (or man) put toward caring for the baby was also experienced as care given to each other. Focusing on the couple's economy of care also provides interesting insights into related topics. For example, Fox argues that a significant amount of the behaviors that scholars have labeled "gatekeeping" may actually be wives' attempts to care for their husbands by protecting them from the additional stress of infant care. …