Married Fathers and Caring Daddies: Welfare Reform and the Discursive Politics of Paternity Author(s): Lynne Haney

and Miranda March Source: Social Problems, Vol. 50, No. 4 (November 2003), pp. 461-481 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of Social Problems Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/sp.2003.50.4.461 . Accessed: 26/07/2011 15:09
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Married Fathers and Caring Daddies: Welfare Reform and the Discursive Politics of Paternity
LYNNE HANEY, New York University MIRANDA MARCH, New York University
This article analyzes the paternal politics underlying contemporary welfare reform in the United States. Current research on U.S. welfare reform tends to focus on the redefinition of womens responsibilities and social conceptions of motherhood. We contribute to this scholarship by explicating the ways in which reform politics also advance powerful conceptions of fatherhood. Through a discourse analysis of national-level policy debates surrounding new fatherhood legislation, we deconstruct policymakers views on what constitutes fatherhood. We then compare their discourses to those articulated in interviews with 51 low-income, African American women. From the comparison, we argue that these groups conceptions of fatherhood diverged in critical ways. Policymakers constructions prioritized the form of mens paternal relations over the content of those relations defining fatherhood in terms of mens biological, institutional, or financial connection to their children. By contrast, the low-income women we interviewed prioritized the content of mens paternal relations over their formconceptualizing fatherhood in terms of mens identification with and participation in paternal activities. By juxtaposing these discourses of fatherhood, our analysis complements feminist research on how ideologies of motherhood influence welfare policies. And by theorizing the differences between these groups conceptions of fatherhood, we hypothesize about the policy implications of this conceptual divergence.

Since the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996, social scientists have conducted an enormous amount of research on welfare politics and policies. Some scholars documented how the replacement of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) restructured womens relationships to social assistance. Their research suggests that new work requirements and eligibility rules pushed women to rely more on the labor market and familial networks and less on state programs (Meyer and Storbakken 2000; Mink 1998; Rose 1995). Other scholars analyzed welfare reform for what it signied about the reconstitution of the state itself. Their analyses indicate that reform marked an end to welfare maternalism and a stronger emphasis on womens roles as wage earners (Little 1999; Orloff 2000; Reimer 2001). Still other scholars tackled the terrain of welfare practices to examine shifts in the mode of state redistribution. Their research exposes variations in the local implementation of reform and in womens ability to transition from paid mothering to wage labor (Blank and Haskins 2001; Corcoran et al. 2000; Danziger et al. 2000).

Many colleagues and friends offered valuable feedback on different incarnations of this article. In particular, the authors would like to thank Robin Rogers-Dillon, Duke Ferris, Kathleen Gerson, Dorith Geva, Kate Gualtieri, Amie Hess, Ruth Horowitz, Robert Jackson, Allison McKim, Ann Orloff, Arlene Skolnick, Andrs Tapolcai, members of the Gender and Inequality Workshop at New York University, the Social Problems editor, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. Direct correspondence to: Lynne Haney, Department of Sociology, New York University, 269 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10003-6687. E-mail: Lynne.Haney@nyu.edu. SOCIAL PROBLEMS, Vol. 50, No. 4, pages 461481. ISSN: 0037-7791; online ISSN: 1533-8533 2003 by Society for the Study of Social Problems, Inc. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

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All of this research indicates that contemporary welfare politics marked a redenition in womens responsibilities and in social conceptions of motherhood. Yet this politics also recongured other familial and domestic relations. Most notably, it set forth conceptions of fatherhoodmessages about the attributes and characteristics associated with fathering. From the outset, fathers were central to welfare reform legislation. An early draft of the PRWORA portrayed fathers as failing to live up to their paternal obligations and thus hastening the demise of the nuclear family. Although such rhetoric had been toned down by the time the PRWORA passed, it continued to surface in the political debates surrounding the Act. The preoccupation with dening fatherhood did not end there: Following the enactment of the PRWORA, the U.S. Congress drafted new fatherhood legislation. First introduced in 1998, the legislation was designed to complement the PRWORA. The legislation has since undergone multiple revisions, metamorphosing into eight different Acts; as of 2003, three Acts remained under Congressional review.1 In all of its incarnations, this legislation advances powerful visions of fatherhood and creates programs to target men as fathers. Although there is ample evidence that paternal politics underlie contemporary welfare reform, sociologists still know very little about the content of this politics. What conceptions of fatherhood are advanced in these political debates? How do policymakers imagine the role of fathers and represent their needs? Sociologists know even less about whether policymakers notions of fatherhood are in sync with those adhered to by the men and women they target. To what extent are the denitions of fatherhood worked out in the halls of Congress consistent with those held by members of the communities most affected by reform? In this article, we explore these questions through an analysis of the discourses of fatherhood articulated by national policymakers and by a sample of low-income women. Put another way, we examine the descriptive practices of fatherhoodthe interpretive processes through which paternal meanings are produced and sustained (Gubrium and Holstein 1987, 1990, 1993). On the one hand, we deconstruct the political debates surrounding fatherhood legislation to illuminate policymakers narratives about what constitutes fatherhood. We then compare these narratives to those advanced by a group of 51 low-income, African American women. From the comparison, we argue that there are substantive differences in these groups discourses of fatherhood. First, they articulate contrasting denitions of fatherhood: Although policymakers views varied, they tended to prioritize paternal form over function, emphasizing mens biological or nancial connections to children. And while the low-income women we interviewed held somewhat divergent paternal blueprints, they converged to prioritize paternal function over form, conceptualizing fatherhood in terms of mens identication with, and participation in, paternal activities. In addition to contesting the denition of fatherhood espoused by policymakers, our respondents challenged its causal logic. For policymakers, paternal form gave rise to paternal functionin their view, fathers would care for children once their relationship was formalized through marriage and breadwinning. For the low-income women we interviewed, it worked the other way around: The formalization of paternal relations came after men had performed as caring parents. By distinguishing between biological and real fathers, or fathers and daddies, our respondents privileged the quality of mens relationship to children over the formalities of their ties (Furstenberg 1995). Just as Patricia Hill Collins (2000) theorized that other mothering is a key form of childrearing in low-income, African American communities, we found other fathering to be central to their notions of the paternal. In this way, we should be clear from the outset that our analysis focuses on the discursive politics of fatherhood. Of course, it could be argued that this focus misses the reality of
1. Most recently, it also surfaced in debates about the re-authorization of TANF. In its current re-authorization proposal, the Bush administration earmarked $300 million each year for five yearsfor a total of $1.5 billionto promote marriage for TANF recipients. It remains to be seen whether this re-authorization proposal will be approved and if it will affect the scope of the fatherhood legislation.

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paternal practices and ignores debates about what fathers are actually doing for children. Yet, following other scholars of familial discourse, we insist on the analytical utility of deconstructing how family relations are imagined and represented in everyday life (Harris 2001; Holstein and Gubrium 1993, 1994; Rosenblatt 1994). By interrogating the paternal theories adhered to by policymakers and low-income women, we expose how they assign meaning to social ties and designate the rights and obligations accompanying them (Hopper 1993). By analyzing family rhetoric as an ideological code, we investigate how, like maternal politics, paternal politics are used to in/validate certain family ties and relations (Mink 1995, 1998; Smith 1993). And by recognizing the complex relationship between familial rhetoric and practice, we hypothesize about the practical implications of these groups divergent conceptions of fatherhood (Harris 2001; Miller 1990).

Maternal and Paternal Discourses of Welfare

Analyses of familial discourse have long been central to the feminist scholarship on the welfare state. Gender scholars have provided detailed accounts of the maternalist underpinnings of U.S. welfare politics and the ways in which conceptions of motherhood shaped, and were shaped by, the development of welfare policy. Feminist historians have revealed that, since its inception, the U.S. welfare state was maternalist in orientation (Brush 1996; Haney and Pollard 2003; Koven and Michel 1993). An abundance of research on the Progressive Era has established that female reformers drew on maternalist visions, and mixed them with their own versions of professionalism, to carve out places for themselves in policymaking circles (Gordon 1994; Muncy 1991; Skocpol 1992). In doing so, female reformers inserted a particular view of motherhood into state policiesa view that opposed the public and private and separated wage labor and caretaking (Goodwin 1997; Orloff 1996). This conception of motherhood was replete with racial and class biases; to a large extent, it was a bourgeois notion of motherhood that pathologized the practices of immigrant, African American, and workingclass mothers (Gordon 1994; Mink 1995). Despite its racial and class specicity, this maternalist vision became locked into the U.S. policy regime. This rhetoric then had practical effects on womens lives and shortened the leash that tied women to the domestic sphere (Muncy 1991). Ultimately, it also had structural effects and fostered the emergence of a two-tiered welfare system, which positioned women as domestic caretakers dependent on a male wage (Fraser 1989; Fraser and Gordon 1994; Nelson 1990). Feminist analyses of contemporary welfare politics tend to share this maternal focus. Most gender scholars emphasize the material effects of the recent round of welfare reform. Many interpret reform as signifying an end to the bifurcated welfare systemby requiring poor mothers to participate in wage labor, the PRWORA may blur the line between the masculine and feminine subsystems of welfare (Harrington 2000; Orloff 2000, 2003). By commodifying poor womens labor, reform may result in a less gender-differentiated welfare system. Other gender scholars are not as sanguine about the material effects of reform. Because the ideal of the full-time caretaker never applied to poor, African American mothers, they argue that welfare reform simply mandates these womens participation in wage labor (Mink 1998, 1999; Roberts 1999). Moreover, they question the states commitment to enjoining motherhood and employment, claiming that the lack of adequate support for womens incorporation into the labor market may deepen their impoverishment and/or heighten their reliance on men (Edin 2000; Kittay 1999; Piven 1999; Thomas 1995). Although gender scholars diverge in their evaluations of the material effects of welfare reform, they converge to view it as a reconceptualization of motherhood. Clearly, contemporary welfare politics has been shaped by maternal politics. Yet paternal politics have also become central to debates about state provision. The insertion of the paternal into these debates marks a change in development of U.S. social policy. As Ann Orloff (2003) has argued, U.S.

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welfare policy rarely targeted men as fathers. Instead, men tended to be conceptualized as everything women were not: as independent wage earners as opposed to dependent caretakers; as rights-bearing individuals as opposed to members of needy families; and as beneciaries of cash benets as opposed to recipients of services (Fraser 1989; Nelson 1990). Contemporary welfare reform complicates this division by positioning some men as fathers. The introduction to the PRWORA constructed men as part of the problem, attributing poor womens vulnerability to irresponsible men and dead beat dads. The Act also dictated appropriate paternal behavior, requiring that fathers undergo paternity testing and pay child support. Hence, after decades of feminizing the needs of poor families, U.S. welfare policy has acknowledged mens roles as fathers. This shift has not gone completely unnoticed in the welfare reform literature. Yet here, too, the focus has been on how the PRWORA tracks men and how this new tracking subverts the welfare systems two-tiered, gendered structure. Just as women may have been pushed into the masculine tier through mandatory employment, men may have moved into the feminine tier through mandatory paternity testing and child-support enforcement (Monson 1997; Orloff and Monson 2002). In addition, mens positioning as fathers may signify the rise of a third welfare tier designed to punish men who fail to support their families (Willrich 2000). According to this line of reasoning, welfare reform will breed new stratication among men: While some men will continue to enjoy the privileges associated with the breadwinner role, others will be criminalized because of their failure to fulll the responsibilities of this role. While quite promising, these analyses of the states systemic tracking of men beg a critical question: If policymakers now dene men as fathers, how do they interpret paternal roles and responsibilities? As we know from feminist theories of welfare, states are not only re/distributive bodiesthey are also interpretive entities that dene the ideal attributes and characteristics of parents and spouses (Fraser 1989; Haney 2002). As analyses of maternalism reveal, state interpretations of the maternal were extraordinarily powerful: From the Progressive Era on, they shaped what was possible at the policy level. They also inuenced womens reactions to policies, sometimes leading women to accept policy constraints and other times prompting women to resist them. The same can be said of denitions of fatherhood. Thus, before scholars can theorize the paternal politics of welfare, they need to analyze the discourses of fatherhood and paternal visions articulated in welfare debates. In fact, there are strong indications that, outside the welfare arena, social conceptions of fatherhood are in ux. The gender revolution in the U.S. has left an imprint on cultural definitions of fathers as well as mothers (Furstenberg 1995; Gerson 1995; Hochschild 1989). Many scholars argue that there has been a shift from viewing fathers strictly as breadwinners to highlighting their roles as nurturers (Coltrane and Galt 2000; Marsiglio 1995). Once dened by their biological and nancial connection to children, fathers are increasingly expected to be emotionally close to and available for their children. These cultural expectations have been shown to inuence mens evaluations of themselves as fathers (Furstenberg and Harris 1993; Lerman and Ooms 1993). As William Marsiglio (1998) put it, the emphasis has shifted from mens procreative responsibilities, or the practical aspects of paternity, to mens procreative consciousness, or their emotional attachment to paternity. To what extent do national policymakers echo this shift in emphasis? Are their discourses of fatherhood consistent with these cultural changes? And do low-income women concur with these conceptions of fatherhood? How do they represent paternal roles and responsibilities?

Data and Methods

To explore these questions, we rely on two types of data. First, we conducted a discourse analysis of the debates surrounding fatherhood legislation rst formulated in 1998. We traced

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the different incarnations of this legislation and the testimony related to it.2 During its four year history, this legislation was debated numerous times by members of Congress, policymakers, family experts, and fatherhood activists. These debates and testimony provided a unique window into the paternal politics of welfare reform. Perhaps even more than those related to the PRWORA, these Congressional debates exposed national policymakers discourses of fatherhood and of paternal responsibility. And, unlike the PRWORA, there has been virtually no sociological work on the pending fatherhood legislation, despite its clear relevance to analyses of gender and the welfare state. Second, we coupled this discursive analysis with a study of the narratives of fatherhood produced in 51 in-depth interviews with low-income women. Our interview sample was drawn from one of the longest running studies of disadvantaged families, the Baltimore Parenthood Study (BPS). The BPS commenced in 1966 with a sample of 399 pregnant adolescents; it now includes these womens offspring (Furstenberg, Brooks-Gunn, and Morgan 1987). Since 1966, the BPSs retention rate for the rst cohort of women was 57 percent; since 1983, the retention rate for their children was 75.5 percent.3 Drawing our sample from the BPS accorded us unique research opportunities. It allowed us to avoid snowball sampling, which is a common sampling procedure in this kind of research. Snowball sampling often breeds a homogeneous respondent pool comprised of women with similar backgrounds and life experiences. The BPS enabled us to include a relatively diverse group of low-income women and to control for their age and experience with the welfare system. As a result, our sample looks similar to the population targeted by welfare reformers: Low-income, African American women who were teenage mothers or the children of teenage mothers. Our sub-sample of 51 women was drawn randomly from the entire BPS sample. Of our respondents, 65 percent had long-term or recent experience with the welfare system. At the time of the interview, 80 percent were working outside the homemany of them were employed in low-wage, service-sector jobs in food service (12 percent), child care (12 percent), retail sales (8 percent), personal care (8 percent), or cleaning services (6 percent). All of our respondents had children; 85 percent had more than one child. Overall, 68 percent of our respondents had been married; 38 percent were living with spouses at the time of the interview. An additional 20 percent were living with boyfriends or lovers. Roughly 25 percent of our respondents maintained regular, on-going contact with their childrens biological fathers; 30 percent had limited contact with these men. Finally, 15 percent of our respondents received regular, formalized child support from their childrens biological fathers. Our interviews were conducted in respondents homes, and ran for three to four hours.4 The interviews addressed two general issues. First, they examined respondents experiences with welfare reform: How did they interpret the recent shifts in welfare policies? What aspects of reform did they nd most relevant to their lives? Second, they probed into the organization of their community and kin networks and the allocation of resources within them. It was here that our respondents expressed their interpretations of fatherhood. We were not entirely prepared for their focus on men; given prevailing assumptions about the
2. The legislation and testimony analyzed in this article were collected from the online LexisNexis database, which includes the complete transcripts of all the material cited. The database allows for the search of legislation and testimony by topic and for the tracking of different versions of a bill. It also permits researchers to follow the trajectory of a bill through its relevant subcommittees. 3. These retention rates are similar to other studies such as the National Longitudinal Study of Young Women (NLS-YW) and the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). For instance, from 19661995, the NLS-YW had a retention rate of 59.7 percent, only slightly higher than the BPSs rate for the rst cohort of women. Moreover, BPS participants are comparable to those from these other studiesthey are similar to their national counterparts in terms of education, marital status, and employment, although they have slightly fewer children and lower rates of welfare use. For more on these parallels, see Foley (1998a, 1998b). 4. All but one of these interviews were taped and transcribed. For the one interview that was not taped, we analyzed the notes taken by one of the interviewers.

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importance of female support networks, we expected our respondents to highlight the role of female kin (Hao and Brinton 1997; Oliker 2000; Stack 1974). And to some extent they did. But our respondents also spent large portions of the interview constructing narratives about men as fathersthey often shifted the focus of our questions to discuss their denitions of fatherhood and their theories of what fatherhood entailed. Quite early in the research we realized that these paternal representations were themselves ripe for investigation. Thus, the focus of our analysis largely came from below and reected what our female respondents problematized about contemporary welfare politics.

Making Better Fathers: Paternal Form over Paternal Function

Just two years after Congress passed the PRWORA, it began to formulate legislation aimed at fathers. These Acts were clearly related: While the PRWORA set forth an agenda for womens appropriate childrearing, the fatherhood legislation did the same for men. The Acts even shared a father; Representative Clay Shaw, a Republican from Florida, was active in writing the PRWORA and in pushing the House version of the Responsible Fatherhood Act. In 1998, the ofce Representative Nancy Johnson, a Republican from Connecticut, issued an advisory to members of Congress announcing the rst round of hearings on new fatherhood legislation. The advisory noted that oral testimony would be heard only from invited speakers, a list that included directors of programs for low-income fathers, child support administrators, and members of advocacy groups. A second round of hearings took place in 2000. Transcripts from these hearings revealed widespread bi-partisan support for fatherhood legislation. Those involved in the political debates seemed to agree on three issues. First, they shared a denition of the problem: The nuclear family was declining in African American communities, which resulted in generations of fatherless children. Both the House and Senate legislation began with a litany of problems associated with fatherlessnessfrom substance abuse, to delinquency, to physical neglect, to out-of-wedlock births, to poverty (U.S. Congress, Senate 1999). As the House version warned, Violent criminals are overwhelmingly males who grew up without fathers (U.S. Congress, House 2001). And as the Senate version cautioned, Children who live apart from their biological fathers are . . . more likely to bring weapons and drugs into the classroom . . . more likely to become pregnant as teenagers (U.S. Congress, Senate 2001). To support such claims, policymakers and experts made frequent references to the Moynihan Report, which popularized the notion of the African American family as a tangle of pathology. In his testimony, Charles Ballard, an African American head of several fatherhood programs and himself the father of an out-of-wedlock child, praised Moynihans prophetic statements on the decline of the American family, and the African American family in particular and urged Congress to have the courage to act on Moynihans recommendations (U.S. Congress, Senate 2000a). As in the Moynihan Report, many policymakers used rhetoric of intergenerational contagion, likening fatherlessness to a disease passed down through the generations. As Gregory Palumbo, executive director of Oklahomans for Families Alliance and a fathers rights activist, told legislators:
Many of the behaviors that result in negative social indicators for children are learned, and passed down from generation to generation. The consequences of fatherlessness for children are associated with dramatic increases in being homeless or runaway, behavioral disorders, drug use, and lling prisons. (U.S. Congress, House 1999a)

In addition to their common denition of the problem, policymakers agreed on the general contours of a solution: to recongure the role of fathers in low-income communities. When these experts referred to fathers, they meant something quite specicmen with biological connections to children. Policymakers conceptualized fatherhood in quite formulaic

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terms. For them, the act of procreation was the foundation of fatherhood; fathers were men with blood ties to children. In their construction, biological fathers irresponsible behavior had pushed their families into poverty and led their children into delinquency, recklessness, and even suicide. From this perspective, once the severed ties between biological fathers and their offspring were mended, a plethora of social problems would be resolved. How could state policy mend these severed ties? Here, too, policymakers appeared to agree: Their formulaic view of fatherhood led them to rework the institutional links between biological fathers and their children. Rather than relying on past techniques that coerced men into paying child support, the policies they proposed sought to transform men into solid family members. This implied formalizing the relationship between childrens biological fathers and mothers through marriage. It meant strengthening the structural relation between biological fathers and their offspring. It also implied solidifying normative paternal roles and responsibilities. In short, it meant securing a married, nuclear family formwhat Dorothy Smith (1993) has termed the model of the Standard North American Family, or SNAF. Although policymakers converged to view biological fatherhood as the problem, and marriage as a panacea, they diverged somewhat over how to conceptualize the ideal SNAF model. Some policymakers insisted on a model based on male breadwinning and female domestic service. For them, once men became breadwinners, they would transform into responsible fathers. Other policymakers were less insistent that men become sole providers and more preoccupied with their wage-earning potential. Recognizing that the two-wage-earner family has become the norm, their goal was to prepare men to t this family model. Thus, while both groups strove to turn biological fathers into married fathers, they disagreed over the precise means to this end: Should policy endeavor to secure the male breadwinner family form in lowincome communities? Or should policy concentrate on making low-income men marriageable by fostering their employability?

Making Men Marry: Good Fathers Are Heads-of-Households

Policymakers who emphasized the cultural pathologies that undermined the male breadwinner family form tended to be the most vociferous and to receive the most media attention. The causal links they made among social problems were clear: Poor communities failed to value married fatherhood and male breadwinning. Without the inculcation of such values, these communities would continue to be plagued by cycles of crime, out-of-wedlock births, and welfare dependency. For them, the crisis of fatherhood was rooted in the ethos of the poor. The goal was to impose another denition of fatherhood on poor communities and to restore men to their rightful place as scal and moral heads-of-household. Once a proper family form was in place, appropriate paternal functions would emerge. In effect, lawmakers assumed that once men were married, they would naturally assume the breadwinner role. As Wade Horn, Assistant Secretary for Children and Families, told Congress:
Federal legislation must clearly promote married fatherhood as the ideal. All available evidence suggests that the most effective pathway to involved, committed, and responsible fatherhood is marriage. Research consistently documents that unmarried fathers, whether divorced or unwed, tend over time to become disconnected, nancially and psychologically, from their children. . . . We need a public policy that supports [fathers] work as nurturers, disciplinarians, mentors, moral instructors and skill coaches. (U.S. Congress, House 1999b)

This discourse of fatherhood gave rise to clear policy prescriptions. All the versions of fatherhood legislation mandated that state funds be used to hold married fatherhood as the ideal. Politically conservative policymakers took this one step further, arguing that lowincome fathers were not sufciently acquainted with the idea of marriage itself. Representative Nancy Johnson testied:

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HANEY/MARCH Part of the problem seems to be that our society ceased to expect poor people to marry and that there was nothing wrong with millions of poor children being reared by single mothers, often on welfare. This view is completely out of touch with what we know about what it takes to make adults healthy and happy and . . . what it takes to rear strong and accomplished children. Marriage is goodfor both the poor and nonpoor. If we can restore marriage to its rightful place at all levels of our society, we will have accomplished more that could be achieved by any government program we might design. (U.S. Congress, House 1999c)

To achieve this, policymakers proposed to teach men about marriage and its rewards. The Senates Responsible Fatherhood Act of 2001 called for the promotion of marriage through disseminating information about its benets. The legislation provides states with grants to fund television and print advertisements that promote the formation and maintenance of married two-parent families. States can either produce these campaigns directly or contract them out to non-prot organizations and religious agencies. Concomitantly, the legislation channels funds for programs that promote the benets of marriage on an individual level through counseling and mentoring programs. Again, states would have wide latitude to fund public, private, or religious programs. Some politically conservative skeptics responded that information was not enough: Even if low-income men became aware of the benets of marriage, they might not have the emotional maturity for marriage. As Jeffrey Johnson, president of a national non-prot group dedicated to strengthening families, explained to Congress:
Young, low-skilled, unmarried, poor parents have their children before they are mature enough to understand and manage a committed relationship and before they recognize the implications of unmarried, unprotected sex and childbearing. (U.S. Congress, Senate 2000c)

To secure this resocialization, policymakers proposed teaching low-income men how to form successful marriages. A recurring provision in the House and Senate Acts was that states must fund at least one fatherhood program that utilizes married couples to provide services for low-income fathers. For example, the 2001 House version stipulates that funding be used:
[To] sustain marriage through marriage preparation programs, premarital counseling, marital inventories, skills-based marriage education, nancial planning, and divorce education and reduction programs, including mediation and counseling. (U.S. Congress, House 2001)

In addition, this legislation established and funded fatherhood programs with strong therapeutic components. The Senates version proposed to instruct men how to sustain marriage through marriage education programs and fatherhood preparedness classes. These programs included educational campaigns to give men relationship skills, premarital counseling to impart knowledge about healthy marriages, and marital enrichment classes to offer conict resolution techniques. Wade Horn defended the focus in a media interview:
It would be wholly inappropriate for the government to run a dating service. . . . Were going to support activities that help couples who choose marriage for themselves develop the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain healthy marriages. I nd it almost unfathomable why anyone would be against helping a low-income family who chooses marriage for themselves access the skills and knowledge to build a healthy marriage. (Toner 2002)

Making Men Marriageable: Good Fathers Are Wage-Earning Husbands

Policymakers at the other end of the political spectrum supported many of these proposals. Democratic lawmakers and experts tended to agree that there was a crisis of fatherhood in low-income communities. And they concurred that the roots of the crisis could be traced to a breakdown in the connection between marriage and fatherhood. Yet while political conservatives insisted that stable families were synonymous with male breadwinning families, these policymakers claimed that healthy families could include two wage earners. For them, the

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impediment to married fatherhood was not low-income fathers moral or cultural ethos, but their inability to contribute materially. Without the ability to act as wage earners, these policymakers argued, men found it difcult to maintain a nuclear family form. By recognizing the futility of demanding that men without economic opportunities get married and support their children, these policymakers inserted a new distinction into policy debates about fatherhood: There were men who could support their families materially, but would not; and there were men who would support their families materially, but could not. In essence, they distinguished between dead beat dads and dead broke dads (Orloff and Monson 2002). They also claimed that most low-income fathers fell into the latter category they were men who had the desire to support their children, but who lacked the capacity to do so. Until these men became marriageable, there would be little incentive for low-income men and women to formalize relationships through marriage. In his written testimony, Dr. Jeffrey Johnson, the head of the national pro-family group Partners for Fragile Families, described the rehabilitation strategies his organization utilized to make low-income fathers marriageable:
Dead-broke dads are often young, had their rst child before nishing high school or acquiring much work experience. They are in all practical respects, unemployable. . . . In line with the goal of promoting marriageablility and increased child support, all PFF grantees are required to institute or provide access to intensive career and personal development skills training in preparation for placement in family sustaining, wage growth jobs. . . . In addition, we teach values, manhood, parental accountability, anger management, health, sexuality and pregnancy prevention, conict resolution and self sufciency. (U.S. Congress, Senate 2000c)

Given that these policymakers viewed marriageability as central to the crisis of fatherhood, they sought policies to address mens unemployment or underemployment. According to them, poor communities lacked the right values and the right jobs. Low-income men needed a sense of masculinity that afrmed their obligations to children; they needed opportunities for nancial self-improvement; and they needed programs that provided job training, education, and practical skills. Once they became wage earners, they would begin to act as responsible parents. And once they had economic opportunity, the gender role confusion that arose from their lack of economic power would end. The reverse would also occurwith family relationships formalized, men would have an incentive to improve their nancial standing; with connection to their offspring, men would have a reason to advance economically. Just as conservative policymakers blueprints linked breadwinning to good fathering, these lawmakers discourse maintained that wage earning would make men better fathers. As Preston Garrison, the head of another fatherhood program, testied:
Serious attention must be paid to building the capacity of low income fathers to attain the economic sustainability necessary to maximize the potential for children to grow up free from poverty and dependence on the government. To accomplish this, we must give attention to increasing the ability of fathers . . . to become employable in the new workforce so they can contribute economically and emotionally to their children. (U.S. Congress, Senate 2000b)

The discursive connection these policymakers made between wage earning and fatherhood appeared in the proposed legislation less often than the agendas of conservative policymakers. But both the House and Senates fatherhood legislation did contain provisions for job training and educational programs for low-income men. For example, the 1999 House version included funding for programs that sought to improve low-income fathers economic status by providing work-rst services, subsidized employment, career-advancing education, job retention, and job enhancement (U.S. Congress, House 1999a). The more recent version of the House legislation coupled such provisions with programs to instill a family-oriented masculinity in low-income men and to teach them to become scally responsible. It not only earmarked funds to inculcate the values necessary for sexual delity and non-violent conict resolution, but it included programs to socialize men into roles as nancial planners. As it stated, fatherhood programs were designed:

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Hence, while policymakers debated what type of family form state policy should prioritize, they shared a denition of fatherhood that privileged the biological and material dimensions of fatherhood over its social dimensions. All those involved in the Congressional debates argued that the biological relationship between fathers and their children should anchor family structure; the biological connection between fathers and their children was an irreplaceable component of healthy families. They also assumed that, in some form, the nuclear family model would transform men into responsible fathers. Once an appropriate family form was established, fathers would adhere to gender-appropriate roles and behavior. The rhetoric used by policymakers to condone and condemn various paternal forms clearly reected a larger political discourse about families. From the rst advisory announcing the fatherhood hearings, the contours of the fatherhood debate were shaped by a SNAFinfected rhetoric that pathologized non-nuclear family forms. The near consensus on the desirability of biological, married families among those invited to testify before Congress suggests that the parameters of the debate were set so narrowly as to preclude discussions of alternatives to SNAF. If policymakers testimony expressed a somewhat divergent causal ordering of marriage and breadwinning, their insistence that ideal paternal form gives rise to ideal paternal functions remained mired in a conservative family values discourse.

Making Better Daddies: Paternal Function over Paternal Form

Like members of Congress, the low-income women we interviewed had strong opinions about fatherhood. In fact, their views were so strong that they surfaced in all our interviews, even though few of our interview questions pertained directly to fatherhood. When we asked these women about the connections between their work and family lives, they discussed fathers. When we questioned them about the role of extended kin and community networks in their lives, they discussed fathers. And when we inquired about their experiences with state assistance, they discussed fathers. Although their representations of fatherhood occasionally diverged, they did converge to challenge the simple formula adhered to in Congressional debateswhereby fatherhood was dened in biological terms and good fathering was reduced to mens institutional or nancial connection to children. Instead, these women advanced a more complex and malleable conception of fatherhood. Initially, this exible denition caused some confusion in the interviews. Our own assumptions about the biological basis of fatherhood led us to misinterpret respondents views. For instance, in describing the excellent relationship between her mother and father, 31-year-old Loretta explained, They have known each other for 25 years. And [they have] been married 20 years. Other women, like Sheryl, a 49-year-old mother of six, showed us pictures of her childrens fathersmen who looked only a few years older than her children. Still other women, like 32-year-old Darlene, began the interview by explaining that her childrens father was incarcerated. Then, later in the interview, she claimed that her children were lucky to have a father who did right by them and saw them almost every weekend. Needless to say, we were quite perplexed by such seemingly inconsistent accounts.

Whos Your Daddy?: Biological and Other Fathers

As the interviews progressed, it became clear that such accounts were not inconsistent. Women like Loretta, Sheryl, and Darlene did not dene fatherhood in strictly biological terms. Nor did they see procreation as the foundation of fatherhood. Instead, they maintained that

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there were biological and real fathersand often the two did not meet. As Margaret, a 49year-old mother of two put it: Every man that fathers a child is not a father. Like Frank Furstenbergs (1995) distinction between daddies and fathers, our respondents invented ways to classify mens involvement in their childrens lives. Put another way, they advanced a conception of other fathering that was similar to Collins (2000) notion of other mothering. According to Collins, other mothering or community mothering arose out of the historical, economic, and social conditions of African American communities conditions in which it was not always possible or desirable for biological mothers to be sole caretakers. Similarly, our respondents presented other fathering as emerging out of a combination of necessity and choice. Many of them recounted painful memories of paternal abandonment, which they argued had prompted them to adhere to an expansive notion of fathering. Some of them claimed that men wanted nothing to do with them or their children; others explained that men had been forcibly separated from them due to incarceration. These women then presented other fathering as a response to their experiences of lossas a way to support themselves and their children in the sheer absence of biological fathers. As 32-year-old Kimberly described her daughters biological father:
He conceived her, but now hes nowhere. For the rst three or four years of her life, he was locked up. So he didnt see her. Now he has three other kids. Hes married. And he just forgot about her. I really dont even want her to be a part of that. He wont even do paternity. Its all messed up. I went down to social services to get him down for a [paternity] test. But he gets all mad and wont do it. [It is] just not worth it. I would rather just leave it alone.

While paternal abandonment was by far the most common reason given for the importance of other fathers, some women also linked their denitions of fatherhood to their own emotional and physical abuse. These women told stories of being hurt and disappointed by their biological fathers so often that their views of fatherhood changed. They portrayed the inclusion of other fathers as something of a survival strategy, as a way to protect themselves or their children from further abuse. For example, after years of watching her 32-year-old daughter be neglected by her biological father, Dorothy suggested that her daughter nd a real daddy and stay away from her biological father who causes more grief than anything. Then there was 32-year-old Jackie, who re-examined her notion of fatherhood after discovering her infant son with 2nd and 3rd degree burns to the crown of his headwounds inicted on him by his biological father. She claimed that in order to protect her son, she replaced his biological father with her long-term lover, Arnold. When we asked about the role Arnold played in her childrens lives, Jackie explained:
As far as they [her children] know, Arnold is not their real father. Hes daddy. He is not who made us . . . But he is daddy. He does everything for them. He has been in their lives since they were babies . . . So they call him daddy. They know nobody else as daddy. I know I will have to answer for it, come Judgment Day, but until I get to that point, all they will know is that their biological father is dead. If they see him on a bus, I wouldnt say, Thats your father.

So who did these women classify as other fathers? A majority of them applied this label to male relativesgrandfathers, uncles, cousins, or brothers. They were men who lived in close proximity to women and their children. In discussing such men, women claimed that their blood ties were less important than their on-going contact through familial networks. When women spoke about their own other fathers, they frequently constructed these relationships as evolving over time, beginning when they were children and stretching into adulthood. April, a 33-year-old mother of two, considered the man her mother married when she was a small child to be her father. Although they divorced when April was young, she continued to call him her father, displaying pictures of him in her apartment and calling his new wife her stepmother. When her children get older, she hopes they will exhibit pictures of their fatheran elderly uncle who moved in with them after her daughters biological father

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was shot on the street while taking the girls shopping. When asked about the father of her two children, 48-year-old Mabel described their daddy:
Ive been with him since 1985. Hes not the father of either of my kids. But he is, really. Hes been a part of their lives since they were real young. Hes the only daddy they know. Even though hes got four other kids, he raised mine. Hes their daddy.

In addition to extended kin, our respondents applied the other father label to men from their community and friendship networks. Roughly 35 percent of the women we interviewed discussed other fathers with no biological relation to their children. These men were neighbors, friends, and fellow church members. As 30-year-old Stephanie discussed her daughters daily routine, she stopped to comment on the signicance of the girls other father:
She has a real supportive godfather; hes my best friend . . . Hes married and has a little girl, but he realizes how hard I work to keep things nice and he just helps . . . He knows that she doesnt really have a male role model. So thats what I ask of him, to be here for her and to come get her on a Saturday and take her places. He comes over and spends time with her. . . . He takes care of her. She goes home with him on weekends and stuff. She has the best godfather in the world; far better than any dad she could have.

Other fathers could also be these womens former boyfriends and lovers. Some women whose children had different biological fathers designated one of them as the father of all their children. For instance, Michele, a 31-year-old mother of three who was no longer in touch with two of her childrens biological fathers, presented the man she was in contact with as a father to all three of her kids. Hes real good, she explained. He takes them all out on the weekends. He treats them the same, you know. Like his kids. Not like playing favorites or anything. Latarsha, a 29-year-old mother of three, portrayed one of two of her ex-husbands in a similar way. She believed that the biological father of her oldest son wanted little to do with them, but that Marvin, the biological father of her youngest son, was an involved parent. So she positioned Marvin as another father to her older son. As she explained:
[Marvin] normally takes the youngest one off to his house. He will spend time with the oldest one, too . . . Hes been around the oldest one since he was little, so its kind of like the oldest one kind of grew up with him really as a father more than his own father . . . Just about every weekend the youngest one will go and then the oldest one will call him on the phone. And talk about boy things or whatever. Its not like he doesnt have a male gure in his life. He is closer to him than he is to his own father. Because his father has never been there.

Clearly, these womens construction of fatherhood is not entirely new; nor is it a simple outgrowth of the most recent round of welfare restructuring. In many ways, it harks back to the familial constructions uncovered by Carol Stack (1974) in her ethnographic work in an African American community nearly 30 years ago. Like Stacks informants, our respondents used the category of father to denote social ties and emotional attachments rather than a simple biological connection. In fact, some of our respondents even traced the long legacy of their paternal representations: They claimed to have had other fathers as they grew up, and then to have used other fathers to help raise their own children. For Jacqueline, a 53-yearold mother of three, this paternal construct was passed down in her family across three generations. When Jacqueline was in her mid-30s, she learned that the man she thought was her biological father was really a family friend. She took the news in stride, recalling that the daddy of her own children had no biological connection to them. When we asked about the father of her daughters children, she responded that he was not in their lives either. Then she smiled and noted that a reliance on multiple fathers ran in the family.

The Limits of Marriage and Money

These womens broad denition of fatherhood had important implications for their theories of how men became good fathers. National policymakers adhered to a clear formula for

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this: For them, marriage and money would make men better fathers. Yet neither marriage nor money was as central to our respondents paternal blueprints. While 68 percent of them had been married, roughly one third lived with spouses at the time of the interview. Statistics like this provoke consternation in national policymakers, prompting them to channel funds to promote marriage. The assumption underlying these efforts is that men pose the main obstacle to marriage. A similar assumption characterizes much of the social scientic work on the crisis of fatherhood (Blankenhorn 1995; Hobson and Morgan 2002; Nock 1998). For instance, Elijah Anderson (1993) has argued that coupling in inner-city communities resembles a game of conquest in which women exchange sex for the promise of marriage and money. Men are expected to do right by these women by marrying and supporting them. But mens own desires often lead them elsewhere, which can create a community of part-time fathers. The women we interviewed painted a very different picture of their expectations and desires. Far from presenting it as a panacea, these women expressed a deep ambivalence about marriage. As Kathryn Edin (2000) found in her work on low-income womens views of marriage, many of our respondents said they were better off without a spouse since marriage posed more risks than rewards. In explaining their logic, these women often drew on their life experiences: Those who had been married frequently recalled that their spouses created more turmoil in their lives. Others remembered that marriage had made their lives more hectic as it meant another child to care for. As Mildred put it, Nobody told me that when you get married, thats like having another kid. Still others revealed that they felt materially and emotionally constrained by their spouses. Moreover, few of the women who remained single thought of themselves as losers in a game of conquest. Far from it: They told stories of marriage proposals they had rejected and of engagements they had called off. Over and over again, these women insisted that marriage was not the way to make a man responsible or to secure a sense of well-being. As 29-year-old Sonya recounted her relations with men, she noted:
The man has always been basically a want thing. Its never been a need, like some young women [say]: I need him, he has to help me. Ive never been there. Ive always been totally in control so that if a man is in my life, he fussed, You act like you dont want me to do nothing. I always feel like if you are going to do it, do it . . . You live here like I do. You open and shut that refrigerator so you see what the house needs . . . You look at the childrens feet, you know if they need shoes . . . So Ive always been independent. [Men] made me that way.

Our respondents articulated a similar logic when conceptualizing the relationship between marriage and fatherhood. Just as they questioned the desirability of marriage for themselves, they were suspicious about its benets for their children. In effect, they rejected the discursive connection that policymakers made between an ideal paternal form and ideal paternal functions. Importantly, few respondents were opposed to marrying their childrens fathers in the abstractif the men were committed parents, perhaps it made sense to formalize the relationship. But they insisted that, in and of itself, the formalization of the relationship did not transform men into compassionate parents. As 49-year-old Carol passionately argued as she discussed the development of her two children:
I get angry when I see all these studies that say theres something wrong with children because its only one parent raising them . . . I have two very positive children. One of them is Stephanie, who I raised as a single parent. And the other one, I was married and still raised [him] as a single parent . . . My son and daughter are almost identical. Because a person being there and a person participating and being a father and a dad are two different things. He fathered him. He didnt discipline him. He didnt listen to him. He didnt help. He didnt do anything . . . I can love my children enough for two. I can be a mother and a father if I have to, and I have been.

As Carols comments indicate, many of our respondents felt the need to justify the distinction they made between marriage and fatherhood. And they frequently did so by appealing to their experiences. As in their rationales for their inclusion of other fathers, these women drew on life experiences to support their rejection of marital reductionism. Discursively, they

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linked their views of marriage to those articulated in their extended kin and community networks. Some women presented themselves as socialized to disentangle marriage from parenthood. The men they were raised to feel most attached to were not always married to their mothers. When they became pregnant, they recalled being steered away from marrying their childrens biological fathersoften by female kin who reminded them that men rarely metamorphosed into good parents after marriage. As Carol, who got pregnant when she was 16-years-old, described her decision not to marry her sons biological father:
I was young and he was young, even though he was four years older than me. But his peopleI remember this as if it were yesterdayhis people wanted us to be married. And Im looking like, Married? Im thinking Married? Married? And my mother and them were like, No way! Just because I was pregnant. My mother and them were like, No, no!

At the more practical level, our respondents portrayed their kin and community networks as organized to facilitate the separation between marriage and fatherhood. They recalled that the on-going assistance they received during pregnancy and childrearing allowed them to raise their children outside a nuclear family setting and gave them a practical alternative to this family form. In effect, they saw this practical support as shaping and underlying their conceptual distinction between marriage and fatherhood. For instance, 49-year-old Margaret explained how her ability to survive as an unmarried, teen mother had been dependent on strong kin and community ties. Yet when she looked around her neighborhood, she worried that such supports had weakened and young women had been pushed into the kind of bad and dangerous relationships she had avoided. In response, she created a Sisters Circle, comprised of extended family members. When we asked Margaret to describe the activities of the Circle, she portrayed the group as a way to address the weakening communal bonds:
I see [the need for help] more with young people, and it is because a lot of government rules and standards have changed . . . Quite a few years ago, you looked out for your own. Then it sort of broke apart where everyone was Me, me, me. And they didnt consider each other or anyone else other than themselves. So now what we are doing is putting it together as a group. If someone sees someone needs something [we get it].

In addition to disentangling marriage from fatherhood, our respondents challenged the connection policymakers made between fatherhood and money. This is not to say that their paternal blueprints excluded mens nancial responsibility to their children. Most respondents insisted that mens economic contributions were important. Yet claiming entitlement to support was not the same as equating it with good fathering. While policymakers often blurred the two, these women rarely did. Instead, when they discussed fatherhood, our respondents made an important distinction between economic and social support. They then linked economic support to procreation. As 32-year-old Kenisha remarked, You play, you pay. They also connected social support to fatherhood. Again, there were biological fathers and real fathers; the former paid, the latter cared. Our respondents worried about the effects of conating the two and of allowing men to view money as fatherhood and paying as caring. As with other aspects of their paternal blueprints, many respondents felt compelled to justify their rejection of material reductionism. Some of them did this by explaining what they thought such reductionism would lead to. In their minds, reducing fatherhood to nancial support would give their childrens biological fathers an easy way out. By making money a central issue, they would enable biological fathers to escape from other responsibilities. By doling out a bit of money, men would think they had fullled their paternal duties. In the end, they would detach from their broader obligations as fathersobligations these women found far more important to their childrens well-being than money. For instance, 32-year-old Pam was our only respondent who had enforced a child support agreement through court. When we inquired about how she pursued the agreement, she responded:

Welfare Reform and the Discursive Politics of Paternity He wouldnt even claim her as his. She knew him from the community. But he never did tell her he was her father. I said I was gonna tell her, then he got real mad. So I went downtown to the court to le child support papers. He was real angry . . . Honestly, it was not about the money. I dont think I would even take the money. It was about him being a father. About claiming his child. I wanted him to be a father. This was the way I could do it. She needed him, not his money.

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Or as April put it when we asked if she received child support for her children:
Well, he [her daughters biological father] is supposed to pay child support. He just dont help me. But hes been downtown for child support and all that. And I just dont worry about it . . . With me, it aint really a money thing. I mean, the money will help me. But its more, I really want their fathers in their life and stuff. And would he be there? . . . hes not there.

Other respondents justied their views of nancial support by emphasizing the strings attached to this support. They claimed that men who paid support often felt entitled to dictate how their children were raised. While they were open to advice from involved fathers, they would not accept it from men who simply provided material support. And since providing nancial support rarely prompted men to participate fully in childrearing, women found such interventions unwarranted. For them, money made men intrusive, not involved; it encouraged men to evaluate, not to participate. Since the act of paying support emboldened men to critique their mothering, these women stressed the limits of money. As 34-year-old Julia recalled:
Hed come bring Pampers or food and then complain about how the apartment looked. He gave me a little money and then told me how to use it. Im sorry, that wasnt worth it . . . Id like to see him raise these babies alone. Ill buy the Pampers myself so he cant say nothing.

Or as 29-year-old Rhonda explained the tradeoff she made with her former lover:
I let him get away with paying a small amount of money because I gured the less he pay, the less he bother me and that kinda stuff . . . [If] youre not gonna see the child the way youre supposed to, when youre supposed to, theres no need to get involved.

Thus, our respondents clearly rejected national policymakers insistence on the material basis of fatherhood; for them, money did not make a father. This rejection is one way to understand their opinions about the mandatory child-support enforcement accompanying the PRWORA. Many welfare scholars have discussed low-income womens ambivalence toward such enforcement, emphasizing the dangers that women associate with forced support and their fear of male abuse and retaliation (Mink 1998, 1999). Although some of our respondents did voice concern about their ability to protect themselves from abusive relationships, far more central to their views on mandatory support was their sense of what their children needed from fathers. If they adhered to a paternal blueprint that conated fatherhood and money, they worried that their children would then be left with minimal paternal support. In this way, they presented their views of mandatory child support as inuenced not only by their own needs, but also by their denition of fatherhood and their desire to secure broad paternal care for their children.

Fathers as Caregivers
Our respondents challenged the three key aspects of policymakers discourse on fatherhood complicating its biological foundationalism, marital models, and material reductionism. Yet these womens conceptions of fatherhood were not constructed in simply negative terms. In our interviews, these women also advanced a positive image of fatherhood. Their ideal images further problematized policymakers causal formula: For them, paternal function took priority over paternal form. Ideal fathers were those who fullled paternal responsibilities, irrespective of the particular form of their relationship to children.

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Close to all of the women we interviewed claimed that the most fundamental aspect of fatherhood was a mans identication as a father: Was being a father key to a mans sense of self? Was it a salient identity for him? Did he take pride in his parenting? Our respondents presented these issues as far more signicant than a mans biological or material relation to children. Their paternal discourse therefore allowed for all kinds of men to be good fathers biological fathers, relatives, neighbors, or friends. Mens sense of responsibility mattered the most. This is how 32-year-old Paulette described the biological father of her two children, a man who never paid child support:
He is a good father. He took a job as a coach at their [her daughters] high school. Imagine, so he can see them when he likes. He sees them cause hes the lacrosse coach. He talks to them. Hell call up and see how they are doing and everything . . . To me, thats a good father.

In our respondents paternal conceptions, mens identication as fathers gave rise to good paternal practices. Explicitly and implicitly, our respondents represented paternal behavior as an outgrowth of mens commitment as parents. As these women discussed their paternal ideals, they offered numerous examples of what they saw as good paternal practices. For some, good fathers were nurturing and caring: They nursed children when they were sick; they listened when kids needed to be heard; and they provided children with attention, advice, and stability. For others, good fathers simply spent time with children: They visited children on a regular basis; they entertained kids; and they gave kids access to new familial and social relationships. For others still, good fathers acted as mentors: They taught kids right from wrong; they helped to discipline children; and they fostered kids talents and interests. When we asked Marquia, a 32-year-old mother of three, to describe her childrens relationship to their biological father, she depicted him as encompassing all of these characteristics:
They jump on him and yell, Daddy, daddy, daddy. Whatever they want, movies, games, gossiping. He listens to the music they listen to now. So hes a big kidrolling around, wrestling, punching each other. One [daughter] is into wrestling; one is into Angel and Buffy. Hes doing these things with them . . . Hes also a protector. Over-protective of his girls. [Hell say] Look at what you are wearing. Youre not going out of the house. By respecting him, they are respecting themselves. Then theres the support thing. My daughters are tomboys with the sports. He tells them to be the best and excel at what they want. Hes the father-type. And a friend. When they need to gossip or just let it all out . . . Each one of them got to have their time [with him]. So he spends so much time with them, yakking about this and that.

Other women, like Sonya, stressed good fathers importance as role models:
You learn from your daddy lots of things. Since my father was not around, my granddaddy was my daddy. He taught me a lot. Like how a man should treat me. I learned from him how I should expect to be treated by a man. I dont accept nothing less . . . This is one of the things Devon [her boyfriend] shows to Nikita. Hes a model like that. How he treats me, she sees that. How he treats her, too. Thats real. That stuff stays with you.

Importantly, few of our respondents believed that their caregiver ideal could be imposed on men or that men could be forced to become committed to their children. In explaining their doubts, these women frequently drew on their experiences with such coercion: They recalled demanding that men spend more time with their children or using child support decrees to force a paternal connectionusually to no avail. They also recounted how such attempts seemed to backre, prompting men to become increasingly alienated and disengaged from parenting. Unlike policymakers, who maintained that men could be pushed into fathering through material support or marriage, these women insisted on the limitations of paternal pressure. Instead of forcing men to form bonds with their children, many of our respondents said it was more fruitful to look to extended kin and community networks for men who already identied as fathers and were ready to serve as good fathers.

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While our respondents caregiver ideal emphasized paternal identication and practices, the form of mens connection to children was not irrelevant. They simply assigned paternal form a different relevance than did policymakers. First, in their model, the form of mens relationship to children could be solidied once men had established good paternal practices. For them, paternal form came from paternal function, which was something of a reversal of policymakers causal logic. Second, the paternal forms their model privileged diverged from policymakers ideals. When these women spoke about formalizing a paternal relationship, they often mentioned assigning labels to these men. Once men had proven themselves as good fathers, they earned labels like daddy, godfather, or father. Such labels xed the relationship, signifying its long-term viability. Our respondents also discussed solidifying paternal form through cohabitation. For them, the decision to live with lovers, male relatives, or friends signied mens new level of paternal responsibility and willingness to participate in childrens everyday lives. It also implied mens acceptance of a new nancial role since cohabitation often formalized mens material contribution to childrearing. Thus, along with paternal labels, cohabitation became a sign to denote mens contributions as daddies and their integration into childrens lives. In short, our respondents dened fatherhood as a social relationship and good fathering as a commitment to caretaking. Like policymakers, the women we interviewed constructed paternal blueprints both to represent and validate particular domestic relations and attachments. And, like policymakers, these women advanced complex paternal theories both to reect and produce interpersonal responsibilities, rights, and obligations. Yet there remain critical differences between these groups paternal discourses. Their discourses were produced in different contexts and wielded vastly different amounts of social power and inuence over state policies. They also had contrasting referents. As our respondents articulated their paternal constructions, they almost always drew on their experiential environments: They conveyed the importance of other fathers by referring to their own upbringing; they expressed their ambivalence about marital and material reductionism by recounting what they found desirable and viable in their actual kin and community networks; and they imagined the caregiver ideal by accentuating their experiential knowledge of childrens needs. Instead of reverting to abstract ideology, as so many policymakers did, our respondents drew on real-life referents to project what kind of paternal bonds would best secure childrens well-being. Although it is outside the scope of this study to assess these projections, other sociologists have found the content of fathers relationships to children to be more important than the form of the relationships. They have established that the formation of a close and caring relationship with a father gure has the strongest effect on a childs well-beingirrespective of whether the father gure is married to the mother or has a biological connection to the child (Coltrane 1998; Furstenberg 1995; Furstenberg and Harris 1993; Marsiglio 1995). Thus, it appears as though our respondents experiential knowledge highlights the key inuences on childrens welfare: paternal involvement, interaction, and attachment.

From Paternal Discourses to Paternal Policies

After decades of using the social policy apparatus to dictate the terms of motherhood, U.S. policymakers have set their sights on fatherhood. Although welfare policies always sent implicit messages about the appropriate attributes of fathers, they now do so explicitly. As the U.S. Congress drafted and debated legislation targeted at fathers, it set forth a powerful discourse of fatherhood. Their discourse prioritized the form of mens connections to children over the content of those connections. They constructed fathers in narrow, biological terms by negating the paternal roles played by a variety of men; they emphasized mens institutional relations to children by insisting that marriage will transform them into better fathers; and they stressed mens nancial obligations by equating good fathers with breadwinning

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fathers. Policymakers assumed that the absence of this paternal model bred pathologies of fatherlessness. The only way to correct for these absences and pathologies was to impose an appropriate model of fatherhood on low-income communities. Yet our interview data suggest that there is a common model of fatherhood in the communities targeted by policymakers. While this model was not consistent with that of policymakers, it was far from pathological. Instead, it was constructed and sustained by women who cared deeply about their childrens well-being. Theirs was a exible denition of fatherhood that privileged the content of paternal practices as opposed to their institutional form. It highlighted mens identication with parental roles and commitment to children. It allowed for a variety of men to ll paternal roles, from biological to other fathers. It separated mens marital connections and material contributions from their broad responsibilities as fathers. Finally, it considered paternal involvement, attachment, and caregiving as ideals. Clearly, more research is needed on the prevalence of this conception of fatherhood as well as its effects on childrens well-being. Yet if our respondents accounts are any indication, there is likely to be a discursive disjuncture between policymakers and their targeted communities. The possible sources of this disjuncture are many. These conceptions of fatherhood emanated from different discursive environments: Policymakers advanced their paternal claims in a highly politicized debate on the oor of Congress, while our respondents did so in a relatively private interview setting. The discursive demands of these contexts certainly varied, perhaps shaping the parameters of what could be said. Yet while situational differences may help to explain the form of these discoursesespecially the formulaic and reductionist quality of much of policymakers rhetoricthey do not go far enough in accounting for the content of their paternal conceptions and the causal links they imply. For such an account, more substantive factors should be analyzed. In particular, policymakers paternal discourse often reected an ideological commitment to the SNAF model and politicallyconservative notions of family values; they were also mired in debates about scal and societal responsibility. Many of our respondents were cognizant of this ideological frame, as they frequently justied and defended their paternal blueprints in relation to it. But while our respondents paternal discourse was not devoid of ideological commitment, it was grounded much more in the actualities of their everyday lives and in personal and social experience. Understanding the potential sources of this discursive disjuncture is analytically and politically signicant given that it is likely to have practical implications. The history of state intervention into poor womens mothering provides a clue as to what these practical effects might entail. From the Progressive Era on, welfare policy held out the nuclear family as the norm, pushing poor women to conform to middle-class notions of childrearing. While such policy efforts rarely succeeded in enforcing conformity, they did place new pressure on poor mothers by forcing them to overcome the gap between their experiences and the dictates of social policy. These policies also made it difcult for poor women to sustain the maternal forms they believed worked for them. The individualistic model of mothering embedded in state policy often ran counter to their collective mode of motheringleaving the carework done by other mothers unremunerated. Although poor women created inventive ways to remunerate this labor, its informal nature strained and constrained these networks. Policymakers not only ignored poor womens conception of mothering, but they actually worked against it. In doing so, they left a series of maternal possibilities untapped. They also bred misconceptions about poor womens mothering by stigmatizing those who did not adhere to their narrow denition of mothering. Instead of learning from this history, U.S. policymakers are poised to repeat it with lowincome fathers. There are, of course, alternatives. Although our respondents rarely spelled them out explicitly, their accounts implied distinct fatherhood policies and programs. Some of them may overlap with those proposed by Congressit is imaginable that our respondents would support programs to emphasize paternal involvement and nancial responsibility. Yet other policy solutions are also imaginable. Rather than devoting public funds to marriage programs that may undermine existing paternal networks, state policy could harness these

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support networks to care for children even more effectively. This could be done by securing childrens access to the other fathers surrounding them through state-funded after-school programs, sports programs, or community groups. Another approach would be to use state funds to secure the longevity of other-father relationships. This could include everything from community grants that support on-going mentoring programs to housing grants that enable poor families to reside in the same neighborhood over time. Yet another approach would be to ensure that other fathers have the resources they need to care for children. This would mean nding ways to channel state funds to those men who actually father children, may they be relatives, friends, or neighbors. All these approaches rest on the recognition of existing forms of fatherhood and of the ways they operate and evolve. They also depend on replacing policymakers narrow denition of fatherhood with a more exible conception that is sensitive to the realities of parenting in low-income communities.

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